NSA Tools Behind WannaCry Being Used In Even Bigger Attack Campaign

Attackers have been using NSAs EternalBlue and Double Pulsar to distribute AdylKuzz cryptocurrency malware to hundreds of thousands of systems, Proofpoint says. The WannaCry ransomware outbreak this week garnered widespread attention for its sheer global scope and audacity but another likely even bigger attack leveraging the same stolen NSA exploits has been going on unnoticed…

How Basic Endpoint Patching Helps Protect Against Ransomware and Other Attacks

On Friday, a group of unknown threat actors carried out one of the largest cyberattacks of its kind, which infected hundreds of thousands of computers in 150 countries. The ransomware, known as WannaCry, exploits a Microsoft Windows OS vulnerability that was patched in Microsoft’s Security Bulletin two months ago. The universal advice was straightforward: Update…

Ransomworm: The birth of a monster

The last few weeks have seen two substantial attacks: one massive phishing attack that leveraged Google Apps and which tricked recipients to give OAuth access to their email accounts, and a large-scale ransomware attack that blanketed almost 100 countries a week later. Now, consider the likely marriage of these two attacks, and the monster that…

Who are we kidding? WannaCry is not a first

On Friday, May 12, 2017, the world was alarmed to discover that cybercrime has reached a new record, in a widespread ransomware attack dubbed WannaCry that is believed to have caused the biggest attack of its kind ever recorded. The details of the attack are all being reported as we go, as security teams scramble…

WannaCry: What you need to know

The unprecedented outbreak of Trojan ransomware WannaCry has created a worldwide plague affecting home users and businesses. We have already posted some basics about WannaCry, and in this post we will provide further advice particularly for businesses. It is urgent and critical to know what WannaCry is, how it spreads, what dangers it poses, and…

WannaCry: Are you safe?

A few days ago saw the beginning of the Trojan encryptor WannaCry outbreak. It appears to be pandemic — a global epidemic. We counted more than 45,000 cases of the attack in just one day, but the true number is much higher. What happened? Several large organizations reported an infection simultaneously. Among them were several…

Microsoft to governments: Stop hoarding vulnerabilities

Microsoft is full of surprises lately: first they issued patches for unsupported versions of Windows, then they publicly criticized the NSA for hoarding knowledge about critical software vulnerabilities (and exploits for them). “We have seen vulnerabilities stored by the CIA show up on WikiLeaks, and now this vulnerability stolen from the NSA has affected customers…

Majority of workers blindly open email attachments

The vast majority (82 percent) of users open email attachments if they appear to be from a known contact, despite the prevalence of well-known sophisticated social engineering attacks, according to Glasswall. Of these respondents, 44 percent open these email attachments consistently every time they receive one, leaving organizations vulnerable to data breaches sourced to malicious…

Cybercrime can come in any shape or size, and not always the form you’d expect

Cyberespionage is now the most common type of attack seen in manufacturing, the public sector and now education, warns the Verizon 2017 Data Breach Investigations Report. Much of this is due to the high proliferation of propriety research, prototypes and confidential personal data, which are hot-ticket items for cybercriminals. Nearly 2,000 breaches were analyzed in…

Phishing attacks responsible for three-quarters of all malware

With phishing now widely used as a mechanism for distributing ransomware, a new NTT Security reveals that 77% of all detected ransomware globally was in four main sectors – business & professional services (28%), government (19%), health care (15%) and retail (15%). While technical attacks on the newest vulnerabilities tend to dominate the media, many…