The Necurs Botnet: A Pandora’s Box of Malicious Spam
This is the tale of a cybercrime botnet operation that, within about five years of its existence, has been named one of the largest botnets in the world. It’s called the Necurs botnet. It militarizes up to 6 million zombie endpoints, delivers some of the worst banking Trojans and ransomware threats in batches of millions…
Locky ransomware makes a comeback, courtesy of Necurs botnet
The Necurs botnet has, once again, begun pushing Locky ransomware on unsuspecting victims. The botnet, which flip-flops from sending penny stock pump-and-dump emails to booby-trapped files that lead to malware (usually Locky or Dridex), has been spotted slinging thousand upon thousand of emails in the last three or four days.
An untold cost of ransomware: It will change how you operate
Ransomware is unfortunately an IT reality. With the complexity and frequency of attacks, there is a good chance you or someone you know has been impacted. Many victims attacked are tempted to just pay the ransom and be done with it; a strategy that is more widely-used than you might think. Even the FBI has…
38% of consumers affected by ransomware pay up
Consumers are increasingly being targeted with ransomware, and many of them are paying up, according to Trustlook. Since the beginning of 2016, ransomware has gone from a relatively exclusive category of malware utility to a mainstream destructive tool used in wave after wave of phishing attacks against individuals and companies alike. Ransomware is now so…
Report: Cybercrime climate shifts dramatically in first quarter
The first quarter of 2017 brought with it some significant changes to the threat landscape and we aren’t talking about heavy ransomware distribution either. Threats which were previously believed to be serious contenders this year have nearly vanished entirely, while new threats and infection techniques have forced the security community to reconsider collection and analysis…
The top 5 dumbest cyber threats that work anyway
The common conception of cyber attacks is kind of like bad weather: ranging from irritating to catastrophic, but always unpredictable. Hackers are simply too sophisticated to draw any reliable judgments on and we shouldn’t try. As it turns out, some hackers are fairly predictable in their successful use of really dumb attacks. Here’s a few.
3, 2, 1, GO! Make backups of your data!
With the recent proliferation of ransomware, a type of malware that encrypts your data and holds it hostage until payment is received, what should be done to protect valuable data? One of the best defences against this threat is having a good backup strategy. This protects your data against all sorts of unpleasant mishaps. How frequently you…
45% of large British businesses sustained a successful ransomware attack
Over a third of British businesses (36 percent) are not very confident that efforts to completely eradicate a recent ransomware attack from work systems have been successful. The research, carried out by One Poll, quizzed 500 IT decision makers in companies with 250 or more employees across the UK to uncover the extent to which…
Explained: Packer, Crypter, and Protector
In this article, we will try to explain the terms packer, crypter, and protector in the context of how they are used in malware. Bear in mind that no definitions for these categories are set in stone and that they all have overlap and that there are exceptions to the rules. But this is the…
Paying for ransomware could cost you more than just the ransom
Ransomware attacks are now incredibly sophisticated and occurring with increasing frequency. In fact, many called 2016 “the year of ransomware,” and for good reason: Trend Micro found there were 752 percent more new ransomware families discovered compared to 2015. With the rise of ransomware, it’s very likely that your business will be affected by one of these attacks in…