The Law of Unintended Outbreak – Who Is at Risk from Petya?
Hot on the heels of the global WannaCry outbreak in May, yesterday saw a wave of what looked like copycat malware sweeping the globe again. However, on closer inspection there may more to this than meets the eye, more than a simple new variant of an already established ransomware borrowing propagation techniques from WannaCry. The…
Petya Weren’t Expecting This: Ransomware Takes Systems Hostage Across the Globe
Early on Tuesday, June 27, reports began to circulate that organizations in the Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe were suffering ransomware attacks. It quickly became clear that this Petya attack could equal or surpass the May WannaCry attack. WannaCry’s spread was so successful because it was powered by a flaw in Windows, and although Microsoft…
WannaCry? You’re Not Alone: The 5 Stages of Security Grief
When it comes to securing the enterprise, the attackers have the advantage. Defenders are required to protect against every conceivable threat while the attacker needs only a single attack vector to penetrate a network. The universe of potential intrusion vectors is vast: faulty authentication mechanisms, gaps in the perimeter network, legacy applications, and, of course,…
Honda Halts Production at Japan Plant After Cyber Attacks
Honda said Wednesday it had temporarily halted production at a plant in Japan after it suffered a cyberattack from the same ransomware that struck hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide last month. The Japanese automaker said it had shut its plant in Sayama, near Tokyo, on Monday after discovering its computer system was infected with…
Why WannaCry Was a Wake Up Call for Critical Infrastructure Security
The WannaCry ransomware attack impacted more than 10,000 organizations in 150 countries, including manufacturing and industrial organizations like Nissan, Renault and Dacia, Spanish Telefónica and Deutsche Bahn. It’s likely that a fair number of industrial organizations have been impacted, but haven’t reported the incidents since they are not required to do so by regulatory requirements.
U.K. Center of Security Excellence Hit by Ransomware
One of the world’s top ten universities, awarded the status of “centre of excellence in cyber-security research” by the UK’s GCHQ, has been hit by a so-far unrecognized strain of ransomware. This comes just one month after many UK health trusts were struck by the global WannaCry ransomware. In a statement originally issued yesterday and…
U.S. Warns of North Korea’s ‘Hidden Cobra’ Attacks
The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) released a technical alert on Tuesday on behalf of the DHS and the FBI to warn organizations of North Korea’s “Hidden Cobra” activities, particularly distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The threat actor dubbed by the U.S. government “Hidden Cobra” is better known in the infosec community as Lazarus…
10 Ways to Fight Advanced Malware With Threat Intelligence Sharing
Last month, we celebrated the two-year anniversary of the IBM X-Force Exchange (XFE). During that week, the threat intelligence sharing platform reached a record spike in traffic as users flocked to the site to stay up to date on the recently exposed WannaCry ransomware.
Building Upon Trump’s Executive Order on Cybersecurity
Just days after President Trump signed his executive order on cybersecurity, the massive WannaCry attack dominated the news cycle. The assault infiltrated 150 countries, penetrating national networks and infrastructure. A breach of such international scale has rightly raised questions about government preparedness for digital warfare. In answering these concerns, Trump’s executive order should not be…
Stopping Threats in Their Tracks With Proactive Monitoring
With household names such as Renault ceasing manufacturing and the National Health Service of the U.K. actively redirecting patients from hospitals that are incapable of providing critical health care, ransomware has moved well beyond an annoyance that impacts your grandmother’s laptop and directly into the global spotlight. Over the past few days, however, the behavior…