Industry Intel

Girl Scouts and OpenText empower future leaders of tomorrow with cyber resilience

The transition to a digital-first world enables us to connect, work and live in a realm where information is available at our fingertips. The children of today will be working in an environment of tomorrow that is shaped by hyperconnectivity. Operating in this...

World Backup Day reminds us all just how precious our data is

Think of all the important files sitting on your computer right now. If your computer crashed tomorrow, would you be able to retrieve your important files? Would your business suffer as a result? As more and more of our daily activities incorporate digital and online...

3 Reasons We Forget Small & Midsized Businesses are Major Targets for Ransomware

The ransomware attacks that make headlines and steer conversations among cybersecurity professionals usually involve major ransoms, huge corporations and notorious hacking groups. Kia Motors, Accenture, Acer, JBS…these companies were some of the largest to be...

How Ransomware Sneaks In

Ransomware has officially made the mainstream. Dramatic headlines announce the latest attacks and news outlets highlight the staggeringly high ransoms businesses pay to retrieve their stolen data. And it’s no wonder why – ransomware attacks are on the rise and the...

An MSP and SMB guide to disaster preparation, recovery and remediation

Introduction It’s important for a business to be prepared with an exercised business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) plan plan before its hit with ransomware so that it can resume operations as quickly as possible. Key steps and solutions should be followed...

Podcast: Cyber resilience in a remote work world

The global pandemic that began to send us packing from our offices in March of last year upended our established way of working overnight. We’re still feeling the effects. Many office workers have yet to return to the office in the volumes they worked in pre-pandemic....

5 Tips to get Better Efficacy out of Your IT Security Stack

If you’re an admin, service provider, security executive, or are otherwise affiliated with the world of IT solutions, then you know that one of the biggest challenges to overcome is efficacy. Especially in terms of cybersecurity, efficacy is something of an amorphous...

How Cryptocurrency and Cybercrime Trends Influence One Another

Typically, when cryptocurrency values change, one would expect to see changes in crypto-related cybercrime. In particular, trends in Bitcoin values tend to be the bellwether you can use to predict how other currencies’ values will shift, and there are usually...

Tens of thousands of web sites affected in ongoing mass SQL injection attack

Mar 26, 2012 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

Hundreds of thousands of legitimate web sites are currently affected in a a mass SQL injection attack that has been ongoing for the past several months. The ongoing mass SQL injection attacks, are directly related to last year’s scareware-serving Lizamoon mass SQL injection attacks.

The cybercriminals behind it, are automatically exploiting the legitimate web sites, and embedding a tiny script on the affected pages, abusing an input validation flaw, or exploiting vulnerable and outdated versions of the web application software running on them.

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Spamvertised LinkedIn notifications serving client-side exploits and malware

Mar 23, 2012 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

Cybercriminals are currently spamvertising LinkedIn themed messages, in an attempt to trick end and corporate users into clicking on the malicious links embedded in the emails.

The campaign is using real names of LinkedIn users in an attempt to increase the authenticity of the spamvertised campaign.

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Malicious USPS-themed emails circulating in the wild

Mar 23, 2012 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

Cybercriminals are currently spamvertising malicious USPS-themed emails, that entice end and corporate users into clicking on malicious links found in the emails.

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Rogue APKs continue to find new homes

Mar 22, 2012 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

by Armando Orozco

We’ve been tracking rogue premium-sms Android apps for sometime now. Here’s an interesting site we came across offering a download of the Google Music application, but this one comes with a cost. This site serves up a premium-sms Trojan of the ransom variety. Targeting Russian speakers these Rogue’s, we call Android.FakeInst, offer to give access to the app but for a fee.

Spamvertised ‘Your tax return appeal is declined’ emails serving client-side exploits and malware

Mar 22, 2012 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

Cybercriminals are currently spamvertising with IRS (Internal Revenue Service) themed emails, enticing end and corporate users into downloading and viewing a malicious .htm attachment.

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Trojan Downloaders actively utilizing Dropbox for malware distribution

Mar 21, 2012 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

By Curtis Fechner

It’s never surprising to see the multitude of tactics a cybercriminal will use to deliver malware. In this case, I came across a collection of files masquerading as RealNetworks updater executables. These files were all located in a user’s %AppData%realupdate_ob directory, and the sizes were all quite consistent.

At first glance there was nothing too special about this finding – malware appearing to be legitimate software is nothing new.

When I looked into the specific behaviors of the file, it became clearer that the software is in fact malicious, and that it is actually downloading malicious files from the popular web-based file hosting service Dropbox. These files came in two varieties: some files were randomly-named; other files were named for legitimate software. For example: utorrent.exe, Picasa3.exe, Skype.exe, and Qttask.exe.

Millions of harvested U.S government and U.S military email addresses offered for sale

Mar 16, 2012 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

Remember the underground service offering millions of harvested emails for sale profiled at the Webroot Threat Blog in January?

It appears that cybercriminals are continuing to innovate in this underground market segment by offering geolocated databases of millions of harvested emails for better targeting in their upcoming spam campaigns.

In this post, I’ll profile yet another cybercrime underground service selling millions of harvested emails to potential cybercriminals.

Research: U.S accounts for 72% of fraudulent pharmaceutical orders

Mar 16, 2012 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

Just how profitable is spam? Who’s buying the counterfeit pharmaceutical items advertised so heavily in a huge percentage of the spam campaigns currently circulating in the wild?

According to a newly released report by the University of California at San Diego, although hundreds of thousands of people visit the fraudulent pharmaceutical scam sites, only a small percentage of them is actually purchasing the counterfeit pharmaceutical items.

In this particular case, the United States leads with 72% of total purchases from fraudulent pharmaceutical sites.

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Spamvertised ‘Google Pharmacy’ themed emails lead to pharmaceutical scams

Mar 15, 2012 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

Cybercriminals are currently spamvertising a Google-themed email campaign that’s enticing home and corporate PC users into clicking on bogus link leading to pharmaceutical scams.

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Spamvertised ‘Your accountant license can be revoked’ emails lead to client-side exploits and malware

Mar 9, 2012 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

Cybercriminals are currently spamvertising a malicious email campaign that’s designed to trick you into clicking on a bogus complaint.pdf link which ultimately leads to client-side exploits and malware.

The campaign is launched by the same gang that launched the “Spamvertised ‘Termination of your CPA license’ ” malicious campaign last month.

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Research: proper screening could have prevented 67% of abusive domain registrations

Mar 9, 2012 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

On a daily basis, spammers register thousands of new domains across multiple domain registrars, and take advantage of WHOIS privacy services to ensure that security researchers and anti-spam fighters will have hard time taking them down. So what can we do about it?

According to a newly released research by Knujon.com, proper screening could have prevented 67% of those abusive domain registrations.

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A peek inside the Darkness (Optima) DDoS Bot

Mar 8, 2012 | Industry Intel, Threat Lab

With politically motivated DDoS (distributed denial of service attack) attacks proliferating along with the overall increase in the supply of managed “DDoS for hire” services, it’s time to get back the basics, and find out just what makes an average DDoS bot used by cybercriminals successful.

Continuing the “A peek inside…” series, in this post I’ll profile the Darkness X (Optima) DDoS bot, available for purchase at selected cybercrime-friendly online communities since 2009.

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