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...

Compromised Indian government Web site leads to Black Hole Exploit Kit

By Dancho Danchev

Our sensors recently picked up a Web site infection, affecting the Web site of the Ministry of Micro And Medium Enterprises (MSME DI Jaipur). And although the Black Hole Exploit Kit serving URL is currently not accepting any connections, it’s known to have been used in previous client-side exploit serving campaigns.

Let’s profile the campaign, list the malicious URLs, associate them with previously launched malicious campaigns, and provide actual MD5s for historical OSINT preservation/attribution purposes.

More details: read more…

Recent spike in FBI Ransomware striking worldwide

By Israel Chavarria

Recently we have seen a spike of this ransomware in the wild and it appears as though its creators are not easily giving up. This infection takes your computer hostage and makes it look as though the authorities are after you, when in reality this is all just an elaborate attempt to make you pay to unblock your computer. read more…

New commercially available DIY invisible Bitcoin miner spotted in the wild

By Dancho Danchev

Just as we anticipated in our previous analysis of a commercially available Bitcoin miner, cybercriminals continue “innovating” on this front by releasing more advanced and customizable invisible Bitcoin miners for fellow cybercriminals to take advantage of.

In this post, we’ll profile yet another invisible Bitcoin miner, once again available for purchase on the international cybercrime-friendly marketplace, emphasize on its key differentiation features, as well as provide MD5s of known miner variants.

More details:

read more…

DIY malware cryptor as a Web service spotted in the wild – part two

By Dancho Danchev

With more Web-based DIY malware crypters continuing to pop up online, both novice and experienced cybercriminals can easily obfuscate any malicious sample into an undetected — through signatures based scanning not behavioral detection — piece of malware, successfully bypassing perimeter based defenses currently in place.

In this post I’ll profile a recently launched service, empowering virtually everyone using it, with the capability to generate undetected malware. I’ll emphasize on its key differentiation factors and provide sample MD5s known to have been crypted using the service.

More details:

read more…

Commercial ‘form grabbing’ rootkit spotted in the wild

By Dancho Danchev

Trust is vital. It’s also the cornerstone for the growth of E-commerce in general, largely thanks to the mass acceptable of a trusted model for processing financial data and personally identifiable information. For years, the acceptance and mass implementation of PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) has been a driving force that resulted in a pseudo-secure B2C, B2B, and B2G electronic marketplace, connecting the world’s economies in a 24/7/365 operating global ecosystem.

The bad news? Once the integrity of a host or a mobile device has been compromised, SSL, next to virtually every two-factor authentication mechanism gets bypassed by the cybercriminals that compromised the host/device, leading to a situation where users are left with a ‘false feeling of security‘.

In this post, I’ll profile a recently advertised commercial ‘form grabbing’ rootkit, that’s capable of ‘”grabbing” virtually any form of communication transmitted over SSL

More details: read more…

Newly launched ‘Magic Malware’ spam campaign relies on bogus ‘New MMS’ messages

By Dancho Danchev

The gang of cybercriminals behind the ‘Magic Malware‘ has launched yet another malicious spam campaign, attempting to trick U.K users into thinking they’ve received a notification for a “New MMS” message. In reality, once users execute the malicious attachment, it will download and drop additional malware on the affected hosts, giving the cybercriminals behind the campaign complete access to the affected host.

More details: read more…

Android.RoidSec: This app is an info stealing “sync-hole”!

Android.RoidSec has the package name “cn.phoneSync”, but an application name of “wifi signal Fix”. From a ‘Malware 101’ standpoint, you would think the creators would have a descriptive package name that matches the application name. Not so, in this case. So what is Android.RoidSec? It’s a nasty, malicious app that sits in the background (and avoids installing any launcher icon) while collecting all sorts of info-stealing goodness. read more…

New versatile and remote-controlled “Android.MouaBot” malware found in the wild

By Cameron Palan and Nathan Collier

Recently, we discovered a new malicious Android application called Android.MouaBot. This malicious software is a bot contained within another basic app; in this case, a Chinese calculator application. Behind the scenes, it automatically sends an SMS message to an auto-reply number which replies back to the phone with a set of commands/keywords. This message is then parsed and the various plugins within the malicious packages are run or enabled.

read more…