On Friday, 12 May 2017, a large cyber-attack using it was launched, infecting more than 230,000 computers in 150 countries, demanding ransom payments ($300 worth in bitcoin) in the cryptocurrency bitcoin in 28 languages The attack affected Telefónica and several other large companies in Spain, as well as parts of Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), […]
The Vulnerability The flaw is exploited through a specially crafted Microsoft Word RTF (Rich Text Format) file, which contains an embedded OLE2link object. The object instructs Word to send a HTTP request to a remote server controlled by the attackers, to retrieve from it a malicious .hta file masquerading as a RTF file. A .hta […]
According to research Kaspersky Lab, networks belonging to at least 140 banks and other enterprises have been infected by malware that relies on the same in-memory design to remain nearly invisible. Because infections are so hard to spot, the actual number is likely much higher. Another trait that makes the infections hard to detect is […]
Cobalt hacker group has carried out this attack in 14 different countries including Russia, the UK, the Netherlands and Malaysia. The ‘touchless jackpotting’ technique employed does not involve any physical manipulations of ATMs. Bank systems are infected using tools that are widely available in public sources. The shortest time taken to obtain total control over […]
Originally, Mirai was designed to infect devices built with weak default logins and passwords by scanning the internet for them and then trying a list of more than 60 password combinations. But this new strain also targets a flaw in the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) service embedded in the Zyxel router products, allowing the […]
Black Friday was a dark day for San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency, as an apparent crypto-ransomware infection spread across the Muni system’s networks, taking down ticketing for Muni’s train stations and systems used to manage the city’s buses. The operator of the ransomware demanded $73,000 in exchange for restoration of Muni’s data, according to a […]
Attacks that took down Dyn appear to have been “rented” from multiple botnets. Welcome to the Internet of Evil Things. The attack that disrupted much of the Internet on October 21 is still being teased apart by investigators, but evidence thus far points to multiple “botnets” of Internet-connected gadgets being responsible for blocking access to […]
Ransomware just got even more real: it’s now the number one attack vector in the financial services sector, which traditionally has been considered a model industry for best security practices. Some 55% of financial services firms recently surveyed by SANS report ransomware as the top attack threat, followed by phishing (50%), which previously held the […]
Securing the internet of things should become a major priority now that an army of compromised devices – perhaps 1 million strong – has swamped one of the industry’s top distributed denial-of-service protection services. A giant botnet made up of hijacked internet-connected things like cameras, lightbulbs, and thermostats has launched the largest DDoS attack ever […]