Master Boot Record | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The  recent wave of cyber attacks  targeting Albanian organizations involved the use of a wiper called  No-Justice . The  findings  come from cybersecurity company ClearSky, which said the Windows-based malware "crashes the operating system in a way that it cannot be rebooted." The intrusions have been attributed to an Iranian "psychological operation group" known as Homeland Justice, which has been active since July 2022, specifically orchestrating destructive attacks against Albania. On December 24, 2023, the adversary resurfaced after a hiatus, stating it's "back to destroy supporters of terrorists," describing its latest campaign as #DestroyDurresMilitaryCamp. The Albanian city of Durrës  currently hosts  the dissident group People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MEK). Targets of the attack included ONE Albania, Eagle Mobile Albania, Air Albania, and the Albanian parliament. Two of the primary tools deployed during the campaign include an e...

Ransomware threat has risen exponentially so much that ransomware authors have started abusing the MBR in their attacks to lock down your entire computer instead of just encrypting your important files on hard drive. Talos team at Cisco Systems has released a free, open-source tool that protects the master boot record (MBR) sector of computers from modification by bootkits, ransomware, and other malicious attacks. Master Boot Record (MBR) is the first sector (512 bytes) on your Hard drive that stores the bootloader, a piece of code that is responsible for booting the current Operating System. Technically, Bootloader is first code that gets executed after system BIOS that tells your computer what to do when it start. An advanced malware program, such as rootkit and bootkit, leverages this process to infect computers by modifying the MBR. A boot malware or bootkits has the ability to install ransomware or other malicious software into your Windows kernel, which is almost i...

The problem is simple: all breaches start with initial access, and initial access comes down to two primary attack vectors – credentials and devices. This is not news; every report you can find on the threat landscape depicts the same picture.  The solution is more complex. For this article, we'll focus on the device threat vector. The risk they pose is significant, which is why device management tools like Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) are essential components of an organization's security infrastructure. However, relying solely on these tools to manage device risk actually creates a false sense of security. Instead of the blunt tools of device management, organizations are looking for solutions that deliver device trust . Device trust provides a comprehensive, risk-based approach to device security enforcement, closing the large gaps left behind by traditional device management solutions. Here are 5 of those limitations and how to ov...