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Ukrainian National Police has released a video showing officers raiding company of M.E.Doc accounting software makers, whose systems have been linked to outbreak of Petya (NotPetya) ransomware that recently infected computers of several major companies worldwide. On 4th July, masked police officers from Ukrainian anti-cybercrime unit — carrying shotguns and assault rifles — raided the software development firm " Intellect Service, " in the capital city Kyiv and seized their servers, which were reportedly compromised by hackers to spread (ExPetr, PetrWrap, Petya, NotPetya) ransomware. Researchers from ESET security firm have found a very stealthy malicious code in the M.E.Doc software update which was injected by an unknown hacker or group of hackers in mid-April by exploiting a vulnerability. The malicious software upgrade, designed to install a backdoor and give unauthorized remote access to attackers, was then delivered as an update to nearly 1 million computers belonging...

The author of original Petya ransomware is back. After 6 months of silence, the author of the now infamous Petya ransomware appeared today on Twitter to help victims unlock their files encrypted by a new version of Petya, also known as NotPetya . "We're back having a look in NotPetya," tweeted Janus, a name Petya creator previously chose for himself from a villain in James Bond. "Maybe it's crackable with our privkey. Please upload the first 1MB of an infected device, that would help." This statement made by the Petya author suggests he may have held onto a master decryption key , which if it works for the new variant of Petya infected files, the victims would be able to decrypt their files locked in the recent cyber outcry. Janus sold Petya as a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) to other hackers in March 2016, and like any regular ransomware, original Petya was designed to lock victim's computer, then return them when a ransom is paid. This ...

What if I say the Tuesday's devastating global malware outbreak was not due to any ransomware infection? Yes, the Petya ransomware attacks that began infecting computers in several countries, including Russia, Ukraine, France, India and the United States on Tuesday and demands $300 ransom was not designed with the intention of restoring the computers at all. According to a new analysis, the virus was designed to look like ransomware but was wiper malware that wipes computers outright, destroying all records from the targeted systems. Comae Technologies Founder Matt Suiche, who closely looked the operation of the malware, said after analyzing the virus, known as Petya, his team found that it was a " Wiper malware ," not ransomware. Security experts even believe the real attack has been disguised to divert world's attention from a state-sponsored attack on Ukraine to a malware outbreak. "We believe the ransomware was, in fact, a lure to control the...

Watch out, readers! It is ransomware, another WannaCry, another wide-spread attack. The WannaCry ransomware is not dead yet and another large scale ransomware attack is making chaos worldwide, shutting down computers at corporates, power supplies, and banks across Russia, Ukraine, Spain, France, UK, India, and Europe and demanding $300 in bitcoins. According to multiple sources, a new variant of Petya ransomware , also known as Petwrap, is spreading rapidly with the help of same Windows SMBv1 vulnerability that the WannaCry ransomware abused to infect 300,000 systems and servers worldwide in just 72 hours last month. Apart from this, many victims have also informed that Petya ransomware has also infected their patch systems. "Petya uses the NSA Eternalblue exploit but also spreads in internal networks with WMIC and PSEXEC. That's why patched systems can get hit." Mikko Hypponen  confirms , Chief Research Officer at F-Secure. Petya is a nasty piece of rans...

It is no secret that hackers and cybercriminals are becoming dramatically more adept, innovative, and stealthy with each passing day. While new forms of cybercrime are on the rise, traditional activities seem to be shifting towards more clandestine techniques that come with limitless attack vectors with low detection rates. Security researchers have recently discovered a new fileless ransomware, dubbed " Sorebrect, " which injects malicious code into a legitimate system process (svchost.exe) on a targeted system and then self-destruct itself in order to evade detection. Unlike traditional ransomware, Sorebrect has been designed to target enterprise's servers and endpoint. The injected code then initiates the file encryption process on the local machine and connected network shares. This fileless ransomware first compromises administrator credentials by brute forcing or some other means and then uses Microsoft's Sysinternals PsExec command-line utility to encry...

Last year Google employees took an initiative to help thousands of Open Source Projects patch a critical remote code execution vulnerability in a widely used Apache Commons Collections (ACC) library. Dubbed Operation Rosehub , the initiative was volunteered by some 50 Google employees, who utilized 20 percent of their work time to patch over 2600 open source projects on Github, those were vulnerable to "Mad Gadget vulnerability." Mad Gadget vulnerability ( CVE-2015-6420 ) is a remote code execution bug in the Java deserialization used by the Apache Commons Collections (ACC) library that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a system. The ACC Library is widely deployed by many Java applications to decode data passed between computers. To exploit this flaw, all an unauthorized attacker need to do is submit maliciously crafted input to an application on a targeted system that uses the ACC library. Once the vulnerable ACC libra...