ransomware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Romanian police have arrested five individuals suspected of infecting tens of thousands of computers across Europe and the United States in recent years by spreading two infamous ransomware families—Cerber and CTB Locker. Under Operation Bakovia —a major global police operation conducted by Europol, the FBI and law enforcement agencies from Romanian, Dutch, and the UK—raided six houses in East Romania and made five arrests, Europol said on Wednesday. Authorities have seized a significant amount of hard drives, external storage, laptops, cryptocurrency mining devices, numerous documents and hundreds of SIM cards during the raid. One thing to note is that all of the five suspects were not arrested for developing or maintaining the infamous ransomware strains, but for allegedly spreading CTB Locker and Cerber. Based on CryptoLocker, CTB Locker , aka Critroni, was the most widely spread ransomware families in 2016 and was the first ransomware to use the Tor anonymizing network

A massive malicious email campaign that stems from the world's largest spam botnet Necurs is spreading a new strain of ransomware at the rate of over 2 million emails per hour and hitting computers across the globe. The popular malspam botnet Necrus which has previously found distributing Dridex banking trojan , Trickbot banking trojan , Locky ransomwar e, and Jaff ransomware , has now started spreading a new version of Scarab ransomware. According to F-Secure , Necurs botnet is the most prominent deliverer of spam emails with five to six million infected hosts online monthly and is responsible for the biggest single malware spam campaigns. Scarab ransomware is a relatively new ransomware family that was initially spotted by ID Ransomware creator Michael Gillespie in June this year. Massive Email Campaign Spreads Scarab Ransomware According to a blog post published by security firm Forcepoint, the massive email campaign spreading Scarab ransomware virus started at

It comes as no surprise that today's cyber threats are orders of magnitude more complex than those of the past. And the ever-evolving tactics that attackers use demand the adoption of better, more holistic and consolidated ways to meet this non-stop challenge. Security teams constantly look for ways to reduce risk while improving security posture, but many approaches offer piecemeal solutions – zeroing in on one particular element of the evolving threat landscape challenge – missing the forest for the trees.  In the last few years, Exposure Management has become known as a comprehensive way of reigning in the chaos, giving organizations a true fighting chance to reduce risk and improve posture. In this article I'll cover what Exposure Management is, how it stacks up against some alternative approaches and why building an Exposure Management program should be on  your 2024 to-do list. What is Exposure Management?  Exposure Management is the systematic identification, evaluation,

Earlier this month a cybersecurity researcher shared details of a security loophole with The Hacker News that affects all versions of Microsoft Office, allowing malicious actors to create and spread macro-based self-replicating malware. Macro-based self-replicating malware, which basically allows a macro to write more macros, is not new among hackers, but to prevent such threats, Microsoft has already introduced a security mechanism in MS Office that by default limits this functionality. Lino Antonio Buono, an Italian security researcher who works at InTheCyber , reported a simple technique (detailed below) that could allow anyone to bypass the security control put in place by Microsoft and create self-replicating malware hidden behind innocent-looking MS Word documents. What's Worse? Microsoft refused to consider this issue a security loophole when contacted by the researcher in October this year, saying it's a feature intended to work this way only—just like MS Offic

A new widespread ransomware worm, known as " Bad Rabbit ," that hit over 200 major organisations, primarily in Russia and Ukraine this week leverages a stolen NSA exploit released by the Shadow Brokers this April to spread across victims' networks. Earlier it was reported that this week's crypto-ransomware outbreak did not use any National Security Agency-developed exploits, neither EternalRomance nor EternalBlue , but a recent report from Cisco's Talos Security Intelligence revealed that the Bad Rabbit ransomware did use EternalRomance exploit. NotPetya ransomware (also known as ExPetr and Nyetya) that infected tens of thousands of systems back in June also leveraged the EternalRomance exploit , along with another NSA's leaked Windows hacking exploit EternalBlue, which was used in the WannaCry ransomware outbreak. Bad Rabbit Uses EternalRomance SMB RCE Exploit Bad Rabbit does not use EternalBlue but does leverage EternalRomance RCE exploit to spread

A new widespread ransomware attack is spreading like wildfire around Europe and has already affected over 200 major organisations, primarily in Russia, Ukraine, Turkey and Germany, in the past few hours. Dubbed " Bad Rabbit ," is reportedly a new Petya-like targeted ransomware attack against corporate networks, demanding 0.05 bitcoin (~ $285) as ransom from victims to unlock their systems. According to an initial analysis provided by the Kaspersky, the ransomware was distributed via drive-by download attacks, using fake Adobe Flash players installer to lure victims' in to install malware unwittingly. "No exploits were used, so the victim would have to manually execute the malware dropper, which pretends to be an Adobe Flash installer. We've detected a number of compromised websites, all of which were news or media websites." Kaspersky Lab said . However, security researchers at ESET have detected Bad Rabbit malware as ' Win32/Diskcoder.D ' —