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Ransomware groups are increasingly switching to remote encryption in their attacks, marking a new escalation in tactics adopted by financially motivated actors to ensure the success of their campaigns. "Companies can have thousands of computers connected to their network, and with remote ransomware, all it takes is one underprotected device to compromise the entire network," Mark Loman, vice president of threat research at Sophos,  said .  "Attackers know this, so they hunt for that one' weak spot' — and most companies have at least one. Remote encryption is going to stay a perennial problem for defenders." Remote encryption  (aka remote ransomware), as the name implies, occurs when a compromised endpoint is used to encrypt data on other devices on the same network. In October 2023, Microsoft  revealed  that around 60% of ransomware attacks now involve malicious remote encryption in an effort to minimize their footprint, with more than 80% of all compr...

Hands-On Review: Memcyco's Threat Intelligence Solution Website impersonation, also known as brandjacking or website spoofing, has emerged as a significant threat to online businesses. Malicious actors clone legitimate websites to trick customers, leading to financial scams and data theft causing reputation damage and financial losses for both organizations and customers. The Growing Threat of Website Impersonation and Brandjacking Research shows a new phishing site is created every 11 seconds in 2023. Typically, even though the company is a victim of spoofing, the customer holds them responsible for the data breach.  Current market solutions rely on threat intelligence tools that search for fake sites and attempt takedowns. However, takedown processes can be time-consuming, leaving fake sites active and the scope of attacks remains unknown during the critical window of exposure, the time between when the fake site is up and until it is down. Bad actor researches a business ...

The Chinese-speaking threat actors behind  Smishing Triad  have been observed masquerading as the United Arab Emirates Federal Authority for Identity and Citizenship to send malicious SMS messages with the ultimate goal of gathering sensitive information from residents and foreigners in the country. "These criminals send malicious links to their victims' mobile devices through SMS or iMessage and use URL-shortening services like Bit.ly to randomize the links they send," Resecurity  said  in a report published this week. "This helps them protect the fake website's domain and hosting location." Smishing Triad was  first documented  by the cybersecurity company in September 2023, highlighting the group's use of compromised Apple iCloud accounts to send smishing messages for carrying out identity theft and financial fraud.  The threat actor is also known to offer ready-to-use smishing kits for sale to other cybercriminals for $200 a month, alongside e...

A six-month-long international police operation codenamed  HAECHI-IV  has resulted in the arrests of nearly 3,500 individuals and seizures worth $300 million across 34 countries. The exercise, which took place from July through December 2023, took aim at various types of financial crimes such as voice phishing, romance scams, online sextortion, investment fraud, money laundering associated with illegal online gambling, business email compromise fraud, and e-commerce fraud. In addition, authorities froze associated bank and virtual asset service provider (VASP) accounts in an effort to shut off access to criminal proceeds. In total, authorities blocked 82,112 suspicious bank accounts, confiscating $199 million in hard currency and $101 million in virtual assets. "Cooperation between Filipino and Korean authorities led to the arrest in Manila of a high-profile online gambling criminal after a two-year manhunt by Korea's National Police Agency," Interpol, an internation...

A new Go-based information stealer malware called  JaskaGO  has emerged as the latest cross-platform threat to infiltrate both Windows and Apple macOS systems. AT&T Alien Labs, which made the discovery,  said  the malware is "equipped with an extensive array of commands from its command-and-control (C&C) server." Artifacts designed for macOS were first observed in July 2023, impersonating installers for legitimate software such as CapCut. Other variants of the malware have masqueraded as AnyConnect and security tools.  Upon installation, JaskaGO runs checks to determine if it is executing within a virtual machine (VM) environment, and if so, executes a harmless task like pinging Google or printing a random number in a likely effort to fly under the radar. In other scenarios, JaskaGO proceeds to harvest information from the victim system and establishes a connection to its C&C for receiving further instructions, including executing shell command...

The U.S. Justice Department (DoJ) has officially  announced  the disruption of the BlackCat ransomware operation and released a decryption tool that more than 500 affected victims can use to regain access to files locked by the malware. Court documents show that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) enlisted the help of a confidential human source (CHS) to act as an affiliate for the BlackCat group and gain access to a web panel used for managing the gang's victims, in what's a case of hacking the hackers. The confiscation effort involved collaboration and assistance from multiple law enforcement agencies from the U.S., Germany, Denmark, Australia, the U.K., Spain, Switzerland, and Austria. BlackCat , also called ALPHV, GOLD BLAZER, and Noberus,  first emerged  in December 2021 and has since gone on to be the second most prolific ransomware-as-a-service variant in the world after LockBit. It's also the first Rust-language-based ransomware strain spotted ...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on the inner workings of the ransomware operation led by Mikhail Pavlovich Matveev, a Russian national who was  indicted by the U.S. government  earlier this year for his alleged role in launching thousands of attacks across the world. Matveev, who resides in Saint Petersburg and is known by the aliases Wazawaka, m1x, Boriselcin, Uhodiransomwar, Orange, and waza, is alleged to have played a crucial part in the development and deployment of LockBit, Babuk, and Hive ransomware variants since at least June 2020. "Wazawaka and his team members prominently exhibit an insatiable greed for ransom payments, demonstrating a significant disregard for ethical values in their cyber operations," Swiss cybersecurity firm PRODAFT  said  in a comprehensive analysis shared with The Hacker News. "Employing tactics that involve intimidation through threats to leak sensitive files, engaging in dishonest practices, and persisting in retaining...

Threat actors are increasingly making use of GitHub for malicious purposes through novel methods, including abusing secret Gists and issuing malicious commands via git commit messages. "Malware authors occasionally place their samples in services like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and Discord to host second stage malware and sidestep detection tools," ReversingLabs researcher Karlo Zanki  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "But lately, we have observed the increasing use of the GitHub open-source development platform for hosting malware." Legitimate public services are  known  to be  used  by  threat actors  for hosting malware and acting as  dead drop resolvers  to fetch the actual command-and-control (C2) address. While using public sources for C2 does not make them immune to takedowns, they do offer the benefit of allowing threat actors to easily create attack infrastructure that's both inexpensive and reliable. ...

Some of you have already started budgeting for 2024 and allocating funds to security areas within your organization. It is safe to say that employee security awareness training is one of the expenditure items, too. However, its effectiveness is an open question with people still engaging in insecure behaviors at the workplace. Besides, social engineering remains one of the most prevalent attacks, followed by a successful data breach.  Microsoft found  that a popular form of video-based training reduces phish-clicking behavior by about 3%, at best. This number has been stable over the years, says Microsoft, while phishing attacks are increasing yearly.  Regardless, organizations have faith in training and tend to increase their security investments in employee training after attacks. It comes second in the priority list for 51% of organizations, right after incident response planning and testing, according to the IBM Security  "Cost of the Data Breach Report 2023" ....