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In 2024, global ransomware attacks hit 5,414, an 11% increase from 2023.  After a slow start, attacks spiked in Q2 and surged in Q4, with 1,827 incidents (33% of the year's total). Law enforcement actions against major groups like LockBit caused fragmentation, leading to more competition and a rise in smaller gangs. The number of active ransomware groups jumped 40%, from 68 in 2023 to 95 in 2024. New Ransomware Groups to Watch In 2023 there were just 27 new groups. 2024 saw a dramatic rise with 46 new groups detected. As the year went on the number of groups accelerated with Q4 2024 having 48 groups active.  Of the 46 new ransomware groups in 2024, RansomHub became dominant, exceeding LockBit's activity. At Cyberint, now a Check Point Company, the research team is constantly researching the latest ransomware groups and analyzing them for potential impact. This blog will look at 3 new players, the aforementioned RansomHub, Fog and Lynx and examine their impact in 202...

Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Argentina, and Thailand have become the targets of a campaign that has infected Android TV devices with a botnet malware dubbed Vo1d . The improved variant of Vo1d has been found to encompass 800,000 daily active IP addresses, with the botnet scaling a peak of 1,590,299 on January 19, 2025, spanning 226 countries and regions. As of February 25, 2025, India has experienced a notable surge in infection rate, increasing from less than 1% (3,901) to 18.17% (217,771).  "Vo1d has evolved to enhance its stealth, resilience, and anti-detection capabilities," QiAnXin XLab said . "RSA encryption secures network communication, preventing [command-and-control] takeover even if [the Domain Generation Algorithm] domains are registered by researchers. Each payload uses a unique Downloader, with XXTEA encryption and RSA-protected keys, making analysis harder." The malware was first documented by Doctor Web in September 2024 as affecting Androi...

Firefox browser maker Mozilla on Friday updated its Terms of Use a second time within a week following criticism overbroad language that appeared to give the company the rights to all information uploaded by users. The revised Terms of Use now states - You give Mozilla the rights necessary to operate Firefox. This includes processing your data as we describe in the Firefox Privacy Notice . It also includes a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license for the purpose of doing as you request with the content you input in Firefox. This does not give Mozilla any ownership in that content. A previous version of this clause, which went into effect on February 26, said - When you upload or input information through Firefox, you hereby grant us a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to use that information to help you navigate, experience, and interact with online content as you indicate with your use of Firefox. The development came days after the company introduced a T...

A 23-year-old Serbian youth activist had their Android phone targeted by a zero-day exploit developed by Cellebrite to unlock the device, according to a new report from Amnesty International. "The Android phone of one student protester was exploited and unlocked by a sophisticated zero-day exploit chain targeting Android USB drivers, developed by Cellebrite," the international non-governmental organization said , adding traces of the exploit were discovered in a separate case in mid-2024. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2024-53104 (CVSS score: 7.8), a case of privilege escalation in a kernel component known as the USB Video Class (UVC) driver. A patch for the flaw was released for the Linux kernel in December 2024. It was subsequently addressed in Android earlier this month. It's believed that CVE-2024-53104 was combined with two other flaws – CVE-2024-53197 and CVE-2024-50302 – both of which have been resolved in the Linux kernel. They are yet to be included i...

Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is an amazing technology developed by Microsoft that lets you access and control another computer over a network. It's like having your office computer with you wherever you go. For businesses, this means IT staff can manage systems remotely, and employees can work from home or anywhere, making RDP a true game-changer in today's work environment. But here's the catch: because RDP is accessible over the internet, it's also a prime target for unethical hackers. If someone gains unauthorized access, they could potentially take over your system. That's why it's so important to secure RDP properly. Why IT Teams Depend on RDP, Despite the Risks More than 50 percent of Kaseya's small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) customers use RDP for daily operations due to its efficiency and flexibility: Reduces Costs and Downtime – IT teams can resolve technical issues remotely, eliminating travel expenses and delays. Supports B...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a widespread phishing campaign that uses fake CAPTCHA images shared via PDF documents hosted on Webflow's content delivery network (CDN) to deliver the Lumma stealer malware. Netskope Threat Labs said it discovered 260 unique domains hosting 5,000 phishing PDF files that redirect victims to malicious websites. "The attacker uses SEO to trick victims into visiting the pages by clicking on malicious search engine results," security researcher Jan Michael Alcantara said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "While most phishing pages focus on stealing credit card information, some PDF files contain fake CAPTCHAs that trick victims into executing malicious PowerShell commands, ultimately leading to the Lumma Stealer malware." The phishing campaign is estimated to have affected more than 1,150 organizations and more than 7,000 users since the second half of 2024, with the attacks primarily singling out victims in Nort...

Microsoft on Thursday unmasked four of the individuals that it said were behind an Azure Abuse Enterprise scheme that involves leveraging unauthorized access to generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) services in order to produce offensive and harmful content. The campaign, called LLMjacking, has targeted various AI offerings, including Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service. The tech giant is tracking the cybercrime network as Storm-2139. The individuals named are - Arian Yadegarnia aka "Fiz" of Iran, Alan Krysiak aka "Drago" of United Kingdom, Ricky Yuen aka "cg-dot" of Hong Kong, China, and Phát Phùng Tấn aka "Asakuri" of Vietnam "Members of Storm-2139 exploited exposed customer credentials scraped from public sources to unlawfully access accounts with certain generative AI services," Steven Masada, assistant general counsel for Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit (DCU), said . "They then altered the capabilities of ...

A dataset used to train large language models (LLMs) has been found to contain nearly 12,000 live secrets, which allow for successful authentication. The findings once again highlight how hard-coded credentials pose a severe security risk to users and organizations alike, not to mention compounding the problem when LLMs end up suggesting insecure coding practices to their users. Truffle Security said it downloaded a December 2024 archive from Common Crawl , which maintains a free, open repository of web crawl data. The massive dataset contains over 250 billion pages spanning 18 years.  The archive specifically contains 400TB of compressed web data, 90,000 WARC files (Web ARChive format), and data from 47.5 million hosts across 38.3 million registered domains. The company's analysis found that there are 219 different secret types in the Common Crawl archive, including Amazon Web Services (AWS) root keys, Slack webhooks, and Mailchimp API keys. "'Live' secrets ar...

The threat actor known as Sticky Werewolf has been linked to targeted attacks primarily in Russia and Belarus with the aim of delivering the Lumma Stealer malware by means of a previously undocumented implant. Cybersecurity company Kaspersky is tracking the activity under the name Angry Likho, which it said bears a "strong resemblance" to Awaken Likho (aka Core Werewolf, GamaCopy, and PseudoGamaredon). "However, Angry Likho's attacks tend to be targeted, with a more compact infrastructure, a limited range of implants, and a focus on employees of large organizations, including government agencies and their contractors," the Russian company said . It's suspected that the threat actors are likely native Russian speakers given the use of fluent Russian in the bait files used to trigger the infection chain. Last month, cybersecurity company F6 (formerly F.A.C.C.T.) described it as a "pro-Ukrainian cyberspy group." The attackers have been found...