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Ransomware is one of the most blatant and obvious money making schemes for cybercriminals and it was most likely to be known when last year Cryptolocker ransomware targeted millions of computers worldwide. Recently, security researchers at the Antivirus firm TrendLabs have unearthed another sophisticated variant of the ransomware malware which is employing  Windows PowerShell  in an effort to encrypt files on the victims' computer. The firm detected the variant as TROJ_POSHCODER.A . Windows PowerShell is a task automation and configuration management framework from Microsoft, consisting of a command-line shell and associated scripting language. It provides full access to COM and WMI, enabling administrators to perform administrative tasks on both local and remote Windows systems as well as WS-Management and CIM enabling management of remote Linux systems and network devices. It is believed that cybercriminals have used this feature of Windows just in order to make

Is your organization constantly under threat from credential phishing? Even with comprehensive security awareness training, many employees still fall victim to credential phishing scams. The result? Cybercriminals gaining immediate and unhindered access to sensitive data, email accounts, and other applications. But what if you could outsmart these criminals and protect your organization? Join  Graham Cluley , renowned cybersecurity expert and host of the Smashing Security podcast, and  Mike Britton , CISO at Abnormal Security, for an illuminating webinar that delves into the world of credential phishing and offers actionable insights. What Will You Learn? Understanding the Lure:  How attackers manipulate victims into submitting credentials, employing tactics such as generative AI. Why Victims Fall for the Trap:  A detailed look at why security awareness training may not always succeed in preventing employees from taking the bait. Effective Strategies to Combat Threats:  Compre

Super Low RPO with Continuous Data Protection: Dial Back to Just Seconds Before an Attack Zerto , a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, can help you detect and recover from ransomware in near real-time. This solution leverages continuous data protection (CDP) to ensure all workloads have the lowest recovery point objective (RPO) possible. The most valuable thing about CDP is that it does not use snapshots, agents, or any other periodic data protection methodology. Zerto has no impact on production workloads and can achieve RPOs in the region of 5-15 seconds across thousands of virtual machines simultaneously. For example, the environment in the image below has nearly 1,000 VMs being protected with an average RPO of just six seconds! Application-Centric Protection: Group Your VMs to Gain Application-Level Control   You can protect your VMs with the Zerto application-centric approach using Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs). This logical grouping of VMs ensures that your whole applica

Social networking sites and search engines  are expected   to be hit hard by cybercriminals this holiday season, but the FBI is warning consumers about two other threats they may encounter – so called "smishing" and "vishing" scams. Both threats are variations of phishing, but smishing uses SMS texts to initiate the scam, while vishing uses automated phone calls. Reports of these types of scams date back to at least 2006, but the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) issued an  advisory .Friday warning consumers that they will be prevalent this holiday season. In these types of attacks, a user receives a text message or automated phone call to their cell phone stating there is a problem with their bank account, the FBI said in its advisory. The user is given a phone number to call or a website to log onto to provide account credentials to remedy the issue. "While most cyberscams target your computer, smishing and vishing scams target your mobile phone, and they're becom

Both cryptocurrency and ransomware are nothing new in the digital world; both have been there for a very long time, which was enough for them to find common pieces for starting their relationship. Ransomware can be like a virtual car that works on all types of fuels, and crypto is the one that is currently most recommended. No one can argue that 2020 was the year of ransomware in the cyber world, but it wasn't due to the fact that cybercriminals chose ransomware just because they knew how to attack properly. It's because of the fact that crypto rose mostly this year, along with the new normal of the digital world. It gave them a new cause to stick to ransomware, thanks to the anonymous payments that can be made using a cryptocurrency.  How does ransomware work?  Ransomware is a malware type that encrypts the victim's files, whether it's a random user or an organization, leading to denying them access to those files on their personal devices. And the key to gaining

Phishing attacks are steadily becoming more sophisticated, with cybercriminals investing in new ways of deceiving victims into revealing sensitive information or installing malicious software. One of the latest trends in phishing is the use of QR codes, CAPTCHAs, and steganography. See how they are carried out and learn to detect them. Quishing Quishing, a phishing technique resulting from the combination of "QR" and "phishing," has become a popular weapon for cybercriminals in 2023. By concealing malicious links within QR codes, attackers can evade traditional spam filters, which are primarily geared towards identifying text-based phishing attempts. The inability of many security tools to decipher the content of QR codes further makes this method a go-to choice for cybercriminals. An email containing a QR code with a malicious link Analyzing a QR code with an embedded malicious link in a safe environment is easy with  ANY.RUN : Simply open  this task  in th

A zero-day vulnerability has been discovered in the desktop version for end-to-end encrypted Telegram messaging app that was being exploited in the wild in order to spread malware that mines cryptocurrencies such as Monero and ZCash. The Telegram vulnerability was uncovered by security researcher Alexey Firsh from Kaspersky Lab last October and affects only the Windows client of Telegram messaging software. The flaw has actively been exploited in the wild since at least March 2017 by attackers who tricked victims into downloading malicious software onto their PCs that used their CPU power to mine cryptocurrencies or serve as a backdoor for attackers to remotely control the affected machine, according to a blogpost on Securelist. Here's How Telegram Vulnerability Works The vulnerability resides in the way Telegram Windows client handles the RLO (right-to-left override) Unicode character (U+202E), which is used for coding languages that are written from right to left, li

An ever-evolving and rampant form of cybercrime that targets emails as the potential medium to conduct fraud is known as Business Email Compromise. Targeting commercial, government as well as non-profit organizations, BEC can lead to huge amounts of data loss, security breach, and compromised financial assets. It is a common misconception that cybercriminals usually lay their focus on MNCs and enterprise-level organizations. SMEs these days are just as much a target to email fraud as the larger industry players. How Can BEC Affect Organizations?  Examples of BEC include sophisticated social engineering attacks like phishing, CEO fraud, fake invoices, and email spoofing, to name a few. It can also be termed an impersonation attack wherein an attacker aims to defraud a company by posing people in authoritarian positions. Impersonating people like the CFO or CEO, a business partner, or anyone you will blindly place your trust in is what drives these attacks' success. February of

Three young hackers who were sentenced late last year for creating and spreading the notorious Mirai botnet are now helping the FBI to investigate other "complex" cybercrime cases in return to avoid their lengthy prison terms. Paras Jha, 21 from New Jersey, Josiah White, 20 from Washington, and Dalton Norman, 21 from Louisiana, plead guilty in December 2017 to multiple charges for their role in creating and hijacking hundreds of thousands IoT devices to make them part of a notorious botnet network dubbed Mirai . Mirai malware scanned for insecure routers, cameras, DVRs, and other Internet of Things (IoT) devices which were using their default passwords and then made them part of a botnet network . The trio developed the Mirai botnet to attack rival Minecraft video gaming hosts, but after realizing that their invention was powerful enough to launch record-breaking DDoS attacks against targets like OVH hosting website, they released the source code of Mirai . The

CISOs, security leaders, and SOC teams often struggle with limited visibility into all connections made to their company-owned assets and networks. They are hindered by a lack of open-source intelligence and powerful technology required for proactive, continuous, and effective discovery and protection of their systems, data, and assets. As advanced threat actors constantly search for easily exploitable vulnerabilities around the clock, CISOs are in pursuit of improved methods to reduce threat exposures and safeguard their assets, users, and data from relentless cyber-attacks and the severe consequences of breaches. In response to this need, an emerging solution addressing the most critical priorities at the initial stage of the attack chain has provided security leaders with a new tool to manage their most pressing threat exposures at their origin. Leading analyst firm Gartner Research describes the solution: "By 2026, organizations prioritizing their security investments based

Threat actors operating under the name Anonymous Arabic have released a remote access trojan (RAT) called  Silver RAT  that's equipped to bypass security software and stealthily launch hidden applications. "The developers operate on multiple hacker forums and social media platforms, showcasing an active and sophisticated presence," cybersecurity firm Cyfirma  said  in a report published last week. The actors, assessed to be of Syrian origin and linked to the development of another RAT known as S500 RAT, also run a Telegram channel offering various services such as the distribution of cracked RATs, leaked databases, carding activities, and the sale of Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) bots. The social media bots are then utilized by other cyber criminals to promote various illicit services by automatically engaging with and commenting on user content. In-the-wild detections of Silver RAT v1.0 were first observed in November 2023, although the threat actor's plans to release the tr

Coinhive, a notorious in-browser cryptocurrency mining service popular among cybercriminals, has announced that it will discontinue its services on March 8, 2019. Regular readers of The Hacker News already know how Coinhive's service helped cyber criminals earn hundreds of thousands of dollars by using computers of millions of people visiting hacked websites . For a brief recap: In recent years, cybercriminals leveraged every possible web vulnerability [in Drupal , WordPress , and others ] to hack thousands of websites and wireless routers , and then modified them to secretly inject Coinhive's JavaScript-based Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency mining script on web-pages to financially benefit themselves. Millions of online users who visited those hacked websites immediately had their computers' processing power hijacked, also known as cryptojacking , to mine cryptocurrency without users' knowledge, potentially generating profits for cybercriminals in the background.

21st-century technology has allowed Cybercriminals to use sophisticated and undetectable methods for malicious activities. In 2020 alone, a survey revealed that  65% of US-based companies were vulnerable to email phishing and impersonation attacks . This calls for upgrading your organization's security with DMARC, which if not implemented, will enable cyber-attackers to: Instigate money transfers from vulnerable employees via spoofed emails while impersonating senior executives in your company Send fake invoices to your employees and partners Deal in illegal goods via your domain  Spread Ransomware Impersonate customer support to steal confidential customer or partner information Such situations can have long-lasting consequences on your business. From inflicting a blow on thebrand's reputation and credibility among its partners and customer base to loss of valuable company information and millions of dollars, the risks are countless. What is Domain Spoofing? Domain

Generative AI will enable anyone to launch sophisticated phishing attacks that only Next-generation MFA devices can stop The least surprising headline from 2023 is that ransomware again set new records for a number of incidents and the damage inflicted. We saw new headlines every week, which included a who's-who of big-name organizations. If MGM, Johnson Controls, Chlorox, Hanes Brands, Caesars Palace, and so many others cannot stop the attacks, how will anyone else? Phishing-driven ransomware is the cyber threat that looms larger and more dangerous than all others. CISA and Cisco report that 90% of data breaches are the result of phishing attacks and monetary losses that exceed $10 billion in total. A report from Splunk revealed that 96 percent of companies fell victim to at least one phishing attack in the last 12 months and 83 percent suffered two or more. Protect your organization from phishing and ransomware by learning about the benefits of Next-Generation MFA. Download th

Security researchers have been warning about a new malicious campaign that leverages an alternative scheme to mine cryptocurrencies without directly injecting the infamous CoinHive JavaScript into thousands of hacked websites. Coinhive is a popular browser-based service that offers website owners to embed JavaScript code that utilizes their website visitors' CPUs power in order to mine the Monero cryptocurrency for monetization. However, since its inception, mid-2017, cybercriminals have been abusing the service to illegally make money by injecting their own version of CoinHive JavaScript code to a large number of hacked websites, eventually tricking their millions of visitors into unknowingly mine Monero coins. Since a lot of web application security firms and antivirus companies have now updated their products to detect unauthorized injection of CoinHive JavaScript, cybercriminals have now started abusing a different service from CoinHive to achieve the same. Hackers