For years, cybercriminals have been extorting victims by locking their computers with malware. The hackers promise to give the victim their files back as long as they fork over the cryptocurrency—typically Bitcoin—within the stipulated time limit.
Now, someone has added a new, perverse twist to this tried and tested scheme: demanding naked photographs instead of Bitcoin. Researchers at MalwareHunterTeam, a research group focused on ransomware, spotted the software, called nRansomware on Thursday. The group posted a screenshot of the message that's displayed when a victim gets infected:
Read moreOne of the world’s “big four” accountancy firms has been targeted by a sophisticated hack that compromised the confidential emails and plans of some of its blue-chip clients.
Deloitte, which is registered in London and has its global headquarters in New York, was the victim of a cybersecurity attack that went unnoticed for months. One of the largest private firms in the US, which reported a record $37bn revenue last year, Deloitte provides auditing, tax consultancy and high-end cybersecurity advice to some of the world’s biggest banks, multinational companies, media enterprises, pharmaceutical firms and government agencies.
Read moreLogin data for more than half a million records tied to vehicle tracking device company SVR Tracking have leaked online, potentially exposing the personal and vehicle data of drivers and businesses using its service.
The leaked repository was first spotted by the Kromtech Security Center, which blamed a misconfigured Amazon AWS S3 bucket that was left publicly accessible for an unknown period of time for the breach. Kromtech first noticed the cache on Sept. 18, according to experts, and the bucket was closed from public access hours after the security company alerted SVR on Sept. 20. The records included user login info like emails and passwords.
Read moreIran is building up its cyber capabilities and the emergence of a group of hackers, dubbed APT33, has given rise to concerns the nation's cyberwarfare units are looking to launch destructive attacks on critical infrastructure, energy and military bodies.
The APT33 group has been operational since 2013 and focused on the aerospace industry, successfully hacking firms with aviation in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia in the last year, researchers at cybersecurity company FireEye warned Wednesday. Petrochemical firms in South Korea and Saudi Arabia were also targeted, according to the firm's report.
Read moreHundreds of thousands of computers getting penetrated by a corrupted version of an ultra-common piece of security software was never going to end well. But now it's becoming clear exactly how bad the results of the recent CCleaner malware outbreak may be.
Researchers now believe that the hackers behind it were bent not only on mass infections, but on targeted espionage that tried to gain access to the networks of at least 20 tech firms. Earlier this week, security firms revealed that CCleaner, a piece of security software distributed by Czech company Avast, had been hijacked by hackers and loaded with a backdoor that evaded the company's security checks.
Read moreThe top securities regulator in the United States said Wednesday night that its computer system had been hacked last year, giving the attackers private information that could have been exploited for trading.
The disclosure, coming on the heels of a data breach at Equifax, the major consumer credit reporting firm, is likely to intensify concerns over potential computer vulnerabilities lurking among pillars of the American financial system. The Securities and Exchange Commission said in a statement that it was still investigating the breach of its corporate filing system. The system, called Edgar, is used by companies to make legally required filings to the agency.
Read moreHackers have successfully breached CCleaner’s security to inject malware into the app and distribute it to millions of users. Security researchers at Cisco Talos discovered that download servers used by Avast (the company that owns CCleaner) were compromised to distribute malware inside CCleaner.
“For a period of time, the legitimate signed version of CCleaner 5.33 being distributed by Avast also contained a multi-stage malware payload that rode on top of the installation of CCleaner,” says the Talos team. CCleaner has been downloaded more than 2 billion times according to Avast, making it a popular target for hackers.
Read moreAn undocumented Microsoft Office feature allows attackers to gather sensitive configuration details on targeted systems simply by tricking recipients to open a specially crafted Word document—no VBA macros, embedded Flash objects or PE files needed.
The undocumented feature is being used by adversaries, according to Kaspersky Lab researchers, as part of a multistage attack that first involves gathering the system configuration data on targeted systems. “This code effectively sent information about the software installed on the victim machine to the attackers, including info about which version of Microsoft Office was installed,” wrote Kasperky Lab researchers.
Read moreSwitzerland’s defence ministry has foiled a cyber attack by malware similar to that used in other global hacking campaigns, the government said in a statement on Friday. The attack was detected in July by software that operated much like the Turla malware family, it said.
The government declined to give information about the origin of the attack or say if any damage including data theft had occurred. It cited security considerations. Government specialists took counter measures and an investigation is underway, while criminal charges have been lodged with federal prosecutors against persons unknown to them.
Read moreHackers can bypass a new security feature in MacOS High Sierra to load malicious kernel extensions. According to security researchers at Synack, the forthcoming update to MacOS features something called Secure Kernel Extension Loading” (SKEL).
Patrick Wardle, chief security researcher at Synack, said that while the feature was “wrapped in good intentions”, in its current implementation, SKEL “merely hampers the efforts of the ‘good guys'” (ie 3rd-party MacOS developers such as those that design security products). “Due to flaws in its implementation, the bad guys (hackers/malware) will likely remain unaffected,” he said in a blog post.
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