Articles about Malware

A new report from HP Wolf Security reveals cybercriminal marketplaces offering low-level attackers the tools needed to bypass detection and infect users in the form of so-called 'meal kits'.

These are pre-packaged malware kits which give low-level attackers all the ingredients to evade detection tools, making it easier for them to breach organizations and steal sensitive data.

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The shift to remote and hybrid working has led to many problems for IT teams, not least that it offers an expanded attack surface. Add in the threat from cybercriminals looking to capitalize on advanced AI capabilities to create malware and you have some major challenges.

We spoke to Doug Kersten, CISO of enterprise collaboration specialist Appfire, to discuss the key security challenges product and DevOps teams face today and how to overcome them.

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OpenText Cybersecurity has released its sixth annual look at the threat landscape to reveal the most notorious malware trends.

This year four new ransomware gangs, believed to be a new generation of previous big players, top the list. Newcomer Cl0p takes the prize for this year's nastiest malware after commanding exorbitant ransom demands with its MOVEit campaign.

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In the third quarter of this year, phishing attacks soared by 173 percent compared with the previous three months, and malware was up 110 percent over the same period.

Email security company Vade has released its quarterly Phishing and Malware Report which shows Q3 2023's malware volumes almost set a record for the highest total of any quarter, trailing only Q4 2016's mark of 126.8 million.

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Almost every organization freely admits that people are the biggest risk to their security and are most vulnerable when using email. While the 'outbound' risk of an employee accidentally or intentionally leaking data is very clearly categorized as an insider risk, even a phishing attack that originates from outside the organization requires an insider to, essentially, open the door.

And it’s a valuable vulnerability for threat actors to be aware of; the FBI reported that Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams accounted for $50 billion in losses between June 2016 to December 2022.

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A new report from SpyCloud shows that while 79 percent of organizations say they are confident in their ransomware defenses, 81 percent were affected at least once in the past 12 months.

The study also shows that infostealer infections preceded 22 percent of ransomware events for North American and European ransomware victim companies in 2023. 76 percent of infections that preceded these ransomware events involved the Raccoon infostealer malware.

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Critical infrastructure protection specialist OPSWAT has released its latest Threat Intelligence Trends survey looking at organizations to manage the current threat landscape and how to prepare for future challenges.

It finds that 62 percent of organizations recognize the need for additional investments in tools and processes to enhance their threat intelligence capabilities. Only 22 percent have fully matured threat intelligence programs in place though, with most indicating that they are only in the early stages or need to make additional investments in tools and processes.

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Historically Windows has been the favorite target of cybercriminals, but new research from Accenture suggests macOS is becoming a lucrative priority on the dark web and information on exploits is being traded for millions of dollars.

The Accenture Cyber Threat Intelligence (ACTI) team has noted a significant upward trend in dark-web threat actors targeting macOS from 2019 to 2022 and the volume from 2023 has overtaken 2022 in just the first six months.

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Every day, cyber incidents and their subsequent downtimes seem to fill the news. These downtimes, both costly and damaging to consumer trust, have rightfully been something that CISOs and CIOs work to prevent with increasingly sophisticated security measures. But sometimes the most damaging "disasters" are the simplest.

Earlier this year, one of the hyperscale suffered a major data center incident in which a water leak triggered a fire in a co-location data center, knocking more than 90 services offline in France. This serves as a reminder to us all that, despite rising cybercrime stealing the headlines, preparing for physical disasters remains a vital part of any disaster recovery (DR) plan. It is crucial that businesses consider the impact that these incidents may create on their own day-to-day operations and invest in their own disaster recovery.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT have become a tool for cybercriminals to enhance their phishing email attacks. These chatbots use large datasets of natural language and reinforcement learning to create typo-free and grammatically correct emails, giving the appearance of legitimacy to unsuspecting targets. This has raised concerns among cybersecurity leaders, with 72 percent admitting to being worried about AI being used to craft better phishing emails and campaigns.

Chatbots can help cybercriminals scale the production of advanced social engineering attacks, such as CEO fraud or business email compromise (BEC) attacks. Additionally, cybercriminals may use AI-powered chatbots to scrape personal or financial data from social media, create brand impersonation emails and websites, or even generate code for malware such as ransomware. In particular, without AI, creating malware is a specialized task that requires skilled cybercriminals. However, the use of chatbots could make it easier for non-specialists to do this, and we can also expect AI-generated outputs to improve over time.

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While IT security leaders are concerned about attacks that use malware-exfiltrated authentication data, many still lack the necessary tools to investigate the security and organizational impact of these infections and effectively prevent follow-on attacks.

Research from cybercrime analytics company SpyCloud shows 98 percent of over 300 mid-market and enterprise IT security professionals from the US and UK surveyed say better visibility into at-risk applications would significantly improve their security posture.

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A new report shows a 1,400 percent increase in fileless or memory-based attacks, which exploit existing software, applications, and protocols to perform malicious activities against cloud-based systems.

The research from Aqua Security's Nautilus research team collected honeypot data over a six-month period and shows that more than 50 percent of the attacks focused on defense evasion.

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Cybercriminals are using AI-created malware that is adept at avoiding detection by traditional antivirus models, according to the latest report from Acronis.

The report also finds email attacks and ransomware cases have exploded relative to last year. Acronis-monitored endpoints are picking up valuable data about how cybercriminals operate and how some attacks have become more intelligent, sophisticated, and difficult to detect.

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Last month broke ransomware records -- and not in a good way. The latest report from Blackfog shows 66 publicly disclosed ransomware attacks, the highest recorded since the company began reporting in January 2020.

More concerning still is a significant uptick in the attack success rate, with a 154 percent increase over 2022.

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A new report shows a 121 percent increase in cybercriminals using legitimate websites to obfuscate malicious payloads.

The report from Egress, based on data from its Egress Defend cloud email security solution, shows YouTube, Amazon AWS, Google Docs, Firebase Storage, and DocuSign to be the top 10 most frequently used sites.

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