Millions of Android devices are infected with malware before they leave the factory
At Black Hat Asia, a team of Trend Micro security researchers claimed that millions of Android devices are infected with malware before they leave the factories.
One of the most effective ways of infecting Android devices is to do so before they even make it into the hands of customers. First spotted by The Register, operations may have been going on since at least 2017.
Dark web market in infostealers is booming
A new report from the Secureworks Counter Threat Unit (CTU) uncovers a thriving market in infostealer logs that serves as a key enabler for some of the most damaging forms of cybercrime such as ransomware attacks.
On the 'Russian Market' site alone, the number of logs for sale increased by 150 percent in less than nine months, from two million on a single day in June 2022 to over five million on a single day in late February 2023.
Microsoft is able to look inside your password protected zip files
Microsoft has been spotted scanning for malware within password protected zip files stored on its cloud services.
Security researcher Andrew Brandt was among those to notice that Microsoft appears to be bypassing passwords added to zip archives in order to check for malware. While the intentions of the company may be good, the practice raises serious questions about privacy and security.
Technology sector suffers most from poor cyber hygiene
Analysis of exposed dark web assets from SpyCloud finds that the technology sector has the highest number of malware-infected employees and consumers, the highest number of exposed corporate credentials, and the most exposed malware cookie records.
In the analysis of the darknet exposure of employees of Fortune 1000 enterprises across 21 industry sectors, researchers uncovered 27.48 million pairs of credentials with corporate email addresses and plain text passwords, with over 223,000 exfiltrated by malware.
Malicious HTML attachments double in the last year
Last May, 21 percent of all HTML attachments scanned were malicious. Ten months on, that figure has more than doubled with 45.7 percent of scanned HTML files found to be malicious in March 2023.
This finding comes from the latest Threat Spotlight report from Barracuda Networks, which shows that not only is the overall volume of malicious HTML attachments increasing, they remain the file type most likely to be used for malicious purposes.
Number of ransomware victims increases by 25 percent
A new report based on publicly available resources finds a 25 percent increase in ransomware victims from Q4 2022 and a 27 percent increase compared to Q1 of the same year.
The study from GuidePoint Security's Research and Intelligence Team (GRIT) tracked 849 total publicly posted ransomware victims claimed by 29 different threat groups in the first quarter of this year.
Over 700 million credentials exposed and 22 million devices infected in 2022
The latest Identity Exposure Report from SpyCloud shows that last year its researchers recaptured 721.5 million exposed credentials from the criminal underground, and found over 22 million unique devices infected by malware.
Of the exposed credentials recovered by SpyCloud, roughly 50 percent came from botnets, tools commonly used to deploy highly accurate information-stealing malware. These infostealers enable cybercriminals to work at scale, stealing valid credentials, cookies, auto-fill data, and other valuable information to use in targeted attacks or sell on the darknet.
WithSecure creates an 'undo button' for ransomware
Ransomware attacks continue to plague organizations and can have an effect beyond the financial, damaging reputations and customer trust.
Now though WithSecure has developed a new technology called Activity Monitor that can essentially undo the damage malware can cause.
2022 breaks records for cyber threat activity
The final quarterly analysis of 2022's threat landscape from Nuspire confirms that last year saw the most threat activity in history.
While Q4 saw dips across all three sectors Nuspire monitors -- malware, botnets and exploits -- the net sum for the year shows a marked increase, especially in the case of exploits, which nearly doubled.
HTML smuggling -- the latest way to to deliver malware
Since Microsoft began the default blocking of macros in documents sent over the internet there's been an increase in the use of HTML files to deliver malware.
Research by Trustwave Spiderlabs reveals a rise in so called 'HTML smuggling' using HTML5 attributes that can work offline by storing a binary in an immutable blob of data within JavaScript code. The embedded payload then gets decoded into a file object when opened via a web browser.
New Linux malware up 50 percent in 2022
Although it has a reputation as a safe and secure operating system, Linux is not immune to malware. Indeed it's become an attractive target as increasing numbers of servers and other devices run Linux-based OSes.
Data analyzed by the Atlas VPN team, based on malware threat statistics from AV-ATLAS, shows new Linux malware threats hit record numbers in 2022, increasing by 50 percent to 1.9 million.
Archive files overtake Office docs as a malware delivery method
Archive file formats -- like ZIP and RAR files -- are the most common file type for delivering malware, overtaking Office files for the first time in three years.
A new report from HP Wolf Security, based on on data from millions of endpoints, finds that between July and September this year 44 percent of malware was delivered inside archive files -- an 11 percent rise over the previous quarter -- compared to 32 percent delivered through Office files such as Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Containers: The ultimate Trojan horse
Containers are meant to be immutable.Once the image is made, it is what it is, and all container instances spawned from it will be identical. The container is defined as code, so its contents, intents and dependencies are explicit. Because of this, if used carefully, containers can help reduce supply chain risks.
However, these benefits have not gone unnoticed by attackers. A number of threat actors have started to leverage containers to deploy malicious payloads and even scale up their own operations. For the Sysdig 2022 Cloud-Native Threat Report, the Sysdig Threat Research Team (Sysdig TRT) investigated what is really lurking in publicly available containers.
Cryptojacking malware sees a 230 percent increase in 2022
Crypto mining has become incredibly popular with cybercriminals over the past year, growing by 230 percent. It's not hard to see why as it's expensive in terms of machinery and energy consumption, so if you can cryptojack someone else's machine to do it there are healthy profits to be made.
New research from Kaspersky shows that despite the 'crypto winter' which has seen the value of cryptocurrencies drop significantly and the cryptocurrency industry facing a liquidity crisis, criminal activity targeting the crypto industry doesn’t seem to be slowing down.
Cyren Hybrid Analyzer improves malware detection without hitting performance
Undocumented malware only makes up a small proportion of files, yet it presents a high risk of infection. Sandboxing and analyzing everything in order to eliminate risk, however, has a major impact on performance.
To address this Cyren has produced Hybrid Analyzer. Using emulation -- effectively automatically reverse engineering the code contained in a file -- this new offering operates 100 times faster than a malware sandbox and between five and 20 times faster than alternative file analysis solutions.
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