Catalin Cimpanu reports: A new botnet made up of roughly 100,000 home routers has silently grown over the past two months. According to current evidence, the botnet’s operators appear to use the infected routers to connect to webmail services and are most likely sending out massive email spam campaigns. First spotted this September by the…
Category: Malware
Supply-chain attack on cryptocurrency exchange gate.io
ESET malware researcher Matthieu Faou writes: On November 3, attackers successfully breached StatCounter, a leading web analytics platform. This service is used by many webmasters to gather statistics on their visitors – a service very similar to Google Analytics. To do so, webmasters usually add an external JavaScript tag incorporating a piece of code from…
Records lacking for ransomware attack on sheriff’s office
Molly Smith reports: Records of a ransomware attack on the Hidalgo County Sheriff’s Office are nonexistent, leaving little details available with the exception of an investigator’s testimony during a recent trial. HCSO investigator Marco Antonio Mandujano lost data obtained from an early 2017 dump of a sexual assault victim’s cellphone because the computer on which…
GandCrab ransomware crew loses $1Mil after Bitdefender releases free decrypter
Score one for the good guys. Catalin Cimpanu reports: Bitdefender believes the criminal group behind the GandCrab ransomware has lost an estimated $1 million in ransom payments after the company released a free decryption utility for GandCrab victims last week. The Romanian antivirus maker says that at least 1,700 GandCrab victims were able to successfully…
Civil servant who watched porn at work blamed for infecting a US government network with malware
Zack Whittaker reports: A U.S. government network was infected with malware thanks to one employee’s “extensive history” of watching porn on his work computer, investigators have found. The audit, carried out by the U.S. Department of the Interior’s inspector general, found that a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) network at the EROS Center, a satellite imaging…
Mirai Co-Author Gets 6 Months Confinement, $8.6M in Fines for Rutgers Attacks
Brian Krebs reports: The convicted co-author of the highly disruptive Mirai botnet malware strain has been sentenced to 2,500 hours of community service, six months home confinement, and ordered to pay $8.6 million in restitution for repeatedly using Mirai to take down Internet services at Rutgers University, his former alma mater. Paras Jha, a 22-year-old computer…