Edmund H. Mahony reports: Spain on Friday turned over notorious Russian computer hacker Peter Yuryevich Levashov to FBI cyber detectives in New Haven, who have accused him of developing the Kelihos network of hundreds of thousands of infected computers and using it to stuff inboxes with spam, steal secret financial data and spew malicious programming…
Category: Malware
SC:Spartanburg Co. libraries hit by ransomware attack
Damn. Some will likely call this a training #FAIL, , but it’s still sad/frustrating. WSPA reports: Spartanburg County Public Libraries confirmed Tuesday night that they suffered a ransomware attack Monday morning impacting the library system’s ability to check out books. Spartanburg County Librarian Todd Stephens said access to the system’s computers and wireless have been…
HHS OCR January 2018 OCR Cybersecurity Newsletter: Cyber Extortion
January 30, 2018 Incidents of cyber extortion have risen steadily over the past couple of years and, by many estimates, will continue to be a major source of disruption for many organizations. Cyber extortion can take many forms, but it typically involves cybercriminals’ demanding money to stop (or in some cases, to merely delay) their…
More than half of ransomware victims hit at least twice
Tony Morbin reports: New research on ransomware by Sophos reveals that the average total cost of an attack is US$ 133,000 (£94,000), including ransom, downtime, manpower, device cost, network cost, and lost opportunities – but for the top five percent most impacted organisations, costs were US$1.3 million to US$6.6 million (£900,000 to £4.7 million). More…
SC school district latest victim to ransomware
Kendall Morris reports: A South Carolina school district is the latest victim to ransomware. Chester County School District posted on its Facebook page Monday that ransomware hit the district’s servers over the weekend. The post went on to say that no data has been taken or breached, and it has a specialist on site to…
Hackers Behind Dridex Also Created FriedEx Ransomware
ESET reports: In a new blog post researchers from ESET researchers reveal that that the authors behind the infamous Dridex banking trojan are also behind the high-profile, sophisticated ransomware variant FriedEx. The ransomware was discovered in early July 2017 by Michael Gillespie. In August, it returned to the spotlight and made headlines by infecting NHS hospitals in Scotland. FriedEx…