Avi Mizrahi reports on an interesting revelation in the Avalanche case: Reports of individuals, corporations, banks and even hospitals falling victim to ransomware are nothing new these days, but now we learn that the office of a US state attorney has also been blackmailed for bitcoin. The Allegheny County district attorney, Stephen Zappala Jr., has confirmed…
Category: Malware
Ransomware Author “Pornopoker” Arrested in Russia
Catalin Cimpanu reports: Russian authorities have arrested a man suspected of writing and distributing ransomware. The suspect, whose name hasn’t been released yet, goes by the nickname of Pornopoker. […] According to police, Pornopoker had created ransomware that locks users’ computers with a message perpetrating to be from Russian authorities, such as the police (MIA),…
In Break From Usual, Threat Actors Use RAT To Steal POS Data
Jai Vijayan reports: Memory-scraping tools that surreptitiously copy and export data from running processes have pretty much been the only malware that threat actors have used in recent years to steal credit and debit card data from Point-of-Sale (POS) systems. But that doesn’t mean that other options don’t exist. Security vendor SecureWorks this week said…
‘Avalanche’ network dismantled in international cyber operation
From Europol, today: On 30 November 2016, after more than four years of investigation, the Public Prosecutor’s Office Verden and the Lüneburg Police (Germany) in close cooperation with the United States Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania, the Department of Justice and the FBI, Europol, Eurojust and global partners, dismantled an international criminal infrastructure platform known as…
Carleton U. hit by ransomware, students told to keep Windows PCs away
Iain Thomson reports: Carleton University in Ontario, Canada, has confirmed it has been hit by a ransomware infection that crippled some of the Windows machines on its main campus. Systems at the university started to go down on Tuesday, and its IT department reported that email, network drives and the central university student portal had…
MT: Bigfork school computers breached
Hilary Matheson reports: Bigfork School District will not submit to ransom demands after the district’s computer network was compromised over the weekend by ransomware. Information technology staff have been working to recover computer files and remove the malicious software, which encrypted and locked files from being opened. It’s often the case that ransomware is not…