AP reports that two men have been charged by authorities in Belarus with receiving $1.35 million stolen from the bank account of Penneco Oil Co. in 2012 in a phishing scheme involving Bugat malware. I expect we’ll see a DOJ release on this later today or tomorrow, and I’ll update this post when it’s available.
Category: Malware
Michigan electricity utility downed by ransomware attack
Richard Chirgwin reports: A water and electricity authority in the US State of Michigan has needed a week to recover from a ransomware attack that fortunately only hit its enterprise systems. Lansing’s BWL – Board of Water & Light – first noticed the successful phishing attack on its corporate systems on April 25, and has…
“Gozi Virus” Hacker Gets Cooperation Reward
Patricia Hurtado reports: A Russian who admitted creating a computer virus that infected more than 1 million computers worldwide was spared from additional prison time on top of the the three years he’s already spent locked up after U.S. prosecutors lauded his cooperation with their probe. Nikita Kuzmin, who was arrested in 2010 and pleaded…
Is ransomware considered a health data breach under HIPAA?
Back in March, I blogged about the question as to whether a ransomware attack needed to be reported to HHS as a HIPAA breach. In that post, I quoted an HHS spokesperson who informed DataBreaches.net that a ransomware situation was an impermissible disclosure (because the attacker had access to the data even if the data weren’t…
‘Wizz’ kids: Talos researchers pinpoint French firm as source of spyware-adware threat
Bradley Barth reports: A supposedly legitimate French software firm, Tuto4PC, has actually infected an estimated 12 million PC users with a generic trojan disguised as downloadable utilities programs, according to an in-depth analysis from Cisco’s Talos research division. The so-called utilities software creates a backdoor on infected machines to automatically deliver payloads with spyware and adware capabilities, explained blog post authors and researchers Warren Mercer…
Toymaker’s website pushes ransomware that holds visitors’ files hostage
Infecting site visitors with malware cannot be good for business. Their PR department must be going nuts over this one…. Dan Goodin reports: The website belonging to Maisto International, a popular maker of remote-controlled toy vehicles, has been caught pushing ransomware that holds visitors’ files hostage until they pay a hefty fee. Malicious files provided by…