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The Ransomware Decryption Deception: How Various Scammers Trick Ransomware Victims Into Paying More

Ever since the first large-scale ransomware attacks started targeting individual users, companies, and government institutions, we have witnessed that the primary malicious actor is usually a hacker or a hacker collective. More and more victims are now browsing the web looking for a way to get rid of the threat by not paying the ransom sum, a trend...
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One Researcher's Plan to Broadside Known Windows Tech Support Scammers

2016 saw a lot of different types of scams prey on unsuspecting users. Some achieved greater prevalence than others. One of those was the tech support scam, a ruse where a fraudster calls a victim while impersonating a customer support representative from a well-known technology company. They tell the victim their computer is infected with malware...
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Arby's Confirms Payment Card Breach at Corporate Restaurant Locations

Arby's Restaurant Group, Inc., has confirmed that a breach affected payment systems at its corporate restaurant locations. Information security investigative journalist Brian Krebs first learned something was up when several banks and credit unions reached out to him inquiring if he had heard of an incident involving Arby's. He subsequently reached...
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French man sues Uber after privacy bug led wife to suspect adultery

Modern technology has probably done more than its fair share to ignite illicit relationships, but it can also lead to a romantic affair's unravelling. But if your wife or husband becomes aware of an adulterous entanglement through a buggy app, do you blame yourself for having the affair in the first place, or do you blame the software that couldn't...
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January 2017: The Month in Ransomware

The year of 2017 isn’t shaping up to be a game changer in combatting ransomware so far. On the contrary, crypto infections are becoming increasingly toxic in terms of their impact and attack surface. Online extortionists keep hitting police departments, healthcare organizations, public libraries, schools, hotels, and unprotected servers around the...
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What's on Tap for Tripwire at RSA Conference 2017

Every year, the RSA Conference attracts the industry's most respected thought leaders, seasoned security experts and aficionados from around the globe. In 2016, it saw a record of over 40,000 attendees – all hungry to discuss and debate pressing cybersecurity issues. As one of Tripwire's top information security conferences for 2017, we have no...
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Security and the ‘Weaponization’ of Misinformation

New media, it would appear, now outpaces the old. More data is consumed and processed than at any time before in human history. But as we hasten into a world where the immediate is often favoured over the verified, the attention-grabbing over the considered, and the assumed over the researched in terms of how we both receive and disseminate...
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Autofill FUD

Last week, while browsing various news feeds and websites, I took a scroll through Facebook and saw this video posted from our local morning show, Breakfast Television. They were talking about a Lifehacker post that referenced a github repository belonging to Viljami Kousmanen. The doom and gloom statements of the video are pretty clear evidence of...
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Foreign Intelligence Agency Targeted Norway's Labour Party, Report Police

National police have notified Norway's Labour Party parliamentary group that a foreign intelligence agency targeted its members. On 2 February, the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) notified the Labour Party that hackers had targeted the group in autumn 2016. Labor, which is the biggest party in Norway's Parliament, subsequently sent out a...
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The Evolution of Phishing

If you've got an email account or social media profile, it's likely you've come across phishing of some kind before. In a sentence, phishing is the fraudulent attempt to steal personal information by social engineering: the act of criminal deception. Verizon's latest Data Breach Investigations Report notes that "social engineering remains worryingly...
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The Shamoon v2 Saga Continues

Shamoon v2 is a tenacious piece of malware that recently participated in attacks against 15 Saudi government agencies and private companies. Shamoon compromises hard drives and leaves them completely erased and inoperable. It first appeared in 2012 when it targeted one Saudi company, an assault which today is widely recognized as one of the most...
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Ransomware Attack Causes County to Shut Down IT System

A county located in Ohio has suspended its IT system after a ransomware attack affected computers inside its government center. Licking County officials first discovered there was a problem when they couldn't open files saved to some government computers. When they rebooted those machines, they saw a ransom note and contacted the IT department. IT...
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Gaza Cybergang Group Targeting ME Governments with Downeks, Quasar RAT

Several high-profile attack campaigns targeting Middle Eastern companies have recently come to the attention of the security community. One of the first operations we heard about occurred on November 17, 2016, when Shamoon resurfaced and leveraged Disstrack malware to wipe the computers at an energy organization based in Saudi Arabia. Apparently, ...
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Ignorance is Bliss? An Enormous WordPress Zero-Day has Been Secretly Fixed

What has happened? A severe zero-day vulnerability has been fixed in WordPress, which - if left unpatched - could allow a malicious attacker to modify the content of any post or page on a WordPress site. Woah! Any post or page could be hijacked? Yes, it's as though you've handed the reins of your site over to a malicious hacker and said - "publish...
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Does DoD-Level Security Work in the Real World?

I began my career in Information Security working for the Department of Defense, first for a Naval research facility, then Naval Intelligence, and finally with the National Security Agency. Information security for my first assignment meant locking your classified materials in a safe when you left the office at night, and making sure the office door...
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The Internet Isn’t Vulnerable – It’s a Weapon

In the United States, there is a basic rule of thumb that at some point after a block of metal undergoes a certain amount of manufacturing, it becomes a rifle. When approximately 80 percent of the manufacturing is complete, the metal is not a weapon; at 81 percent, it is. A weapon is dangerous; it is often regulated, and more often than not, it has...