Would you pay 800€ to have your encrypted computer files unlocked? That’s the going rate of cybercriminals’ ransomware these days. ESET Ireland has partners all over Ireland and one of them from Co. Wexford passed on to us the unfortunate story of a customer who got their computer infected by Cryptolocker malware. “The customer had AVG free on a Win XP system. He said he really only used it for email and of course for work stuff. He said he had files going back 8 years on the machine, mostly to do with work and a hell of a lot…
ISBuzz Team
Last July, Damballa’s Threat Discovery Center discussed the infamous web forum, Darkode, that was supposed to be resuscitated by sp3cial1st. Since then, we’ve been monitoring the dark web to see if a new Darkode forum would show up and we discovered the new Darkode Reloaded. It has resurfaced. As promised, the administrators moved the forum to the dark web for “security” reasons and anonymity. Security and anonymity of a criminal forum is only as good as the forum administrator. It’s all a “trompe-l’œil” (illusion). See for yourself, the search page of the forum was wide open to anyone without being…
A staggering 24% of consumers have been duped by online counterfeiters Almost one quarter of consumers have bought a product online that turned out to be counterfeit, including fashion or footwear, electronics and digital content. This is according to new research commissioned by MarkMonitor®, the world leader in enterprise brand protection. The survey, conducted by a leading market research company Opinium, analysed the online shopping habits of 3,450 consumers across nine countries to understand shoppers’ opinions on issues such as buying counterfeit goods and online security. When it comes to general shopping behaviour, the study found that consumers do just…
In response to the news that Phantom Squad has threatened to take down XBox Live and PSN this Christmas using a DDoS attack, Igal Zeifman, senior digital strategist at Imperva have the following comments on it. [su_note note_color=”#ffffcc” text_color=”#00000″]Igal Zeifman, Senior Digital Strategist at Imperva : “Gaming companies should invest in mitigation solutions that provide on-demand scalability, increasing their resource pool when it’s needed the most. They should also be constantly aware of their relative weaknesses and, consequently, be proactive in their response to potential DDoS threats and predictable traffic peaks. That said, it is up to gamers themselves to…
“Once again, Mattel’s ‘Hello Barbie’ doll is in the news”. David Emm, Principal Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab said : “The doll is interactive. It is equipped with a computer chip, a microphone, a speaker and it is also Wi-Fi-enabled. When a child presses Barbie’s belt-buckle, the doll asks a question and records the child’s answer. It is then encrypted and sent over the Internet to be processed by the voice-recognition software of Mattel’s technology partner, ToyTalk. The software then sends a command to Barbie to playback a reply stored in the doll, appropriate to whatever the child chooses to…
Cybercriminals to Target New Payment Technologies, Generic Top Level Domains and the US Elections in 2016 The year 2015 has become widely referred to as the year of the data breach. For the first time as a newly combined company, Raytheon|Websense cybersecurity experts shared their security predictions for the coming year. Researchers suggest to be on the lookout for: U.S. presidential election cyber-antics; cybercriminals pickpocketing the wallet on your phone; and an increase in vulnerabilities from the aging Internet, among other security challenges. The U.S. elections cycle will drive significant themed attacks Attackers will use the attention given to political campaigns,…
A recurring claim at security conferences is that “security is a big data / machine learning (ML) / artificial intelligence (AI) problem”. This is unfortunately wildly optimistic, and wrong in general. While certain security problems can be addressed by ML/AI algorithms, in general the problem of detecting a malicious actor amidst the vast trove of information collected by most organisations, is not one of them. Our faith in AI is based on personal experience (“everything cloud is big data and good”) and the memes of the consumerisation era. It is tempting to project this optimism into an enterprise context: The…
Nearly half (45 per cent) of all businesses recognise the serious threat posed by cryptomalware, also known as ransomware, – a sharp increase from 37 per cent in 2014. However, despite this rising awareness, cryptomalware attacks continue to severely impact companies, with the CryptoLocker ransomware, for example, believed to have infected more than 234,000 computers worldwide. The global cyber-threat landscape continues to expand and cyber-criminals have discovered that the malicious encryption of data, followed by a ransom demand, can be highly profitable. Many companies admit that they often just pay up. The gang behind CryptoLocker is believed to have made…
Cloud adoption will continue to rise next year as concerns over security remain As we approach the end of the year, disaster recovery specialist Databarracks predicts that 2016 will see more small and medium organisations move towards cloud services like Microsoft Office 365 to relieve the growing headache of managing security in-house. Oscar Arean, Technical Operations Manager at Databarracks, explains: “Office 365 will grow to be huge in 2016 because Microsoft have made the process of setting it up so slick and intuitive. Every year, more businesses reach the end of life of their onsite hardware and are faced with…
Did you know that one in every two top managers pay money into corporate accounts via a mobile banking app? Following the recent joint survey conducted by Kaspersky Lab and B2B International, it was also discovered that over 30 per cent of companies use mobile devices to access corporate bank accounts and to make financial transactions. The survey concluded that business representatives were increasingly making financial transactions with the help of mobile devices. In particular, 28 per cent of small and medium companies, and 34 per cent of enterprises, conducted financial transactions via mobile devices. And it is not just…