As thousands of organizations work to contain and clean up the mess from this week’s devastating Wana ransomware attack, the fraudsters responsible for releasing the digital contagion are no doubt counting their earnings and congratulating themselves on a job well done. But according to a review of the Bitcoin addresses hard-coded into Wana, it appears

Blockchain news is seemingly everywhere these days, and for good reason. The technology behind bitcoin holds a lot of promise for all sorts of use cases — some of them having nothing to do with digital payments. Over the course of last year, a lot of ideas regarding the technology were tried out, but “during 2017, many of them will be discarded,̶

There is much chatter about blockchain and how it could impact the way we do business today. Arvind Krishna, senior vice president at IBM Research, said that “over the past two decades, the internet has revolutionized many aspects of business and society … Blockchain could bring to those processes the openness and efficiency we have come to expec

A school located in Los Angeles County, California has paid computer criminals 28,000 USD after it suffered a ransomware attack.Officials at Los Angeles Valley College (LAVC) came to the decision after a ransomware infection left them with no way to recover their organization’s encrypted data.As the school explains in an update (PDF):“In consulta

An attacker is obtaining access to unprotected MongoDB databases, stealing and erasing their content, and holding them for ransom.On 27 December, security researcher Victor Gevers came across a MongoDB server that was open to external connections and that lacked a password on its admin account.This database didn’t contain a lot of information. In fact,

Financial institutions, real estate brokers, law firms and other organizations with an interest in trust-based transactions will be swarming blockchain in 2017, and you can bet regulators will be right behind them. The end of 2016 marks blockchain’s evolution from niche curiosity to corporate up-and-comer as institutions seek ways to benefit from reduc

On 28 October, the cryptocurrency world saw the emergence of a new player, the Zcash (ZEC) cryptocurrency. Its developers have described it rather figuratively: “If Bitcoin is like HTTP for money, Zcash is HTTPS.” They continue by noting that “unlike Bitcoin, Zcash transactions can be shielded to hide the sender, the recipient and value of

 Download the PDF Introduction In 2016, ransomware continued its rampage across the world, tightening its hold on data and devices, and on individuals and businesses. The numbers speak for themselves: 62 new ransomware families made their appearance. There was an 11-fold increase in the number of ransomware modifications: from 2,900 new modifications i

 Download the PDF Introduction In 2016, ransomware continued its rampage across the world, tightening its hold on data and devices, and on individuals and businesses. The numbers speak for themselves: 62 new ransomware families made their appearance. There was an 11-fold increase in the number of ransomware modifications: from 2,900 new modifications i

When I became Global Blockchain Lead for Security Services at IBM in January 2016, I had no idea what kind of year awaited me. Just a few highlights: In February, IBM introduced developer services on the Bluemix cloud to enable rapid creation and monitoring of blockchain applications. In April, IBM launched a new set of highly secure blockchain services on

Multiple stories published here over the past few weeks have examined the disruptive power of hacked “Internet of Things” (IoT) devices such as routers, IP cameras and digital video recorders. This post looks at how crooks are using hacked IoT devices as proxies to hide their true location online as they engage in a variety of other types of cybe

 Blockchain.info, the world’s most popular Bitcoin wallet and Block Explorer service went down this week due to a DNS Hijacking attack. Crypto-currencies continue to be a privileged target of cyber criminals, Bitcoin wallets and services provided by many companies operating in the industries have been targeted by criminal organizations as never before.

AVG security researcher Jakub Kroustek has recently discovered tracks of the Cerber 3 ransomware virus marking encrypted files with the .cerber3 file extension. Unlike previous variants of Cerber, for which decryptors have been already developed, this variant contains fixes that prevent malware researchers from decrypting the files.Since this virus is a part

vDOS — a so-called “booter” service that has earned in excess of $600,000 over the past two years helping customers coordinate more than 150,000 so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks designed to knock Web sites offline — has been massively hacked, spilling secrets about tens of thousands of paying customers and their

Now LeakedSource disclosed details from two Bitcoin data breaches that affected the bitcoin exchange BTC-E.com and the discussion forum Bitcointalk.org. The data breach notification service LeakedSource is becoming familiar to my readers, recently it reported the data breach suffered by many IT services, including Last.fm and DropBox, both occurred in 2012.