Miners are a class of malware whose popularity has grown substantially this year. The actual process of cryptocurrency mining is perfectly legal, though there are groups of people who hoodwink unwitting users into installing mining software on their computers, or exploiting software vulnerabilities to do so. This results in threat actors receiving cryptocurr

We first detected the banking malware EMOTET back in 2014, we looked into the banking malware’s routines and behaviors and took note of its information stealing abilities via network sniffing. After a period of relative inactivity, it appears it’s making a comeback with increased activity from new variants (Detected by Trend Micro as TSPY_EMOTET.AUSJLA

News Overview The second quarter of 2017 saw DDoS attacks being more and more frequently used as a tool for political struggle. The Qatar crisis was accompanied by an attack on the website of Al Jazeera, the largest news network in the area, Le Monde and Le Figaro websites were targeted in the heat of the presidential election in France, and in Great Britain

A flashlight app, fake videos or a fake gaming app? Any one of those could be malicious and harboring a mobile malware app, right there in a trusted official app store. In an ongoing trend, IBM X-Force noted that malicious apps manage to circumvent controls and infiltrate legitimate stores. And this is not about the plethora of adware apps infecting users in

There were a number of incidents in 2016 that triggered increased interest in the security of so-called IoT or ‘smart’ devices. They included, among others, the record-breaking DDoS attacks against the French hosting provider OVH and the US DNS provider Dyn. These attacks are known to have been launched with the help of a massive botnet made up o

The Dridex banking Trojan, which has become a major financial cyberthreat in the past years (in 2015, the damage done by the Trojan was estimated at over $40 million), stands apart from other malware because it has continually evolved and become more sophisticated since it made its first appearance in 2011. Dridex has been able to escape justice for so long

News Overview Thanks to IoT botnets, DDoS attacks have finally turned from something of a novelty into an everyday occurrence. According to the A10 Networks survey, this year the ‘DDoS of Things’ (DoT) has reached critical mass – in each attack, hundreds of thousands of devices connected to the Internet are being leveraged. The fight against this

Introduction Hajime (meaning ‘beginning’ in Japanese) is an IoT worm that was first mentioned on 16 October 2016 in a public report by RapidityNetworks. One month later we saw the first samples being uploaded from Spain to VT. This worm builds a huge P2P botnet (almost 300,000 devices at the time of publishing this blogpost), but its real purpose

This is the tale of a cybercrime botnet operation that, within about five years of its existence, has been named one of the largest botnets in the world. It’s called the Necurs botnet. It militarizes up to 6 million zombie endpoints, delivers some of the worst banking Trojans and ransomware threats in batches of millions of emails at a time, and it kee

Threat actors use botnets — networks of infected computers or devices — for various cybercriminal purposes, most significantly distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against predefined targets. Today, botnets with DDoS capabilities are even for sale on the Dark Web. In March 2016, our IBM report, “The Inside Story on Botnets,” explored the

A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack is one of the most popular tools in the cybercriminal arsenal. The motives behind such attacks can vary – from cyber-hooliganism to extortion. There have been cases where criminal groups have threatened their victims with a DDoS attack unless the latter paid 5 bitcoins (more than $5,000). Often, a DDoS attack is

A cross-platform win32-based Mirai spreader and botnet is in the wild and previously discussed publicly. However, there is much information confused together, as if an entirely new IoT bot is spreading to and from Windows devices. This is not the case. Instead, an accurate assessment is that a previously active Windows botnet is spreading a Mirai bot variant

News Overview Without doubt, 2016 was the year of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) with major disruptions in terms of technology, attack scale and impact on our daily life. In fact, the year ended with massive DDoS attacks unseen before, leveraging Mirai botnet technology, whose first appearance was covered in our last DDoS Intelligence Report. Since th

Many IT departments have undergone some serious changes over the last couple of years when it comes to support and management of devices and applications. Mobile users, scattered offices and different virtualization solutions make it almost impossible for IT professionals to maintain traditional on-site support. Spooky Action at a Distance Some corporations

The Mirai botnet, which is made up of IoT devices and which was involved in DDoS attacks whose scale broke all possible records, causing denial of service across an entire region, has been extensively covered by the mass media. Given that the botnet’s source code has been made publicly available and that the Internet of Things trend is on the rise, no