Security researchers found evidence that the Conti ransomware strain could be a possible successor to the Ryuk crypto-malware family.Vitali Kremez, strategic advisor for SentinelLabs, analyzed both Conti and Ryuk. He found that the former appeared to be based on the code of the latter’s second version. He also observed Conti to be using the same ransom

Security researchers detected a new variant of the Joker spyware family that had infiltrated Google Play and had begun abusing an old trick to target users.Check Point Research found that the authors of Joker, a dropper and premium dialer spyware, had once again modified their creation’s code so that the malware would bypass the Play Store’s secu

Things just got serious.Business Email Compromise is no longer solely the province of chancers and opportunistic Nigerian actors such as the Yahoo Boys. Organised criminal gangs with a high level of professionalism have seen the opportunity and seized it.Security researchers at Agari have published a report detailing their investigations into a Russian cyber

Renewable energy company EDP Renewables notified its landowners of a ransomware attack that it suffered in the spring of 2020.In a sample notification letter received by the Attorney General’s Office of Vermont, EDP Renewables informed its landowners that its information systems had suffered a ransomware attack on April 13, 2020.EDP Renewables responde

A Nigerian national entered into the custody of the FBI to face charges of having targeted several U.S. companies with business email compromise (BEC) scams.On July 3, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois announced that the United Arab Emirates had expelled Olalekan Jacob Ponle (a/k/a “Mr. Woodbery” and “Mark Kain”), 29, ori

If the global cybercrime forecast took the form of a weather report, it might go something like this: The extended outlook calls for continued online lawlessness, scattered malware attacks and an ongoing blizzard of data breaches.After all, with experts predicting that the cybercrime epidemic will cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021 as the shortage o

Hackers are once again finding unsecured MongoDB databases carelessly left exposed on the internet, wiping their contents, and leaving a ransom note demanding a cryptocurrency payment for the data’s safe return.As ZDNet reports, ransom notes have been left on almost 23,000 MongoDB databases that were let unprotected on the public internet without a pas

Security researchers spotted Trickbot malware checking the screen resolution as a means of evading analysis on a virtual machine (VM).Digital security firm MalwareLab came across a sample of the trojan that checked to see whether a computer’s screen resolution was either 800×600 or 1024×768. It then terminated if it found that the screen reso

Security researchers detected a new ransomware strain that leveraged piracy as a means of distributing itself to Mac users.On June 29, a Twitter user reached out to Malwarebytes about a malicious Little Snitch installer that was available for download on a Russian forum known for sharing torrent links.A close look at the installer revealed that it used a gen

Security researchers identified a string of attacks in which malicious actors attempted to target dozens of U.S. organizations with WastedLocker ransomware.Symantec detected the attack attempts on several of its customers’ networks. As part of this discovery, the security firm realized that the threat behavior it was observing coincided with research p

The European GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is one of the most influential consumer privacy laws that has affected 500,000 companies throughout the world. This law has played a crucial role in formulating another substantial privacy law known as the California Consumer Privacy Act that came into effect on January 1, 2020.Similar to the European GD

A Vancouver man received a federal prison sentence for his involvement in developing several distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnets.On June 25, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Alaska announced that Chief U.S. District Judge Timothy M. Burgess had sentenced Kenneth Currin Schuchman, 22, of Vancouver, WA to 13 months in federal priso

New malware called “Lucifer” came with numerous exploits for conducting cryptomining functionality and performing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on infected Windows machines.Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 research team identified two versions of Lucifer in their research. (Both variants bore the name “Satan DDoS,” but

Do you think you have found a vulnerability in the Sony PlayStation 4 or the PlayStation Network?If so, you could be heading towards a sizeable sum of money. That’s because Sony announced details of a new bug bounty program that it is running in co-ordination with vulnerability-reporting platform HackerOne.Sony is inviting security researchers, gamers

Security researchers came across a new ransomware family called “CryCryptor” that masqueraded as a Canadian COVID-19 tracing app.CryCryptor emerged just days after the Canadian government announced it would support the development of a national, voluntary tracing app for COVID-19 called “COVID Alert.”That official app had not yet ente