Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

The number of successful ransomware attacks on the education sector increased 388% in the third quarter of 2020. According to Emsisoft, the education sector reported 31 ransomware incidents in Q3 2020. That’s a 388% increase over the 8 incidents that occurred in the previous quarter. Nine of the 31 ransomware attacks disclosed in the third quarter of the year involved data exfiltration, a tactic which has become common with ransomware gangs over the past year.

This blog provides an overview of the situation surrounding the release of the source code, and supplementary 'injection' files, for the Android banking trojan 'Cerberus'.

Did you know that Discord attachments are publicly accessible? Did you know that even after deleting an attachment, the link to download the file is still active? In this edition of our leaky app series, we cover how sharing attachment links in Discord can cause accidental public exposure of data. We will also look into the malware abuse case of threat actors using Discord as a malware-hosting platform.

A cybersecurity bulletin was released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on October 28, 2020. The three agencies have issued a high-level warning about an increased, imminent threat of ransomware attacks in the healthcare sector. The cybercriminal group behind the TrickBot, Ryuk, and BazarLoader malware is now targeting U.S. hospitals and healthcare providers.

Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released Alert (AA20-302A) on October 28th called “Ransomware Activity Targeting the Healthcare and Public Health Sector.” This alert details TTPs associated with ongoing and possible imminent attacks against the Healthcare sector, and is a joint advisory in coordination with other U.S. Government agencies.

Several weeks ago, my good friend Katie Nickels (Director of Intelligence at Red Canary extraordinaire) and I were chatting about Ransomware. She was super interested and passionate about some new uses of a ransomware variant named “Ryuk” (first detected in 2018 and named after a manga/anime character) [1]. I was, to be honest, much less interested. It turns out, as usual, Katie was right; this was a big deal (although as you will see, I’m right too… still dull stuff!).

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently announced that activity in LokiBot, a form of aggressive malware, has increased dramatically over the last two months. The activity increase was discovered by an automated intrusion detection system referred to as EINSTEIN, which the Department of Homeland Security uses for collecting and analyzing security information across numerous government agencies.

First identified as active in November 2012, 'njRAT', also known as 'Bladabindi' or 'Njw0rm', is a well established and prevalent remote access trojan (RAT) threat that was initially created by a cybercriminal threat group known as 'Sparclyheason' and used to target victims located in the Middle East. Undoubtedly following the source code leak, reportedly in May 2013, njRAT has become widely available on the cybercriminal underground with numerous variants being released over the years.

Kovter is a fileless malware that attempts to remain invisible and targets the Windows operating system. Kovter avoids detection as it relies on the host registry to store its configuration data, thus avoids traditional endpoint protection (anti-virus) file scanning.