With some members of the so-called Armada Collective in jail, another actor has decided to co-opt their technique of sending threatening DDoS extortion messages to businesses worldwide. Only difference is, this group isn’t following through with its threat, and it’s still collecting serious money. A blog post from CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince says that the...

A lack of security common sense still plagues businesses with 30 percent of phishing emails opened by campaign targets. Worse, 12 percent click on the attachments inside those phishing attacks, giving crooks easy access to systems to snarf up credentials that are later used to pull off financially or espionage motivated crimes. That’s the big...

A menacing wave of ransomware that locks up Android devices and demands victims pay $200 in Apple iTunes gift card codes is raising concern among security researchers. The ransomware attacks, they say, open a new chapter for Android vulnerabilities similar to Microsoft’s obsolete, unpatched and unsupported Windows XP operating system. “This is a new and...

Hackers behind the $81 million heist in February at Bangladesh Bank used stolen credentials to inject a malware toolkit into the financial institution’s implementation of the SWIFT payment system. The attackers used the access afforded by the credentials to send fraudulent money transfers to accounts in the Philippines and the malware was used to electronically cover the...

Was the Federal Bureau of Investigation justified in paying over $1.3 million for a hacking tool that opened the iPhone 5c of the San Bernardino shooter? For some in the security community the answer is a resounding yes. For others, the answer is not so clear-cut. FBI Director James Comey said on Thursday the agency...

In a storyline that rivals an episode of The Sopranos, researchers at FireEye documented the heist of bank card data from 20 million individuals that involved a complex web of crooks that may have netted hackers more than $100 million since 2014. In conjunction with recently acquired Isight Partners, FireEye released a report Thursday that shines a bright...

Threatpost Op-Ed is a regular feature where experts contribute essays and commentary on what’s happening in security and privacy. Today’s contributors are Dave Dittrich and Katherine Carpenter. Reports of APT activities detail compromises spanning multiple organizations, sectors, industry verticals, and countries (over multiple years). According to MITRE: “it is becoming increasingly necessary for organizations to...

Tibetans, journalists and human rights workers in Hong Kong and Taiwan have been targeted in an APT campaign that makes use of Microsoft Rich Text File (RTF) documents to compromise computers. Researchers say it’s a new strategy by attackers in an ongoing advanced persistent threat that dates back to 2009. According to Arbor Networks, the...

Cisco Talos said on Friday that 3.2 million servers are vulnerable to the JBoss flaw used as the initial point of compromise in the recent SamSam ransomware attacks. Worse, researchers said that thousands of servers have already been backdoored. Hardest hit have been K-12 schools running library management software published by Follett called Destiny, Cisco...

Two powerful Trojans, Nymaim and Gozi ISFB, have been combined to create a “double-headed beast” called GozNym. The Trojan has managed to steal $4 million since it was first discovered just two weeks ago, according to IBM X-Force Research. It reports the hybrid Trojan is currently engaged in an active campaign with 72 percent of...