Ransomware is evolving and soon will share the same deadly efficiencies as notorious worms of the past, such as Conficker and SQL Slammer. In fact, according to security researchers at Cisco Talos, today’s newest ransomware, SamSam, is a harbinger of a new wave of more malicious, tenacious and costly ransomware to come. “Ransomware authors are...

Researchers have been combing through code related to the Petya ransomware long enough they’ve been able to cobble together a decryption tool that should allow most victims to generate keys in less than 10 seconds. A Twitter user who goes by the handle @leostone came up with a genetic algorithm on Friday to generate passwords and subsequently...

Google beefed up the way it displays Safe Browsing Alerts for Network Administrators this week, adding information about sites peddling unwanted and malicious software as well as those caught carrying out social engineering attacks. Google debuted the service, which notifies network admins after observing potentially damaging URLs on their networks, in 2010. Going forward, administrators...

Researchers discovered a Mac OS X variant of the Windows-based Pirrit adware that creates a proxy server on infected Mac computers and injects ads into webpages. According to researchers at Boston-based Cybereason Labs, the adware, dubbed OSX.Pirrit, is mostly benign, serving up just ads, but has the potential to morph into something more sinister. “Today...

The FBI issued a rare bulletin admitting that a group named Advanced Persistent Threat 6 (APT6) hacked into US government computer systems as far back as 2011 and for years stole sensitive data. The FBI alert was issued in February and went largely unnoticed. Nearly a month later, security experts are now shining a bright...

Security experts warn companies need to brace for new harder-to-detect and more determined variants of the Locky ransomware spotted recently in the wild. The news comes just as reported Locky ransomware attacks have waned in recent weeks. Locky is now trying to evade detection by changing the way the ransomware communicates from an infected computer...

Researchers warn hundreds of popular Firefox browser extensions are vulnerable to attack that could give hackers control of Mac OS X and Windows computers. Researchers from Northeastern University say the flaw is tied to Firefox’s support for an older browser extension platform and the Mozilla Foundation’s plug-in vetting process for its Firefox browser. Researchers presented...

Technology vendor Cisco is pushing out security updates to customers to address a critical vulnerability found in its recently introduced line of FirePower firewall products. The vulnerability, according to Cisco, allows attackers to slip malware onto critical systems without detection. The flaw is also impacts  Snort, an open source network-based intrusion detection system also owned by Cisco....

Ransomware clearly has people on many fronts worried, so much so that the United States and Canada took an unprecedented step last week to issue a joint advisory on the threat posed by crypto-ransomware. The U.S. Cyber Emergency Response Team together with the Canadian Cyber Incident Response Centre penned a comprehensive warning on the heels...

Researchers found a vulnerability in the classic compression standard Lhasa, once a mainstay for game developers in the mid-’90s and still in use today. Researchers at Cisco’s security research arm, Cisco Talos, identified the vulnerability calling it as a classic heap-spray exploit. In a report disclosing the vulnerability, Talos reports a rigged LHA and LZH...