IT Security Information

Since December 2019, ransomware operators have been using leakware/ransomware hybrid attacks more and more often. These attacks combine the classic ransomware attack with a leakware attack. In a classic ransomware attack, the victim’s data is encrypted and is only decrypted back after the victim pays a ransom fee to the ransomware operators. In a leakware attack, the data is stolen, and the victim is blackmailed with the data being published publicly unless he pays a certain fee. In a leakware/ransomware hybrid attack, the data is first stolen, then encrypted. Then the victim is first asked to pay the ransom for decryption. If the victim declines to pay the ransom, the attackers threaten him to release the stolen data publicly. In some cases, business partners and/or customers of the victim are also contacted and informed of the impending data release to put even more pressure on the victim.

Around 300 billion e-mails are sent every day - the number of e-mails sent and received for private and business purposes is forecast to rise to 361.6 billion by 2024. However, not all e-mails that end up in users' inboxes are wanted, and unwanted e-mails not only...

The Hornetsecurity Security Lab presents details on the webshells behind the Emotet distribution operation, including insights into payload downloads and how from 2020-07-22 to 2020-07-24 Emotet payloads on Emotet download URLs were replaced with HTML code displaying GIFs. The analysis shows that the number of downloads of the malicious content behind the Emotet download URLs is significant and has been observed peaking at 50,000 downloads per hour. Highlighting that Emotet emails do get clicked. The analysis further shows that compromised websites are not just compromised once but multiple times by different actors and cleanup efforts by the website administrators are often insufficient leading to re-enabling of the malicious Emotet downloads.