Security News

Here's the irony of ransomware data breach stories that gets surprisingly little attention: cybercriminals enthusiastically encrypt and steal sensitive data to extort money and yet their victims rarely bother to defend themselves using the same obviously highly effective concept. If sensitive data such as IP are competently encrypted, that not only means that attackers can't access or threaten to leak it, in many cases they won't even be able to see it in the first place - all encrypted data looks alike.

Cybercriminals are targeting Alibaba Elastic Computing Service instances, disabling certain security features to further their cryptomining goals. Alibaba offers a few unique options that make it a highly attractive target for attackers, researchers noted.

With a bait attack, criminals try to obtain the necessary details to plan future attacks against their targets, says Barracuda. Cybercriminals often will research potential victims to help strategize exactly how and where to attack them.

If you're congratulating yourself on your progress adopting Kubernetes, just consider that the cybercriminals have been poring over it too. Does your Kubernetes deployment support multiple components and services across multiple nodes, all spawning data, the hijacking of which could bring your operations to a shuddering halt? Great.

Companies are vulnerable to potential cyberthreats during mergers and acquisitions; learn from an expert why and how to reduce security risks during the transition. Why are cybercriminals targeting companies undergoing a merger or acquisition?

Ransomware remains primary threat in the first half of the year as cybercriminals continued to target big-name victims. Working with third parties to gain access to targeted networks, they used Advanced Persistent Threat tools and techniques to steal and encrypt victims' data.

According to a recent AtlasVPN report, malicious office documents are the latest trend in cybercriminal behavior; a timely strategy as companies pause office reentry plans and continue to work remotely due to COVID-19. "Even though infecting office documents with malware has been established for a long time, it is still very successful at tricking people," said William Sword, Atlas VPN cybersecurity researcher, in a blog post about the findings.

Threat actors are capitalizing on the growing popularity of proxyware platforms like Honeygain and Nanowire to monetize their own malware campaigns, once again illustrating how attackers are quick to repurpose and weaponize legitimate platforms to their advantage. "Malware is currently leveraging these platforms to monetize the internet bandwidth of victims, similar to how malicious cryptocurrency mining attempts to monetize the CPU cycles of infected systems," researchers from Cisco Talos said in a Tuesday analysis.

Cybercriminals are making strides towards attacks with malware that can execute code from the graphics processing unit of a compromised system. In a short post on a hacker forum, someone offered to sell the proof-of-concept for a technique they say keeps malicious code safe from security solutions scanning the system RAM. The seller provided only an overview of their method, saying that it uses the GPU memory buffer to store malicious code and execute code.

Companies should now consider cybercriminals as business competitors, according to Lacework's 2021 Cloud Threat Report Volume 2. The Lacework Lab analyzed telemetry from its customers and other data to identify rising and increasing security threats to cloud deployments.