Half of Ransomware Victims Recovered Their Data After Paying the Ransom Demand

Mar 9, 2018 7:13:17 AM By Stu Sjouwerman

A massive survey of nearly 1,200 IT security practitioners and decision makers across 17 countries reveals that half the people who fell victim to ransomware infections last year were ...

Another Ransomware Variant Strikes Colorado DOT Days after Initial Attack

Mar 2, 2018 10:26:26 AM By Stu Sjouwerman

Colorado’s Department of Transportation (CDOT) has suffered an infection from another variant of the same ransomware family that attacked it just days earlier. On 1 March, a variant of ...

Organizations Are Failing To Learn From Phishing And Ransomware Attacks

Feb 28, 2018 10:33:17 AM By Stu Sjouwerman

Warwick Ashford, security editor at ComputerWeekly had an interesting observation after reading CyberArk's latest cyber threat report: "Organisations are failing to learn from cyber ...

Annabelle: The Terrifying New Ransomware Variant

Feb 24, 2018 7:50:07 AM By Stu Sjouwerman

A new ransomware variant called Annabelle has been discovered, which seems to have been designed to ‘show off the skills’ of the developer who created it, by being as difficult to deal ...

2,000 Systems Down Due To SamSam Ransomware Infection At Colorado Department of Transportation

Feb 22, 2018 7:03:16 AM By Stu Sjouwerman

February 22, the attack hit CDOT’s computers, encrypted files and demanded to pay the ransom in Bitcoins. Security officials shut down more than 2,000 employee computers while they ...

Cisco: "Cybercrime Swaps Ransomware For Cryptomining, Generating Millions"

Feb 5, 2018 7:14:15 AM By Stu Sjouwerman

Cisco's Talos Threat Intelligence team has a good observation. Cybercriminals can just steal CPU/GPU cycles and directly generate any cryptocurrency without infecting the system with ...

Forget Viruses or Ransomware—Is Your Biggest Cyberthreat Greedy Cryptocurrency Miners?

Jan 19, 2018 5:53:48 PM By Stu Sjouwerman

This week, cybersecurity firm Check Point published its regular Global Threat Index. Malware that hijacks workstations to mine cryptocoins has apparently become the most popular infection ...

Why Cybercrime Ditches Bitcoin Ransomware Payments And Where They Are Going Next

Jan 19, 2018 12:43:39 PM By Stu Sjouwerman

The popularity of bitcoin is creating problems for ransomware criminals wanting to get paid in the skyrocketing cryptocurrency. "We'll see a progressive shift in 2018 towards criminal use ...

Healthcare Ransomware Attacks – Don’t Be Part of the Statistics

Jan 17, 2018 2:58:43 PM By Stu Sjouwerman

Rebecca Wynn at securitycurrent.com wrote a great article on how not to become a ransomware statistic in health care: "In 2017, six of the top ten HIPAA breaches reported to the U.S. ...

Hospital Pays $55K Ransomware Demand DESPITE Having Backups

Jan 16, 2018 1:29:10 PM By Stu Sjouwerman

An Indiana hospital paid a ransom of $55,000 to get rid of ransomware that had infected its systems and was hindering operations last week. The infection took root last week, on Thursday, ...

[Heads-up] Unusual Ransomware Strain Encrypts Cloud Email Real-time

Jan 13, 2018 9:59:14 AM By Stu Sjouwerman

OK, here is something unusual and really scary. KnowBe4's Chief Hacking Officer Kevin Mitnick called me with some chilling news. A white hat hacker friend of his developed a working ...

63% of organizations experienced an attempted ransomware attack in 2017

Jan 10, 2018 4:01:31 PM By Stu Sjouwerman

Interesting research by Enterprise Strategy Group: 63% of organizations experienced an attempted ransomware attack in 2017, with 22% reporting these incidents occurred on a weekly basis. ...

File-less Malware Attacks Hit Milestone in 2017 And Ransomware Grows to $5 Billion Industry

Dec 21, 2017 2:06:35 PM By Stu Sjouwerman

New data shows that file-less malware attacks are now the majority of all attacks this year, and ransomware grows to a whopping 5 billion industry. Fileless malware attacks using ...

Roll back time when users click on a bad link with our new free tool, Second Chance!

Dec 18, 2017 11:52:31 AM By Stu Sjouwerman

Wouldn't it be great if your users had a way to "roll back time" when they forgot to think before they click on a bad link? Now they can! We are excited to announce Second Chance, a ...

This ransomware asks victims to name their own price to get their files back

Dec 8, 2017 9:30:00 AM By Stu Sjouwerman

Attackers behind this form of file-encrypting malware - which has similarities with Locky - think that if the victim can set their own price, they're more likely to pay. A form of ...

48 Servers Of North Carolina County Held Hostage by LockCrypt Ransomware

Dec 7, 2017 6:33:03 AM By Stu Sjouwerman

A hacker’s 1 p.m. deadline to pay $23,000 passed Wednesday, and Mecklenburg County has not decided whether to pay the ransom for a cyber-attack that “paralyzed” the county. County manager ...

UK Shipping firm Clarksons falls victim to hybrid ransomware / data theft extortion

Nov 29, 2017 4:06:33 PM By Stu Sjouwerman

Shipping company Clarksons has fallen victim to a major ransomware attack that could result in the exposure of private data, the company warned today. The statement continued: "Our ...

Massive Phishing Attack On Businesses with Evil New Ransomware Strain

Nov 25, 2017 11:02:08 AM By Stu Sjouwerman

The Scarab ransomware strain is updated again and spreads via Necurs botnet in a massive 12.5 million campaign, mostly targeting .com domains. Scarab was spotted June 2017 for the first ...

‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Fall Finale Cliffhanger: Hospital Shut Down By Ransomware Attack

Nov 19, 2017 8:24:01 AM By Stu Sjouwerman

Ransomware goes prime time: TV Show Grey's Anatomy characters Bailey and Arizona are unable to access medical records on the computer and an I.T. specialist named Tim notes that cardiac ...

The future of cyberwar: Weaponised ransomware, IoT attacks and a new arms race

Nov 18, 2017 11:03:15 AM By Stu Sjouwerman

Steve Ranger at TechRepublic did a good job summarizing the direction of future threats we are going to have to deal with. "After at least a dozen years in the shadows, cyberwarfare is ...

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