While the legal status of cryptocurrencies and laws to regulate them continue to be hammered out, scammers are busy exploiting the digital gold rush. Besides hacking cryptocurrency exchanges, exploiting smart-contract vulnerabilities, and deploying malicious miners, cybercriminals are also resorting to more traditional social-engineering methods that can reap millions of dollars. Read Full Article
Way back in 2013 our malware analysts spotted the first malicious samples related to the Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Rakhni family. That was the starting point for this long-lived Trojan family, which is still functioning to this day. Now the criminals have decided to add a new feature to their creation – a mining capability. Read Full Article
This report will examine what is hopefully ransomware’s last breath, in detail, along with the rise of mining. The report covers the period April 2017 to March 2018, and compares it with April 2016 – March 2017. Read Full Article
In January, we uncovered a sophisticated mobile implant Skygofree that provides attackers with remote control of infected Android devices. Network worm OlympicDestroyer attacked on the Olympic infrastructure just before the opening of the games in February. Read Full Article
In late 2017, information appeared on specialized resources about a Telegram ICO to finance the launch of its own blockchain platform. The lack of information provided fertile ground for scammers: the rumors prompted mailshots seemingly from official representatives of the platform, inviting people to take part in the ICO and purchase tokens. Read Full Article
In recent months, the topic of cryptocurrency has been a permanent news fixture — the value of digital money has been see-sawing spectacularly. Such pyrotechnics could hardly have escaped the attention of scammers, which is why cryptocurrency fluctuations have gone hand in hand with all kinds of stories. These include hacked exchanges, Bitcoin and Monero ransoms, and, of course, hidden mining. Read Full Article
Last year we published a story revealing the rise of miners across the globe. At the time we had discovered botnets earning millions of USD. We knew this was just the beginning of the story, which turned out to develop rapidly. Read Full Article
In an earlier publication we noted that cybercriminals were making use of social engineering to install this sort of software on users’ computers. This time, we’d like to dwell more on how exactly the computers of gullible users start working for cybercriminals. Read Full Article
Every year, Kaspersky Lab’s experts look at the main cyberthreats facing connected businesses over the coming 12 months, based on the trends seen during the year. For 2018, we decided to extract some top predictions that also have big implications for everyday connected life. Read Full Article
In 2017, the main global threat to users was ransomware: and in order to recover files and data encrypted by attackers, victims were required to pay a ransom in cryptocurrency. In the first eight months of 2017, Kaspersky Lab products protected 1.65 million users from malicious cryptocurrency miners, and by the end of the year we expect this number to exceed two million. Read Full Article