Financial threats

Over the last month alone, we have detected several large botnets designed to profit from concealed crypto mining. We have also observed growing numbers of attempts to install miners on servers owned by organizations. When these attempts are successful, the companies’ business processes suffer because data processing speeds fall substantially.

In one of our previous articles, we analyzed the NeutrinoPOS banker as an example of a constantly evolving malware family. A week after publication, this Neutrino modification delivered up a new malicious program classified by Kaspersky Lab as Trojan-Banker.Win32.Jimmy.

The threat from ransomware continues to grow. Between April 2016 and March 2017, we blocked ransomware on the computers of 2,581,026 Kaspersky Lab customers. In May, we saw the biggest ransomware epidemic in history, called WannaCry.

According to KSN data, Kaspersky Lab solutions detected and repelled 342, 566, 061 malicious attacks from online resources located in 191 countries all over the world.

At the end of 2016, there was a major attack against San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency. The attack was done using Mamba ransomware. This month, we noted that the group behind this ransomware has resumed their attacks against corporations.

This spring, the author of the NukeBot banking Trojan published the source code of his creation. Now, three months after the source code was published, we decided to have a look at what has changed in the banking malware landscape.

After an analysis of the encryption routine of the malware used in the Petya/ExPetr attacks, we have thought that the threat actor cannot decrypt victims’ disk, even if a payment was made. This supports the theory that this malware campaign was not designed as a ransomware attack for financial gain.

Earlier today (June 27th), we received reports about a new wave of ransomware attacks spreading around the world, primarily targeting businesses in Ukraine, Russia and Western Europe. Our investigation is ongoing and our findings are far from final at this time. Despite rampant public speculation, the following is what we can confirm from our independent analysis.

From time to time authors of effective and long-lived Trojans and viruses create new modifications and forks of them, like any other software authors. One of the brightest examples amongst them is Zeus, which continues to spawn new modifications of itself each year.

In early 2017, Kaspersky Lab’s researchers have discovered an emerging and dangerous trend: more and more cybercriminals are turning their attention from attacks against private users to targeted ransomware attacks against businesses.

Sometimes ransomware developers make mistakes in their code. These mistakes could help victims regain access to their original files after a ransomware infection. This article is a short description of several errors, which were made by the WannaCry ransomware developers.

In the several years that the Dridex family has existed, there have been numerous unsuccessful attempts to block the botnet’s activity. The ongoing evolution of the malware demonstrates that the cybercriminals are not about to bid farewell to their brainchild, which is providing them with a steady revenue stream.

According to KSN data, Kaspersky Lab solutions detected and repelled 479,528,279 malicious attacks from online resources located in 190 countries all over the world. File antivirus detected a total of 174,989,956 unique malicious and potentially unwanted objects.

We’ve become accustomed to seeing a steady stream of security breaches month after month; and this quarter has been no exception, including attacks on Barts Health Trust, Sports Direct, Intercontinental Hotels Group and ABTA.

Earlier today, our products detected and successfully blocked a large number of ransomware attacks around the world. In these attacks, data is encrypted with the extension “.WCRY” added to the filenames. Our analysis indicates the attack, dubbed “WannaCry”, is initiated through an SMBv2 remote code execution in Microsoft Windows.