Financial threats

In June, 2016, the Russian police arrested the alleged members of the criminal group known as Lurk. The police suspected Lurk of stealing nearly three billion rubles. The story of Lurk gives some idea of the amount of work that has to be done to obtain enough evidence to arrest and prosecute suspects.

In the second quarter of 2016, Kaspersky Lab’s web antivirus detected 16,119,489 unique malicious objects: scripts, exploits, executable files, etc. 54,539,948 unique URLs were recognized as malicious by web antivirus components.

Bankers and encryptors, ransomware and spyware, old and new exploits; APT attacks, ATM infection, spear phishing and fraud targeting large numbers of users – cybercriminals continue their hunt for money and information

We recently found that a new logic in the latest version of the Shade encryptor currently being spread widely within the territories of Russia and CIS. On the basis of this logic, the ransomware checks the computer for any involvement in accounting activities and, if the check is successful, installs remote control tools into the compromised system instead of encrypting the victim’s files.

While we were researching the malicious program Lurk in early February 2016, we discovered an interesting oddity in how this banking Trojan spreads. From the data we had, it emerged that the users attacked by Lurk also installed the remote administration software Ammyy Admin on their computers.

The number of users attacked with ransomware is huge. But how big is it? Ransomware seems to be a global threat. But maybe there are regions at a higher risk of danger? There seem to be a lot of ransomware malware groups. But what are the most widespread and dangerous?

The number of users attacked with ransomware is huge. But how big is it? Ransomware seems to be a global threat. But maybe there are regions at a higher risk of danger? There seem to be a lot of ransomware malware groups. But what are the most widespread and dangerous?

Over the last two years, deep in the slums of the Internet, a different kind of underground market has flourished. The short, cryptic name perhaps doesn’t say much about it: xDedic. However, on this obscure marketplace anyone can purchase more than 70,000 hacked servers from all around the Internet.

In this blog post we discuss the threats to visitors aiming to travel to Brazil to watch the Olympic Games and to those planning to watch it online. We’ll talk about phishing attacks, highlight WiFi security and touch upon physical security that involves the usage of USB charging spots, the problem of credit card cloning and ATM skimmers.

We have written about this banker Trojan before. It caught our attention almost as soon as it appeared because it used a fileless spreading mechanism – malicious code was not saved on the hard drive and ran in memory only. However, until now no detailed description of Lurk had been published.

In 2009, instead of infecting the computers of users worldwide, criminals went directly after the ATM itself – infecting it with malware called Skimer. Seven years later, our experts discovered a new, improved, version of Skimer.

2016 has only just got underway, but the first three months have already seen the same amount of cybersecurity events that just a few years ago would have seemed normal for a whole year. The main underlying trends remained the same, while there was significant growth in trends related to traditional cybercrime, especially mobile threats and global ransomware epidemics.

Petya Trojan is an unusual hybrid of an MBR blocker and data encryptor: it prevents not only the operating system from booting but also blocks normal access to files located on the hard drives of the attacked system.

Millions of people around the world now use ATMs every day to withdraw cash, pay in to their account or make a variety of payments. Unfortunately, ATM manufacturers and their primary customers – banks – don’t pay much attention to the security of cash machines.

In February 2016, the Internet was shaken by an epidemic caused by the new ransomware Trojan Locky. The Trojan has been actively propagating up to the present day. Kaspersky Lab products have reported attempts to infect users with the Trojan in 114 countries around the world. Analysis of the samples has shown that this Trojan is a brand new ransomware threat, written from scratch.