The Turkish Crime Family is a hacker group claiming to have over 600 million iCloud credentials from iCloud, Me and Mac.com domains. It’s reported that over 220 million of these accounts have been tested as active and that number is no laughing matter.
mac hacker – read more
Canada’s University of Calgary paid almost $ 16,000 ($ 20,000 Canadian, ~£10,800) to recover crucial data that has been held hostage for more than a week by crypto ransomware attackers.
The ransom was disclosed on Wednesday morning in a statement issued by University of Calgary officials. It said university IT personnel had made progress in isolating the unnamed ransomware infection and restoring affected parts of the university network. It went on to warn that there’s no guarantee paying the controversial ransom will lead to the lost data being recovered.
“Ransomware attacks and the payment of ransoms are becoming increasingly common around the world,” Wednesday’s statement read. “The university is now in the process of assessing and evaluating the decryption keys. The actual process of decryption is time-consuming and must be performed with care. It is important to note that decryption keys do not automatically restore all systems or guarantee the recovery of all data. A great deal of work is still required by IT to ensure all affected systems are operational again, and this process will take time.”
Enlarge (credit: Malwarebytes)
The website belonging to Maisto International, a popular maker of remote-controlled toy vehicles, has been caught pushing ransomware that holds visitors’ files hostage until they pay a hefty fee.
Malicious files provided by the Angler exploit kit were hosted directly on the homepage of Maisto[.]com, according to antivirus provider Malwarebytes. The attack code exploits vulnerabilities in older versions of applications such as Adobe Flash, Oracle Java, Silverlight, and Internet Explorer. People who visit Maisto[.]com with machines that haven’t received the latest updates are surreptitiously infected with the CryptXXX ransomware. Fortunately for victims in this case, researchers from Kaspersky Lab recently uncovered a weakness in the app that allows users to recover their files without paying the extortion demand. People infected with ransomware in other drive-by attacks haven’t been so lucky.
After discovering the infection of the Maisto homepage, Malwarebytes Senior Security Researcher Jerome Segura used this tool from website security firm Sucuri. It detected that Maisto was running an out-of-date version of the Joomla content management system, which is presumed to be the way attackers were able to load the malicious payloads on the homepage.
New York Times |
Hacker Tactic: Holding Data Hostage
New York Times THE perpetual cat-and-mouse game between computer hackers and their targets is getting nastier. Cybercriminals are getting better at circumventing firewalls and antivirus programs. More of them are resorting to ransomware, which encrypts computer data … |
