Tag: increase | Page 5

National Cybersecurity Center reports increase in ransomware a…

March 18, 2023/in Internet Security

AMMAN — Bassam Maharmeh, the president of the National Cybersecurity Center, announced on Friday that the number of cybersecurity
incidents targeting government institutions and vital sectors in Jordan last
year reached 1,326. اضافة اعلان

Maharmeh added that 2 percent of these attacks were deemed
“very dangerous,” Al-Mamlaka TV reported.

Maharmeh also noted that there had been a significant increase
in ransomware attacks during the second half of last year. Ransomware is a type
of malicious software that threatens to publish the victim’s data or block
access to it unless a ransom is paid.

Report to follow
The
National Cybersecurity Center is responsible for protecting government networks
and vital sectors, such as communications, electricity, and national
security-related sectors, from cyberattacks, said Maharmeh.

He added that the center will soon publish a detailed report on
the most prominent cybersecurity incidents that occurred in Jordan last year.

Vulnerabilities
in VMware esxi systems
Earlier
this year, the center warned of a security vulnerability that may expose
devices to ransomware attacks.

The center explained that the security
vulnerability targets systems that operate on the VMware esxi system, allowing
ransomware programs such as “ESXiArs” to exploit the vulnerability
and encrypt sensitive data, demanding a ransom payment in exchange for the
decryption key.

As a
preventative measure, the center advises users of systems operating on the
VMware ESXi system to update to the latest version as soon as possible to
address this security vulnerability and protect their systems from ransomware
programs.

Additionally, the center recommends implementing strong access
controls and authentication procedures, regularly backing up important data and
storing backups off-site, and training employees on best cybersecurity
practices.

Cloudflare DDoS Report Finds Increase in Attack Volume and Duration

January 16, 2023/in Internet Security

Cloudflare released its Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Threat Report for the fourth quarter of 2022. The report covers the DDoS attack landscape as detected by the Cloudflare network. HTTP DDoS attacks increased 79% year-over-year with ransom DDoS attacks seeing an increase as well. The report found that longer attacks on increasing especially with network-layer DDoS attacks.

Cloudflare found that attacks exceeding 100 gigabits per second increased by 67% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ). Attacks that lasted longer than three hours also increased by 87% QoQ. Omer Yoachimik, Product Manager at Cloudflare, notes that for HTTP DDoS attacks:

While most of these attacks were small, Cloudflare constantly saw terabit-strong attacks, DDoS attacks in the hundreds of millions of packets per second, and HTTP DDoS attacks peaking in the tens of millions of requests per second launched by sophisticated botnets.

QoQ Change in DDoS attack rates in 2022 Q4 as measured by Cloudflare (credit: Cloudflare)

In August of 2022, Google claimed that they fended off a DDoS attack that peaked at 46 million requests per second. Emil Kiner, Senior Product Manager at Google, and Satya Konduru, Engineering Lead at Google, put the scale of the attack into perspective:

To give a sense of the scale of the attack, that is like receiving all the daily requests to Wikipedia (one of the top 10 trafficked websites in the world) in just 10 seconds.

Yoachimik shares that Cloudflare defended an attack against a Korean-based hosting provider that reached one terabyte per second. The attack in question was an ACK flood and was about one minute in duration. An ACK flood attempts to overload a server with TCP ACK packets. The server consumes resources processing the ACK packages preventing it from handling legitimate requests.

Cloudflare found that HTTP DDoS attacks made up 35% of all traffic to Aviation and Aerospace Internet sites. For Education Management companies 92% of traffic was part of network-layer DDoS attacks. Yoachimik also shared that 93% of network-layer traffic to Chinese Internet properties was part of network-layer DDoS attacks.

Ransom DDoS attacks also increased with 16% of…

Source…

Fortinet forecasts increase in cyberthreats

December 12, 2022/in Internet Security

Criminals weaponise new technologies

Attacks on virtual cities and the metaverse are expected to escalate, according to Mr Rattipong.

Various kinds of cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) offerings, the metaverse, virtual city attacks and money laundering-as-a-service (LaaS) are expected to pose crucial threats in cyberspace next year, according to Fortinet, a global cybersecurity company.

“Cyber-risks continue to escalate as cybercriminals are using more ways to weaponise new technologies at scale to enable more disruption and destruction,” said Rattipong Putthacharoen, senior manager for systems engineering at Fortinet.

Some 2% of the global botnet traffic was detected in Thailand, he said.

In 2023, Wiper Malware is expected to enable more destructive attacks, with attackers introducing new variants of this decade-old attack method, said Mr Rattipong.

According to FortiGuard Labs Global Threat Landscape report, the first half witnessed an increase in disk-wiping malware in conjunction with the war in Ukraine, but it was also detected in 24 countries outside of Europe.

Malware that may have been developed and deployed by nation-states could be picked up and reused by criminal groups, including for the CaaS model, according to Fortinet.

Apart from ransomware and malware-as-a-service offerings, new “a la carte services” will emerge, he said, noting CaaS offers an attractive business model for threat actors.

Subscription-based CaaS offerings could potentially provide additional revenue streams, Mr Rattipong said.

He said cybercrimes will enable more effective attack strategies that involve reconnaissance. As attacks become more targeted, threat actors will likely hire “detectives” on the dark web to gather intelligence on a particular target before launching an attack.

LaaS, driven by automation, is another threat and it is difficult to trace, said Mr Rattipong.

Cybercriminals use machine learning for recruitment targeting, helping them to identify potential mules in less time.

Manual mule campaigns will be replaced with automated services that move money through layers of crypto…

Source…

Cryptomining Malware Sees 230% Increase in Q3 2022 / Digital Information World

November 17, 2022/in Computer Security

The recent shockwaves that were sent through the crypto world have made various crypto tokens extremely affordable, and it has also resulted in the entire industry experiencing an extended bear market with all things having been considered and taken into account. In spite of the fact that this is the case, malicious actors are still not letting up and are continuing to use cryptominers to profit from mining malware by infecting users who download pirated content from the internet.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that there has been a 230% increase in cryptominer usage in the third quarter of 2022 alone, as reported by Kaspersky. There are now over 150,000 distinct cryptominers that are being used because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up allowing malicious actors to earn tens of thousands of dollars.

Monero is a popular cryptocurrency for these malicious actors since it allows them to stay more under the radar than might have been the case otherwise, but bitcoin is also being mined with these programs. The people who are infecting users with these mining programs often disguise them as being useful programs or cracks that can allow users to use paid programs free of charge.

Criminals can hijack computer systems and use their processing power to mine crypto. This is useful considering the high cost of electricity these days which has forced many legitimate miners to close up shop for the short term. Avoiding pirated content and software can be a useful way to avoid having your own systems used for such illicit purposes, but it will take a long time before this information makes its way into the mind of the average user.

Victims are often left with slow computer systems due to much of the processing power going towards crypto mining. They also get left with immense electricity bills and they often don’t know the reason for the bill being so high. Something must be done to curtail this activity because it is seriously hurting end users around the world.

Source…

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