Avast Security News

SamSam ransomware was first spotted in the digital wild back in 2015. Since then, its purveyors have racked up approximately $6M in extorted ransom money, experts surmise, and its diabolical reign shows no sign of slowing. The malware continues to be improved upon to make it sneakier, with its newest version encrypting files late at night, hoping to infect the system when the user is away from the screen. Additionally, the SamSam attacks all seem strategic and deliberate, as opposed to automated outbreaks, making them some of the most feared and destructive cyberattacks active today.

Social website Reddit announced this week that they suffered a data breach in June. In its official statement, the company calls the breach a “security incident” and provides a detailed account of how it happened.

An elaborate and sophisticated criminal operation like something out of an Oceans 11 sequel has just been uncovered, and the caper here is mass malvertising. While investigating exploit kits, security researchers stumbled upon an operation where criminal activity abused the legitimate online advertising industry to spread trojans, ransomware, and more.

Source code to Exobot banking trojan leaked “This has happened in the past, and it poses a risk as we saw in the case of the infamous Mirai botnet,” says Avast Security Evangelist Luis Corrons, speaking to the news that the source code to a potent bank trojan known as Exobot has been released into the wild of the dark web for anyone who cares to use it for their own ill will. The publicly-shared Mirai source code gave malware architects the blueprints to a powerful botnet, upon which they expanded. “Many malware writers used it to create their own customized version of the bot. We can expect the same here,” adds Luis.

The IoT world is abuzz with the discovery of a new Bluetooth flaw that opens the door to man-in-the-middle attacks, which are exactly what they sound like — attacks where a third party wedges itself between two of your networked devices and helps itself to the sensitive data stored on each. These attacks are possible when the network has weak or no security, and that is precisely the problem inherent in CVE-2018-5383, a cryptographic flaw that affects two Bluetooth features — Secure Simple Pairing and LE Secure Connections.