Posts Tagged ‘Ransomware’

Meltdown and Spectre

By Liam | January 30, 2018

You probably can’t have missed the reports about the cyber-Armageddon that are circulating today. Two very significant vulnerabilities have been found in the processor chips that are used by nearly every single computer, tablet, phone and smart toaster.

Review of my 2017 predictions.

By Liam | December 28, 2017 |

I don’t see many people who make predictions for the coming year actually come back to review what they predicted. I’m not one of those though, so here is my review. I’ve included the original text below in blue, but the full article for my 2017 predictions is here.

Dodgy e-mail that looks legit.

By Liam | November 17, 2017

I received a dodgy e-mail on my personal account yesterday. I’m surprised the GMail spam filters didn’t catch it and flag it for me. Like last weeks story, this message looked kinda plausible.

Draughty Backdoor in popular application.

By Liam | September 21, 2017 |

It was revealed a couple of days ago that a widely used application had a backdoor in it. A specific version of CCleaner, a well known utility for doing housekeeping on computers, had been compromised by evil doers.

Phishing subject lines – Top 10.

By Liam | July 20, 2017

What would you expect if you got an e-mail with the subject line of “Security Alert”? How about “Unusual sign-in activity”? You probably expect it to be an e-mail that is trying to raise your awareness about some potential security issue. I’m afraid it is likely not. These are just two examples from the Top…

Communication is vital after a disaster.

By Liam | July 13, 2017

Maersk Line were one of the biggest victims of the Petya/NotPetya Ransomware worm that struck on 27th June 2017. Here are some details, in case you missed it. Two weeks later, they are still not back to full operational capacity, but they are doing something really well. The are using the critical competence of communication…

The latest Ransomware outbreak – Petya

By Liam | June 28, 2017 |

So here we go again with another outbreak of Ransomware, based on the National Security Agency (NSA) hacking tools that were leaked by a hacking group. Some experts are calling this one Petya, as it seems very similar to the Petya Ransomware strain that has been around for over a year.

WannaCry no more. At least for now.

By Liam | May 22, 2017

I’m just going to have a short article this week, just to close off the WannaCry story and counter any of the misinformation that was spread by some supposed “experts”. WannaCry is still circulating and affecting machines, but thanks to the kill switch discovered by @MalwareTechBlog, it is more or less neutralised now. Those machines still…

Do you WannaCry? I didn’t think so.

By Liam | May 18, 2017

I delayed this week’s blog, just to let some of the dust settle on the whole WannaCry (also known as WCry or WannaCrypt) furore and see if we can learn anything from it that will help protect my readers going forward. I’ll start with some easy background on Ransomware and them explain what was special…

Evil e-mail has your name and address!

By Liam | March 30, 2017

Reports today are somewhat concerning. Below are two examples of evil e-mail that has been doing the rounds in the last day or so. The greeting addresses you by your first/given name and the file that is attached to the e-mail is called after your surname. The postal address shown IS also your address. I’ll…

There is a lot of variations in scam e-mail the last couple of days.

By Liam | October 27, 2016

I yearn for the days when evil e-mail was so easily identified “becuse it wuz ritten in, gud, inglish wit grate spellhng an pun.tation”. 😃 In the last couple of days, the evil doers have been varying their scam e-mails fairly wildly and it’s bound to catch out some people. I’ll run through three sneaky methods…

Snail mail delivers USB keys … WTF?

By Liam | September 23, 2016

I find I’m writing a second article about Evil USBs within a week. At least these ones don’t destroy your equipment, but they might infect you with nasty software that does things that you really wouldn’t want it doing. In this case, in Victoria, Australia, Evil Doers were dropping USB drives into people’s mailboxes. The…

Repeat after me … Microsoft do NOT e-mail out system updates! It’s Fantom Ransomware.

By Liam | August 31, 2016

More evil e-mail is coming to scramble all the files on your computer and then demand you to pay your hard earned cash in order to get back access to same. In other words you are being held to Ransom and so we get the term Ransom Software or Ransomware for short and this new…

“Attack” on Garda systems is likely a Ransomware incident.

By Liam | August 9, 2016

Now that the dust is settling after the IT Security incident, which caused the Garda Síochána (the Irish Police force) to shut down access to their systems late last week, it would appear that it wasn’t quite as nefarious an incident as was being portrayed in the media. Headlines such as “Mob target Garda computers”…

Evil doers just being evil … news at 11!

By Liam | July 14, 2016

The good folk over at Cisco’s Talos Threat Intelligence Organisation have been looking at a new piece of “apparent” Ransomware called Ranscam. The reason I use “apparent” is because it doesn’t hold any of your data to ransom, quite simply because it’s deleted it already! That doesn’t stop it trying to get you to pay…