In addition to being permanently or temporarily closed due to ransomware attacks, many victims also suffered employee layoffs and executive resignations.A successful ransomware attack can devastate an organization. And even paying the ransom doesn’t mean your company won’t suffer lasting damage. A report released Tuesday by security provider Cybereason looks at the impact of ransomware on many organizations and offers advice on how to defend yourself against these types of attacks.

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In as little as nine minutes, using only encrypted email addresses as identification, the Lazarus hackers created Binance accounts and traded crypto stolen from Eterbase, the Slovakian exchange, according to account records that Binance shared with the police and that are reported here for the first time.

“Binance had no idea who was moving money through their exchange” because of the anonymous nature of the accounts, said Eterbase co-founder Robert Auxt, whose firm has been unable to locate or recover the funds.

Eterbase’s lost money is part of a torrent of illicit funds that flowed through Binance from 2017 to 2021, a Reuters investigation has found.

As Reuters reported in January, Binance kept weak money-laundering checks on its users until mid-2021, despite concerns raised by senior company figures starting at least three years earlier. In response to that article, Binance said it was helping drive higher industry standards and the reporting was “wildly outdated.” In August 2021, Binance compelled new and existing users to submit identification.

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Filed: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/

Several U.S. federal agencies today revealed that Chinese-backed threat actors have targeted and compromised major telecommunications companies and network service providers to steal credentials and harvest data.

As the NSA, CISA, and the FBI said in a joint cybersecurity advisory published on Tuesday, Chinese hacking groups have exploited publicly known vulnerabilities to breach anything from unpatched small office/home office (SOHO) routers to medium and even large enterprise networks.

Once compromised, the threat actors used the devices as part of their own attack infrastructure as command-and-control servers and proxy systems they could use to breach more networks.

“Upon gaining an initial foothold into a telecommunications organization or network service provider, PRC state-sponsored cyber actors have identified critical users and infrastructure including systems critical to maintaining the security of authentication, authorization, and accounting,” the advisory explains.

The attackers then stole credentials to access underlying SQL databases and used SQL commands to dump user and admin credentials from critical Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) servers.

The federal agencies advise organizations to apply security patches as soon as possible, disable unnecessary ports and protocols to shrink their attack surface, and replace end-of-life network infrastructure that no longer receives security patches.

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Make Use Of: “Whether you have the strongest or weakest passwords, countless scenarios can leak your password online. It could be a data breach, or you accidentally shared your credentials with a malicious actor through a phishing website. But how do you tell if your password has been hacked? And what are some of the easiest ways to find that? Here, we share some of the most effortless methods through which you can check if your password has ever leaked online…”

Microsoft Word documents aced with a novel strain of malware are being sent to unsuspecting user’s email inboxes, security researchers have confirmed.

The malicious code – which goes by the name of SVCReady – is being spread via phishing attacks, and computers without antivirus software installed are most at risk.

Security researchers have observed several updates have been released already which suggests it’s far from the finished article.

It’s also not the only case of Microsoft Word being weaponized for malicious purposes this week – Snake Keylogger malware was found inside PDF attachments being distributed for much the same effect.

Protecting Yourself from Phishing Attacks

Microsoft Word documents are sent, received, and opened by millions of users every day — which makes them the perfect vehicle for spreading malware.

There are some golden rules when it comes to email safety. For example, never opening attachments from email addresses you don’t recognize.

Phishing emails are often riddled with spelling mistakes and will try to inject a sense of urgency into victims with some sort of call to action — such as suggesting an account will be blocked or payment will be taken. Being able to recognize these telltale signs is essential.

It’s also a good idea to install antivirus software that has the capacity to scan emails and perform pre-emptive checks on files you download, detect and remove any malware that does make its way onto your system.

Filed: https://tech.co/news