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Despite the disruption of Axpergle (Angler), which dominated the landscape in early 2016, exploit kits as a whole continued to be a threat to PCs running unpatched software. Some of the most prominent threats, from malvertising to ransomware, used exploit kits to infect millions of computers worldwide in 2016. The prevalence of exploit kits as an…
Read MoreAs the shopping sprees become increasingly frenetic during holiday season, it’s hard not to worry about how much credit card debt we’re piling. Some of us rely on email notifications from our banks to track the damage to our finances. So what happens when we suddenly get notified about charges for things we never bought?…
Read MoreAs everybody else winds down for the holidays, the cybercriminals behind Cerber are busy ramping up their operations. Following our discovery of a spam campaign that takes advantage of holiday shopping, we found two new campaigns that continue distributing the latest variants of Cerber ransomware. These campaigns are the latest in a series of persistent cybercriminal…
Read MoreWe see it every year: social engineering attacks that take advantage of the online shopping activities around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, targeting customers of online retailers. This year, we’re seeing a spam campaign that Amazon customers need to be wary of. The fake emails pretend to be notifications from the online retailer that a purchase has…
Read MoreAny IT professional who’s ever had an experience with malware knows how fast an intrusive attack can happen, and how difficult it can be to educate employees to be vigilant against such threats. And with ransomware attacks only growing, having information, tools and technologies to help protect your network can mean the difference between serious…
Read More“Criminal case against you” is a message that may understandably cause panic. That’s what a recent spam campaign hopes happens, increasing the likelihood of recipients opening the malicious attachment. We recently discovered a new threat that uses email messages pretending to be fax messages, but in truth deliver a ransomware downloader. The attachment used in this…
Read MoreJust when it seems the Ransom:Win32/Locky activity has slowed down, our continuous monitoring of the ransomware family reveals a new workaround that the authors might be using to keep it going. The decline in Locky activity can be attributed to the slowdown of detections of Nemucod, which Locky uses to infect computers. Nemucod is a…
Read MoreAs part of our ongoing effort to provide better malware protection, the July 2016 release of the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) includes detection for Win32/Cerber, a prevalent ransomware family. The inclusion in MSRT complements our Cerber-specific family detections in Windows Defender, and our ransomware-dedicated cloud protection features. We started seeing Cerber in February…
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