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Ransomware at IT Services Provider Synoptek

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Sat, 28 Dec 2019 01:49:05 +0000

Synoptek, a California business that provides cloud hosting and IT management services to more than a thousand customer nationwide, suffered a ransomware attack this week that has disrupted operations for many of its clients, according to sources. The company has reportedly paid a ransom demand in a bid to restore operations as quickly as possible. Irvine, Calif.-based Synoptek is a managed service provider that maintains a variety of cloud-based services for more than 1,100 customers across a broad spectrum of industries, including state and local governments, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, media, retail and software. The company employs nearly a thousand employees and brought in more than $100 million in revenue in the past year.

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IndependentKrebs

Nuclear Bot Author Arrested in Sextortion Case

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2019 19:09:10 +0000

Last summer, a wave of sextortion emails began flooding inboxes around the world. The spammers behind this scheme claimed they’d hacked your computer and recorded videos of you watching porn, and promised to release the embarrassing footage to all your contacts unless a bitcoin demand was paid. Now, French authorities say they’ve charged two men they believe are responsible for masterminding this scam. One of them is a 21-year-old hacker interviewed by KrebsOnSecurity in 2017 who openly admitted to authoring a banking trojan called “Nuclear Bot.”

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IndependentKrebs

Ransomware Gangs Now Outing Victim Businesses That Don’t Pay Up

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2019 02:21:23 +0000

As if the scourge of ransomware wasn’t bad enough already: Several prominent purveyors of ransomware have signaled they plan to start publishing data stolen from victims who refuse to pay up. To make matters worse, one ransomware gang has now created a public Web site identifying recent victim companies that have chosen to rebuild their operations instead of acquiescing to their tormentors.

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IndependentKrebs

Inside ‘Evil Corp,’ a $100M Cybercrime Menace

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Mon, 16 Dec 2019 14:08:21 +0000

The U.S. Justice Department this month offered a $5 million bounty for information leading to the arrest and conviction of a Russian man indicted for allegedly orchestrating a vast, international cybercrime network that called itself “Evil Corp” and stole roughly $100 million from businesses and consumers. As it happens, for several years KrebsOnSecurity closely monitored the day-to-day communications and activities of the accused and his accomplices. What follows is an insider’s look at the back-end operations of this gang.

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IndependentKrebs

The Great $50M African IP Address Heist

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2019 22:31:12 +0000

A top executive at the nonprofit entity responsible for doling out chunks of Internet addresses to businesses and other organizations in Africa has resigned his post following accusations that he secretly operated several companies which sold tens of millions of dollars worth of the increasingly scarce resource to online marketers. The allegations stemmed from a three-year investigation by a U.S.-based researcher whose findings shed light on a murky area of Internet governance that is all too often exploited by spammers and scammers alike.

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IndependentKrebs

Patch Tuesday, December 2019 Edition

Credit to Author: BrianKrebs| Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2019 01:51:25 +0000

Microsoft today released updates to plug three dozen security holes in its Windows operating system and other software. The patches include fixes for seven critical bugs — those that can be exploited by malware or miscreants to take control over a Windows system with no help from users — as well as another flaw in most versions of Windows that is already being exploited in active attacks.

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