This palm-sized box can break your iPhone’s password, giving police full access to a device’s file system — messages, photos, call logs, browsing history, keychain and user passwords, and more.
As the value of cryptocurrencies—driven by the phenomenal rise of Bitcoin—has increased significantly, a new kind of threat has become mainstream, and some might say has even surpassed all other cybercrime.
Reputable anti-malware security vendor Malwarebytes is warning Mac users that malware attacks against the platform climbed 270 percent last year.
While Dofoil/Smoke Loader has been used in nefarious hacking operations for almost a decade, it recently made headlines after Malwarebytes, a cybersecurity firm, discovered it was posing as a patch for Spectre and Meltdown, two major flaws that exist in nearly every computer processor on the market.
Until it happens to you, it’s just another news story. Cybercrime affects millions of people around the world every day. New threats are constantly emerging, but the goal is always to steal consumer or business information and monetize it. With the popularity of e-commerce and online banking comes new opportunities for cybercriminals to cause harm. Security companies, like Malwarebytes, are leading the fight against breaches with the latest techniques and exhaustive research methods based on customer telemetry data to provide products that safeguard consumers and businesses alike.
Researchers at cybersecurity firm Malwarebytes discovered that the so-called ‘drive-by cryptomining’ malware had managed to infect Android phones and redirect them to a website running cryptocurrency mining code that automatically sucks a phone’s processing power to crunch equations needed to generate Monero.
Smartphone users are just as vulnerable to cryptocurrency mining hijacks as their PC counterparts, and sometimes on a dramatic scale. Malwarebytes has detailed a “drive-by” mining campaign that redirected millions of Android users to a website that hijacked their phone processors for mining Monero. While the exact trigger wasn’t clear, researchers believed that infected apps with malicious ads would steer people toward the pages. And it wasn’t subtle — the site would claim that you were showing “suspicious” web activity and tell you that it was mining until you entered a captcha code to make it stop.
Ransomware became the fifth-most-common threat for businesses in 2017 as detections increased by 90% from the previous year. Attacks also hit consumers hard, reaching a 93% detection rate year-over-year, reports Malwarebytes.
Cybercrime has become the biggest threat to digital information, causing reputational and financial damage to businesses and consumers around the globe. The pace at which cybercrime has evolved since the 1980s is a concern for businesses that have become increasingly dependent on computers to house sensitive and proprietary data.
In the days since Meltdown and Spectre have been made public, Malwarebytes has tracked which elements of the design flaw, known as speculative execution, are vulnerable and how different vendors are handling the patching process.
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