Cyber Crime

Pierluigi Paganini October 31, 2016
Massive hacking campaign on Joomla sites via recently patched flaws

Experts from the firm Sucuri observed a spike in the number of attacks in less than 24 hours after Joomla released patches for two critical flaws. On October 25, Joomla released the version 3.6.4 to fix two high severity vulnerabilities, CVE-2016-8870, and CVE-2016-8869. The first flaw, tracked as CVE-2016-8870, could be exploited by attackers to create user accounts even if […]

Pierluigi Paganini October 31, 2016
Young hacker arrested for disrupting 911 Service with a TDoS attack

An 18-year-old man from Arizona, Meetkumar Hiteshbhai Desai, was arrested this week because he is suspected for the severe disruption of 911 service. A few weeks ago, a group of researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s Cyber-Security Research Center demonstrated how it is possible to significantly disrupt the US’ 911 emergency call system. An attacker […]

Pierluigi Paganini October 30, 2016
Crooks earned at least $1.35m with spamming campaigns

Authorities identified a man in Florida that powered spamming campaigns abusing an army of corporate servers and private email accounts. Spam is still a profitable business for crooks and to give you an idea of how the cyber criminals work let share with you the story of the leader of a spamming gang. Timothy Livingston (31), […]

Pierluigi Paganini October 30, 2016
AV-TEST study sees search engine results even more poisoned with malicious links

According to a study published by the independent anti-virus testing outfit AV-TEST, the number of malicious search engine results has been increasing. The vast majority of the Internet users blindly trust data provided in response to their queries to the search engines. Actually, search engine results are increasingly poisoned with malicious links, the experts noticed a […]

Pierluigi Paganini October 30, 2016
LDAP as attack vector could power Terabit-Scale LDAP DDoS Attacks

Security experts observed attackers launching a powerful LDAP DDoS, the new amplification method could peak Terabit-Scale attacks. LDAP DDoS attacks are the novelty in the threat landscape, the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) protocol could be abused to power massive DDoS attacks. The LDAP is an open standard application protocol for accessing and maintaining distributed […]

Pierluigi Paganini October 29, 2016
Exclusive: MalwareMustDie spotted a new IoT Linux/IRCTelnet malware made in Italy

Exclusive: The security researcher MalwareMustDie has found a new Linux/IRCTelnet malware– made in Italy – that aims IoT botnet connected by IRC and Telnet. It is able to generate an IPv6 DDoS and performing NEW dangerous capabilities that Mirai was unable to cover. In  a brief interview to Security Affairs @unixfreakjp of MalwareMustDie group explains […]

Pierluigi Paganini October 29, 2016
Hacking back the Mirai botnet, technical and legal issues

Security researchers have found vulnerabilities in the source code of the Mirai botnet and devised a method to hack back it. The Mirai botnet, this name is familiar to security experts due to the massive DDoS attack that it powered against the Dyn DNS service a few days ago. The Mirai malware was first spotted […]

Pierluigi Paganini October 29, 2016
Ukrainian hackers Cyber Hunta leaked emails of Putin’s Advisor

Hackers of the Cyber Hunta collective leaked thousands of emails allegedly stolen from the account of Vladislav Yuryevich Surkov. Last week a Russian government website was hacked by the Jester hacker who defaced the website of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, MID.ru in retaliation for the recent attacks against US targets. This week a Ukrainian hacker collective […]

Pierluigi Paganini October 28, 2016
Crime doesn’t pay, Fappening hacker gets 18 months in jail

The person behind the Fappening case, Ryan Collins (36), received a lighter penalty than the five years prison initially on the table for the guilty plea. Do you remember the Fappening case? In 2014, a cache of nude photos and videos of celebrities was leaked online, hackers have stolen them by accessing the iCloud accounts […]

Pierluigi Paganini October 27, 2016
Hackers behind the BLACKGEAR espionage campaign now targets Japan

The threat actor behind the Blackgear cyber-espionage campaign that is targeting Japanese entities is the same that hit Taiwan in 2012. According to security experts from Trend Micro, Japanese organizations were targeted in an espionage campaign dubbed Blackgear. Attackers behind the Blackgear appear to be the same that targeted users in Taiwan in 2012, they used […]