Blog

“Shifu” Banking Trojan – Technical Analysis and Recommendations

January 27, 2017 | NSFOCUS

By: NSFOCUS Security Labs Overview The banking Trojan “Shifu” was discovered by the IBM counter fraud platform in April, 2015. Built on the Shiz source code, this Trojan employs techniques adopted by multiple notorious Trojans such as Zeus, Gozi, and Dridex. This particular Trojan targeted 14 banks in Japan and re-emerged in Britain compromising 10 […]

ElasticSearch Hit by Ransom Attack

January 26, 2017 | NSFOCUS

By: Dr. Richard Zhao, SVP of Global Threat Research, NSFOCUS Overview During the week of January 21, 2017, over 34,000 vulnerable MongoDB databases fell victim to a ransom attack. Data residing on these databases was erased or encrypted and bitcoin payment was demanded in lieu for return of the data. Moreover, on January 18th, 2017, […]

Gazing into our Crystal Ball – 2017 Cybersecurity Predictions

December 19, 2016 | NSFOCUS

By: Stephen Gates, Chief Research Intelligence Analyst, NSFOCUS Cyber extortion and attacks can take many forms – from ransomware to DDoS shakedowns and data-dump blackmail, organizations all over the globe have been directly impacted by these campaigns in 2016. This year we saw the first DDoS attack exceeding 1Tbps in size and the proliferation of attacks […]

Case Study: Thwarting 100,000+ Attacks on the G20 Summit, the NSFOCUS Experience

December 12, 2016 | NSFOCUS

By: Dr. Richard Zhao, SVP of Global Threat Research, NSFOCUS In September 2016, prominent world leaders representing the top 20 global economies gathered together in Hangzhou, China to kick off the 11th meeting of Group of Twenty (G20). This year marked the first time that the event was hosted in China and as a result, […]

Threat Intelligence: What It Is and How to Use It Effectively

November 29, 2016 | NSFOCUS

By: Anil Nandigam, Sr. Director, Product Marketing, NSFOCUS In today’s cyber landscape, decision makers constantly question the value of their security investments, asking whether each dollar is helping secure the business. Meanwhile, cyber attackers are growing smarter and more capable every day. Today’s security teams often find themselves falling behind, left to analyze artifacts from […]

Threat Intelligence – You can’t complete the picture, if you don’t have the missing piece.

October 11, 2016 | NSFOCUS

Author: Stephen Gates, Chief Research Intelligence Analyst, NSFOCUS Over the last year, the cybersecurity industry has been abuzz about this new thing called “threat intelligence”. However, threat intelligence (intel) as a whole is not really that new. Threat intel was probably used in every military-like campaign going back to the rise of the great civilizations […]

Advanced Persistent Threats – A Simple Analogy

August 1, 2016 | Adeline Zhang

Author: Stephen Gates, Chief Research Intelligence Analyst, NSFOCUS One of the things that amazes me the most is how the general population lacks a firm understanding of the cyber threats they face daily. Since few people outside of security circles have actually been trained in cyber security, the general lack of knowledge pertaining to cyber-attacks […]

Building Cyber Awareness – What I would do first!

June 15, 2016 | Adeline Zhang

Track: General Security Author: Stephen Gates, Chief Research Intelligence Analyst, NSFOCUS In my travels around the globe, I am often asked what strides an organization should take in order to measurably reduce their exposure to cyber threat actors, and their relentless cyber-attacks. Deploying the right security technologies obviously makes good sense. However, no matter how much […]

Why the Name Icarus? – The Latest Anonymous Operation

May 17, 2016 | Adeline Zhang

Track: General Security Author: Stephen Gates, Chief Research Intelligence Analyst, NSFOCUS According to reports, the famous hacker collective known around the world as Anonymous is back at it again.  Icarus is the name of their latest operation, which began in the first few days of May. When I first heard about the latest name for their […]

DDoS Attacks: A Closer Look, Part 1

April 20, 2016 | NSFOCUS

Track:  Technical Author: Martin Stone, Principal Sales Engineer, NSFOCUS If you’ve ever seen portrayals of DDoS attacks in TV and movies, they might seem like scary, mysterious attacks, launched by elite hackers, against which there is no protection. Nothing could be farther from the truth.  DDoS is one of the simplest and easiest ways to […]