Authors: Stephen Gates, Chief Research Intelligence Analyst & Cody Mercer, Senior Intelligence Threat Researcher Overview From reports in late January 2017, the Shamoon malware is back. Shamoon wipes the disks of computers infected with the malware. Apparently a new Shamoon variant prompted Saudi Arabia telecoms authority to issue a warning on Monday, January 23, 2017 for […]

Author: Stephen Gates, Chief Research Intelligence Analyst Ransomware: The Human Touch As a security professional, I often get asked about the latest threats. Most consumers don’t understand the difference between viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware, adware, scareware, malvertising, phishing, etc. Sometimes, even those of us in the field see it all as malware. Basically, it’s all malicious […]

Executive Summary JTB Corp. (JTB), a well-known travel agency in Japan announced on June 14, 2016 that it had experienced a massive data leak upon an attack targeting its servers. Initial reports indicate that 7.93 million people using JTB to book trips may have had their personal booking data exposed. The leaked data contained sensitive […]

Authors: Stephen Gates, Chief Research Intelligence Analyst & Cody Mercer, Senior Intelligence Threat Researcher Executive Summary Looking back on 2016, there were a few key predictions that ended up becoming a reality. While many organizations have been reassuring themselves for years, saying: “Who would launch a DDoS attack against us?” – they ended up falling victim […]

Sources of Data NSFOCUS collects data from all of their DDoS Protection Solutions deployed worldwide that are being managed by their managed service offering. The botnets that are used across the world can be tracked by NSFOCUS, and those details are used to formulate many of the attack trends shown in this report. NSFOCUS is […]

Authors: Richard Zhao, CTO & Cody Mercer, Senior Intelligence Threat Researcher Security Event Investigation and Threat Intelligence Over a year ago I purposed the three main tenants encompassing a successful Threat Intelligence framework: Define a system infrastructure for security event disclosure and case analysis. Clearly delineate security disclosure responsibilities to respective parties. Cultivate a security data […]

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, securing the Summit’s cyber assets and associated networks quickly became […]

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 banks on September 22, […]

ElasticSearch Hit by Ransom Attack Overview Last week, over 34,000 vulnerable MongoDB databases fell victim to a recent ransom attack. Data residing on these databases was erased or encrypted and bitcoin payment was demanded in lieu for data return. Moreover, on Jan 18th 2017, several hundred ElasticSearch servers were hit by a ransom attack within […]

Former Lastline CEO To Spearhead Next Phase of U.S. and International Growth Santa Clara, Calif., February 13, 2017 – NSFOCUS, a global provider of intelligent hybrid DDoS defenses, today announced that Jens Andreassen has been named Chief Operating Officer, effective immediately. In his role at NSFOCUS, Andreassen will be responsible for launching new products and […]