Web User - UK (2020-01-22)

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12 22 Jan - 4 Feb 2020 Email us your security questions at [email protected]

THISISSUE’SEXPERT:

Vyacheslav

Zakorzhevsky,

HeadofAnti-Malware

ResearchatKaspersky

(www.kaspersky.co.uk)

Q

Didmalware

attacksget

worsein 2019?

JasonHines,Twitter

A

The volume of

online attacks has

been growing for

years but, in 2019, certain

types of attack became

less effective and hackers

focused on gaining profit

Travelexhitby

ransomwareattack

Theforeign-exchangecompany

Travelexsuffereda serious

ransomwareattack,whichcaused

chaosforitscustomersandpartner

companieswhorelyonitssystems

toconductfinancialtransactions.

Travelexfirstdetectedthata

“softwarevirus”hadcompromisedits

serviceson 31 Decemberand,asa

precaution,tookallitssystemsoffline

topreventthemalwarefrom

spreadinganyfurther.Thefirm

subsequentlyconfirmedthatthe

viruswastheransomwareknown

asREvil,alsoknownasSodinokibi.

Thegroupbehindtheattack

claimedtohavetakenapproximately

5GBofcustomerdata,and

demandeda ransomof$6m

(approximately£4.6m)toreturnit.

Thedatais believedtocomprise

datesofbirth,nationalinsurance

numbersandcreditcardinformation.

fromusers.

This is partly

because we’ve

become

more aware

of the

threats and

how to

avoid them,

and

organisations

are more

responsible.

A good example is

cryptominers, which have

lost their popularity due to

lower profitability and

cryptocurrencies’ fight

against covert mining.

Attempts to install programs

that secretly generate

cryptocurrency on users’

computers(called

‘local’ miners)

have dropped

by 59%.

We witnessed growth

in zero-day exploits,

whichshows that

many products remain

vulnerable and are used for

sophisticated attacks, a trend

that is likely to continue in

the future. Meanwhile, the

share of new backdoors and

banking Trojan files, among

all types of threat detected

by Kaspersky, grew by 134%

and 61% respectively.

Mostnotably,wesawan

increase in online skimmers

(sometimes referred to as

sniffers), where scripts

are embedded in online

stores and used to steal

customers’ credit card data

from websites. There was a

187% growth in the number

of online skimmers’ unique

files (scripts and HTML)

detected by Kaspersky.

Web skimmers also

entered the top 20

malicious objects detected

online, taking 10th place in

the overall ranking.

News about the latest threats and advice from securityexperts

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Travelex is now in discussions with the

National Crime Agency (NCA) and the

Metropolitan Police, who are both

conducting their own investigations into

the breach. It apologised to customers

“for the inconvenience caused”.

bit.ly/travelex

Criminals exploit flaw

in Firefox

Mozilla has patched a critical

security flaw in its Firefox

browser that’s being actively

exploited by criminals. The

company said the vulnerability affects

users running version 72.0.1 of Firefox

and confirmed that it’s “aware of

targeted attacks in the wild abusing

this flaw”. Firefox users should update

their browsers immediately.

The flaw allows an attacker to seize

control of an affected computer

through a mechanism that causes

‘type confusion’, according to Mozilla.

This is a potentially critical error that

can lead to data being read from or

written to locations of memory that

are normally out of bounds. When

triggered, it can lead to an exploitable

crash when the browser attempts to

manipulate JavaScript objects.

It’s the second time in seven months

that Firefox has sustained a critical

zero-day vulnerability being actively

exploited in the wild. A previous flaw,

discovered in June 2019, gave

attackers the ability to execute

arbitrary code on affected machines

and, in some cases, take over users’

devices remotely.

bit.ly/firefoxflaw

There has been an increase in

attackers using online skimmers to steal

credit card data from websites