SecurityWeek

Confusion over the source and motive behind the NotPetya ransomware outbreak was given an extra stir with the offer for sale of a private decryption key. Posts appeared Tuesday on both Pastebin and DeepPaste: "Send me 100 Bitcoins and you will get my private key to decrypt any harddisk (except boot disks)."

A Moscow court on Thursday jailed the leader of a notorious hacking group for two years for breaking into the accounts of high-ranking Russian officials.Vladimir Anikeyev headed the Shaltai Boltai collective -- Russian for "Humpty Dumpty" -- believed to be behind high-profile hacks, including into the Twitter account of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.

Kaspersky Lab researcher Vitaly Kamluk has released the source code of Bitscout, a compact and customizable tool designed for remote digital forensics operations.

Symantec announced on Thursday that it has agreed to acquire Israeli cybersecurity start-up Fireglass for an undisclosed sum.

Google on Wednesday announced that a total of 138 vulnerabilities were addressed in the Android platform with the release of this month’s set of security patches.

Approximately 250 years ago Samuel Johnson said, “The next best thing to knowing something, is knowing where to find it.” This is quite a fitting quote from the author of A Dictionary of the English Language and equally fitting today when it comes to understanding your digital risk. 

Android file-encrypting ransomware SLocker was recently observed using an interface similar to that of the WannaCry malware that hit Windows systems worldwide last month, TrendMicro security researchers reveal.

Cisco has released updates for its Ultra Services Framework and Elastic Services Controller products to address several vulnerabilities rated critical and high severity.

Organizations that want to manage their security risk need to understand how they are exposed. The applications an organization runs make up a tremendous amount of this exposure due to the fact that vulnerabilities in the applications, as well as misconfigurations, are likely targets for attackers. Being able to properly defend these applications requires the organization to first identify their attack surfaces before meaningful risk management can take place.

Several prominent Chinese-language news websites that are blocked in China have been targeted in malware, phishing and reconnaissance attacks, according to a new report from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab group.

The NotPetya wiper wasn’t the only piece of malware distributed last week using the compromised M.E.Doc update mechanism: a fake WannaCry ransomware variant was delivered using the same channel, Kaspersky Lab reports.

Understanding geopolitics is key to understanding the perpetrators and victims of cyber espionage. This is one of the key messages from the German federal domestic intelligence service (BfV) 2016 annual report (summary PDF). 

We are in an increasingly mobile-first and distributed world. Remote networks and mobile users are the new reality, and they all require access to business-critical applications, which used to be located safely behind the corporate firewall.

While the number of malware samples spotted in 2016 decreased compared to the previous year, threats have been more sophisticated, according to the latest security report from antivirus research company AV-TEST.

ESET security researchers have performed a detailed analysis of a stealthy backdoor used by the group behind the NotPetya destructive wiper and injected into the legitimate resources of tax accounting software M.E.Doc earlier this year.

Kaspersky Lab security researchers have observed a new step in the evolution of the Neutrino malware, with a recently observed variant targeting point of sale (PoS) terminals.

An unpatched vulnerability affecting Humax WiFi Router model HG-100R allows attackers to compromise the WiFi credentials and even retrieve the router console administrative password, Trustwave SpiderLabs researchers discovered.

Hackers have stolen significant amounts of Bitcoin and Ethereum after hijacking a computer belonging to an employee of Bithumb, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges.

The developers of Libgcrypt, the cryptographic library used by the GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) implementation of the OpenPGP standard, released an update last week to prevent side-channel attacks that allow the recovery of RSA private keys.

Windows 10 users who haven’t installed the Creators Update will soon be notified to review their privacy settings and to install the latest feature update to remain secure, Microsoft announced.