Articles

Blog post

Midyear Security Report: Exploit Kits and Ransomware Get Creative

The modern online adversary is out to make money, not simply hack networks for the fun of it. In the Cisco 2015 Midyear Security Report, there’s yet more evidence that criminals are using tools with ever-increasing sophistication to steal valuable personal or financial data and sell it, coerce users into paying ransoms for their own […]

July 29, 2015 • 3 min read
Blog post

Threat Spotlight: “A String of Paerls”, Part 2, Deep Dive

This post has been coauthored by Joel Esler, Craig Williams, Richard Harman, Jaeson Schultz, and Douglas Goddard  In part one of our two part blog series on the “String of Paerls” threat, we showed an attack involving a spearphish message containing an attached malicious Word doc. We also described our methodology in grouping similar samples based on Indicators of Compromise: static and […]

July 8, 2014 • 1 min read
Blog post

Fake German Bill Spam Campaign Spreads Malware

Update 2014-01-10: This malicious campaign has expanded to include emails that masquerade as bills from NTTCable and from VolksbankU Update 2014-01-21: We’ve updated the chart to include the Vodafon emails and latest URL activity English language has emerged as the language of choice for international commerce. Since people throughout the world are used to receiving English […]

January 9, 2014 • 2 min read
Blog post

The Internet of Everything, Including Malware

We are witnessing the growth of the Internet of Everything (IoE), the network of embedded physical objects accessed through the Internet, and it’s connecting new devices to the Internet which may not traditionally have been there before. Unfortunately, some of these devices may be deployed with a security posture that may need improvement. Naturally when we saw […]

December 4, 2013 • 3 min read
Blog post

Massive Increase in Reconnaissance Activity – Precursor to Attack?

Update 2013-11-12: Watch our youtube discussion Update 2013-11-05: Upon further examination of the traffic we can confirm that a large percentage is destined for TCP port 445. This is indicative of someone looking for nodes running SMB/DCERPC. With that in mind it is extremely likely someone is looking for vulnerable windows machines or it is quite possible that […]

November 4, 2013 • 2 min read