Erich’s “What in the (cyber security) world is going on?” 02-16-17 edition

So, I will unabashedly admit to failing miserably at making my weekly post the last couple of weeks. I’ve been traveling and webinaring and otherwise buried in stuff. Oh, and I was abducted by aliens. yeah, that’s it… aliens. Either way, my bad.

Careless Licking Gets a Nasty Ransomware Phishing Infection

Yeah, I totally took this headline from my employer. It was just too good to pass up. What happened is Licking County Ohio got hit by ransomware that took down about 1,000 machines and completely shut down the town government. The best quote I’ve seen for a while came from that when County Auditor Mike Smith commented: “Apparently, our clock still works”. Ouch!

 

Polish banks hit by malware sent through hacked financial regulator

Well, some smooth slick soul managed to upload malware to the Polish financial regular’s website which resulted in infections in some Polish banks. Not a good thing, not at all. Just goes to show, be cautious even when dealing with “trusted” sources.

 

There is a fake Netflix app that is ransomware

Trying to steal Netflix? It may cost you. Just pay the $8mo for crying out loud.

 

New campaign spreading ransomware and another trojan simultaneously

Because Locky doesn’t suck enough as it is, this campaign is also downloading a click-fraud trojan so they can make a few bucks on the side. Shameless.

 

Mirai is spreading via Windows malware

They have started spreading this via windows trojans as they work to build the largest, most terrifying IoT botnet ever known to man. When fridges revolt, nobody is safe!

 

Arby’s got breached

More than 350,000 credit and debit cards could be at risk after Arby’s POS systems were found to be malware laden. I’d say more, but I have no beef with them. (<- you see what I did there, right?)

 

Soda machines take down a university

A gaggle of  infected IoT devices, including vending machines, caused a lot of havoc at an unnamed university by flooding the DNS server with seafood-related lookups. Obviously something was fishy, so they took action and tracked it down.

 

That’s all I have this week. I’m going to work on doing more mini posts based on things I see during the week, so subscribe and you will get those notifications. Thanks


Erich Kron is the Security Awareness Advocate at KnowBe4, and has over 20 years’ experience in the medical, aerospace manufacturing and defense fields. He is the former security manager for the US Army 2nd Regional Cyber Center-Western Hemisphere.

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