Naming themselves Night Sky, a new ransomware family was spotted on the first day of 2022, by the MalwareHunterTeam. They appear to work in the RaaS (Ransomware-as-a-Service) model, similar to other ransomware groups like REvil, LockBit, and Hive, publishing stolen data exfiltrated throughout the attack in a deep web site if the ransom is not paid by the victim. Currently, there are two companies listed on their deep web site, where the group has published the victim’s allegedly stolen data.

With our recent 7.16 Elastic Security product release, we improved our existing Linux malware feature by adding memory protection. In this blog, brought to you by Elastic’s Engineering Security Team, we lean into this recent advancement to show how we are protecting the world’s data from attack.

Nowadays, malware used to have several stages before it fully compromised the targeted host or machine. The very well-known initial stager is the “phishing email” that contains a malicious macro code or malicious URL link that will download either the actual loader or the next stager to download the actual payload.

Ransomware has quickly become one of the most prevalent cyber threats facing organizations today. Unfortunately, the cybercriminal community has latched onto this attack method because infections can quickly cause devastating damage to the victim, and strikes are incredibly easy to launch at scale. The best way to ensure that your organization does not fall victim to a ransomware attack is to understand what happens when an attacker injects this type of malware into a system.

In the first half of 2021, average ransomware demands surged by 518%, while payments climbed by 82%. There has been a growing number of attacks in healthcare, with 560 healthcare facilities hit by ransomware last year in the U.S. alone. As new attacks generate headlines each week, we get real-world use cases for how ransomware proliferates in diverse ways, including social engineering attacks and exploitation of vulnerabilities.

Co-authored by Zhi Xu and Matt Allen We are proud to share that Netskope Threat Protection has received the 2021 On-Demand Malware Detection certification from prestigious SE Labs for a third consecutive year. Specifically, Netskope performed 100% threat detection on both known malware samples and unknown malware samples during tests conducted in December 2021, with a 0% false-positive rate.

The Elastic Security team identified a noteworthy cluster of malicious activity after reviewing our threat prevention telemetry. A valid code signing certificate is used to sign malware to help the attackers remain under the radar of the security community. We also discovered a novel malware loader used in the campaign, which we’ve named BLISTER. The majority of the malware samples observed have very low, or no, detections in VirusTotal.

The success of a modern business is heavily reliant on the network of which its computers and employees operate. With many risks looming online, a secured operating system and network are critical for most businesses to perform to their full ability. One of the most prolific threats to modern business is ransomware.

Ransomware is on the rise and shows no signs of slowing. In the past year alone, major ransomware attacks have hit just about every major industry, including health care, physical infrastructure, digital infrastructure, and food. It’s no longer a matter of if, but when an organization will be attacked, which is why most companies now spend considerable resources to defend against ransomware attacks.