The most common route for malware infections remains social engineering in its various forms: phishing, vishing, etc. Such approaches take advantage of users’ deliberately cultivated willingness to trust communications they receive and to follow the instructions and links such malicious communications carry.

CrossLock is a ransomware group that emerged in April 2023, targeting a large digital certifier company in Brazil. This ransomware was written in Go, which has also been adopted by other ransomware groups, including Hive, due to the cross-platform capabilities offered by the language. CrossLock operates in the double-extortion scheme, by threatening to leak stolen data on a website hosted on the deep web if the ransom isn’t paid by the victim.

In recent years, especially with hybrid work, almost everyone uses an iOS or Android device for work. In fact, in a recent survey, Lookout found that 92% of remote workers use their personal laptops or smartphones for work tasks, with 46% of them having saved files onto their devices. Now that employees expect to be productive from anywhere, organizations across all industries have become more relaxed with allowing the use of personal devices with bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs.

Researchers at the Lookout Threat Lab have discovered a new Android surveillance tool which we attribute with moderate confidence to the Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran (FARAJA). Named BouldSpy for the “BoulderApplication” class which configures the tool’s command and control (C2), we have been tracking the spyware since March 2020.

While ransomware continues to be a growing problem, double extortion ransomware in particular has been growing even more rapidly for organizations. Zscaler’s ThreatLabz has found a nearly 120% growth in double extortion ransomware. Double extortion attacks are devastating for organizations because they involve both the encryption of production data as well as the exfiltration of data.

The continued increase in cybercrime and breach attempts is not a new trend. For years now, the percentages have ticked upwards, and though cybersecurity has evolved, so have hackers seeking data, money, or infamy. While the initial attack vectors can be myriad — vulnerability exploits, misconfigurations, and credential theft to name a few — there are two tactics that stand tall above the rest: Ransomware and business email compromise (BEC).

Cyber attacks have become inevitable. According to research from Rubrik Zero Labs, 99% of IT and Security leaders were made aware of a cyberattack against their organization in 2022 with an average of 52 cyberattacks in this category. On top of that, 96% of IT and Security leaders are concerned they will be unable to maintain business continuity if they experience a cyberattack this year.

The JFrog Security Research team recently discovered a new malware payload in the PyPI repository, written in C#. This is uncommon since PyPI is primarily a repository for Python packages, and its codebase consists mostly of Python code, or natively compiled libraries used by Python programs. This finding raised our concerns about the potential for cross-language malware attacks.

South Korean cyber security organisation AhnLab has identified a breach in Microsoft SQL servers allowing deployment of Trigona ransomware. The attacks were threat actors using brute-force or dictionary attacks with obtained or guessed credentials to infiltrate externally accessible MS-SQL servers.

Cyber attacks can have a significant impact on point-of-sale (POS) services, which are used in retail environments to process transactions and collect payments from customers. POS systems typically involve the use of software, hardware, and network components, which can be vulnerable to a variety of cyber threats. A successful campaign targeting POS systems can result in credit card theft, transaction tampering, service disruption, brand damage and other severe organizational damage.