Do you remember when viruses used to be funny and not such a big deal? Maybe a cat would constantly pop up on your desktop or you’d get spammed with hundreds of ads for male enhancement pills? Well, the early 2000s are over (yes, it’s depressing) and malware has advanced far beyond its somewhat quirky origins. Today, viruses have become extremely sophisticated and it’s difficult to know for sure if your files have been infected or not. So what is malware exactly?

Elastic Security discovered PHOREAL malware, which is targeting Southeast Asia financial organizations, particularly those in the Vietnamese financial sector. Given the continuous pace of malware development, it's no surprise that adversarial groups will leverage successful campaigns as the basis of developing future attacks, and the recently discovered backdoor campaign targeting Vietnamese financial services is no exception.

Windows 11 is coming. Ever since its release in October 2021, users have been checking for updates, eagerly waiting to upgrade. Microsoft’s requirements are stricter than usual, and thus the feature rollout is coming in episodes. Existing Windows 10 users can download it for free. For the rest, there are a few compatibility checks before upgrading.

The US Senate has passed legislation designed to improve the cybersecurity of the Federal Government. The legislation, which consists of three bills, was unanimously passed by the Senate on Tuesday evening, and would – amongst other things – require organisations working in critical industry sectors to alert the US Government about hacks and ransomware attacks.

Beyond the disturbing images of the invasion of Ukraine that began February 24 are the invisible cyberattacks that preceded it and continue to be waged on Ukraine by Russian state-sponsored and other threat actors, which also threaten the West. Vedere Labs, Forescout’s threat intelligence and research team, is closely monitoring the evolution of cyber activities connected to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

On Feb. 23, 2022, destructive attacks were conducted against Ukrainian entities. Industry reporting has claimed the Go-based ransomware dubbed PartyTicket (or HermeticRansom) was identified at several organizations affected by the attack,1 among other families including a sophisticated wiper CrowdStrike Intelligence tracks as DriveSlayer (HermeticWiper).