Moving Target Defense Blog

This week, cloud security gets an upgrade, large companies take responsibility for past mistakes, and threat actors come up with admittedly innovative ways to steal your data. Keep reading to learn more about this week’s top cybersecurity news. 

Introduction

Morphisec has recently monitored a highly sophisticated Crypter-as-a-Service that delivers numerous RAT families onto target machines.

The Crypter is most commonly delivered through phishing emails, which lead to the download of a visual basic file. In some cases, however, the attack chain starts with a large install file, such as an Adobe installer, which bundles the next stage. 

In this week’s edition of Security News in Review, we have stories about the U.S. Department of Homeland Security calling for mandatory disclosure of ransom payments, reports about the Babuk ransomware shutting down, and the revelation that a German police operation uninstalled Emotet. 

Cybersecurity is generally not the first thing on anyone’s mind when she or he is contemplating a major operation or a prolonged hospital stay. However, with the healthcare sector experiencing a constant rise in cyber attacks, the potential health impact of getting caught in the crossfire of a ransomware attack is now an increasingly frightening prospect for a significant number of healthcare consumers. 

In this week’s roundup, we discover new tactics of threat actors, ongoing cyberattacks, and (surprisingly) the new depths ransomware operators will travel in order to make their victims pay. Keep reading to learn about the latest developments in cybersecurity. 

For healthcare end-users, the impact of a cyberattack does not quickly fade. That's according to Morphisec's 2021 Consumer Healthcare Cybersecurity Threat Index. Our survey of over 1,000 US consumers found that within the past year, 20 percent of people were impacted by a cyberattack or data breach due to one of their healthcare providers. Compared to last year, when 21 percent of consumers said the same thing, our research shows that consumer awareness of healthcare cyberattacks is becoming alarmingly consistent. 

Cybercrime is on the rise across all levels of industry and government. Nowhere is that more apparent than in financial services, where firms like banks and credit unions experience attacks nearly 300x more often than other industries. This is even accounting for the increased risk of cyberattack that schools and healthcare organizations faced as targets of opportunity in the COVID-19 pandemic. 

This week on Security News in Review, we have coverage on the Facebook data leak, some movement from the federal government on closing a weak spot, and theories on whether IcedID could take on the role Emotet used to have. 

With attacks increasing by 140 percent between 2018 and 2019, the threat from ransomware was growing long before the COVID-19 pandemic began. Last year, however, thanks to a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances, the trend line for ransomware growth has gone vertical.

This weekend on security news in review, we have some new data on firmware attacks against global enterprises, insights into how much damage ransomware has caused the healthcare industry, and the Department of Homeland Security laying out a new cybersecurity strategy.