Malware

The hackers who injected malicious code into a version of computer maintenance app CCleaner last year may have been preparing to deliver third-stage malware to at least a select few of the 2.27 million computers that had downloaded the tainted utility program.

Microsoft said it discovered and stopped a large attack that attempted to use variants of the Dofoil, or Smoke Loader, trojan to spread a cryptocurrency miner.

A newly discovered and unusually sophisticated cryptojacking attack attempts to install cryptominers on both database and application servers by targeting misconfigured Redis servers, as well as Windows servers that are susceptible to the EternalBlue NSA exploit.

Researchers from IOActive have developed a proof-of-concept attack that turns ordinarily benevolent robots into malicious, money-grubbing automatons who demand bitcoin as a ransom payment.

After monitoring the malware distributor for the past six months, Talos said in a blog post that Gozi ISFB remains active in 2018 leveraging a wider distribution surface in attack recent campaigns.

The developers behind GandCrab have followed up on their promise and released version 2.0 of the ransomware, one that cannot be defeated by the free GandCrab 1.0 decryptor created by Bitdefender.