Thursday 7 December 2017, Safety Guide

Malicious apps in the Google Play store

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Cyber security specialists from the ESET company have detected eight dangerous applications available in the Google Play store. These includes: MEX Tools, Clear Android, Cleaner for Android, World News, WORLD NEWS, World News PRO.

The given applications do not arouse any suspicions in Google Play store users. However, in reality the apps are a cleverly designed multi-stage downloaders.

After being downloaded and installed, the apps do not request any suspicious permissions and even mimic the activity the user expects them to exhibit.

However, during the initial installation process, an additional Trojan-like software is also installed, without the user’s knowledge. The newly acquired malware can secretly connect with the cyberattac

Monday 4 December 2017, Safety Guide

A large Uber costumers data breach

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The cab-hailing app Uber has recently revealed that in October 2016 the unknown group of hackers has gained accessed the accounts of Uber clients.

The whole matter was kept secret by a Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, who had paid 100,000 USD of ransom to the cybercriminals. In his statement, Khosrowshahi said the company had “obtained assurances that the downloaded data had been destroyed” and improved its security, but that the company’s “failure to notify affected individuals or regulators”.

The Uber company has admitted that the hackers have stolen the personal information from over 57 million Uber users around the world, including names and driver's license numbers of around 600,000 drivers in the U.S., rider names, email addresses a

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The online store Morele.net warns its customers against false messages. Cybercriminals used the so-called spoofing, where domain appearing in the address of the sender is identical to the store's domain – noname@morele.net.

The customers of the store have receive an e-mail messages (titled as "Invoice for Order No. 4389844") containing a malicious attachment.

Morele.net assures that the messages were not sent from the store's servers, and that the police was already informed about the situation. The store is to take all legal steps to identify cybercriminals and to prevent the occurrence of similar actions in the further. Morele.net emphasizes that the problem may concern in particular company servers that do not include the protoc

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Cybercriminals have decided to once again attack the users of the popular social networking site - Facebook. The attack is intended to take over the user's account along with the website maintained on the portal.

A phishing attack involves sending a message that resembles that of a Facebook administrator. The message also has the official logo of the portal. After opening the message, The user is redirected to the post, where he or she  learns that his or hers site will be removed from the social networking, as a result of violations reported issued by the another Facebook user.

As always, the user can evade the accusation by clicking on the link to the page where he or she must enter the login information for the portal. By doing so

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The Nebezpiecznik portal warns of fake e-mail messages sent by the cyber criminals, in which they impersonate DotPay company.

The messages contain an attachment file. Opening it carries large consequences – infection of the device and loss of the 350 PLN.
You can read the e-mail content here.

Opening the attachment will initialize the download of the malicious file, denoted as binstxt.exe. The file  acts as a classical ransomwere and is capable of encrypting all the data stored on the disk. Once the encryption process is over, the victims receive a message inform

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A new dangerous malware targeting Android devices is on the loose. So far the virus, known as LokiBot, has collected over 1.5 million USD from its their victims.

A new threat was discovered by the security experts from the Kaspersky Lab. LokiBot behaves as a typical banking trojan, generating and distributing fake "bank" notifications. It can also steal the victim’s contacts. It has a specific command to spam all contacts with SMS messages as a means to spread the infection. Furthermore, the malware has an unique option, which allows it to lock the infected devise and prevent the user from accessing it.

Another very interesting feature of LokiBot is its ransomware capabilities. If threaten, the malware can act as a classic ransomwa

Thursday 16 November 2017, Safety Guide

A fake update of WhatsApp!

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A fake version of WhatsApp, denoted as Update WhatsApp Messenger, was recently found on Google Play Store.
The fake app was clearly designed to mimic the popular messaging app and to trick the users into downloading it thinking that they were downloading an actual WhatsApp’s update.

The fake application differentiates itself by adding unicode to the end of its developer name. Instead of a space, unicode added at the end makes it look like a space while having a different value, making it hard to detect.

According to the Hackers News portal, the fake app contained unwonted ads, and is also known to stealthily download an additional file to Android phones called Whatsapp.apk. The purpose of this file is yet unknown, but it is safe to

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Beware of fake SMS messages strikingly similar to those sent by the mobile operators.
The whole matter was revealed by the Nebezpiecznik.pl portal, one of whose readers has recently received such an SMS.

The fake message reads: "I'm back! The number given as the sender of the SMS had finished talking. You can call back. The message is free, sent by the Operator".

Persons who have received such an SMS can reflexively dial the number, however the cost of such a call can be quite high.

To avoid any problems, the phone users should pay attention to the beginning of the number. If the number starts with +53 then it is almost certain that the sent message is false. Any attempt to call back to the given number ca

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The security firm ESET noted that Eltima Software company has unknowingly provided an application infected with the OSX trojan.

The Eltima was the victim of a cyber attack. Those who have installed the Elmedia Player software had also downloaded a malicious trojan Proton, which was in the application installation files. The trojan can take control of the victim's device, steal information from browsers like passwords and logins, or the contents of Bitcoin wallet.

After the ESET expert response, malicious software was removed from the application and Eltima servers. At risk were the owners of macOS devices.

If anyone has downloaded and installed Elmedia Player or Folx by October 19th, he or she ought to scan the system with u

Wednesday 1 November 2017, Safety Guide

Bad Rabbit – a new dangerous ransomware

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Bad Rabbit – a new variant of a famous Petya ransomware – was recently spreading across Russia, Ukraine, Germany and Japan servers and computer systems. The attack began on October 24, however, new victims are still being identified.

According to security experts from the ESET company, the highest infection vector for Bad Rabbit was detected in Russia (over 65% of indentified cases), Ukraine (12%), Germany (2.4%), and in Japan (3.8%). ESET emphasizes that all attacks on individuals (over 200 cases) were carried out simultaneously.

Security experts also report that the ransomware used in the attacks (denoted as Win32/Diskcoder.D) was distributed through a fake Adobe Flash update, offered up from compromised websites.

Afte

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Security experts from the ESET company warned against another dangerous infection data encryption data scrambling virus, known as DoubleLocker.

According to the researches the virus is distributed mostly as a fake Adobe Flash Player through compromised websites and is especially dangerous for the Android smartphone users.

After installation DoubleLocker changes the device’s PIN, preventing victims from accessing their devices, and also encrypts the data using AES algorithm. Shortly after the victim is informed that in order to retain the data, he or she must pay a ransom (of approximately 300 PLN) via bitcoin payment system. However, ESET experts advise against paying any money, as there is no guarantee of obtaining a decryption key.

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The T-Mobile telecommunication operator has notified the police of detecting atypical movements in the security system made by the employees of one of the T-Mobile's business partners.

The suspects are the employees of the call center and marketing company who possessed the authorized access to the T-Mobile’s customers personal data.

The stolen information was transferred to the competition. As was determined by the police, the disloyal employees received a steady pay for stealing the T-Mobile’s customers data. Police seized access to the servers on which the stolen data was stored.


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The security experts from SensePost warn about a newly discovered form of the cyberattack, that takes advantage of one of the Microsoft Office feature, called Microsoft Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE). Surprisingly, this type of attack existed since the early 1990s, when DDE was introduced.

DDE was designed to allows the Office application to load data from other each other. Unfortunately, it can be also used by the hackers to create malicious Word files with DDE fields that instead of opening another Office app, open a command prompt and run malicious code.

This is just another case where malware authors have found a creative way of abusing a legitimate feature, like with OLE and macros.

Before the Microsoft Office developer re

Saturday 14 October 2017, Safety Guide

A fake version of Adblock Plus extension

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Unfortunately, we may have a bad news for all the Google Chrome users, who have recently installed the AdBlock Plus expansion.

According to the twitter user describing as @SwiftOnSecurity, up until 10th of October, a fake AdBlock Plus clone was listed in Google Chrome’s official Web Store. @SwiftOnSecurity tweeted that: “Google allows 37,000 Chrome users to be tricked with a fake extension by a fraudulent developer who clones popular name and spams keywords.”

It is unclear if the fake plug-in was designed to drop malware or other malicious payloads. However, just to be on the safe side, it is advised to check its developer’s credentials (by selecting: Chrome > More Tools > Extensions) or even better, to reinstall the web

Wednesday 11 October 2017, Safety Guide

Disqus users’ data leakage exposed

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Disqus – a worldwide blog comment hosting service for web sites and on-line communities, has admitted that it was hacked 5 years ago in July 2012.

The stolen data included e-mail addresses, usernames, sign-up dates, and last login dates in plain text for over 17.5 million users. The hackers also got their hands on passwords for about 71% of the affected users, which were salted and hashed using the weak SHA-1 algorithm.

The theft was discovered this week after the database was sent to Troy Hunt, who runs data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned, who then informed Disqus of the breach. The company claims that although there was no evidence of unauthorized logins, affected users will be e-mailed about the breach, and their previous p