Pitney Bowes, a global package delivery giant, has been hit by a second ransomware attack in less than seven months, according to ZDNet. Those responsible for the attack have released screenshots portraying directory listings from inside the company’s network. What is Maze ransomware and what makes it so special?

The ability of an actor to remain undiscovered or obfuscating its doings when driving a malicious campaign usually affects the gains of such campaigns. These gains can be measured in different items such as time to allow completion of operations (exfiltration, movement of compromised data), ability to remain operative before take down notices are issued, or ability to obtain gains based on for-profit driven crimeware (DDoS for hire, Crypto mining).

You may be surprised to learn that a particular malware is responsible for data theft in over 20% of financial institutions and other verticals in 2019. Watering hole attacks involve a web server that hosts files or applications where the website or files on the site become weaponized with malware. While recent news cycles have shined a spotlight on ransomware and crimeware, malware is not a new concept.

Whilst researching recent client-side attacks our security team observed a highly-sophisticated self-cleaning and self-destructing skimmer on the popular hardware tool website Greenworks. The hack was first spotted by RapidSpike’s Client-Side Security Scanner on June 8th, and at the time of writing, the hack is still live on www.greenworkstools.com/.

Malware attacks are evolving and once common tactics are becoming a thing of the past. Attack strategies, like using a third-party hacking program or injecting viruses from external sources, are almost obsolete as they leave a distinct footprint. Most antimalware tools can now detect the presence of a foreign program or device and immediately block them.

In government, mobile devices are both embraced and resisted. The mobility and ease of use afforded by smartphones and tablets helps boost worker productivity even as they open doors for hackers. According to research by Wandera, in 2018 there were 455,121 mobile phishing attacks, 1.9 million Wi-Fi incidents, and 32,846 malware attacks.

A new kind of spam is being observed in the field that uses the browser notification feature to trick users into subscribing to sites that will in turn bombard users with notifications usually related to click or add profit schemes. Subscription notification request seen below: Browser notification subscription requests are a legitimate feature that allows visitors of a site to be notified when there is new content available. It saves users the need to constantly refresh or keep open browser tabs.

The cybercrime threatscape is constantly changing as hackers adapt and repurpose the use of many different types of tools and attack vectors, and a recent report by Kaspersky Lab indicates that the use of remote administration tools (RATs) has increased during 2018. RATs are commonly developed as legitimate software suites with bundled functionalities to support system administrators and other power users.