fake antivirus

Europol Warns of Internet of Things Risk

In a newly released report, Europol’s European Cybercrime Center (EC3) warns that the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) threatens to strengthen the hand of organized cyber criminal groups and make life much more difficult for police and governments that wish to pursue them. EC3’s latest Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment (iOCTA) says the “Internet of Everything” will greatly complicate the work of law enforcement creating “new opportunities for everything from cyber criminals to state actors to child abusers. The growing numbers of connected devices will greatly expand the “attack surface” available for cyber criminal activity, the EC3 warns. Cyber criminals may co-opt connected devices for use in common criminal activity (like denial of service attacks and spam campaigns). However, advancements like connected (“smart”) vehicles and infrastructure create openings for large scale and disruptive attacks. The report, which was published late last months, is a high level position paper and pulls data mostly […]

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D.C. Media Sites Found Hacked, Serving Fake AV

Websites operated by media outlets in the Washington D.C. area were the targets of widespread hacks this week, with web sites for two major radio stations among those found serving up malicious links that installed fake antivirus software on victims’ machines. Researchers at two security firms, Invincea and zScaler, identified compromises on the web sites of the two stations – WTOP, the D.C. areas largest FM station, and a sister site, FedNewsRadio, 1500 AM, which caters to government employees. The compromises were part of a string of almost identical attacks that redirected visitors to the web sites that push malicious software to victims’ machines. Only visitors using versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser were targeted with the attack, zScaler said. In a related post, researchers at Invincea said the attacks were similar to one they had investigated a breach at dvorak.org, a web site operated by technology blogger John […]

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