Pulling apart a mass market personalised malware debt invoice email

Details

Category: Cyber Security (Personal)

Every few days myself and everyone else on the planet (apart from Kim Jong-un land) receives phishing and malware emails. The good thing is they are often not personalised so we get used to them. Over the last few years’ malware and spam writers have clocked on to this fact.

Today I received a decent attempt at personalising a malware email which would likely convince most people though not me of course! Think about it if the below would convince the average business or IT user then spear phishing would have nearly a 100% chance of working if planned and executed correctly.


Good it maybe, there are some giveaways: from a "prize company" not a debt collection agency, subject is my name which could say debt for Graeme Batsman, GBP not £, Danish URL for a British debt, my post code could be on a new line and no full stop on the final line.

Read more …

Mossack Fonseca: how can you protect your digital crown jewels to an extremely high level?

Details

Category: Cyber Security (Personal)

Another hour, day, week, month and year, another leak but this is not just a leak containing details of the middle classes, it contained the details of the very rich and the upper echelons of society. Clearly a leak containing thousands or millions of PII (personally identifiable information) records of normal users is not acceptable but when holding records of: royals, presidents or prime ministers, politicians, celebrities, sports people and just general very wealthy individuals you would think the controls along with vetting would be far higher.

Imagine you are a London law firm dealing with large charities, universities, large businesses, wealthy individuals and the head of state, not the prime minister David Cameron but Queen Elizabeth II. The first set of clients need good protection, more than those of a standard British law firm and Queen Elizabeth II would need top notch protection, potentially up a government rating of Secret or even Top Secret. On top of this only a few senior partners would deal with the client and their background checks would be higher.

Read more …

If you cannot stop mass market ransomware, how will you withstand targeted malware attacks?

Details

Category: Cyber Security (Personal)

I am writing this on a train (to a conference) to pass time [1]* and as readers will know I love and hate malware. Ransomware is not new, it has been around for a decade or more but it is only in the last few years it has jumped into the spotlight. Starting off with fake antivirus suites which would claim to find an “infection”, offer “cleanup & protection”, hide your data in the background and charge a “license” fee, really a less obvious ransom demand. Funny it is it requests payment for protection but is the infection itself.

Move on to the last 2-3 years and Cryptolocker, Cryptowall and Cryptoguard have appeared along with various other names and variations. Typically you open a macro enabled Office document, download an executable or an exploit kit is run in the web browser. All of these download an executable which calls back home to generate a public/private key. Files of various extensions are encrypted locally along with USB devices and mapped drives. Thus if a low level user gets infected the external hard drive used for backup along with an entire file server can get encrypted.

Read more …