Money theft is one of the most important risks for any organization, regardless of its scope of activity. According to our data, 42% of cyberattacks on companies are committed to obtain direct financial benefits. You can detect an attack at various stages—from network penetration to the moment when attackers start withdrawing money. In this article, we will show how to detect an attack at each of its stages and minimize the risk, as well as analyze two common scenarios of such attacks: money theft manually using remote control programs and using special malware—a banking trojan.
Today, Microsoft and partners across 35 countries took coordinated legal and technical steps to disrupt one of the world’s most prolific botnets, called Necurs, which has infected more than nine million computers globally. This disruption is the result of eight years of tracking and planning and will help ensure the criminals behind this network are no longer able to use key elements of its infrastructure to execute cyberattacks.
A botnet is a network of computers that a cybercriminal has infected with malicious software, or malware. Once infected, criminals can control those computers remotely and use them to commit crimes. Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, BitSight and others in the security community first observed the Necurs botnet in 2012 and have seen it distribute several forms of malware, including the GameOver Zeus banking trojan.
Imagine someone withdrew money from a company's account at night. The next morning panic breaks out, leading to yet more problems. The IT department can reinstall a compromised system from scratch or restore it from backup. Reinstalling from scratch will wipe out all traces left by the attackers, and external investigators will have to search for clues in other systems. Restoring from backup carries the risk of accidentally reinstating a compromised image. In this paper, we will describe common mistakes that experts make when responding to security incidents.
Following last year's cyberattacks, even previously laid-back people are now concerned about cybersecurity. That's why we decided to make the twelfth Positive Hack Days information security forum even more open and large-scale: it will be held at Gorky Park in Moscow on May 19 and 20, 2023. We've already started preparing for the event and are accepting applications from speakers. You can submit a talk topic until March 25.
