Month: September 2019

This is brilliant and scary at the same time. I’m always impressed by what Samy can think of. This particular hack makes your computer think a plugged-in Raspberry Pi is an Ethernet device and takes over all your Internet traffic, at the same time poisoning your browser with hijacked copies of Javascripts. This works even on a machine with screen locked.

It is reminiscent of the days of CD-ROM attacks, when your computer will auto-run the contents of a CD-ROM, even when the account is locked.

Source: Samy Kamkar: PoisonTap – exploiting locked computers over USB

This is the right strategy against ransomware. Backup, backup and backup. At the first sign of any ransomware attack it is important to isolate affected machines immediately and contact a cybersecurity professional to mitigate and prevent further infection.

The US city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, rejected a ransom demand of $5.3 million and came back with a counter-offer of $400,000, while restoring encrypted data from backup.

Source: US City Rejects $5.3 Million Ransom Demand and Restores Encrypted Files from Backup (SecAlerts)

When what you can remotely exploit, you can remotely remove.

In a rare feat, French police have hijacked and neutralized a massive cryptocurrency mining botnet controlling close to a million infected computers. The notorious Retadup malware infects computers and starts mining cryptocurrency by sapping power from a computer’s processor. Although the malware was used to generate money, the malware operators easily could have run other […]

Source: Police hijack a botnet and remotely kill 850,000 malware infections – TechCrunch