The Petya Virus: How It All Went
27 June 2017 could be called Ukrainian history’s “black cyber Tuesday”. On that day, the NotPetya (Petya.A, ExPetr) attack began, affecting almost all sectors in the country: communications, energy, banking, media, and transportation. The Petya ransomware is far from the first test of the strength of Ukraine’s infrastructure. Such attacks have been attempted at least three times. The first two attacks...
Malvertising: Can It Be Stopped?
Yet another threat to users’ safety is becoming increasingly prevalent — malicious advertising or malvertising. Malicious advertising itself isn’t new, but recently, its use has become alarmingly widespread: last year, there have been almost twice as many instances of malicious advertisements than there were in 2015. Of the 80 million sites analyzed by researchers in 2015, 19,000 pages were found to be infected; in 2016,...
What is Online Skimming and How to Avoid It
Card skimming, implemented through card reading slips on ATM machines, is familiar to many. Nowadays this type of credit card fraud is also appearing on the web. Of course, it is improved and adapted according to its new ‘habitat’. But the crux of the matter remains the same: the theft of credit card information for its use in criminal undertakings. On the web, harmful Javascript code effectively replaces the skimmers on the...
How to Make a Profit out of Voice Call Based 2FA
You thought all hackers are bad? It’s not so simple: in IT circles there has long been a distinction between “black hat” and “white hat” code crackers. The first are easily understood: they are using their skills to deprive users and companies of money, and also prey on other valuable information for the purposes of identity theft. But there are those who engage in hacking, not for gain, but with humanitarian and scientific motives....
The Risks and Perils of Pokemon GO
This summer it seems the world has gone crazy over Pokemon. The characters who first gained fame in the animated series from the early 2000s have returned triumphantly and are again earning millions – now in the form of the game Pokemon GO. Its popularity is such that even serious IT-themed internet publications are writing articles about the rules of the game and advice about how to download and install it in countries...
Which messaging apps are trustworthy?
Last time we analyzed the question of what makes for secure messaging apps. Now we’ll take a look at the level of security provided by several of today’s popular message exchange programs. Facebook Messenger and Google Hangouts These apps are built into their respective social networks. For this reason alone, they’re certainly not in the running to win “most secure messaging apps of 2016”. The lion’s share of these companies’ profits...