A new breed of vicious spam emails has been unleashed upon the world wide web. The campaign known as Scarab ransomware was first noticed by security experts on November 23, 2017 and reached 12.5 million email addresses in the first four hours of its release.
The SCARAB campaign utilizes the notorious Necurs botnet, one of the largest botnets in the digital world. It has been recognized for delivering some the most relentless banking Trojans ever reported since its emergence on the cybercrime scene in 2012.
Back in November, this botnet emitted spam emails that contained a classic “Scanned from Lexmark/Epson/HP/Canon” subject line to encourage victims to engage. Once the emails were opened, one click on their enclosed 7zip attachment was all it took for a computer to become completely compromised. Files were instantly encrypted with the extension “[suupport@protonmail.com].scarab” and a ransom note demanded a payment amount based on the length of time it took the victim to respond.
This scenario is unfortunately very common with millions of cyber attacks happening every moment. The global cost of cybercrime is expected to reach nearly $2 trillion before 2020. Unfortunately, no company is safe from an attack and many risk losing everything by making one wrong move (or one wrong click). According to ISACA’s “2015 Global Cybersecurity Status Report”, only 38% of companies are prepared to thwart cybercrime threats.
While ransomware is becoming more sophisticated daily, there many are ways to prevent it from taking over your business. Here are three ways to stay safe:
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