While the Christmas Holiday is one of the most anticipated events of the season, it is not only about sweet biscuits, cheerful jollies or presents. In fact, vicious cyber criminals take this joyous time as an opportunity for more scams and deception of the innocent people. This time, we are discussing malware campaigns that are targeting individuals who definitely feeling the holiday the spirit.
Ransomware infections, GratefulPOS, Zeus Panda: make sure they do not ruin your holidays
CratefulPOS, ransomware infections and Zeus Panda are the three kings, or three threats, that you should definitely be aware of this time of the year. Their sudden comeback may be linked to the naive nature of the holiday season, but security researchers could deny this association. In our opinion, crooks might be hoping to “steal Christmas” just like Grinch did. However, we hope that the attempt will suffer the same fate as in the amusing movie.
GratefulPOS appears to be a malware strain and it was first discovered about a month ago. Its finders were researchers from Target Cyber Threat Intelligence & Detection. Together with researchers from different companies, the combined teamwork allowed the elaborate investigation of the infection. Malware is highly dangerous and attacks devices by compromising POS networks.
While GratefulPOS malware strain might not be feeling in the holiday mood, Zeus Panda certainly is. This banking Trojan is now pursuing a little bit different strategy for its distribution. It appears that it tries to trick people into becoming infected by displaying content which is related with exciting Christmas shopping rituals. Since everyone is feeling the craze for the upcoming event, it is clear that some individuals might be absent-minded and click on random online adverts.
Of course, there has been a slight increase in the ransomware developed than it had been a couple of weeks before. Please try to avoid potentially dangers online content by avoiding online content. Furthermore, do not respond to unknown email letters or download attachments from these messages.
Try to be careful: holiday-themed malspam might be distributed
It is also possible that hackers are going to release a series of holiday-themed malspam. If you are introduced with a coupon for a very expensive utility or an item, please make sure that this offer is coming from a reliable source. If not, then you are probably going to get scammed (if you download the attachment or enter the recommended URL). We hope that this holiday season won’t be ruined by some sort of malware threat. No one would like to spend their Christmas eve trying to recover encrypted files.
Source: community.rsa.com.
