![]() ![]() Such attacks can also target individual users: In September 2017, some Apple users reported being remotely locked out of iCloud accounts while hackers demanded payment in bitcoin to unlock them. They ultimately leaked the company’s dirty laundry publicly, costing it more than $150 million. In that incident, unknown hackers held the studio’s internal data for ransom, including gossip about celebrities, internal drama and even Amazon purchases. This includes extortion attacks, like the high-profile hack of Sony in 2014. Ransomware attacks increased 2,500 percent in 2017, according to computer security company Carbon Black, and they are expected to continue to grow. “The model has changed from ‘How do I take this data and sell it on the market,’ to, ‘How do I take this data and hold it for ransom and hold it against it because you perceive it to be valuable?’” He was speaking on a panel hosted by the National Cybersecurity Alliance in New York. “There have been more attacks on data like emails and company gossip, that may not be seen as valuable but do have value to the company’s brand,” Calatayud said. While consumers have traditionally considered information like credit card and Social Security numbers to be the main targets for hackers, the rise of ransomware attacks means everything from seemingly inconsequential messages in chat programs like AOL Instant Messenger to snapshots on your Google Drive could be used against you. Hackers are going after compromising photos, chats and emails and demanding funds to keep them under wraps, according to Paul Calatayud, chief security officer, Americas, at security company Palo Alto Networks. Ransomware attacks - malware that encrypts data until victims pay up - have been on the rise and a new form of crypto extortion is also increasing: blackmail attacks. Criticizing management? Complaining about that demanding customer? Jealous about a co-worker’s new desk? These are seemingly harmless comments that a malicious third party could exploit if chat logs ever leaked.” “It is difficult to police what is said in Slack discussions, especially at mid- to large-sized organizations where dozens or hundreds of private channels are commonplace. “Forget corporate espionage - workforce chat logs are often a treasure trove of embarrassment and blackmail,” he said. ![]() Slack asks users to report any potential vulnerabilities. George Avetisov, chief executive officer of security company HYPR, said employee gossip makes Slack and other office chat programs an appealing target for hackers. The bug was discovered by security company Detectify and fixed before any information was leaked. ![]() In 2017, Slack said it had detected and patched a vulnerability that would have given hackers full access to chat histories, shared files and other features, Wired reported. Slack Technologies, the popular workplace messaging service, is moving forward with plans to go public after garnering a $7.1 billion valuation in August.īut there’s one issue that experts say will be a major hurdle for the company, its users and potential investors: security. This first payload scanned for the presence of certain antivirus programs before deciding whether to download and install a new backdoor program that Trend Micro has dubbed SLUB (for Slack and GitHub, which the attackers use as a repository).Be careful what you chat about with your co-workers - it could be costly. In cases where the exploit ran successfully, it triggered a multi-stage infection chain that first involved downloading and executing a malicious DLL file via PowerShell. However, the flaw was patched by Microsoft in May 2018, so having an up-to-date operating system would have prevented the attack. That vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2018-8174 and can be exploited through Internet Explorer. It’s not clear if victims were directed to the website via an email campaign or if attackers just waited for regular visitors, but the site was modified to host an exploit for a remote code execution vulnerability in the Windows VBScript engine. The technique of infecting websites that are of interest to a particular group of individuals or organizations is known as a “watering hole” attack. ![]() The backdoor was detected by security firm Trend Micro in a targeted attack launched from the compromised website of an organization called the Korean American National Coordinating Council that posts articles related to North and South Korean politics. While abusing legitimate services for malware command-and-control purposes is not a new development, this is the first time researchers have seen Slack, a popular enterprise collaboration tool, being used in this way. A group of hackers is using a previously undocumented backdoor program designed to interact with attackers over Slack. ![]()
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