On January 13, college student Zachary Shames pleaded guilty to a federal district court in Virginia, US, for authoring Limitless Logger, the malicious keylogger that was used to steal thousands of sensitive user information like passwords and banking credentials. In November 2014, Trend Micro’s Forward Looking Threat Research team (FTR) published a research paper that covered Limitless and how it was used to steal information from thousands of victims. Prior to that, we passed on details that correctly identified Shames as the creator to the FBI. This blog details how we made that link, which we left out of the published research paper.
Read MoreBusiness Email Compromise (BEC) attacks have proven to be an effective tactic, with criminals stealing large amounts of money from various businesses. From 2013 to 2015, BEC-related damages were estimated at US$ 2.3 billion. Targeting C-level executives has proven to be a very successful tactic, with multiple companies falling victim to this kind of scam.
The operators behind these scams operate from countries where they believe they are safe from law enforcement. Bringing down these syndicates is no easy task: law enforcement agencies and researchers need to work across borders, with differing laws coming into play.
Read MoreA male and a female, both aged 22 and hailing from Colchester, Essex in the United Kingdom, were arrested on suspicion of operating two services featured in many malware business models – the popular counter antivirus (CAV) service Refud.me and the crypting service Cryptex Reborn. Both services have been taken down thanks to the partnership of Trend Micro’s…
Read MoreWe’ve recently seen multiple arrests and take downs of cybercriminals and their infrastructure. Here is another one to add up. Law Enforcement in England has arrested and prosecuted a cybercriminal called Jam3s in cooperation with Trend Micro. His real identity is James Bayliss. James ran some SpyEye command-and-control servers and also coded a SpyEye plugin…
Read MoreThe past few weeks have seen the ransomware CryptoLocker emerge as a significant threat for many users. Our monitoring of this threat has revealed details on how it spreads, specifically its connection to spam and ZeuS. However, it looks there is more to the emergence of this thread than initially discovered. We have identified one…
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