There’s a new spam campaign targeting Scandinavians spreading insidious ransomware – with a 0% detection rate.
Heimdal Security has identified the campaign as the fourth major ransomware campaign since early September, including one that compromised 142 million legitimate websites. It begins by sending emails with an attached Word document to arbitrary recipients. The document contains macros that, when triggered, will download and execute the malicious ransomware, encrypting and locking all files on the computer.
To decrypt the files and regain access to the data, the victim must first contact two different Gmail accounts and pay the ransom.
It’s pretty simple, except for one thing: This spam campaign has managed to completely evade detection by a total of 57 anti-malware tools listed on VirusTotal.
So, how can one protect themselves? Users should be extra cautious when it comes to opening emails from unknown senders, but they should also make sure that everything on their systems is fully up to date.
“Outdated browsers are some of the most commonly used attack vectors that cybercriminals use in their campaigns,” said Andra Zaharia, security expert at Heimdal Security, in a blog post. “So, things get pretty dangerous when millions of users choose or are forced by their employers to use outdated versions of IE, Firefox , or Chrome.”
Finally, outdated operating systems are also a huge threat, especially when 3.6% of Internet users worldwide still have Windows XP installed, which Microsoft stopped supporting months ago. And, social engineering is still successful.
