Malware

The news talk about a cyber attack when reporting about Petna and WannaCry. This implies purposeful activities aiming at causing damage. On the other hand, cyber-criminals who are in the blackmailing business with ransomware are mainly interested in making easy money. They failed both with WannaCry…

The Petya ransomware, about which the first reports were published in the G DATA blog, occasionally rears its head with some new features (last time as "GoldenEye"). This time is no different - except that this is the first time that Petya uses an exploit from the arsenal of an intelligence agency.…

WannaCry's encryptor was deactivated by a kill switch. But the worm component is still active. It crawls the internet for vulnerable systems and captures them where possible. It has recently been hitting US hospitals. In addition, the case WannaCry shows that it could have been worse. Time to…

An outbreak of the latest version of "WannaCry" has been claiming victims in several countries. The speed and ferocity of the outbreak has taken many by surprise. Researchers are as yet puzzled as to the origin of the outbreak which hit 11 countries within just three hours. So far Spain and Russia…

After the big infection wave that hit thousands of computers all over the world on Friday, May 12, we are taking a look at some things that WannaCry has taught us and some of the aspects that have surprised many.

People and media are mostly looking at ransomware as a fairly recent problem. That seems to be logical if you see the steep rise of ransomware the past three years. In fact, the problem is much older than most of us think. For this we need to go back in time to the beginning of December 1989.

The Android operating system clearly dominates the mobile market, with a share of around 72 percent. In Germany alone, around 67 percent of smartphone owners use a device with an Android operating system (source: Statcounter). G DATA security experts discovered over 750,000 new Android malware apps…

We've done some counting for 2016 and the first quarter of 2017. Here is the first part of our malware statistics for the past and the current year.

A company offering protection against Zero-day exploits, exposes a vulnerability in Windows, which allegedly allows attackers to turn AV-products into malware. A lot of uncertainty has been created. On closer inspection, there is no reason to panic.

Despite a tendency of criminals to abandon banking malware in favor of ransomware, there is no reason to let down your guard. The ZeuS banking malware has been reported about a number of times already. It used to be one of the most notorious and prolific pieces of malware around. Lately, researchers…