That's Hitting World Right Now Uses NSA Windows Exploit - WannaCry Ransomware

Earlier today, a massive ransomware campaign hit computer systems of hundreds of private companies and public organizations across the globe – which is believed to be the most massive ransomware delivery campaign to date.

The Ransomware in question has been identified as a variant of ransomware known as WannaCry (also known as 'Wana Decrypt0r,' 'WannaCryptor' or 'WCRY').

Like other nasty ransomware variants, WannaCry also blocks access to a computer or its files and demands money to unlock it.

Once infected with the WannaCry ransomware, victims are asked to pay up to $300 in order to remove the infection from their PCs; otherwise, their PCs render unusable, and their files remain locked.

In separate news, researchers have also discovered a massive malicious email campaign that's spreading the Jaff ransomware at the rate of 5 million emails per hour and hitting computers across the globe.

Ransomware Using NSA's Exploit to Spread Rapidly

What's interesting about this ransomware is that WannaCry attackers are leveraging a Windows exploit harvested from the NSA called EternalBlue, which was dumped by the Shadow Brokers hacking group over a month ago.

Microsoft released a patch for the vulnerability in March (MS17-010), but many users and organizations who did not patch their systems are open to attacks.

The exploit has the capability to penetrate into machines running unpatched version of Windows XP through 2008 R2 by exploiting flaws in Microsoft Windows SMB Server. This is why WannaCry campaign is spreading at an astonishing pace.

Once a single computer in your organization is hit by the WannaCry ransomware, the worm looks for other vulnerable computers and infects them as well.

Infections from All Around the World

In just a few hours, the ransomware targeted over 45,000 computers in 74 countries, including United States, Russia, Germany, Turkey, Italy, Philippines and Vietnam, and that the number was still growing, according to Kaspersky Labs.

According to a report, the ransomware attack has shut down work at 16 hospitals across the UK after doctors got blocked from accessing patient files. Another report says, 85% of computers at the Spanish telecom firm, Telefonica, has get infected with this malware.

Another independent security researcher, MalwareTech, reported that a large number of U.S. organizations (at least 1,600) have been hit by WannaCry, compared to 11,200 in Russia and 6,500 in China.

Screenshots of the WannaCry ransomware with different languages, including English, Spanish, Italian, were also shared online by various users and experts on Twitter.

Bitcoin wallets seemingly associated with WannaCry were reportedly started filling up with cash.

The Spanish computer emergency response organization (CCN-CERT) has even issued an alert that warns users of the "massive attack of ransomware" from WannaCry, saying (translated version):

"The ransomware, a version of WannaCry, infects the machine by encrypting all its files and, using a remote command execution vulnerability through SMB, is distributed to other Windows machines on the same network."

It is unclear how the WannaCry ransomware is infecting systems, but obvious attack vector can be phishing emails or victims visiting a website containing malware.

"Power firm Iberdrola and utility provider Gas Natural were also reported to have suffered from the outbreak.," according to BBC.

How to Protect Yourself from WannaCry

First of all, if you haven't patched your Windows machines and servers against EternalBlue exploit (MS17-010), do it right now.

To safeguard against such ransomware infection, you should always be suspicious of uninvited documents sent an email and should never click on links inside those documents unless verifying the source.

To always have a tight grip on all your important files and documents, keep a good backup routine in place that makes their copies to an external storage device that is not always connected to your PC.

Moreover, make sure that you run an active anti-virus security suite of tools on your system, and most importantly, always browse the Internet safely.


Source: The Hacker News

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20 Sites To Keep Your Identity Hidden - Send Anonymous Emails

The first question to answer here is why go for anonymous email when there are plenty of premium featured and free email services such as Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo! Mail available? Well, privacy and anonymity is a digital right — our digital right. These email services are ‘free’ because of the advertisements.

Although deemed necessary evils, ads are mostly tailored for the visitor or service user, and to do that, service providers need your data to show you advertisements targeted to you and your user group. These are ads that you are most likely to click and/or follow.

Moreover, the disclosure of the motives of secret agencies and their top-secret internet-censoring programs (such as PRISM) has raised concerns among digital privacy advocates. If you want to keep your emails away from prying eyes, this article will introduce to you the many options for sending and receiving anonymous emails.

Anonymous email forms the basic foundation of anonymity over the web. Internet is no secure storage, but you have a say in who has access to your data and who doesn’t. If that is no, anonymous emails is one way to ensure your emails are not trackable online.

Note: Anonymity is not possible on the web without hiding your IP address, so you must use Tor, or any other proxy or VPN service before using the services below to remain anonymous on the Internet.
Encrypted / Anonymous Email Service
Here are some of the anonymous email services that lets you send and receive emails anonymously online. Some of them have encryption features, others are disposable or will self-destruct after a specified period of time. Here are 5.

Anonymous Email – TorGuard – This service provides you an anonymous inbox with lots of privacy and cryptographic features. You get 10MB storage, and end-to-end security using SSL encryption for connection and G/PGP encryption for securing the messages.

Tor Mail – Tor Mail is a Tor Hidden service that provides truly anonymous email service. It runs on the hidden service network of The Tor Project so you must use Tor to access and use it. Tor Mail is developed for super anonymity. As it’s built over the Tor network, it cannot be traced easily.

GuerrilaMail – GuerrillaMail offers you a disposable, self-destructible, temporary email address to send and receive emails anonymously on the internet. Mail is deleted after an hour. You only need to choose an email address; no personal data is required.

Secure Mail – This service encrypts your mail using 4096-bit key, which makes it unreadable by anyone except you. It doesn’t ask for your personal information or IP address to sign up. They also have a zero-tolerance policy against spam.

The Anonymous Email – Create an account to send and receive emails by signing up with your real email. None of your other personal info is necessary.

Send Emails Without Registration

Sometimes you just need to send emails without prior registration. In fact you don’t even need to receive any feedback. If this is you, here are 8 services that is essentially a form where you put in details of the email you want to send. Note that there is no way for the receiver to get back to you.

AnonymousEmail.me – Here you will find only a simple form to fill in the receiver’s address, subject and the email content (you can also attach a file to the email if necessary). To get a reply, opt to provide a reply-to email address, otherwise this is a one-way ticket to sending an anonymous email.

5ymail – Send and receive beautifully formatted messages using its rich-text editor without revealing your true self. You will have to give up a real email to receive your 5ymail inbox credentals. There is also a paid version for more features.

CyberAtlantis – It offers a simple interface to provide the receiver’s email address, subject, and the message. It strips off the IP address from your mail, and thus you can’t be traced easily. It asks for none of your personal information.

W3 Anonymous Remailer – Send anonymous emails to anyone. You only need to enter the receiver’s email address, subject and the message for the email.

Send Anonymous Email – This one operates with a plain interface to enter the sender and receiver’s address, subject and message. No other details are required to send emails with this. The IP addresses are logged in.

Send Email Message – You only need to enter the receiver’s email address, subject, and the message. Over 100,000 anonymous emails are sent every day for free.

AnonEmail – You get to send anonymous emails without revealing any information about your identity.

Receive Emails

If you just need a disposable email to confirm links and don’t want to deal with the newsletter or other deals they might send you in the future, try these 7 email services. Accounts are created automatically when a mail is received for that address.

Anonymous Email – Hide My Ass! – Hide My Ass! offers a free anonymous email account, which can be used to receive (but not send) emails. You can opt for new email received notifications to be sent to your real email or even set your inbox to “self-destruct” with an expiration date. 

myTrashMail – Get open and public email accounts created upon receiving mail or sign up for a private and password-protected one to receive mail. The accounts are temporary and will be deleted automatically after some time.

NotSharingMy.Info – NotSharingMy.Info provides you with a permanent anonymous email address to receive emails without providing any traceable and identifiable information. It only requires your real email address for signing up. All emails to the anonymous email address is forwarded to your real email address.

Mailnesia – Aside from inboxes generated automatically upon receipt of an email, Mailnesia even features an automatic confirmation-links click system which is useful if you make lots of sign-ups on web services.

Mailinator – Here is one that lets you create email inboxes quickly and even automatically. You can only receive emails with it.

Spambog – Spambog offers you a disposable (7-day purge), temporary, anonymous email inbox on the Web. You can receive, reply and forward emails but not send an original one. An email alias can be protected with a password.

TempInbox – Here’s another temporary, disposable, auto-automated email inbox service. Give any email alias to anyone and check that inbox on the website for your incoming mail.

OffSec 2017

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