Kaspersky Says 2020 Most Productive Year For Ransomware 2.0 In Asia Pacific

It’s no surprise that you’ve been hearing about a lot more ransomware attacks lately. Cybersecurity firm Kaspersky confirmed a significant increase in Ransomware 2.0 attacks in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region last year.

Ransomware 2.0 refers to the hacker shift from locking data to stealing data and holding it for ransom. “2020 was the most productive year for ransomware families who moved from hostaging data to exfiltrating data, coupled with blackmailing,” said Kaspersky Lead Malware Analyst Alexey Shulmin.

He added, “In APAC, we noticed an interesting re-emergence of two highly-active groups, REvil and JSWorm. Both resurfaced as the pandemic raged in the region last year and we see no signs of them stopping anytime soon.”

REvil, in particular, has achieved quite a bit of infamy in the last few months. The hacker group reportedly claimed they breached Acer and demanded from the company the largest known ransom ever of US$50 million (~RM205.6 million). Separately, it was reported that REvil ransomware can apparently change Windows passwords and then automate a system’s file encryption via Safe Mode.

Kaspersky noted that, back in 2019, REvil hackers mostly targeted victims in the Asia Pacific – particularly in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Last year, however, the cybersecurity firm detected the group’s presence in almost all countries and territories.

According to Kaspersky, the biggest chunk of REvil’s industrial targets falls under the Engineering and Manufacturing category (30%) followed by Finance (14%) and Professional and Consumer Services (9%).

AirAsia Hit With The Highest Number Of Complaints In Second Half Of 2020

The Malaysian Aviation Commission (MAVCOM) said that AirAsia recorded the highest number of complaints (196) in the second half of last year (2H20). Malaysia Airlines (MAS) came in second (105) and AirAsia X third (57), the commission revealed in its biannual consumer report.

Unsurprisingly, the number one type of complaints MAVCOM received in 2H20 was related to the processing of refunds – 35.1% of all total complaints. AirAsia and AirAsia X took the lion’s share of those complaints with 75.8%, while MAS got 12.1% and Malindo Air 10.1%.

“All airlines had a reduction in the number of complaints in 2H20 except for AirAsia, AirAsia X and Firefly,” MAVCOM noted. AirAsia X also received a staggeringly high number of registered complaints (8,948) per million passengers. In comparison, that figure was just 477 for Malaysia Airlines and 208 for Malindo Air.

Ticket refunds have been a particularly thorny issue for AirAsia. Last year, as the Covid-19 pandemic raged, AirAsia boss Tony Fernandes urged customers to accept store credit instead of refunds, noting at the time that over 80% of them already did so. He warned that refunds might take a long while to process due to the overwhelming number of requests.

According to The Star, both MAVCOM and MATTA (Malaysian Association of Tour and Travel Agents) have publicly said that airlines should provide full refunds for flights cancelled because of COVID-19 restrictions.

Trend Micro Detected 119,000 Cyber Threats Per Minute In 2020

Cybersecurity software firm Trend Micro said it detected 119,000 cyber threats per minute last year as home workers and infrastructure came under attack. The firm said it blocked 62.6 billion threats in 2020, up by 20% from the previous year.

Email-based threats represent the vast majority (91%) of threats blocked by the firm last year, indicating that phishing attacks continue to be highly popular. In Malaysia, 307 million email threats were detected – the seventh highest figure in Asia and the third highest in Southeast Asia.

Trend Micro detected almost 14 million unique phishing URLs in 2020 as attackers went after people working from home. Indeed, home networks were a major attraction for cybercriminals last year as they tried to compromise corporate systems. These findings and more were part of the firm’s annual cybersecurity report.

Attacks on home surged by an astounding 210% to reach nearly 2.9 billion – amounting to 15.5% of all homes. Most (73%) of these attacks involved brute forcing logins to gain control of a router or a smart device.

Trend Micro observed that newly detected ransomware families increased by 34% last year. In particular, “double extortion” attacks – where attackers steal data before encrypting it to force payment by threatening to release the stolen information – became increasingly common.

A clear example of such an attack would be what happened recently to CD Projekt Red, the developer of Cyberpunk 2077. Hackers stole the game’s source code (along with that of The Witcher 3) and asked for a ransom, but the company refused to pay.

Still, the gaming industry isn’t typically a top target. Trend Micro noted that the sectors most targeted by ransomware attacks were government, banking, manufacturing, and healthcare.

EOL for Adobe Flash Player today

 Adobe displays Flash Player end of life popup on Windows devices

If you have installed a recent version of Adobe Flash Player on a Windows machine, you may see a popup displayed by the program that informs you that Flash support is ending on December 31, 2020.

Adobe announced years ago that it would end support for Adobe Flash in 2020; browser makers such as Google, Microsoft or Mozilla pledged to remove Flash functionality from web browsers at the same time to limit security issues and other potential issues.

Some browsers include Adobe Flash natively; most Chromium-based browsers, including Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, do. Other browsers require a plugin that needs to be installed, and it is users of the latter that Adobe tries to reach with its popup message.

Flash Player's update check, run once every seven days, displays the popup when it is run the next time. Users have options to select "remind me later" or to "uninstall". The latter starts the uninstallation process, the former will display the warning again in the near future.