Pirated Software led to a Ransomware Incident

Long have the dangers of pirated software be shouted from the mountaintops by security researchers. Despite being illegal, the user has no idea what they are downloading. In many cases what they believe is a software package, movie, or TV show is laden with malicious payloads. Some of those payloads contain ransomware. This publication has covered how this is a favored distribution technique for many malware families and how the Pysa ransomware has been seen distributed via fake software crack sites. Now a company in the BioTech sector just suffered a Ryuk attack via a student downloading pirated software. In a recent article published by Sophos, an incident involving their Rapid Response Team was covered. The team was called in to neutralize a Ryuk infection that occurred at a European biomolecular research institute. The organization has close links with several universities and works with students from those u...

Herelations.fun Ads

Herelations[.]fun is a rogue site sharing many similarities with express-news.me, makeklick.biz, ltheyearr.online, saytoyoup.fun, and countless others. Visitors to this webpage are presented with questionable content and/or redirected to untrustworthy or possibly malicious sites. Users typically enter these pages unintentionally; most get redirected to them by intrusive adverts or installed PUAs (Potentially Unwanted Applications). These apps do not require explicit user permission to infiltrate systems. PUAs are designed to cause redirects, deliver intrusive advertisement campaigns, and collect browsing-related information. When accessed, the first thing herelations[.]fun does is check the visitor's IP (Internet Protocol) address to learn their geolocation. This data determines the website's behavior. In other words, whether visitors are presented with dubious material and/or redirected elsewhere - depe...