Phobos Ransomware Emerges from the Dark

Discovered in December 2018, a new ransomware variant called Phobos was discovered by researchers at Covewave which it would seem is a combination of the Dharma and Crysis ransomware variants. The naming of the new ransomware variant will pique the interest of those fond of Greek Mythology as Phobos was the god of fear who was the son of Ares and a brother to Deimos the god of terror. With such a strong name questions will be asked as to whether the malware is indeed something to be scared of. In the report published by Coveware what readers will initially find the most striking is the similarities to the Dharma ransomware variant that has been used so successfully over the years. These similarities go so far as to use the same attack vector that Dharma has, namely open or poorly secured RDP ports. The leveraging of unsecured RDP or Remote Desktop Protocols ports is a favored attack method of hackers. In Septembe...

Search-operator.com Redirect (Mac)

Search-operator.com is a fake search engine similar to search.tapufind.com, search-me.club, search.hogwarin.com and many others. Most of them are promoted as useful, capable of providing their users with more accurate search results, faster searches or improved browsing experience in some other way. However, it is known that search-operator.com is promoted using a rogue downloaders/installers that are designed to adjust browser's settings. One of them is a fake Adobe Flash installer. Besides, fake search engines often collect various browsing-related and other data. As a rule, the aforementioned installers/downloaders target web browsers such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Safari. In this case they make search-operator.com as a default search engine, homepage and a new tab URL. These changes mean that users of a hijacked browser are forced to visit this website when they...