Rest in Peace Rex Mundi

Europol along with French, UK, and Thai police arrested eight people suspected either to have been involved or to have been part of a now infamous hacker group known as Rex Mundi. Meaning king of the world in Latin, the group has been active since 2012. The group became particularly known for hacking into companies' networks, stealing private information, and later contacting the victims to request the payment of a ransom fee. The group was also known for demanding fees for not disclosing the hacks and sometimes also asked for higher sums of money for revealing the security flaw they used to enter the victim's network. This probably seemed like a nice thing to do by the group in light of making the life of a poor CIO hell for a period. Europol released a statement detailing the international operation supported by Europol and the Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce (J-CAT)  that started almost exactly one year...

Can't Turn Off Sticky Keys

If you are a Windows operating system user, then most probably you have the Sticky Keys feature built in into your operating system, unless you are using older than Windows 95 Windows version. Sticky Keys is one of the several accessibility options available in Windows operating systems and it can be both useful and annoying, especially if you do not need them. However, it can be useful for users with certain disabilities and can help to make complex commands easier. Usually Sticky Keys are generated when you press the Shift key on your keyboard five times in a row and the main purpose of this feature is to help users who are having problems with pressing multiple keys at the same time. For example, if you want to open Task Manager which is usually done by using a keyboard shortcut, by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc simultaneously (while holding each key pressed) you can do it another way - by pressing Ctrl, then A...

Qnbqw Ransomware

Qnbqw is a ransomware-type virus recently discovered by Michael Gillespie. Once infiltrated, Qnbqw encrypts most of stored files using AES-256 cryptography. While doing so, Qnbqw appends filenames with ".qnbqw" extension. For instance, "sample.jpg" is renamed to "sample.jpg.qnbqw". Encrypted data instantly becomes unusable. Immediately after encryption, Qnbqw generates a text file ("Notice.txt") and drops it's copy in every existing folder. The created text file informs victims about the encryption and encourages them to immediately contact Qnbqw's developers via email provided. Victims will then supposedly receive file decrypting instructions alongside with the key. As mentioned above, Qnbqw uses AES-256 - a symmetric encryption algorithm which uses the exact same key (generated individually for each victim) to both encrypt and decrypt data. The problem is that all keys are stored in a remote server contr...