How Cyber Criminals Target SA Firms

According to a new security report, it looks like cyber crooks are aimed on targeting South African companies!

The chief technology security officer at Vodacom, Vernon Fryer, said “Hackers have identified SA companies as ideal targets to attack for ransom.” He went on to say that in Africa, SA is the most common target for cyber crooks, then comes Kenya, Uganda and Algeria. Some of the top malware programs are CryptoLocker, Rombertik and Superfish.

One of the most common ways to attack companies in Africa is a DDOS (Distributed Denial Of Service) attack. A DDOS attack is an attempt to make an online service unavailable by overwhelming it with traffic from multiple sources, so the cyber criminals send large amounts of junk data to servers which then will lead to them performing slowly or crashing!

According to data collected by Vernon Fryer, a typical attack on a local company sees about 4.43 terabytes of data being directed to a firm, nearly four times the amount of data a large corporation can handle.

It was also revealed that there has been a 150% increase in the number of DDOS attacks in the last 18 months in Africa – that is a significant increase! Not to mention the attacks are typically very short and the criminals are shameless about their intentions.

Here is a typical threat message that you should look out for:

"We have not received your payment. But since our email from which we contacted you yesterday got suspended, we are not sure if you replied.

However, just to make sure, we will give you some more time -until tomorrow. But if not paid until tomorrow, attack will start and price will increase, as explained in first email.

Following such demands, criminals will usually up the tempo of the attack to demonstrate their ability to compromise corporate computer systems.

But if you ignore us, and don't pay within 24 hours, long term attack will start, price to stop will go to 50 BTC and will keep increasing for every hour of attack.

Important: It's a one-time payment. Pay and you will not hear from us ever again! We do bad things, but we keep our word."

As seen from the above message, spam is an ideal delivery method for malware and what follows is usually a final ransom demand of bitcoins, which are hard to trace.

When the cyber criminals use this method of attack they are often very successful, because corporate officers are more keen to avoid having to report that their systems have been hacked. Paying the ransom may seem like a viable option for some, Security Company’s advice against it.

Always remember that these people may be called cyber crooks, but they are still real criminals. Even if you do pay the ransom it is not a real solution for the future.

For all your IT services, contact us at The Computer Guyz in Cape Town. We can offer you anything from general IT support and network solutions to website development and graphic design.