Weekly News: A crypto-worm is stealing AWS credentials

Researchers have discovered what they believe to be the first-ever crypto-mining worm that also manages to steal AWS credentials. 

Crypto-mining worms have been around for a while, stealthily infiltrating a network and using its computing power to mine cryptocurrency. This new worm is actually not even that good at it, having only made a mere $300 in profits. 

However, the attackers, who go by the name TeamTNT, have managed to incorporate the credential-stealing feature into their code. The researchers believe the attackers have recycled this functionality from a previous worm that targetted Alibaba’s cloud. 

This points to an emerging trend of copy-and-paste, opening the door for future malware to replicate TeamTNT’s code and go onto steal AWS credentials and compromise cloud ecosystems.

Fired for skipping the firewall

A whopping four out of ten businesses in the UK admit having dismissed employees for breaching the company’s security protocols. That’s according to a new survey by Centrify, a privileged access management solutions provider.

Most incidents were related to work-from-home scenarios, as a large proportion of employees tends to circumvent safety measures in favour of comfort or portability. 

As a result, 65% of companies have made important changes to their cybersecurity policy. Shadow IT was already a huge problem before the workforce transitioned to remote work. Now it’s become even more difficult to ensure that employees don’t use personal devices to access company networks and files.

Well, just keep in mind that you could get fired for it.