Avalanche is a notorious online criminal network specialising in Malware, Ransomware and money laundering. They have hundreds of servers working daily, causing havoc to organisations worldwide.
Law enforcement agencies from the USA (FBI), EU (Europol) and the UK (NCA) seized around 40 servers and took a further 200 offline. In addition, they shut down over 800,000 domains with malicious workloads. All in, over 20 different flavours of malware were found. Whilst this won’t help people already infected by Avalanche it’s still a great win for the authorities.
Hacking groups such as Avalanche constantly flip IP addresses and domain names to evade investigators. The authorities used something called sinkholing which redirected network communications from infected PC’s back through their own servers for analysis; sifting through over a hundred terabytes of data to help track down the criminals involved.
Avalanche might be defeated today but unfortunately there are lots of disparate groups engaged in similar criminal endeavours; whether it’s theft through social engineering or via zero day malware attacks.
At Consilium we are pushing hard to speak to organisations about some of the next generation security products that are available. We are accredited as partners for both Palo Alto Network’s Traps and Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection. These products, used individually or in tandem, provide a huge increase in protection over traditional Anti Virus that is now inadequate; indeed, we commonly see malware and ransomware attacks in organisations with traditional AV already installed.
Contact us today to see how we can protect you from malware and ransomware attacks. We offer free trials of Palo Alto Network’s Traps (a next generation AV solution from Palo Alto Networks; a gartner leading enterprise security vendor). We also specialise and partner with other advanced malware protection companies including Malwarebytes and Symantec in addition to offering online backups via Veeam Cloud Connect to further protect your data should you fall victim to a ransomware or malware attack.
