2021 | Digital Shadows

ShadowTalk Year in Review: Top 5 Episodes of 2021

December 30, 2021 | 3 Min Read

And just like that, we’ve come to the end of another year. “But wait” you say, “wasn’t it just January?”...

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AlphaBay’s Return: A slow-burning masterpiece, or a flash in the pan?

December 28, 2021 | 4 Min Read

A few months back, we wrote about how AlphaBay, the infamous dark web marketplace, has returned. For those who missed...

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Year in Review: Our Top Blogs of 2021

December 23, 2021 | 9 Min Read

I’m sure we can all agree that this year has been busy for anyone who had anything, even remotely, to...

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Log4j: Tokyo Drift

December 22, 2021 | 5 Min Read

Just when we thought we were through the significant bits of Log4j issues, a new problem appeared this past weekend....

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US Ban on Huawei: Is this the right approach?

December 22, 2021 | 7 Min Read

On 11 Nov 2021, US President Joe Biden banned the use of Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE within the US,...

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Discord: Do You Need to Be Concerned This Christmas?

December 21, 2021 | 7 Min Read

Picture the scene. It’s Christmas Day, and your child/loved one/other has just opened their present from you…a new games console....

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Log4j: What’s Happened Since

December 15, 2021 | 5 Min Read

Last Friday, we published a blog on the latest significant vulnerability, CVE-2021-44228, which involves a flaw in the Log4j program...

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Cone of Plausibility: Forecasting Ransomware Scenarios in 2022

December 14, 2021 | 10 Min Read

Note: This blog is part of a series of articles related to the use of Structured Analytic Techniques in the...

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The Log4j Zero-Day: What We Know So Far

December 10, 2021 | 6 Min Read

There’s nothing in the cyber threat intelligence world like having a severe remote code execution (RCE) zero-day drop on a...

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Latin American Financial Services: Sunny Climes and Cybercrimes

December 9, 2021 | 8 Min Read

Few things make my eyes sparkle like talking about Latin America. Back in 2018, I had the privilege of being...

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2021: An APAC Cyber-security Odyssey

December 8, 2021 | 9 Min Read

Last year, I rounded up the three most significant events for 2020 and crossed my fingers for brighter days ahead....

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Outside the Perimeter: The New Digital Risk Landscape

December 7, 2021 | 6 Min Read

Alastair Paterson, CEO of Digital Shadows, recently sat down with Ryan Floyd, cofounding Managing Director of Storm Ventures, to discuss...

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Cyber Threats to Government

December 2, 2021 | 3 Min Read

Exploring cyber threats to Government and Public bodies, including ransomware targets and initial access...

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When acting turns criminal: Deepfakes and voice impersonators in the cybercriminal underground

December 1, 2021 | 13 Min Read

You’ve probably heard the old adage: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Falling for...

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To Disclose, or Not to Disclose: The PoC Dilemma

November 30, 2021 | 6 Min Read

At the beginning of our conversation on vulnerability intelligence a couple of weeks ago, I briefly touched on a fictional...

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The Patching Nightmare

November 24, 2021 | 7 Min Read

Note: This blog is part of a three-blog series on Vulnerability Intelligence that accompanies the release of Digital Shadows’ latest...

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Black Friday: Is there a threat actor in your shopping cart?

November 23, 2021 | 9 Min Read

Black Friday represents a huge opportunity for consumers to purchase a range of items at cut-rate prices: Electrical items, furniture,...

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Emotet is back again: what does it mean?

November 16, 2021 | 4 Min Read

Emotet is back again on the scene and, to be fair, we’re not surprised. Its predictable return has come just...

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Vulnerability Intelligence: What’s the Word in Dark Web Forums?

November 16, 2021 | 7 Min Read

Note: This blog is part of a three-blog series on Vulnerability Intelligence that accompanies the release of Digital Shadows’ latest...

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What is Vulnerability Intelligence?

November 11, 2021 | 6 Min Read

Picture this: it’s a Monday morning, and you’ve just found out that a critical vulnerability was announced on your favorite...

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Vulnerable smart contracts and fake blockchains: What do investors need to know?

November 10, 2021 | 10 Min Read

Well, here we are again. Another blog on a topic that’s often spoken about but little understood: cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency-related decentralized...

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What We’re Reading This Month

November 9, 2021 | 6 Min Read

As an intelligence analyst, it’s paramount that you stay on top of what’s happening in the world around you. To...

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Initial Access Brokers in Q3 2021

November 3, 2021 | 9 Min Read

As the end of the year approaches, it’s time once again to look at the initial access broker (IAB) activity...

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Managing your External Attack Surface with SearchLight

November 2, 2021 | 4 Min Read

Recently we have been hearing plenty about External Attack Surface Management (EASM). While Digital Shadows focuses on digital risk protection...

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ENISA 2021 Threat Landscape: Initial Thoughts

November 1, 2021 | 12 Min Read

The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) has released its yearly threat landscape report, which contains some handy insights. The...

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REvil Dead, And Other Spooky Security Tales

October 27, 2021 | 6 Min Read

I can’t start off this blog with the R-word. You know the one. I’ve poked fun at it before because...

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Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Week 4 – Cybersecurity first (…middle and last)

October 26, 2021 | 6 Min Read

Our blog series for National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM) has come to an end. So far, we have looked at...

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Ransomware Q3 Roll Up

October 25, 2021 | 11 Min Read

We have reached the end of another quarter, and it is time again for us to have a look back...

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What Is Intellectual Property Protection?

October 20, 2021 | 2 Min Read

Growing costs of intellectual property theft Intellectual property theft is defined by the FBI as “robbing people or companies of...

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Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Week 3 – Explore. Experience. Share

October 19, 2021 | 11 Min Read

We’re into the third week of National Cybersecurity Awareness Month (NCSAM). In the last two weeks, we have covered How...

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REvil Domains Hijacked, Forum Representative Announces Group’s Intention to Go Offline

October 18, 2021 | 5 Min Read

The ransomware group REvil (aka Sodinokibi) has been one of the most significant characters in the evolving ransomware drama that...

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Strategic Threat Intelligence and You: What Does It All Mean?

October 14, 2021 | 4 Min Read

What is strategic threat intelligence? In another blog about tactical threat intelligence, we talked about how tactical and strategic threat...

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Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Week 2 – Fight the Phish!

October 13, 2021 | 9 Min Read

Welcome to Digital Shadows’ second installment of our National Cyber Security Awareness Month-themed blogs! You can go back and read...

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What is Third Party Risk?

October 6, 2021 | 3 Min Read

Third party risk is the process of managing risks introduced by suppliers and third parties, often specifically to sensitive data...

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Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Week 1 – Managing Your Digital Shadow

October 5, 2021 | 8 Min Read

This week is the first week of National Cyber Security Awareness Month (NCSAM), which runs from October 1 to October...

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What We’re Reading This Month: September Edition

September 29, 2021 | 8 Min Read

In the Cyber Threat Intelligence world, a reasonably popular question for interviews or establishing street cred on Twitter is asking...

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Tactical Threat Intelligence and You: What Does It All Mean?

September 29, 2021 | 5 Min Read

What is tactical threat intelligence? If threat intelligence is the umbrella, within that umbrella lies strategic and tactical intelligence, next...

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Why CISOs and Executives Should Care About IABs

September 23, 2021 | 3 Min Read

Initial access brokers (IABs) are enablers of high-level cybercriminal activity. They identify weak points in their targets’ systems and networks,...

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Data Leakage Detection Best Practices

September 22, 2021 | 3 Min Read

This blog provides an overview of our recently-published Data Leakage Detection Solutions guide, which provides best practices and free tools...

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Ukrainian-language Cybercriminal Platforms: A Gap In the Market?

September 21, 2021 | 7 Min Read

Most readers will be aware of the threat posed by Russian-speaking cybercriminals, be that big players in the ransomware game,...

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Building successful teams on the cybercriminal underground

September 15, 2021 | 7 Min Read

We’ve all been socialized since childhood to the concept of teamwork. As we progress through life, we see the value...

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Enhance Executive Protection with SocialMonitor

September 14, 2021 | 3 Min Read

Today we’re announcing the release of SocialMonitor, an industry-leading capability to better protect executives from social media impersonation. Read on...

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SearchLight Leads the Digital Risk Protection Market

September 10, 2021 | 3 Min Read

Since the Digital Risk Protection market was first defined in 2017, there have been a growing number of providers and...

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AlphaBay’s Return: SWOT Findings

September 9, 2021 | 14 Min Read

Hot on the heels of our recent blog titled Revil: Analysis of Competing Hypotheses, the Photon Research Team is back...

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What We’re Reading This Month

September 8, 2021 | 6 Min Read

Another busy month goes by, but the team has found some time to read around our threat intelligence-focused roles. This...

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Protecting Against Ransomware: What Role Does Threat Intelligence Play?

September 7, 2021 | 4 Min Read

Ransomware actors are thriving at the moment: there is barely a day that goes by without the announcement of a...

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Preventing Ransomware: Preventing the 300 at Thermopylae

September 2, 2021 | 7 Min Read

Ransomware, Ransomware, Ransomware Unless you’ve been on a quiet sabbatical or otherwise offline and not watching the news for the...

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Social Media Monitoring Best Practices

September 1, 2021 | 3 Min Read

This blog is drawn from the Digital Shadows’ Social Media Monitoring Solutions Guide, which provides best practices for security teams...

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The Never-ending Ransomware Story

August 31, 2021 | 10 Min Read

In the Never Ending Story, Bastian is drawn away from reality into Fantasia—a mythical land desperately in need of a...

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The Eeveelution of ShinyHunters: From Data Leaks to Extortions

August 26, 2021 | 7 Min Read

Suppose you were one of the lucky people playing Pokémon during its golden age (no, Pokémon GO, we’re not talking...

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How Cybercriminals Weaponize Social Media

August 25, 2021 | 9 Min Read

There’s no denying that social media has forever changed how we interact with one another. Social media has been more...

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No Honor Among Thieves: Scamming the Scammers

August 24, 2021 | 5 Min Read

We spoke about this pretty recently on our US edition of the ShadowTalk podcast, but there was a story that...

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Leveraging Digital Shadows’ Premium Services

August 18, 2021 | 3 Min Read

The state of threat intelligence today is a dynamic, ever-changing threat landscape coupled with a global shortage of a skilled...

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The Phight Against Phishing

August 17, 2021 | 17 Min Read

What is Phish(ing)? No, not the band, unless you’re really into jam bands. We’re talking about the email attack variety....

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The (Nation) State of APTs in 2021

August 12, 2021 | 10 Min Read

Even though it seems like every year has been the year of ransomware since probably 2017, this year is in...

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Understanding Smishing Attacks

August 10, 2021 | 5 Min Read

I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that I’ve been receiving a lot of...

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How Has Forum Life Adapted to the Recent Ransomware Ban?

August 5, 2021 | 8 Min Read

In mid-May 2021, multiple cybercriminal forums prohibited users from advertising ransomware and affiliated partnership programs. Law enforcement agencies worldwide have...

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Supply Chain Attacks in 2021: It Takes a Village

August 4, 2021 | 10 Min Read

Big Game Hunting If you’ve performed any recent research about supply chain attacks, it becomes apparent rather quickly that after...

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Initial Access Brokers in Q2

August 3, 2021 | 7 Min Read

Back in March 2021, Digital Shadows published a research report titled Initial Access Brokers: An Excess of Access, analyzing more...

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REvil: Analysis of Competing Hypotheses

July 28, 2021 | 15 Min Read

Until the 13th of July, 2021, things appeared to be going as expected with the threat actors behind REvil (AKA...

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Getting Started With Domain Monitoring Part 3: Remediation

July 27, 2021 | 5 Min Read

This blog is taken from our recent Domain Monitoring Solutions Guide, which provides best practices and free tools to begin...

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SearchLight Reduces Domain Triage by 75%

July 21, 2021 | 5 Min Read

If you’re curious on domain monitoring, our Domain Monitoring Solutions Guide can give you a breakdown of the most common...

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Cyber Threats to the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games

July 21, 2021 | 8 Min Read

Just a few weeks ago, Digital Shadows published a blog written by yours truly that analyzed the cyber threats to...

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Q2 Ransomware Roll Up

July 20, 2021 | 9 Min Read

With the closing of another quarter, it’s once again time to have a look back at the cyber threat landscape...

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REvil Ransomware: What’s Next?

July 15, 2021 | 10 Min Read

When ransomware hits the news cycle, and even the non-cyber security folk have questions, you know it’s gone big. This...

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Kaseya Attack Update: What’s Happened Since?

July 14, 2021 | 6 Min Read

A little over a week ago, we wrote a bit about what we knew about the Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) operator group...

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Why Domains Matter: Impersonations and Your Brand

July 13, 2021 | 9 Min Read

Recently, we’ve released a few articles on typosquatting, Getting Started with Domain Monitoring Part I, and Part II and a...

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Marketo: A Return to Simple Extortion

July 8, 2021 | 9 Min Read

The world of ransomware and cyber extortion continues to change dramatically. On the one hand, new ransomware variants and data...

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Getting Started with Domain Monitoring Part 2: Detection

July 7, 2021 | 4 Min Read

This blog is taken from our recent Domain Monitoring Solutions Guide, which provides best practices and free tools to begin...

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Kaseya Ransomware Supply-Chain Attack: What We Know So Far

July 5, 2021 | 7 Min Read

On 02 July 2021, details started to emerge of a sophisticated supply-chain attack targeting Kaseya VSA, virtual system administrator software...

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Typosquatting Protection 101

July 1, 2021 | 6 Min Read

What is typosquatting? Typosquatting, also known as domain squatting or URL hijacking, is a type of malicious domain-impersonation attack where...

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Getting Started with Domain Monitoring: Part 1, Collection

June 30, 2021 | 4 Min Read

This blog is taken from our recent Domain Monitoring Solutions Guide, which provides best practices and free tools to begin...

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What We’re Reading This Month

June 29, 2021 | 6 Min Read

Ransomware, ransomware, RANSOMWARE! We can’t get away from it. Certainly there’s a fear that focusing too much on one threat...

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Why Do Users Get Banned from Cybercriminal Forums?

June 24, 2021 | 13 Min Read

Cybersecurity reporting tends to focus on stories about governments and law enforcement agencies moving to catch the threat actors responsible...

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Threat Actors Living Off the Land

June 23, 2021 | 10 Min Read

Don’t underestimate your adversary—there are some security practitioners out there who might dismiss your everyday hackers and threat actors as...

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Let’s Talk About Intel Requirements

June 17, 2021 | 7 Min Read

At Digital Shadows we get excited about intelligence. In fact, we’ve talked about it more than once before. One of...

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Key Findings from our Dark Web Monitoring Webinar

June 16, 2021 | 3 Min Read

A few weeks ago, we hosted a webinar on Dark Web Monitoring. I was taken aback that, even a year...

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Cyber Threats to the Online Gaming Industry

June 15, 2021 | 5 Min Read

Last week, Motherboard reported that source code for FIFA 21 had been stolen from EA sports by hackers. This was...

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Cyber Threats to the UEFA EURO 2020 Championship

June 9, 2021 | 7 Min Read

When I was first asked to write a blog about the UEFA EURO 2020 Championship, I immediately imagined going through...

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The Business of Extortion: How Ransomware Makes Money

June 9, 2021 | 8 Min Read

We can’t stop talking about it: Ransomware. It’s dominating a lot of security news for sure, which also means it’s...

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Cryptocurrency Attacks to be Aware of in 2021

June 8, 2021 | 10 Min Read

It’s been a pretty big year so far for cryptocurrency. After it reached an all-time high in April 2021, new...

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On the Rise: Ransomware and the Legal Services Sector

June 3, 2021 | 8 Min Read

Ransomware has continued to dominate the headlines, new attacks, new groups, new data leak sites, and new tactics. Quarter over...

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The Top Three Cybercrime Takeaways from the 2021 Verizon DBIR

June 2, 2021 | 4 Min Read

The 2021 DBIR is still hot off the press, and it did not disappoint. For many years, Verizon’s Data Breach...

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Cyber Attacks: The Challenge of Attribution and Response

June 1, 2021 | 11 Min Read

In December 2020, the world was rocked by an enormous supply chain attack against software provider Solarwinds, which provided unprecedented...

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What We’re Reading This Month

May 26, 2021 | 6 Min Read

As intelligence analysts, our day-to-day is looking at lots of different information and discovering trends or different viewpoints. The research...

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Death and Decay: How Cybercriminal Platforms Meet Their End

May 26, 2021 | 12 Min Read

At Digital Shadows, we’re constantly monitoring the status of cybercriminal locations on the clear, deep, and dark web. It’s a...

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How the Intelligence Cycle Can Help Defend Against Ransomware Attack

May 25, 2021 | 14 Min Read

When Tolkien first sat down to write Lord of the Rings, he probably never imagined it would go on for...

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Ransomware-as-a-Service, Rogue Affiliates, and What’s Next

May 20, 2021 | 7 Min Read

Generating a chain of unforeseen events, the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack has drastically altered the broader cyber threat landscape as...

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10 Milestones Celebrating 10 Years of Digital Shadows

May 19, 2021 | 6 Min Read

2021 marks a bright and beautiful new beginning for many of us, as lockdown measures relax and we emerge from...

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Examining Russian-language Cybercriminal Marketplaces

May 18, 2021 | 10 Min Read

Our blogs have covered the fate of numerous cybercriminal marketplaces on the clear, deep, and dark web over the years....

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Colonial Pipeline Attack Update: Cybercriminal forum XSS, Exploit and RaidForums ban all things ransomware

May 14, 2021 | 8 Min Read

One week ago, on 07 May 2021, members of the DarkSide ransomware affiliate program encrypted infrastructure belonging to the US...

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How Cybercriminals Can Leverage Your Vaccination Card Selfie

May 13, 2021 | 6 Min Read

Gotta do it for the ‘Gram (Instagram), as the kids might say. After a year in quarantine, you just got...

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Mapping MITRE ATT&CK to the WannaCry Campaign

May 12, 2021 | 8 Min Read

Learning from past mistakes is a crucial part of every job. Four years after WannaCry’s outbreak, analyzing which weak security...

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Bitcoin and Alternative Cryptos in the Cybercriminal Underground

May 11, 2021 | 10 Min Read

The popularity of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies continue to progress in the modern-day, with drastically surging valuations. Notably, Bitcoin surpassed its...