Malware Team NetWalker Launches Ransomware Attack Against Weiz

The Malware team NetWalker launched a new ransomware attack against the Austrian village of Weiz which affected the public service system and leaked a lot of the stolen data from building applications as we are about to read more in the following latest cryptocurrency news.

According to the cybersecurity firm Panda Security, the Malware team managed to enter the town’s public network through phishing emails related to the Coronavirus pandemic. The subject of the emails which was ‘’information about the coronavirus’’ was used to bait the employees of the public infrastructure of the city into clicking on malicious links which triggered the ransomware.

Panda Security claims that the ransomware attack belongs to a new version of a ransomware family that spreads by using VBScripts. If the infection is successful, it will spread through the entire windows network to which the infected machine is related. The report details that the ransomware terminates and services under Windows which encrypts files on all available disks thus eliminating the backups.

Weiz is a small village that is considered the major economic center of the Ostseiermark region which is located a few kilometers from the city of Graz. The Austrian village Weiz is also the place where several major companies such as automaker Magna and construction companies Strobl Construction established a production plant. This could indicate that the attack was not random but was meant to fulfill a certain objective. The netwalker group conducted several attacks that targeted the healthcare sector across the planet.

The reports also show that the attack spread against hospitals in Spain. The attacks were also conducted by using phishing emails to deploy ransomware to the hospital systems. As per the other reports recently, Blue Mockingbird, a hacking group tried to distribute Monero mining malware to its enterprise targets. The Red Canary Intel discovered that some of the earliest showings of Blue Mockingbird traced back to December last year. There were two incidents that were investigated by the security firm. This vulnerability affected the web applications which were public and used Telerik UI. The payload which was launched by Blue Mockingbird hacking group was XMRig which is a Monero-mining tool that was incorporated into their attack campaigns.