Lazy hackers don't bother phishing, just log in and run ransomware themselves

An anonymous reader writes: An investigation by Sophos has uncovered a new, lazy but effective ransomware attack where hackers brute force passwords on computers with RDP enabled, use off-the-shelf privilege escalation exploits to make themselves admins, turn off security software and then manually run fusty old versions of ransomware.

Might be a stretch to call it new...

[thegreatbob]

... but it's still a big problem. I've witnessed similar things being done (or having just recently been done) to a number of Linux boxes; one might be surprised by the havoc one can wreak with a non-privileged (but not jailed or sandboxed) account on many internet-connected systems. Also, ensure that anything that must face the internet with RDP open has NLA turned on. Use port knocking, perhaps, if you're stuck with a firewall that doesn't allow the creation of IP-based rules. Anything. At. All. VPNs of a