Facebook Sued Hong Kong Firm for Hacking Users and Ad Fraud Scheme

Following its efforts to take legal action against those misusing its social media platform, Facebook has now filed a new lawsuit against a Hong Kong-based advertising company and two Chinese individuals for allegedly abusing its ad platform to distribute malware and Ad fraud. Facebook filed the...

Black Friday Shoppers Targeted By Scams and Fake Domains

Black Friday and Cyber Monday-related scams are nothing new — but researchers warn that this year, they are seeing an uptick in scams using more sophisticated methods to lure users to hand over their payment data. Research released Tuesday by ZeroFOX uncovered some of the threats that attackers a...

A week in security (November 11 – 17)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we offered statistics and information on a sneaky new Trojan malware for Android, inspected a bevy of current Facebook scams, and explained the importance of securing food and agriculture infrastructure. We also released our latest report on cybercrime tactics and...

Orcus RAT Author Charged in Malware Scheme

In July 2016, KrebsOnSecurity published a story identifying a Toronto man as the author of the Orcus RAT, a software product that’s been marketed on underground forums and used in countless malware attacks since its creation in 2015. This week, Canadian authorities criminally charged him with...

Trump, Putin and Politics Name-Dropped to Peddle Malware

With the U.S. presidential elections looming, bad actors are tapping into the political craze with several malware distribution campaigns, using high-profile political names to tap into victims’ emotions and convince them to click on malicious links. Researchers have uncovered hundreds of...

How adversaries use politics for compromise

By Nick Biasini and Edmund Brumaghin. Executive Summary With the U.S. presidential primaries just around the corner, even malware authors can't help but get behind the frenzy. Cisco Talos recently discovered several malware distribution campaigns where the adversaries were utilizing the names and...

PsiXBot Adds PornModule, Google DNS Service to Its Arsenal

The PsiXBot malware has made a few changes in recent weeks, including implementing Google’s DNS over HTTPS DoH and adding the blackmail-ready “PornModule” to its bag of tricks. PsiXBot is a multi-use Windows malware that has a range of capabilities, including keylogging, stealing passwords and...

RAT Ratatouille: Backdooring PCs with leaked RATs

By Edmund Brumaghin and Holger Unterbrink. Executive summary Orcus RAT and RevengeRAT are two of the most popular remote access trojans RATs in use across the threat landscape. Since its emergence in 2016, various adversaries used RevengeRAT to attack organizations and individuals around the worl...

GoBotKR Targets Pirate Torrents to Build a DDoS Botnet

A botnet dubbed GoBotKR is targeting fans of Korean TV, compromising computers via pirated copies of South Korean movies, games and TV shows available via Korean and Chinese torrent sites. Ultimately, the cybercriminals are building a network that can then be used to perform DDoS attacks of vario...

ThreatList: Top 5 Most Dangerous Attachment Types

Researchers with F-Secure have tracked the top spam-related attachments and campaigns used so far in 2019. The verdict, ZIPs, PDF, and MS office files such as DOC and XLSM file attachments were more commonly used in huge spam campaigns than any other type attachment. In addition, researchers...

Ad Server Patched to Stop Possible Malware Distribution

UPDATE The open-source advertising platform Revive Adserver is urging customers to patch two vulnerabilities, one of which is critical and may have been exploited to allow hackers to deliver malware to third-party websites. Revive Adserver, formerly known as OpenX Source, is a free, open-source a...

New HawkEye Reborn Variant Emerges Following Ownership Change

Edmund Brumaghin and Holger Unterbrink authored this blog post. Executive summary Malware designed to steal sensitive information has been a threat to organizations around the world for a long time. The emergence of the greyware market and the increased commercialization of keyloggers, stealers,...

Moodle CMS <= 3.1.16, 3.4.x <= 3.4.7, 3.5.x <= 3.5.4 and 3.6.x <= 3.6.2 Multiple Vulnerabilities

Moodle CMS is prone to multiple vulnerabilities. Copyright C 2019 Greenbone Networks GmbH Some text descriptions might be excerpted from a referenced sources, and are Copyright C by the respective right holders. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0-or-later This program is free software; you can...

Lazarus Group Widens Tactics in Cryptocurrency Attacks

North Korea-linked APT Lazarus Group has been spotted targeting the cryptocurrency business again, adding Apple users to the mix by using PowerShell scripts to control macOS malware, and honing its Windows strategy. The campaign has been active since at least November 2018, according to an analys...

The return of the BOM

There's nothing new in Brazilian cybercriminals trying out new ways to stay under the radar. It's just that this time around the bad guys have started using a method that was reported in the wild years ago. Russian gangs used this technique to distribute malware capable of modifying the hosts fil...

Necurs Botnet Evolves to Hide in the Shadows, with New Payloads

Necurs, the prolific and globally dispersed spam and malware distribution botnet, has been spotted using a fresh hiding technique to avoid detection while quietly adding more bots to its web. According to research from Black Lotus Labs, which is telecom and ISP provider CenturyLink’s network...

Combing Through Brushaloader Amid Massive Detection Uptick

Nick Biasini and Edmund Brumaghin authored this blog post with contributions from Matthew Molyett. Executive Summary Over the past several months, Cisco Talos has been monitoring various malware distribution campaigns leveraging the malware loader Brushaloader to deliver malware payloads to...

Ford: Subdomain takeover on usclsapipma.cv.ford.com

Hello Ford H1 team, I want to report a Subdomain takeover vulnerability in this report, a pretty serious security issue in some context. Overview: One of the ford.com subdomains is pointing to Azure, which has unclaimed CNAME record. ANYONE is able to own ford.com subdomain at the moment. This...

Emotet re-emerges after the holidays

While Emotet has been around for many years and is one of the most well-known pieces of malware in the wild, that doesn't mean attackers don't try to freshen it up. Cisco Talos recently discovered several new campaigns distributing the infamous banking trojan via email. These new campaigns have...

Distributing Malware By Becoming an Admin on an Open-Source Project

The module "event-stream" was infected with malware by an anonymous someone who became an admin on the project. Cory Doctorow points out that this is a clever new attack vector: Many open source projects attain a level of "maturity" where no one really needs any new features and there aren't a lo...