A week in security (September 14 – September 20)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: New Android malware uses AI to steal bank logins and PINs Did an AI really try to break free from human control? Fake parcel delivery messages steal your card and bank details Flock cameras are tracking people as well as cars Revolut phishing texts appear days afte...

How Candidates Could Use AI for Good

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared inThe Guardian. There are plenty of signs that AI will make all of our experiences of the US midterm elections worse. Voters have anxiety about AI's impacts on the country. Politicos are using AI deepfakes to spread lies. The...

Sexually Explicit Deepfake Sites Target 100-Plus Politicians in Europe

An analysis of 160 deepfake websites reveals politicians in 22 countries appear on them. Nearly all of them are women...

Hugging Face Has a Deepfake Nudes Problem

Researchers tested top image editing models on Hugging Face and found they could easily create explicit deepfakes—and 1,000 image editing prompts show how people use the software...

Google wants to store a selfie video of your face

Google has started rolling out a new way to recover access to your account if you’ve lost your phone or forgotten your password: a “selfie video” verification option. After recording a short video of your face during setup, you can later submit another video during account recovery to prove you a...

The Evolution of iGaming Fraud: What Security Teams Should Expect in 2027

Learn how AI, deepfakes, synthetic identities and fraud-as-a-service may reshape iGaming risk, and what security teams can do to detect future threats in 2027...

Deepfake posting sites depicting famous women taken down by feds

Thanks to Uncle Sam, anyone trying to find nonconsensual intimate deepfakes on CFake.com and SOCFake.com will be disappointed. The US Departments of Justice DOJ and Homeland Security has seized the two domain names under the TAKE IT DOWN Act. The TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed in May 2025, is the first...

Feds Seize CFAKE and SOCFAKE Over Explicit Deepfakes of Famous Women

Both CFAKE and SOCFAKE CFAKE.com and SOCFAKE.com were seized after prosecutors said they hosted nonconsensual nude digital forgeries of famous women...

Grok Is Still Hosting Sexualized Deepfakes of Famous Women

A WIRED investigation found dozens of “nudified” deepfake images and videos on Grok's website, including nonconsensual depictions of celebrities and at least one prominent US politician...

The FBI Wants ‘Near Real-Time’ Access to US License Plate Readers

Plus: Google publishes a live exploit for an unpatched flaw, the feds arrest two men accused of creating thousands of nonconsensual deepfake nudes, and more...

YouTube wants your face to fight deepfakes

If you're worried about deepfake likenesses of yourself showing up online, you're not alone; YouTube is worried for you. It wants to protect you by having you upload a selfie video and government ID to its site. The idea is that the video giant will use its own AI to patrol the service for fake...

AI is distorting the Holocaust (Lock and Code S07E10)

This week on the Lock and Code podcast … In May of last year, a warning about AI came from somewhere unexpected: The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Posting publicly on social media, the museum warned about a Facebook account using generative AI to create fake images of people who died in the...

STRIKE: A Structured Taxonomy of Cybercrime for Risk, Impact, Knowledge, and Evolution

Cybercrime has grown exponentially in both scale and sophistication, posing significant threats. As attack methods evolve rapidly, traditional classification schemes often fail to capture the complexity and diversity of modern threats. To address this gap, we introduce STRIKE,a Structured Taxonom...

Massive AI investment scam network spans 15,500 domains

Researchers tracked a large AI‑themed investment scam campaign involving more than 15,000 domains. It uses cloaking and deepfakes to hide from security tools while targeting ordinary users. Criminals abused the Keitaro ad-tracking platform as part of a cloaking system so real victims see scam...

Why we’re still not doing April Fools’ Day

People lost an estimated $442 billion to scams last year worldwide, according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance. The scale of that is hard to picture, but people's day-to-day scam experience is easier to recognize: Our research found that 44% of people say they encounter mobile scams every single...

The $17 Billion Wake-Up Call: Securing Crypto in the Age of AI Scams

AI-driven crypto scams surge as cybercrime hits $17B, with deepfakes, fraud kits, and industrial social engineering reshaping digital asset threats and defenses...

Common Crypto Scams and How to Protect Your Funds in 2026

Crypto scams are surging worldwide, from pig butchering to fake trading platforms and deepfakes, draining victims while fraud teams struggle to keep up...

Deepfake ‘Nudify’ Technology Is Getting Darker—and More Dangerous

Sexual deepfakes continue to get more sophisticated, capable, easy to access, and perilous for millions of women who are abused with the technology...

Regulators around the world are scrutinizing Grok over sexual deepfakes

Grok’s failure to block sexualized images of minors has turned a single “isolated lapse” into a global regulatory stress test for xAI’s ambitions. The response from lawmakers and regulators suggests this will not be solved with a quick apology and a hotfix. Last week we reported on Grok's apology...

AI-Driven Cybersecurity Threats: A Survey of Emerging Risks and Defensive Strategies

Artificial Intelligence's dual-use nature is revolutionizing the cybersecurity landscape, introducing new threats across four main categories: deepfakes and synthetic media, adversarial AI attacks, automated malware, and AI-powered social engineering. This paper aims to analyze emerging risks,...