A week in security (June 1 – June 7)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: What does Facebook know about me? Lock and Code S06E11 Victims risk AsyncRAT infection after being redirected to fake Booking.com sites Juice jacking warnings are back, with a new twist The North Face warns customers about potentially stolen data Scammers are...

Booking.com reservation abused as cybercriminals steal from travelers

Robert Woodford, a recruitment marketing specialist, recently shared on LinkedIn how he fell victim to a highly sophisticated scam while booking a hotel in Verona through Booking.com, providing a striking example of how attacks on the hospitality industry affect travelers. After completing a...

Ransomware hiding in fake AI, business tools

Artificial intelligence AI and small business tools are being abused as smokescreens to hit unsuspecting victims with ransomware. In the masquerade campaigns discovered by Cisco Talos, cybercriminals hid malware behind software and install packages that mimicked the websites or names of the lead...

How the Farm Industry Spied on Animal Rights Activists and Pushed the FBI to Treat Them as Bioterrorists

For years, a powerful farm industry group served up information on activists to the FBI. Records reveal a decade-long effort to see the animal rights movement labeled a “bioterrorism” threat...

How 'Browser-in-the-Middle' Attacks Steal Sessions in Seconds

Would you expect an end user to log on to a cybercriminal's computer, open their browser, and type in their usernames and passwords? Hopefully not! But that's essentially what happens if they fall victim to a Browser-in-the-Middle BitM attack. Like Man-in-the-Middle MitM attacks, BiTM sees...

184 million logins for Instagram, Roblox, Facebook, Snapchat, and more exposed online

A recent discovery by cybersecurity researcher Jeremiah Fowler of an unsecured database containing over 184 million unique login credentials has once again highlighted the growing threat posed by infostealers. While the sheer volume of exposed data—including emails, passwords, and authorization...

Scammers are using AI to impersonate senior officials, warns FBI

The FBI has issued a warning about an ongoing malicious text and voice messaging campaign that impersonates senior US officials. The targets are predominantly current or former US federal or state government officials and their contacts. In the course of this campaign, the cybercriminals have use...

Lumma Stealer: Breaking down the delivery techniques and capabilities of a prolific infostealer

Over the past year, Microsoft observed the persistent growth and operational sophistication of Lumma Stealer, an infostealer malware used by multiple financially motivated threat actors to target various industries. Our investigation into Lumma Stealer’s distribution infrastructure reveals a...

LockBit Leak Shows Affiliates Use Pressure Tactics, Rarely Get Paid

Weeks after LockBit ransomware breach, leaked data reveals how affiliates generate ransomware, set ransom demands, and often walk away unpaid...

On Technique Identification and Threat-Actor Attribution Using LLMs and Embedding Models

Attribution of cyber-attacks remains a complex but critical challenge for cyber defenders. Currently, manual extraction of behavioral indicators from dense forensic documentation causes significant attribution delays, especially following major incidents at the international scale. This research...

Cyber criminals impersonate payroll, HR and benefits platforms to steal information and funds

The relentless battle against online fraud is a constant evolution, a digital chase where security teams and malicious actors continually adapt. The increasing sophistication of attacks is blurring the lines between legitimate user behavior and impersonation attempts. The campaign we are exposing...

The Growing Threat of Vishing: How Cybercriminals Are Using Multimedia to Target You

The Growing Threat of Vishing: How Cybercriminals Are Using Multimedia to Target You By Mark Joseph Marti and Sandra Pagkaliwagan · May 8, 2025 Introduction Imagine being hacked through a phone call, and you can't even complain because you were the one who provided your sensitive information or...

FBI issues warning as scammers target victims of crime

The FBI has issued a warning about an ongoing fraud scheme where criminal scammers are impersonating FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center IC3 employees in order to scam people. Between December 2023 and February 2025, the FBI received over 100 reports of scams involving people posing as IC3...

ClickFix Scam: How to Protect Your Business Against This Evolving Threat

Cybercriminals aren’t always loud and obvious. Sometimes, they play it quiet and smart. One of the tricks of…...

⚡ Weekly Recap: Nation-State Hacks, Spyware Alerts, Deepfake Malware, Supply Chain Backdoors

What if attackers aren't breaking in—they're already inside, watching, and adapting? This week showed a sharp rise in stealth tactics built for long-term access and silent control. AI is being used to shape opinions. Malware is hiding inside software we trust. And old threats are returning under...

Year in Review: AI based threats

2024 wasn't the year that AI rewrote the cybercrime playbook -- but it did turbocharge some of the old tricks. In Cisco Talos' 2024 Year in Review, with the help of our friends at Robust Intelligence now a Cisco company, we dissect how cybercriminals used generative AI to scale up social...

IR Trends Q1 2025: Phishing soars as identity-based attacks persist

Phishing attacks spiked this quarter as threat actors leveraged this method of initial access in half of all engagements, a vast increase from previous quarters. Conversely, the use of valid accounts for initial access was rarely seen this quarter, despite being the top observed method in 2024,...

ToyMaker Uses LAGTOY to Sell Access to CACTUS Ransomware Gangs for Double Extortion

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed the activities of an initial access broker IAB dubbed ToyMaker that has been observed handing over access to double extortion ransomware gangs like CACTUS. The IAB has been assessed with medium confidence to be a financially motivated threat actor, scanning...

A Deep Dive into the Latest Version of Lumma InfoStealer

Unmasking the Evolving Threat: A Deep Dive into the Latest Version of Lumma InfoStealer with Code Flow Obfuscation By Mohideen Abdul Khader · April 21, 2025 Summary Lumma Stealer, first identified in 2022, remains a significant threat to this day, continuously evolving its tactics, techniques, an...

“Follow me” to this fake crypto exchange to claim $500

A type of crypto scam that we reported about in 2024 has ported over to a new platform and changed tactics—a bit. Where the old scams mostly reached me on WhatsApp, the same group of scammers is now using Direct Messages on X. However, the same old trick of "accidentally" sending you login detail...