Google launches Chrome 99, fixes 28 vulnerabilities

The Chrome team announced the promotion of Chrome 99 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux on March 1, 2022. This will roll out over the coming days/weeks. In the desktop version, a total of 28 vulnerabilities were closed. Of these, 11 were classified as high, 15 as medium and two as...

Update now! Chrome patches actively exploited zero-day vulnerability

Google has released an update for its Chrome browser that includes eleven security fixes, one of which has been reportedly exploited in the wild. The vulnerability that is reported as being exploited in the wild has been assigned CVE-2022-0609. CVE-2022-0609 The vulnerability is described as a...

A week in security (July 12 – July 18)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: DNS-over-HTTPS takes another small step towards global domination Nope, that isn’t Elon Musk, and he isn’t offering a free Topmist Dust watch either Four in-the-wild exploits, 13 critical patches headline bumper Patch Tuesday Is crypto’s criminal rollercoaster...

Coalition Against Stalkerware bulks up global membership

Today, the Coalition Against Stalkerware brought aboard 11 new organizations to address the potentially dangerous capabilities of stalkerware, an invasive, digital threat that can rob individuals of their expectation of, and right to, privacy. These types of apps can provide domestic abusers with...

Emotet revisited: pervasive threat still a danger to businesses

One of the most common and pervasive threats for businesses today is Emotet, a banking Trojan turned downloader that has been on our list of top 10 detections for many months in a row. Emotet, which Malwarebytes detects as Trojan.Emotet, has been leveled at consumers and organizations across the...

VPNFilter malware still making waves

Last month, a piece of malware called VPNFilter caused chaos for owners of MikroTik, Lynksys, TP-Link, and Netgear equipment. Roughly 500,000 devices worldwide fell victim, with the unwanted parasite able to listen to traffic, steal credentials, damage devices, and more. Until patches started to...

A week in security (May 21 – May 27)

Last week we told you about a Mac cryptominer using XMRig, an overview of Dreamcast related scams, part 1 of decoding Emotet, and what to do about bad coding habits that die hard. We also published the results of our second CrackMe contest. Other news How a pioneer of machine learning became one ...

Update now! Google patches vulnerabilities for Pixel mobile phones

Googles Pixel Update Bulletin for September included two security patches that are Pixel specific. Both underlying vulnerabilities are rated critical and could lead to privilege escalation and device takeover. The vulnerabilities Publicly disclosed computer security flaws are listed in the Common...

Urgent update for macOS and iOS! Two actively exploited zero-days fixed

Apple has released emergency security updates to fix two zero-day vulnerabilities previously exploited by attackers to hack iPhones, iPads, or Macs. Publicly disclosed computer security flaws are listed in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures CVE database. Its goal is to make it easier to sha...

Sysrv botnet is out to mine Monero on your Windows and Linux servers

In a Twitter thread, the Microsoft Security Intelligence team have revealed new information about the latest versions of the Sysrv botnet. The variant they focused on uses a range of known exploits for vulnerabilities in web apps and databases to install cryptocurrency miners on both Windows and...

The npm netmask vulnerability explained so you can actually understand it

The popular npm netmask library recently encountered a serious problem, explained as follows: The npm netmask package incorrectly evaluates individual ipv4 octets that contain octal strings as left-stripped integers, leading to an inordinate attack surface on hundreds of thousands of projects tha...

A week in security (May 6 – 12)

Last week on Labs, we discussed what to do when you discover a data breach, how 5G could impact cybersecurity strategy, the top six takeaways for user privacy, vulnerabilities in financial mobile apps that put consumers and businesses at risk, and in our series about vital infrastructure, we...

Green card scams: preying on the desperate

Thanks to @nullcookies for providing leads. Most online scams depend on two things for success: a broken or otherwise onerous process to deal with a legitimate entity, and a desperate target population. With immigration, there are many, many burdensome processes to navigate, and most applicants...

A week in security (July 23 – July 29)

Last week on Labs, we looked at an adware called MobiDash getting stealthy, a new strain of Mac malware called Proton that was found after two years, and the ‘Hidden Bee’ miner that was delivered via an improved drive-by download toolkit. We also delved into the security improvements expected in...

Far Cry 5 download offers: embrace the power of “no”

The recently released Far Cry 5 is a video game where you reclaim Montana from a cult obsessed with the "power of yes" by hitting members over the head with a shovel. It's also one of the biggest sellers for publisher Ubisoft to date, and it stands to reason that many people would like to grab a...

Malicious cryptomining and the blacklist conundrum

When Coinhive first came out in September of 2017, it was fairly easy to identify websites using browser miners by looking for a few lines referencing the Coinhive API within the HTML source code. Because this was a new phenomenon, even bad actors didn't have to hide their intentions, and...

The digital entropy of death: link rot

Hot on the heels of a grim blog about digital death comes…another blog about digital death. Except in this case, the recently deceased would be the links that tie the web together, otherwise known as link rot. Link rot is a weird thing. Say I blog for Puppy Chow and I write an article about the...

New Chrome and Firefox extensions block their removal to hijack browsers

What you don't see won't hurt you, must have been the reasoning of the threat actors who created the latest batch of extensions that make these browser hijackers even more difficult to remove. The extensions redirect users away from pages where they can disable or delete them in order to drive...

Using ILSpy to analyze a small adware file

My curiosity was triggered when the telemetry of our heuristic scanner started showing a multitude of reports about a small file called grandfather.exe, so I went out to grab a copy and have a look at it. As you can probably tell from some of the detection names at Virustotal, this is a MSIL...

Something’s phishy: How to detect phishing attempts

Dear you, It appears you need to update your information. Click here to tell us all your secrets. No really, it's totally safe. We're not going to steal your identity, we swear. If only phishing attempts were that obvious. Instead, these days it's hard to tell a phish apart from a foul, if you...

How Outlook notification sounds can lead to zero-click exploits

An Akamai researcher has found two vulnerabilities in Windows that can be combined to achieve a full, zero-click remote code execution RCE in Outlook. Both vulnerabilities were responsibly disclosed to Microsoft and addressed in the August 2023 and October 2023 patch Tuesdays, so the researcher...

Ransomware review: October 2023

This article is based on research by Marcelo Rivero, Malwarebytes' ransomware specialist, who monitors information published by ransomware gangs on their Dark Web sites. In this report, "known attacks" are those where the victim did not pay a ransom. This provides the best overall picture of...

Attackers waited until holidays to hit US government

The government industry in the United States dealt with heavy hitting breaches against local, federal, and state government networks, primarily during the first quarter of 2021. Our telemetry revealed a small spike in a generic backdoor detection, known as Backdoor.Agent, during March of 2021,...

What special needs kids need to stay safe online

Online safety is hard enough for most adults. We reuse weak passwords, we click on suspicious links, and we love to share sensitive information that should be kept private and secure. Just go back a few months to watch adults gleefully sharing photos of their vaccine cards. The consequences of...

BlackMatter, a new ransomware group, claims link to DarkSide, REvil

Theres a new ransomware gang in town—and, frankly, were not at all surprised. After DarkSide disappeared—coincidentally, immediately after Colonial Pipeline gave in to the groups ransom demand of roughly $5M USD worth in Bitcoin—a new ransomware group who calls themselves BlackMatter surfaced on...

“Seven or eight” zero-days: The failed race to fix Kaseya VSA, with Victor Gevers, Lock and Code S02E13

Kaseya VSA included at least “seven or eight” privately known zero-day vulnerabilities before it suffered a widespread ransomware attack that impacted hundreds of businesses, said Victor Gevers, chair of the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure, or DIVD, a volunteer-run organization that...

Discord users tempted by bots offering “free Nitro games”

The last few weeks have seen multiple instances of problematic bots appearing in Discord channels. They bring tidings of gifts, but the reality is quite a bit different. Given so many more young kids and teens are at home during the current global lockdown, they may well see this scam bouncing...

Fintech security: the challenges and fails of a new era

"I have no idea how this app from my bank works, and I don't trust what I don't understand." Josh is not an old curmudgeon or luddite. He's 42 with a decent understanding of technology. Nevertheless, the changes in fintech have come too fast for him. It's not that he doesn't trust his bank. He...

How to protect against stalkerware, a murky but dangerous mobile threat

Last week, we pledged that—in honor of National Cybersecurity Awareness and Domestic Violence Awareness months—we would continue the fight against the online scourge known as stalkerware, or applications used to track and spy on victims without their knowing consent. We told readers that, despite...

Labs Cybercrime Tactics and Techniques report finds businesses hit with 235 percent more threats in Q1

The Malwarebytes Labs Cybercrime Tactics and Techniques Q1 2019 report found businesses at the butt end of a bad joke. In just one year, threats aimed at corporate targets have increased by 235 percent, with Trojans, such as Emotet, and ransomware in particular revving up in the first quarter...

HMRC phish swipes email login, payment details

It's not tax season in the UK, but that hasn't deterred scammers from sending out mail looking to swipe both card details and email logins in one fell swoop. The email, which claims UKGOV has issued a tax refund to the tune of 542.94 GBP, arrives under the following title, which is spectacularly...

Can search extensions keep your searches private?

One of the most common things most of us do on the Internet is search, whether we are looking up the price of the latest gadget or we need to find the address of that great restaurant recommended by a friend. The dizzying number of Google search queries per second more than 40,000, on average tel...

White hat, black hat, and the emergence of the gray hat: the true costs of cybercrime

This post was written by Michael Osterman of Osterman Research. Osterman Research recently completed a major survey on behalf of Malwarebytes to determine the actual cost of cybercrime to businesses. Many studies have focused on the cost of lost reputation, lost future business, and other...

A week in security (June 18 – June 24)

Last week, we took a deep dive into SamSam ransomware, looked at ways how to identify and delete malicious emails, recognized that there are now risks affecting job recruitment portals, analyzed a malicious Android app banking on the popularity of Fortnite, and identified causes and solutions for...

Internet Safety Month: How to protect your child’s privacy online

June marks the beginning of summer. It is also National Internet Safety Month. This is the perfect time to remind vacationers that while it is essential to check that everything you need is packed and ready for a trip, it is equally vital for the family to take steps in securing their devices and...

A week in security (April 09 – April 15)

Last week, we took a look at a malware-campaign called FakeUpdates, methods to use secure instant messaging, the inner workings of a decryption tool, and some Facebook spam campaigns. We also published our first quarterly Malwarebytes Labs CTNT report of 2018. Other news A security researcher...

BlueBorne – Bluetooth’s airborne influenza

Armis Labs has discovered a new attack vector that targets any device that has Bluetooth capability. This includes mobile, desktop, and IoT — roughly accounting for 8.2 billion devices. All operating systems are susceptible — Android, iOS, Windows, and Linux. Dubbed BlueBorne, it exposes several...

SteelCon: Mahkra ni Orroz

I recently gave a talk at Sheffield's SteelCon, a huge security event spread over a few days with no end of interesting activities taking place. My presentation, called Makhra ni Orroz, is a good 45 minutes of non stop talking and pictures and things. It's also a bit different in terms of what I...

Hansa Market on Dark Web seized by Dutch police

In a simultaneous press conference issued by the Dutch police and US Attorney General Jeff Sessions we learned that the Dark Web market places Alphabay and Hansa market have been seized and shut down by international cooperating authorities. As it turned out Hansa Market was already under control...

A .NET malware abusing legitimate ffmpeg

There is a growing trend among malware authors to incorporate legitimate applications in their malicious package. This time, we analyzed a malware downloading a legitimate ffmpeg. Using this application, this simple spyware written in .NET got a powerful feature. Most of the malware is sufficient...

Police investigate sexual assault on an avatar

British police are investigating a case involving a virtual sexual assault of a girls avatar. Even though there was no physical violence involved the incident will be investigated as it has caused psychological trauma. By definition, an avatar is a virtual representation of a user and is driven b...

Update Chrome now! Google fixes critical vulnerability in Autofill payments

Google has released a Chrome update which includes five security fixes. One of these security fixes is for a critical vulnerability in Autofill payments. Google labels vulnerabilities as critical if they allow an attacker to run arbitrary code on the underlying platform with the user's privileges...

TikTok vulnerability could have allowed hijackers to take over accounts

Microsoft has released a detailed rundown of an issue, now fixed, which was potentially dangerous for users of TikTok. The problem, flagged as a "high-severity vulnerability" by Microsoft, required several steps chained together in order to function. Attackers making use of it could have...

Hertzbleed exposes computers’ secret whispers

Hertzbleed is the name for a vulnerability that can be used to obtain cryptographic keys and other secret data from Intel and AMD CPUs, remotely. It works by monitoring changes in power consumption, which can be deduced by the careful timing of known workloads, thanks to a processor power saving...

Update Chrome now: Four high risk vulnerabilities found

Users of Chrome have been advised to apply updates as soon as possible related to seven security vulnerabilities. CISA has also warned that the vulnerabilities could be used to take control of affected systems. Although no detailed explanation of how these vulnerabilities work has been released,...

Hackers can take over accounts you haven’t even created yet

Account hijacking has sadly become a regular, everyday occurrence. But when it comes to hijacking accounts before they are even created? Thats something youd never think possible—but it is. Two security researchers, Avinash Sudhodanan and Andrew Paverd, call this new class of attack a...

Kaseya Unitrends has unpatched vulnerabilities that could help attackers expand a breach

It must not be easy to work at Kaseya right now. While they are working as hard as they can to help customers, and customers of their customers, recover from the REvil ransomware attack at the beginning of July, a new vulnerability in their software has been disclosed. As a sidenote, Kaseya...

What does WiFi stand for?

We use WiFi to connect to the Internet, but what is it, and what does it stand for? How does it have such a catchy name, and why do we sometimes have a weak Internet connection with a strong WiFi signal and vice versa? Read on to answer these questions and more. What does WiFi mean? Many people...

Would real identities make social media safer?

“Use real identities to reduce abuse online” is a talking point youve almost certainly seen down the years. It also seems to come around like clockwork every other month, and is currently a hot topic in the UK after prominent journalists / media personalities raised the issue. It’s an interesting...

A week in security (January 18 – January 24)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we looked at changes to WhatsApp’s privacy policy, we provided information about Malwarebytes being targeted by the same threat actor that was implicated in the SolarWinds breach, we told the story of ZeroLogon, looked at the pros and cons of Zoom watermarking,...