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...

FoggyWeb, analysis of a Nobelium backdoor

Microsofts Threat Intelligence Center has been analyzing a custom-built backdoor that has been used by the Nobelium group since April 2021. Nobelium is the name given to the threat actor behind the attacks against SolarWinds, the Sunburst backdoor, TEARDROP malware, GoldMax malware, and other...

The Clubhouse database “breach” is likely a non-breach. Here’s why.

Before the work week ended last week Friday, a security researcher found a leak of what is claimed to be full phone numbers of users of Clubhouse, the new social media app everyone is talking about and just recently came out of beta. Clubhouse is an audio-only social media platform where, unlike...

Deep learning: An explanation and a peek into the future

Deep learning is one of the most advanced forms of machine learning, and is showing new developments in many industries. In this article, well explain the concept and give some examples of the latest and greatest ways its being used. What is deep learning? There have been many attempts at creatin...

Rocket Loader skimmer impersonates CloudFlare library in clever scheme

Update: The digital certificate issued for https.ps has been revoked by GlobalSign. Fraudsters are known for using social engineering tricks to dupe their victims, often times by impersonating authority figures to instill trust. In a recent blog post, we noted how criminals behind Magecart skimme...

Online privacy in 2019: a legislative review

For decades, the United States treated data privacy like an aging home, patching individual leaks and drafts only when a new storm hit. The country passed a law protecting healthcare-related information, and not much else. It then passed a law protecting video rental information, and not much els...

A week in security (November 19 – 25)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we took a look at a devastating business email compromise attack, web skimming antics, and the fresh perils of Deepfakes. We also checked out some Chrome bug issues, and took the deepest of deep dives into DNA testing. Other cybersecurity news Adobe Flash bug—get...

What’s causing the cybersecurity skills gap?

The proliferation of next-gen technology into mainstream society has been a boon for consumers, entrepreneurs, and business owners alike. Between the rise of mobile computing, the Internet of Things IoT, and modern social media, our society is more connected than ever before. But all of this...

Perspectives on Russian hacking

Russia is an endlessly fascinating subject both in and around infosec. Recent years have shifted attention away from pure malware capabilities, to psyops, social engineering, and an endless slew of mind games designed to destabilize and keep nations ever-so-slightly off balance. Security firms in...

TLS 1.3 is nearly here

TLS stands for "Transport Layer Security" and it's rather important. Why's that? Oh, I'm glad you asked. Here's me, yelling my password across the office to you: "PASSWORD!!!" You heard me loud and clear, right? But so did basically anyone else nearby. Now let's work in a little TLS love and...

How artificial intelligence and machine learning will impact cybersecurity

Artificial intelligence AI and machine learning ML are hot topics in technology. New use cases and applications are discussed daily—from search results recommendations to smart cars. But what are cybersecurity organizations doing with this tech? What does it take to render additional security out...

Human Factor Podcast: Jenny Radcliffe and Chris Boyd

A little while ago, I was invited to take part in Jenny Radcliffe's Human Factor Podcast. With 44 episodes strong and counting!, Jenny spends an hour or so talking at length with her guests who are professional investigators, security advocates, all-round educators, tireless consultant/conference...

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...

Expired domain names and malvertising

In Q1 and Q2 of 2017, we noticed a sharp decline in drive-by downloads coming from compromised websites. The campaigns of the past are either gone Pseudo Darkleech or have changed focus EITest using social engineering techniques. Malvertising - which has remained steady and is currently the main...

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...

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...

Update Chrome! Google patches actively exploited zero-day vulnerability

Google has released an update for Chrome which includes four security fixes, including one for a vulnerability that has reportedly already been exploited. The easiest way to update Chrome is to allow it to update automatically, which basically uses the same method as outlined below but does not...

Joomla! vulnerability is being actively exploited

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA has added a vulnerability for the Joomla! Content Management System CMS to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. This means that Federal Civilian Executive Branch FCEB agencies need to...

Pegasus spyware and how it exploited a WebP vulnerability

Recent events have demonstrated very clearly just how persistent and wide-spread the Pegasus spyware is. For those that have missed the subtle clues, we have tried to construct a clear picture. We attempted to follow the timeline of events, but have made some adjustments to keep the flow of the...

Malware on the Google Play store leads to harmful phishing sites

A family of malicious apps from developer Mobile apps Group are listed on Google Play and infected with Android/Trojan.HiddenAds.BTGTHB. In total, four apps are listed, and together they have amassed at least one million downloads. Older versions of these apps have been detected in the past as...

The struggle to reduce bug-fixing time is real

There are many reasons why we want a bug fixed as soon as we can, but there are also plenty of reasons why doing it “right now” is not an option. This phenomenon starts at the side of the developers. The average time to fix a bug seems to vary depending on the platform the bug was found in. What ...

New Mac malware raises more questions about Apple’s security patching

Apples reputation on security has been taking a beating lately. As mentioned in some of our previous coverage, security researcher Joshua Long recently shone a light on problems with Apples security patching strategy. His findings showed a shocking number of cases where Apple patched 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...

Child identity theft, part 1: On familiar fraud

In 2013, 30-year-old Axton Betz-Hamilton received an angry phone call from her father two weeks after her mother, Pam, died. "What the hell were you thinking?" he screamed. He had just unearthed a credit card statement in her name that had run over its limit from a box of her mother’s paperwork...

CEOs offer their own view of a US data privacy law

Last week, the chief executives of more than 50 mid- and large-sized companies urged Congress to pass a national data privacy law to regulate how companies collect, use, and share Americans’ data. Buried deep within the chief executives’ recommendations for such a law, presented as a policy...

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...

Explained: Payment Service Directive 2 (PSD2)

Payment Service Directive 2 PSD2 is the implementation of a European guideline designed to further harmonize money transfers inside the EU. The ultimate goal of this directive is to simplify payments across borders so that it's as easy as transferring money within the same country. Since the EU w...

Mobile Menace Monday: Adware MobiDash gets stealthy

The Adware known as MobiDash, detected by Malwarebytes for Android as Android/Adware.MobiDash, is far from a new. However, this ad-displaying nuisance now comes with some additional stealth features. First appearing last spring, these new features are not limited to a single variant of MobiDash...

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...

Avzhan DDoS bot dropped by Chinese drive-by attack

The Avzhan DDoS bot has been known since 2010, but recently we saw it in wild again, being dropped by a Chinese drive-by attack. In this post, we'll take a deep dive into its functionality and compare the sample we captured with the one described in the past. Analyzed sample...

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...

Update your Android devices now! Google patches two actively exploited vulnerabilities

Google has patched 53 vulnerabilities in its Android October security updates, two of which are known to be actively exploited. Google's security bulletin notes that there are indications that these two vulnerabilities may be under limited, targeted exploitation. If your Android phone is at patch...

Ford says it’s safe to drive its cars with a WiFi vulnerability

Ford has released information about a buffer overflow vulnerability in its SYNC 3 infotainment system. Ford learned from a supplier that a security researcher had discovered a vulnerability in the Wi-Fi software driver supplied for use in the SYNC 3 infotainment system available on some Ford and...

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,...

Update now! Mozilla patches two actively exploited vulnerabilities

Mozilla has announced it has fixed security vulnerabilities in Firefox 97.0.2, Firefox ESR 91.6.1, Firefox for Android 97.3.0, and Focus 97.3.0. Users should install the out-of-band security update as soon as possible, since it is designed to apply a fix for two vulnerabilities that are known to ...

Why Data Privacy Day matters: A Lock and Code special with Mozilla, DuckDuckGo, and EFF

You can read our full-length blog here about the importance of Data Privacy Day and data privacy in general Today is a special day, not just because January 28 marks Data Privacy Day in the United States and in several countries across the world, but because it also marks the return of our hit...

QR code scams are making a comeback

Just when we thought the QR code was on its way out, the pandemic has led to a return of the scannable shortcut. COVID-19 has meant finding a digital equivalent to things normally handed out physically, like menus, tour guides, and other paperwork, and many organizations have adopted the QR code ...

APTs and COVID-19: How advanced persistent threats use the coronavirus as a lure

The coronavirus COVID-19 has become a global pandemic, and this is a golden time for attackers to take advantage of our collective fear to increase the likelihood of successful attack. True to form, they've been doing just that: performing spam and spear phishing campaigns using coronavirus as a...

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...

Explained: like-farming

Like-farming, aka like-harvesting, is a method used by commercial parties and scammers alike to raise the popularity of a site or domain. The ultimate dream of every like-farmer is for his post to go viral by accumulating as many likes and shares as possible from all over the world. Like-farmers...

Hackers snab emails and more in Microsoft Outlook, Hotmail, and MSN compromise

Long-time users of certain Microsoft products, such as Hotmail, MSN, and Outlook found they may be wrapped up in a hack grabbing snippets of email information, and in some cases, a little bit more. Microsoft email services have been around forever in Internet time. Yet, many users still have a fe...

Yes, Chromebooks can and do get infected

As a Mac malware specialist, I've seen more than my share of folks saying "Macs don't get viruses" over the years. I've seen and experienced first-hand that this isn't true—even on iOS, where despite having tight, built-in security, iPhones are still capable of getting infected by rare malware. I...

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 (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...

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 ...

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...

Securing financial data of the future: behavioral biometrics explained

Some of us would be pretty excited about a brave, new passwordless world. Gone would be the days of having to write down 27 passwords and post them beside monitor screens. Or having to yell them out loud to a colleague on the other side of the room. For banks and other financial institutions, a...