Canada revisits decision to ban Flipper Zero

In February 2024 the Canadian government announced plans to ban the sale of the Flipper Zero, mainly because of its reported use to steal cars. The Flipper Zero is a portable device that can be used in penetration testing with a focus on wireless devices and access control systems. If that doesnt...

Patch now! First patch Tuesday of 2024 is here

Microsoft has issued patches for 48 security vulnerabilities in the first Patch Tuesday of 2024. With a relatively low number of patches—and only two of them critical—this makes it a relatively quiet month, which is certainly not the norm in January. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures CVE...

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...

5 facts about Vice Society, the ransomware group wreaking havoc on the education sector

Move over Lockbit, there's a new ransomware-as-a-service RaaS player in town attacking the education sector--and its name is Vice Society. Vice Society is believed to be a Russian-based intrusion, exfiltration, and extortion group. And their ideal prey? You guessed it: universities, colleges, and...

WhatsApp hijackers take over your account while you sleep

Late last week, Twitter user Zuk @ihackbanme tweeted an issue about WhatsApp that has the potential to turn heads. The recent WhatsApp accounts takeover is simple and genius. This is how it works: You're sleeping. A "hacker" tries to login to your account via WhatsApp. You get a text message with...

Update Chrome now! Google issues patch for zero day spotted in the wild

Google updated the Stable channel for Chrome to 104.0.5112.101 for Mac and Linux and 104.0.5112.102/101 for Windows which will roll out over the coming days/weeks. Extended stable channel has been updated to 104.0.5112.101 for Mac and 104.0.5112.102 for Windows , which will roll out over the comi...

NGINX zero-day vulnerability: Check if you’re affected

On April 9, hacking group BlueHornet tweeted about an experimental exploit for NGINX 1.18 and promised to warn companies affected by it. On April 10, BlueHornet claimed to have breached the China branch of UBS Securities using the NGINX vulnerability. All we learned on Twitter was that a new...

A new Magecart campaign is making waves

Malwarebytes’ researchers are closely monitoring web skimmers and have noticed that one of the infamous Magecart groups is causing a rise in the number of attacks while gobbling up over a quarter of the total number of attacks in one campaign. Magecart attacks have increased in the past 30 days i...

[updated]QNAP update stops Deadbolt ransomware, annoys some users, starts debate

Earlier this week 25 January, 2022 news broke that a ransomware group was targeting QNAP Network Attached Storage NAS devices. The threat actors claimed the attack was based on a zero-day vulnerability specific to the devices. Today QNAP® Systems, Inc. QNAP pushed out an automatic, forced, update...

A week in security (Nov 8 – Nov 14)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs Multiple video games break after domain name snafu How to remove adware on an Android phone Smart TV adverts put a wrinkle in your programming Are cybercriminals turning away from the US and targeting Europe instead? Patch now! Microsoft plugs actively exploited...

A bug is about to confuse a lot of computers by turning back time 20 years

For those of you that remember the fuss about the Y2K bug, this story may sound familiar. The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency CISA has issued a warning to Critical Infrastructure CI owners and operators, and other users who get the time from GPS, about a GPS Daemon GPSD bug in GPSD...

A week in security (August 16 – August 22)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Podcast: Katie Moussouris hacked Clubhouse. Her emails went unanswered for weeks. How to troubleshoot hardware problems that look like malware problems. Analysts “strongly believe” the Russian state colludes with ransomware gangs. macOS 11’s hidden security...

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...

DNS-over-HTTPS takes another small step towards global domination

Firefox recently announced that it will be rolling out DNS-over-HTTPS or DoH soon to one percent of its Canadian users as part of its partnership with CIRA the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, the Ontario-based organization responsible for managing the .ca top-level domain for Canada and...

A week in security (April 19 – 25)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we interviewed Youssef Sammouda, a 21-year-old bug bounty hunter who is focused on finding vulnerabilities on Facebook. We looked into the CodeCov supply-chain attack, the vulnerabilities in Pulse Secure VPN that are being actively exploited by attackers, and the...

150,000 Verkada security cameras hacked—to make a point

Hackers were able to gain access to camera feeds from Verkada, a tech company that specializes in video security and physical access control, to demonstrate how prevalent surveillance is, reports say. Unfortunately, it also exposed the inner workings of hospitals, clinics, and mental health...

Malvertising campaign on PornHub and other top adult brands exposes users to tech support scams

Threat actors involved in tech support scams have been running a browser locker campaign from November 2020 until February 2021 on the worlds largest adult platforms including PornHub. The same group behind this campaign has been active for much longer and we believe is tied to previous schemes...

3 tips to top up your privacy

Its Data Privacy Day—the perennial event that many internet users may have never heard of, but have strong feelings and opinions about the very things that birthed it in the first place. Originally created to help businesses learn about why online privacy matters, its reach has since extended to...

WOOF locker: Unmasking the browser locker behind a stealthy tech support scam operation

Update 01-27-2020: Shortly after this blog was published we noticed that a large part of the infrastructure behind this browlock was taken down. The malicious server responsible for redirections is no longer responding and we have not observed any new live browlock from this 2 year old campaign. ...

Facial recognition technology: force for good or privacy threat?

All across the world, governments and corporations are looking to invest in or develop facial recognition technology. From law enforcement to marketing campaigns, facial recognition is poised to make a splashy entrance into the mainstream. Biometrics are big business, and third party contracts...

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...

Emotet on the rise with heavy spam campaign

The threat landscape is changing once again, now that the ocean of cryptocurrency miners has shrunk to a small lake. Over the last couple months, we've seen cybercriminals lean back on tried and true methods of financial theft and extortion, with the rise of a familiar Banking Trojan: Emotet...

A month of giveaway spam on Twitter

We've observed a low level spam campaign working its way through Twitter, with just under 2,000 posts visible on public search since September 1. Click to enlarge The posts promote what appears to be CBD oil. For those who don't know And I was one of them—still not sure if this oil is supposed to...

The many faces of omnichannel fraud

The rise of new technologies, social networks, and other means of online communication have brought about compelling changes in industries across the board. For example, in retail, organizations use digital tools such as websites, email, and apps to reach out to their current and potential client...

Mac App Store apps are stealing user data

There is a concerning trend lately in the Mac App Store. Several security researchers have independently found different apps that are collecting sensitive user data and uploading it to servers controlled by the developer. This is referred to as exfiltrating the data. Some of this data is actuall...

A week in security (March 12 – March 18)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we took a look at the inner workings of a fileless attack, explored what happened in a zero day ransomware attack aimed at South Koreans, gave you hints and tips for avoiding cold calls, and took a deep dive into the secretive world of GrayKey. Other news The Equif...

Building an incident response program: creating the framework

In part one of our series, our overview of Building an incident response plan, we discussed what regulations organizations will need to meet in order to address incident/breach response protocols laid out in the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation GDPR. This week, we’ll talk to you about step...

Blast from the past: stowaway Virut delivered with Chinese DDoS bot

Recently, we described an unusual Chinese drive-by attack that was delivering a variant of the Avzhan DDoS bot. The attack also contained multiple components that were not-so-new. Among the exploits, the newest was from 2016. Avzhan is also not a recent malware—the compilation timestamp of the...

OSX.Proton spreading through fake Symantec blog

Sunday night, a series of tweets from security researcher @noarfromspace revealed a new variant of the OSX.Proton malware, spreading in a concerning new method—spoofing security company Symantec's blog. Method of infection The malware is being promoted via a fake Symantec blog site at...

How to tell if your Mac is infected

There are a lot of reasons Mac users don’t sweat getting infected. One: They’ve got a built-in anti-malware system called XProtect that does a decent job of catching known malware. Two: Macs are not plagued by a high number of attacks. Most cybercriminals are focused on infecting PCs. And three:...

Equifax aftermath: How to protect against identity theft

Who here is scrambling around in the aftermath of the recent breach at Equifax to figure out if you've been compromised? Who here is wondering what to do about it if you are? If you're one of the 143 million Americans whose data was accessed by cybercriminals, then you probably raised your hand...

Explained: user agent

If you are the kind of person that uses different browsers or different devices to access websites, you may have noticed that many sites can look quite different depending on which browser you are using. When your browser sends a request to a website, it identifies itself with the user agent stri...

Credit card skimming on the rise for the holiday shopping season

As we head into shopping season, customers arent the only ones getting excited. More online shopping means more opportunities for cybercriminals to grab their share using scams and data theft. One particular threat were following closely and expect to increase over the next several weeks is credi...

Exchange Server security updates updated

Microsoft has re-released the August 2023 Security Updates SUs for Exchange Server. The original release of the SUs, from August 8 2023, had a localization issue with Exchange Server running on a non-English Operating Systems OSes that caused Setup to stop unexpectedly, leaving Exchange services ...

Apple releases emergency updates for two known-to-be-exploited vulnerabilities

On Friday April 7, 2023, Apple released iOS 16.4.1, iPadOS 16.4.1, and macOS 13.3.1 for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, respectively, and our advice is to install them as soon as possible because all three updates include important security fixes. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency...

Fake Hogwarts Legacy cracks lead to adware, scams

Hogwarts Legacy, the much-anticipated Harry Potter video game, has finally landed on major gaming platforms. But, as with all games like this, it comes with a steep price tag, so it's no surprise to suddenly see websites peddling "cracked" versions of the game for free. These sites are easily...

Fake tractor fraudsters plague online transactions

The agriculture sector has been under fire from digital attacks for some time now. The primary problem so far has been ransomware, and law enforcement recently warned that malware authors may be gearing up to time their attacks in this sector for maximum damage. The FBI highlighted that attacks...

Ransomware: Why do backups fail when you need them most?

Its widely known, and endlessly repeated, that the last, best line of defence against the potentially devastating effects of a ransomware attack is your backups. So why do we keep hearing things like this: Were also feeling relatively confident, we have a very good backup system … and then we fin...

Multiple vulnerabilities in popular WordPress plugin WP Fastest Cache

Multiple vulnerabilities have been found in the popular WordPress plugin WP Fastest Cache during an internal audit by the Jetpack Scan team. Jetpack reports that it found an Authenticated SQL Injection vulnerability and a Stored XSS Cross-Site Scripting via Cross-Site Request Forgery CSRF issue. ...

Cloud vs on premises: 3 reasons the Cloud is winning

Thanks to the vast rollout of COVID-19 vaccines to millions of people in the US and Europe, some of us are finally seeing some semblance of a return to normalcy. And organizations, who have experienced first-hand the struggle to stay afloat during months of struggle, are expecting to transition...

Colonial Pipeline attack expected to trigger imminent hardening of cybersecurity rules for federal agencies

UPDATE 04:23 pm Pacific Time, May 12: On Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed an Executive Order that broadly directs the Commerce Department to create cybersecurity standards for companies that sell software to the federal government. The Order comes in the immediate aftermath of a ransomware...

A week in security (January 21 – 27)

Last week on the Malwarebytes Labs blog, we took a look at Modlishka, the latest hurdle in two-factor authentication 2FA, the potential for abuse of push notifications, a malware-phishing combo by the name of CryTekk ransomware, and why we detect PUPs, but enforce the power of users' choice. We...

Official Cardi B website plagued by spammers

We come bearing tidings of proper website maintenance and general housekeeping for singer Cardi B or rather, for her web development team. At first glance, it appeared as though her website had been hacked a few days ago. But a look under the hood told a different story. We were surprised to see...

When three isn’t a crowd: Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks explained

Gone are the days when eavesdropping is just the stuff of spies and the town gossip. In fact, it has evolved to become everyone’s favorite pastime. Thanks to the internet, it is exponentially easier now more than ever to idle by and catch juicy information than to press your ear against your...

Internet Safety Month: How to manage your child’s online presence

When you hear the term "reputation risk management," you might think of a buzzword used in the business sector. Reputation risk management is a term used to describe how companies identify potential risks that may harm their reputation and mitigate them before they blow off. As companies grow, so...

5 cybersecurity questions retailers must ask to protect their businesses

The Target breach in 2013 may not be the biggest retail breach in history, but for many retailers, it was their watershed moment. Point-of-sale PoS terminals were compromised for more than two weeks. 40 million card details and 70 million records of personal information swiped—part of which was...

A first analysis of the i-Soon data leak

Data from a Chinese cybersecurity vendor that works for the Chinese government has exposed a range of hacking tools and services. Although the source is not entirely clear, it seems that a disgruntled staff member of the group leaked the information on purpose. The vendor, i-Soon aka Anxun is...

GitLab warns zero-click vulnerability could lead to account takeovers

GitLab has issued a warning about a critical vulnerability in GitLab Community Edition CE and Enterprise Edition EE. GitLab is an online DevOps platform that allows developers to collaborate on creating software. Organizations have a choice to install GitLab on their own servers or under GitLab’s...

Citrix NetScalers backdoored in widespread exploitation campaign

Fox-IT has uncovered a large-scale exploitation campaign of Citrix NetScalers in a joint effort with the Dutch Institute of Vulnerability Disclosure DIVD. Over 1900 instances were found to have a backdoor in the form of a web shell. These backdoored NetScalers can be taken over at will by an...

Compromised Barracuda appliances equipped with persistent backdoors by attackers

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA has published three malware analysis reports based on malware variants associated with the exploitation of a known vulnerability in Barracuda ESG appliances. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures CVE database lists publicly disclosed...