Update Chrome now! Google patches critical vulnerability being exploited in the wild

Google has released an update for Chrome Desktop which includes one critical security fix. There is an active exploit for the patched vulnerability, according to Google, which means cybercriminals are aware of the vulnerability and are using it. If youre a Chrome user on Windows, Mac, or Linux, y...

Threatening rogue finance apps removed from the Apple Store

Multiple apps have been removed from the App Store in India after a large helping of unethical behaviour was aimed at their users. TechCrunch reports that "Pocket Kash, White Kash, Golden Kash, and OK Rupee" among others were taken down after getting close to the top 20 finance app listing spots...

US dangles $10 million reward for information about Cl0p ransomware gang

The US Department of States national security rewards program, Rewards for Justice RFJ, is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information linking the Cl0p ransomware gang, or any other malicious cyber actors targeting US critical infrastructure, to a foreign government. Advisory from...

Update now, there's a Chrome zero-day in the wild

Google has announced an important update for Chrome to help fend off a zero-day. The update fixes several issues, and readers are advised to ensure they're using the latest version of the browser. Mitigation If youre using Chrome on Mac, Windows, or Linux, you need to update as soon as you possib...

Malwarebytes earns AV-TEST Top Product awards for fifth consecutive quarter

AV-TEST, a leading independent tester of cybersecurity solutions, has just ranked Malwarebytes as a Top Product for consumers and businesses for the fifth quarter in a row. Every two months, experts at AV-Test evaluate Windows antivirus software across three categories: Protection against malware...

Web skimmer found on website of Liquor Control Board of Ontario

On January 12, 2023, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario LCBO published a news release about a cybersecurity incident, affecting online sales through LCBO.com. It is one of the largest retailers and wholesalers of beverage alcohol in the world. Web skimmer The cybersecurity incident was a web...

Hundreds of Microsoft SQL servers found to be backdoored

Researchers at DCSO CyTec recently found a backdoor that specifically targets Microsoft SQL servers. The malware acts as an Extended Stored Procedure, which is a special type of extension used by Microsoft SQL servers. After scanning approximately 600,000 servers worldwide, they found 285 servers...

SonicWall urges customers to patch critical SQL injection bug ASAP

Cybersecurity hardware company, SonicWall, recently released a public security notice about a critical SQL injection flaw affecting its GMS Global Management System and Analytics On-Prem products. The flaw, which is tracked as CVE-2022-22280, is given a 9.4 critical rating. With the high capabili...

Firefox, Thunderbird, receive patches for critical security issues

Mozilla has published updates for two critical security issues in Firefox and Thunderbird, demonstrated during Pwn2Own Vancouver. The vulnerabilities, discovered in the Firefox JavaScript engine shared by the Firefox-based Tor browser relate to Firefox 100.0.2, Firefox for Android 100.3.0, and...

Adobe patches actively exploited Magento/Adobe Commerce zero-day

Adobe has released an emergency advisory for users of its Commerce and Magento platforms. It explains that a critical zero-day vulnerability is actively being exploited in attacks against sites that use these two content management system CMSs. Users should apply the patch as soon as possible. Th...

Let’s Encrypt to revoke “mis-issued” certificates

If you use a Let’s Encrypt SSL/TLS certificate, you may wish to check your account over the coming days. Revocation is coming, and you’ve only got until tomorrow to figure things out. What’s the deal with free certificates? If you’re running a website, you want to make sure that it’s HTTPs. It...

Mac users, update now! “Powerdir” flaw could allow attackers to spy on you

If you have been forgoing updating your Mac, this article might make you think twice. The Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team has discovered a vulnerability in macOS, which allows malicious apps to successfully bypass a users privacy preferences. This means attackers could access personal data...

Phishing campaign goes old school, dusts off Morse code

In an extensive report about a phishing campaign, the Microsoft 365 Defender Threat Intelligence Team describes a number of encoding techniques that were deployed by the phishers. And one of them was Morse code. While Morse code may seem like ancient communication technology to some, it does have...

Second colossal LinkedIn “breach” in 3 months, almost all users affected

LinkedIn has reportedly been breached—again—following reports of a massive sale of information scraped from 500M LinkedIn user profiles in the underground in May. According to Privacy Shark, the VPN company who first reported on this incident, a seller called TomLiner showed them he was in...

Complicated Active Directory setups are undermining security

Security researchers and technical architects from SpecterOps have found that almost every Active Directory installation they have looked at over the last decade has had some kind of misconfiguration issue. And misconfigurations can lead to security issues, such as privilege escalation methods. T...

Hotel staff bust Hermes SMS scammer with suspiciously large number of cables

If you’re in the UK, you’ve likely received a fake delivery SMS at this point. The original big driver for this over the pandemic was a non-stop wave of Royal Mail phishing scams. As that article mentions, most if not all of our interactions with organisations is done by mobile. I receive medical...

A week in security (May 10 – 16)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we watched and reported on the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack as developments of its story unfolded. This attack triggered the White House to refine a planned Executive Order on cybersecurity. We also profiled DarkSide, the ransomware responsible for the...

FIN7 sysadmin behind “billions in damage” gets 10 years

In 2018 three high-ranking members of a sophisticated international cybercrime group operating out of Eastern Europe were arrested and taken into custody by US authorities. Ukrainian nationals Dmytro Fedorov, Fedir Hladyr, and Andrii Kolpakov, were members of a prolific hacking group widely known...

How ransomware gangs are connected, sharing resources and tactics

Many of us who read the news daily encounter a regular drum beat of ransomware stories that are both worrying and heartbreaking. And what many of us don’t realize is that they are often interconnected. Some of the gangs behind the ransomware campaigns that we read about have established a...

Don’t post it! Six social media safety sins to say goodbye to

If you or anyone you know is committing the below social media sins, it’s time to change that habit of an online lifetime. Even the most innocuous of things can cause trouble down the line, because everyone’s threat model is different. Unfortunately, people tend to realise what their threat model...

Spotify resets some user logins after hacker database found floating online

A team of researchers working for vpnMentor has found a treasure trove in the form of an unsecured Elasticsearch database containing over 380 million records. The trove contained login credentials and other data belonging to Spotify users. So whats Spotify doing leaving its user data hanging arou...

Silent Librarian APT right on schedule for 20/21 academic year

A threat actor known as Silent Librarian/TA407/COBALT DICKENS has been actively targeting universities via spear phishing campaigns since schools and universities went back. In mid-September, we were tipped off by one of our customers about a new active campaign from this APT group. Based off a...

Introducing Malwarebytes Privacy

Here at Malwarebytes, we’re no strangers to using virtual private networks VPNs to protect our privacy while browsing online. Regular readers of our blog will remember that we’ve advised on VPN usage on many occasions, whether for mobile device users looking for anonymity or business owners wanti...

Stalkerware and online stalking are accepted by Americans. Why?

Despite warnings from domestic abuse networks, privacy rights advocates, and a committed faction of cybersecurity vendors, Americans may be accepting and minimizing online stalking behaviors, including the use of invasive apps that can pry into a user’s text messages, emails, photos, videos, and...

5 tips for building an effective security operations center (SOC)

Security is more than just tools and processes. It is also the people that develop and operate security systems. Creating systems in which security professionals can work efficiently and effectively with current technologies is key to keeping your data and networks secure. Many enterprise...

Disney+ security and service issues: Here’s what we know so far

The long wait is over. Disney+, the new video-streaming service to rival Netflix and Amazon Prime, debuted last week to much fanfare, racking up 10 million subscribers within a single day of launch. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the kind of splash the majority of users predicted, as they were met with...

Vital infrastructure: emergency services

Organizations in the emergency services sector are there for the public to provide help when situations get out of hand or are too much to handle. This can be because the problem requires special tools and skills to use them, and the organizations are set up to provide assistance at short notice...

Ransomware continues assault against cities and businesses

Ransomware continues to make waves in the US, forcing multiple cities and organizations into tough choices. Pressed for cash and time, local government organizations are left with few options: Either pay the ransom as soon as possible and encourage criminals to continue bringing essential service...

Under the hoodie: why money, power, and ego drive hackers to cybercrime

Just one more hour behind the hot grill flipping burgers, and Derek could call it a day. Under his musty hat, his hair was matted down with sweat, and his work uniform was spattered with grease. He knew he’d smell the processed meat and smoke for the next three days, even after he’d showered. But...

A week in security (June 11 – June 17)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we discussed how to protect the online privacy of children, we gave you a spring 2018 overview of exploit kits, rounded up the ongoing discussions about the VPNFilter malware, and discussed the struggles of UK law enforcement with modern-day cybercrime. Other news...

Instagram story spam claims free Apple Watch

I have to admit, I'm not 100 percent sure who Elton Castee is. "Who's that?" you ask? Digging around revealed that he's big on YouTube, has done some films, and raises money for dogs, which is very cool. He's also popular on Instagram, with 400k+ followers. With that in mind, we've seen a few...

Spartacus ransomware: introduction to a strain of unsophisticated malware

Spartacus ransomware is a new sample that has been circulating in 2018. Written in C, the original sample is obfuscated, which we will go over as we extract it to its readable state. Spartacus is a relatively straight-forward ransomware sample and uses some similar techniques and code to others w...

A week in security (January 22 – January 28)

Last week on Labs, we analyzed a rogue app outbreak on Twitter, took a look at how Singapore's government is faring with network defense, and rolled out our 2017 State of Malware report. We also became visionaries in Gartner's Magic Quadrant report and explored a VR data mishap. Other news Man...

How World Cup crypto prediction sites take your money

Crypto prediction and betting sites are appearing around the World Cup, and researchers have already tracked scams aimed at fans, including fake ticketing, fixed-match betting, prediction scams, and fan-branded meme coins. We investigated one prediction site ourselves. While we aren't claiming...

Google ad for Facebook redirects to scam

Today, we are looking at a malicious ad campaign targeting Facebook users via Google search. It is well-known that tech support scammers attract new victims by buying ads for certain keywords related to their audience. What is perhaps less known is how it is even possible to impersonate top brand...

Disturbing robocaller fined $9.9 million

A federal court in Montana has fined a man $9.9 million after he was found responsible for causing thousands of unlawful and malicious spoofed robocalls. Sometimes there is good news. Well, for almost everybody except for the robocaller who was found guilty of unlawful robocalls to people in stat...

Act now! Ivanti vulnerabilities are being actively exploited

Software vendor Ivanti has warned customers about two actively exploited vulnerabilities in all supported versions of Ivanti Connect Secure and Ivanti Policy Secure Gateways. Successful exploitation would give an attacker the ability to run arbitrary code on Ivantis Virtual Private Network VPN...

Emergency update! Apple patches three zero-days

Apple has released security updates for several products to address a handful of zero-day vulnerabilities that may already have been used by criminals. Updates are available for: iOS 16.7 and iPadOS 16.7 iOS 17.0.1 and iPadOS 17.0.1 watchOS 9.6.3 watchOS 10.0.1 macOS Ventura 13.6 macOS Monterey...

Europol lifts the lid on cybercrime tactics

The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation Europol, has published a report that examines developments in cyberattacks, discussing new methodologies and threats observed by Europols operational analysts. The report also discusses the criminal organizations behind cyberattacks and th...

Two Apple issues added by CISA to its catalog of known exploited vulnerabilities

The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency CISA has added two new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. This means that Federal Civilian Executive Branch FCEB agencies need to remediate this vulnerability by October 2, 20...

Financial services company OneMain fined $4.25 million for security lapses

A series of security errors and mishaps has cost personal loan provider OneMain $4.25m in penalties, issued by the New York State department of financial services. The fines, coming at the end of a detailed investigation into how security practices at the company were determined to be below-par,...

Update now! Apple fixes actively exploited vulnerability and introduces new features

Apple has released security updates for several products. Most notably one of the updates fixes an actively exploited vulnerability in the WebKit component of iOS 15.7.4 and iPadOS 15.7.4 that was fixed earlier in macOS Ventura 13.2.1, iOS 16.3.1, iPadOS 16.3.1, and Safari 16.3. You can find the...

Fake DDoS services set up to trap cybercriminals

The "online criminal marketplace" has been disrupted via several fake Distributed Denial of Service DDoS tools, according to an announcement from The British National Crime Agency NCA. Not everyone on an underground forum is up to no good. Some folks register on hacking sites and services out of...

Medibank customers' personal data compromised by cyber attack

Australian health care insurance company Medibank confirmed that the threat actor behind a cyberattack on the company had access to the data of at least 4 million customers. Although Medibank at first said that there was "no evidence that customer data has been accessed," a week later their...

Researchers found one-click exploits in Discord and Teams

A group of security researchers have discovered a series of vulnerabilities in Electron, the software underlying popular apps like Discord, Microsoft Teams, and many others, used by tens of millions of people all over the world. Electron is a framework that allows developers to create desktop...

Watch out for the email that says “You have a new voicemail!”

A phishing campaign is using voicemail notification messages to go after victims Office 365 credentials. According to researchers at ZScaler, the campaign uses spoofed emails with an HTML attachment that contains encoded javascript. The email claims that you have a new voicemail and that you can...

APT34 targets Jordan Government using new Saitama backdoor

On April 26th, we identified a suspicious email that targeted a government official from Jordans foreign ministry. The email contained a malicious Excel document that drops a new backdoor named Saitama. Following our investigation, we were able to attribute this attack to the known Iranian Actor...

GitLab issues security updates; watch out for hard coded passwords

GitLab has issued several critical security updates, with users of the version control software urged to upgrade their installations as soon as possible. One of the fixes is for a hard coded password issue. What is distributed version control? Distributed version control is a way for an...

Facebook phish claims “Someone tried to log into your account”

Watch out for bogus Facebook phishing messages winging their way to your mailbox. The ruse is quite simple: The mail senders are relying on the recipient’s sense of panic to respond without thinking about it. The mail looks professional enough, and seeks to imitate what would be a fairly typical...

A week in security (Nov 1 – Nov 7)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs Celebrity jewelry house Graff falls victim to ransomware Lessons from a real-life ransomware attack Is Apples Safari browser the last, best hope for web privacy? What is Twitch? Google patches zero-day vulnerability, and others, in Android Zuckerbergs Metaverse, and...