Who is managing the security of medical management apps?

One truth that is consistent across every sector—be it technology or education—is that software is vulnerable, which means that any device running software applications is also at risk. While virtually any application-running device could be compromised by an attacker, vulnerabilities in medical...

Exploring the virtual worlds of advergaming

Games and analytics services ran into one another headfirst recently, in a spat related to the game Conan Exiles. Developers had to remove a tracking service, which allowed game developers to track where Steam players had come from. By generating an API key and integrating it into the game,...

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...

BYOD, why don’t you?

Bring Your Own Device BYOD is a policy that allows employees to bring their own devices to the workplace and use them there. At one time, this was the latest bonus to attract and keep employees happy—plus save a few bucks. Nowadays the question is more like: Is there anyone who doesn't bring his...

Don’t let these gaming threats give you a Game Over

With EGX, the biggest gaming event in the UK opening its doors today, we thought it'd be timely to remind you of some of the threats currently facing gamers. No matter what type of game, client, or system you use, there's always something waiting to try and give you a bad day where the safety of...

Solution Corner: Malwarebytes for Android

People have become increasingly reliant on their mobile devices in recent years. Smartphones and tablets have revolutionized daily life. Unfortunately, such rapid growth has also attracted criminals, bringing Android up to par with Windows in terms of infection rates. Android threat landscape A...

Barclays Bank customers targeted by phishers

Today we have a phish targeting customers of Barclays Bank, located at: bankdotbarclaydotcodotukdotolbdotauthdotloginlinkdotactiondotp1242557947640dotchofcgdotcom/bd/ The phish opens up with an initial lunge for personal details: The first page asks for a surname, then offers the potential victim...

Meta ordered to pay $942 million over harm to children

A New Mexico court has ordered Meta to pay a total of $942 million after finding that Facebook and Instagram harmed young users and that the company misled consumers about the safety of its platforms. Reportedly, the decision combines a $375 million civil-penalty verdict from March with a newly...

Keep getting calls from questionable numbers? Meet Scam Number Check

Have you ever gotten a phone call and had a gut feeling that those random digits looked extra suspicious? It happens to millions of people every day. While many people have trained themselves to ignore such calls, they still pose a threat across the US. In fact, scammers stole more than $21 billi...

Infostealers are becoming the go-to phishing payload

Phishing has changed. Slowly but surely, cybercriminals are turning to infostealers instead. Traditional phishing hasn't gone away. Far from it. But many attackers are no longer focused solely on tricking victims into entering usernames and passwords on fake login pages. Instead, they are using...

WhatsApp hack: Meta wins payout over NSO Group spyware

Meta has won almost $170m in damages from Israel-based NSO Group, maker of the Pegasus spyware. The ruling comes after a six-year legal case against the company after Meta accused it of misusing its servers to spy on users. According to the original complaint against NSO Group, filed in October...

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...

A week in security (July 17 - 23)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: CISA: You've got two weeks to patch Citrix NetScaler vulnerability CVE-2023-3519 Estee Lauder targeted by Cl0p and BlackCat ransomware groups Google fixes "Bad.Build" Cloud Build flaw, researchers say it's not enough Accidental VirusTotal upload is a valuable...

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,...

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...

Cybercrime, fraud, and insider threats increased in 2020 in the UK, report says

Since the initial lockdown, we have seen the rise of certain types of cybercrime, including scams and fraud campaigns that either bank on the global COVID-19 pandemic or take advantage of potential victims that adhere to work-from-home measures. In the UK, the National Crime Agency NCA has...

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...

Report goes “behind enemy lines” to reveal SilverFish cyber-espionage group

The PRODAFT Threat Intelligence Team has published a report pdf that gives an unusually clear look at the size and structure of organized cybercrime. It uncovered a global cybercrime campaign that uses modern management methods, sophisticated tools—including its own malware testing sandbox—and ha...

A week in security (March 15 – 21)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, our podcast featured Adam Kujawa, who talked us through our 2021 State of Malware report. We cover our own research on: Royal mail parcel scam How your iPhone can tell you if you’re being stalked Careers in cybersecurity ProxyLogon PoC whack-a-mole Teen behind 2020...

China’s RedEcho accused of targeting India’s power grids

RedEcho, an advanced persistent threat APT group from China, has attempted to infiltrate the systems behind Indias power grids, according to a threat analysis report from Recorded Future PDF. It appears that what triggered this attempt to gain a foothold in Indias critical power generation and...

Defending online anonymity and speech with Eva Galperin: Lock and Code S02E03

This week on Lock and Code, we discuss the top security headlines generated right here on Labs. In addition, we talk to Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity for Electronic Frontier Foundation, about the importance of protecting online anonymity and speech. In January, the New York Times expose...

Romance scams: FTC reveals $304 million of heartache

In 2020, reported losses to the FTC for romance scams went up by 50% from 2019, totalling $304 million. And things werent exactly good before: Romance scams have cost people a fortune for 3 years running, according to the FTC. Their latest report suggests a steady rise in these kind of scams...

Data privacy law updates eyed by Singapore

In early 2019, Singapore’s data privacy regulators proposed that the country’s data privacy law could use two new updates—a data breach notification requirement and a right of data portability for the country’s residents. The proposed additions are commonplace in several data privacy laws around...

A week in security (April 13 – 19)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we looked at how to avoid Zoom bombing, weighed the risks of surveillance versus pandemics, and dug into a spot of WiFi credential theft. Other cybersecurity news: Malware creeps back into the home: With a pandemic forcing much of the workforce into remote position...

Washington Privacy Act welcomed by corporate and nonprofit actors

The steady parade of US data privacy legislation continued last month in Washington with the introduction of an improved bill that would grant state residents the rights to access, control, delete, and port their data, as well as opting out of data sales. The bill, called the Washington Privacy...

Spear phishing 101: what you need to know

Phishing, a cyberattack method as old as viruses and Nigerian Princes, continues to be one of the most popular means of initiating a breach against individuals and organizations, even in 2020. The tactic is so effective, it has spawned a multitude of sub-methods, including smishing phishing via...

A week in security (September 9 – 15)

Last week on the Labs blog, we looked at free VPN offerings, how malware can hinder vital emergency services, and explored how the Heartbleed vulnerability is still causing problems. We also talked about a large FTC settlement involving Google, and how to keep an eye out for leaky AWS buckets...

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 (April 16 – April 22)

Last week, we took a stroll down memory lane talking about Facebook and MySpace, noticed a change in the Magnitude exploit kit—wherein it started adopting the GandCrab ransomware, took a good look at a new form of adware that is based on Python, chatted a bit about Russian hacking with a...

DDoS attacks are growing: What can businesses do?

Depending on the type and size of your organization, a DDoS Distributed Denial of Service attack can be anything from a small nuisance to something that can break your revenue stream and damage it permanently. A DDoS attack can cripple some online businesses for a period of time long enough to se...

A week in security (March 05 – March 11)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we paid homage to several women in tech, including some of our very own, on International Women's Day and shared their stories. We also looked into an adware posing as an Android app that claims to live stream the 2018 Winter Olympics, exposed scammers that go by t...

Physician, protect thyself: healthcare cybersecurity circling the drain

No one knows you better than you do. But thanks to technology advances and the continued digitization of healthcare data accumulation and sharing processes, we can also honestly say the same about your healthcare provider. Indeed, every time we get in touch with a health professional, data is...

Locky ransomware returns to the game with two new flavors

We recently observed a fresh malicious spam campaign pushed through the Necurs botnet distributing so far, two new variants of Locky ransomware. In our last Q2 2017 report on tactics and techniques, we mentioned that Locky ransomware had reappeared with a new extension, but went dark again for...

The numeric tech support scam campaign

There are many different tech support scam TSS campaigns active at any given moment, the majority of them are fueled by malicious adverts the browser lockers, or bundled software the screen lockers. Something interesting happened recently, where legitimate - but hacked - websites would redirect t...

Aftercall ads are driving Android users crazy

Aftercall is a wave of deceptive Android apps on Google Play that pose as everyday tools while bombarding users with pop-up ads after every phone call. When an unexpected ad pops up every time you hang up a call, it will slowly drive you crazy, especially if you can’t figure out what's causing it...

Retro gaming fans are the new target for fake GitHub malware

Retro gaming fans should be careful with GitHub projects that claim to be tools or plugins for their consoles. Attackers can disguise ordinary computer malware as homebrew software, and the technique works against any retro platform with an active modding scene, not just one console. We recently...

Fake CleanMyMac site installs SHub Stealer and backdoors crypto wallets

A convincing fake version of the popular Mac utility CleanMyMac is tricking users into installing malware. The site instructs visitors to paste a command into Terminal. If they do, it installs SHub Stealer, macOS malware designed to steal sensitive data including saved passwords, browser data,...

Fake PayPal invoice from Geek Squad is a tech support scam

One of our employees received this suspicious email and showed it to me. Although it's a pretty straightforward attempt to lure targets into calling the scammers, it's worth writing up because it looks like it was sent out in bulk. Let's look at the red flags. Firstly, the sender address : PayPal...

A week in security (June 17 – June 23)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Microsoft Recall delayed after privacy and security concerns Almost everything you always wanted to know about cybersecurity, but were too afraid to ask, with Tjitske de Vries: Lock and Code S05E13 43% of couples experience pressure to share logins and locations,...

How to turn off location tracking on iOS and iPadOS

On iOS and iPadOS, location services are typically turned on when you first set up your device. However, there may be reasons why you don’t want your device to be located, perhaps because you don’t want to be found but need to keep the device with you. There are a few options to hide your locatio...

Microsoft’s April 2024 Patch Tuesday includes two actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities

The April 2024 Patch Tuesday update includes patches for 149 Microsoft vulnerabilities and republishes 6 non-Microsoft CVEs. Three of those 149 vulnerabilities are listed as critical, and one is listed as actively exploited by Microsoft. Another vulnerability is claimed to be a zero-day by...

Facebook spied on Snapchat users to get analytics about the competition

Social media giant Facebook snooped on Snapchat users network traffic, engaged in anticompetitive behavior and exploited user data through deceptive practices. Thats according to a court document filed March 23, 2024. The document mentions Facebook’s so-called In-App Action Panel IAAP program,...

New Go loader pushes Rhadamanthys stealer

Malware loaders also known as droppers or downloaders are a popular commodity in the criminal underground. Their primary function is to successfully compromise a machine and deploy one or multiple additional payloads. A good loader avoids detection and identifies victims as legitimate i.e. not...

Ransomware in 2023 recap: 5 key takeaways

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...

Atomic Stealer rings in the new year with updated version

Last year, we documented malware distribution campaigns both via malvertising and compromised sites delivering Atomic Stealer AMOS onto Mac users. This stealer has proven to be quite popular in the criminal underground and its developers have been adding new features to justify its hefty...

Alarm system cyberattack leaves those in need struggling to call for help

An alarm system company that allows those in need to ask for help at the touch of a button has suffered a cyberattack, causing serious disruption. Tunstall Netherlands says the attack left the control room struggling to receive distress calls from clients on Sunday November 12, 2023. Tunstall,...

Introducing ThreatDown: A new chapter for Malwarebytes

Since I started Malwarebytes 15 years ago the threat landscape has changed. Our offerings have evolved. And now the next chapter of our journey begins today. How did we get here? My first cyber “combatant” was an early form of adware running amok on my family’s computer. Removing it was a team...

YouTube launches “global effort” to block ad blockers

The ongoing struggle between YouTube and ad blockers is turning users into the victims. YouTube has gone all out in its fight against the use of add-ons, extensions and programs that prevent it from serving ads to viewers around the world. It started out as just a small experiment, but it looks...

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...

DNA testing company failed to protect sensitive genetic and health data, says FTC

DNA testing has long been a hot-button issue for security and privacy. Concerns about everything from law enforcement and data retention to job offers and insurance have all been examined at great length. With millions of people signing up to use these services, it was only a matter of time befor...