Update Firefox and Thunderbird now! Mozilla patches several high risk vulnerabilities

Mozilla has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in Firefox, Firefox ESR, and Thunderbird. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system. In Firefox 105 a total of seven vulnerabilities were patched, three of which received the...

Ransomware review: July 2022

Malwarebytes Threat Intelligence builds a monthly picture of ransomware activity by monitoring the information published by ransomware gangs on their Dark Web leak sites. This information represents victims who were successfully attacked but opted not to pay a ransom. In July, LockBit maintained...

TrustPid is another worrying, imperfect attempt to replace tracking cookies

German ISPs are considering the introduction of TrustPid, a new type of “supercookie” that comprises of a unique identifier which will be issued for each customer that will be able to track what that customer is doing online. The providers are trying to sell this idea by telling the public that t...

Okta admits 366 customers may have been impacted by LAPSUS$ breach

Through its usual means of communication, its Telegram channel, the LAPSUS$ group has posted screenshots of what appears to be superuser access to the Okta management console. As such, the group claims to have acquired "superuser/admin" access to Okta.com and gained access to Oktas customer data,...

FBI warns of bogus job postings on recruitment sites

Before Christmas was a busy time down at the fake job factory, with all manner of dubious antics out to ruin someone’s day. We’re now info February and the bogus job offers show no sign of abating. In fact, the FBI considers it to be such a problem that its issued an alert. This isn’t your typica...

Google warns some users that FancyBear’s been prowling around

APT28, also known as FancyBear, is at the heart of another targeted campaign. This time, it’s sniffing around users of Google services. Some 14,000 people have been notified about a spear phish attempt looking to compromise accounts and access their files. When did this happen? Sometime late...

US Navy ship Facebook page hijacked to stream video games

The official Facebook page of the US Navy’s destroyer-class warship, USS Kidd, has been hijacked. According to Task & Purpose, who first reported on the incident, the account has done nothing but stream Age of Empires, an award-winning, history-based real-time strategy RTS video game wherein...

Police take a piece out of a ransomware gang, but won’t say which one

One of the worlds ransomware groups appears to be a couple of members short today—and about two million dollars less rich—but nobody is sure which one. Police are staying tight-lipped about whos short-handed following the arrest of two individuals in Kyiv, Ukraine. The arrests are part of a joint...

3 security lessons from an MSP that survived the Kaseya VSA attack

Jay Tipton, chief executive for the Managed Service Provider MSP Technology Specialists, remembers his Fourth of July weekend this year like many MSP employees likely remember theirs: As a bit of a nightmare. “That’s like the worst feeling you’ll ever have,” Tipton said about his initial...

New variant of Konni malware used in campaign targetting Russia

This blog post was authored by Hossein Jazi In late July 2021, we identified an ongoing spear phishing campaign pushing Konni Rat to target Russia. Konni was first observed in the wild in 2014 and has been potentially linked to the North Korean APT group named APT37. We discovered two documents...

Game over: Apex Legends players locked out by protest message

Messages placed directly in or around games is a common hack technique. It can be used for trolling, phishing, scams, or anything else the message-placer can think of. Messages can also be placed in games for the purposes of advertising but thats a tale for a different day. Recently, players of...

Jail for consultant who scraped colossal trove of Alibaba customer data

A billion data points, including the usernames and mobile phone numbers of customers have been siphoned off Alibaba websites by a web crawler. The information has reached us about a week after a court ruling in the case. The court ruling A central Chinese court has ruled that an employee of a...

Google FLoC puts ad trackers on a cookie-free diet

Cookie tracking is dying and Google needs a replacement. Its betting on FLoC, an ad tracking technology that lets it understand peoples behaviour while respecting their privacy. Google has announced that its tests show promising signs that FLoC is working. Is this a milestone on the road to more...

A week in security (November 23 – November 29)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we talked with Chris Boyd about charities that track you online. We also looked back at Zoom, and wondered whether its any safer months after its first vulnerability was reported. We talked about how Apples security is hampering the detection of potentially unwante...

Taurus Project stealer now spreading via malvertising campaign

For the past several months, Taurus Project—a relatively new stealer that appeared in the spring of 2020—has been distributed via malspam campaigns targeting users in the United States. The macro-laced documents spawn a PowerShell script that invokes certutil to run an autoit script ultimately...

Charities and the advertising industry: data ecosystems and privacy risks

Data makes the world go round, more often than not via advertising and its tracking mechanisms. Whether you think making money from large volumes of PII to keep the web ticking over is a good thing, or a sleazy data-grab often encouraging terrible ad practices, it’s not going to go away anytime...

Report: Pandemic caused significant shift in buyer appetite in the dark web

Last year, credentials for PayPal, Facebook, and Airbnb were among the top goods on high demand in the dark web, aka the Internets underground market. But due to the COVID-19 outbreak, with most of the worldwide population sheltering, working, and studying indoors, many facets of life have made a...

The cybersecurity skills gap is misunderstood

Nearly every year, a trade association, a university, an independent researcher, or a large corporation—and sometimes all of them and many in between—push out the latest research on the cybersecurity skills gap, the now-decade-plus-old idea that the global economy lacks a growing number of...

Avoid these PayPal phishing emails

For the last few weeks, there’s been a solid stream of fake PayPal emails in circulation, twisting FOMO fear of missing out into DO THIS OR BAD THINGS WILL HAPPEN. It’s one of the most common tools in the scammer’s arsenal, and a little pressure applied in the right way often brings results for...

Coughing in the face of scammers: security tips for the 2020 tax season

In spite of everything happening in the world right now—the 2020 tax season is about to come to an end, and taxes are due. Americans got a reprieve back in March when the US Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service IRS announced they were pushing back the federal income tax filing due dat...

A week in security (May 25 – 31)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we published our most recent episode of our podcast Lock and Code, providing an in-depth discussion on web browser privacy, looked at the membership bump for the Coalition against Stalkerware, and dug into EDR solutions. We also looked at twists added to the threat...

New AgentTesla variant steals WiFi credentials

AgentTesla is a .Net-based infostealer that has the capability to steal data from different applications on victim machines, such as browsers, FTP clients, and file downloaders. The actor behind this malware is constantly maintaining it by adding new modules. One of the new modules that has been...

Lock and Code S1Ep3: Dishing on data privacy with Adam Kujawa

This week on Lock and Code, we discuss the top security headlines generated right here on Labs and around the Internet. In addition, we talk to Adam Kujawa, a director of Malwarebytes Labs, about the state of data privacy today, including how users and businesses can protect sensitive information...

Cybercriminals impersonate World Health Organization to distribute fake coronavirus e-book

The number of scams, threats, and malware campaigns taking advantage of public concern over the coronavirus is increasing each day. As a result, we've been actively monitoring emails within our spam honeypot to flag such threats and make sure our users are protected. Yesterday, we observed a...

The effects of climate change on cybersecurity

Outside the coronavirus pandemic and its related healthcare and economic fallout, climate change and cybersecurity are seen by many as the two most urgent problems facing our planet now and in the near future. They are two distinct and separate problems, to be sure. There are some areas, however,...

A week in security (April 29 – May 5)

Last week on Labs we discussed the possible exit scam of dark net market Wall Street Market, how the Electrum DDoS botnet reaches 152,000 infected hosts, we looked at the sophisticated threats plague ailing healthcare industry, a mysterious database that exposed personal information of 80 million...

Electrum DDoS botnet reaches 152,000 infected hosts

By Jérôme Segura, Adam Thomas, and S!Ri We have been closely monitoring the situation involving the continued attacks against users of the popular Electrum Bitcoin wallet. Initially, victims were being tricked to download a fraudulent update that stole their cryptocurrencies. Later on, the threat...

Of hoodies and headphones: a spotlight on risks surrounding audio output devices

More than a decade ago, cardiologists from the Beth Israel Medical Center in Boston presented their findings at the American Heart Association AHA Scientific Sessions 2008 about MP3 headphones causing disruptions with heart devices—such as the pacemaker and the implantable cardioverter...

Fake Malwarebytes helpline scammer caught in the act

An estimated one in every 10 American adults lost money in a cyber scam in the past 12 months, according to a report released by the FTC earlier in the month. On average, each scam victim lost $430, totaling about $9.5 billion overall. To put this in perspective, that’s over 22 million Americans...

Stolen security logos used to falsely endorse PUPs

To gain the trust of users, many websites and companies feature the logos of reputable firms who endorse their products. Unfortunately, some unseemly companies do the same, using logos of companies who have not, in fact, endorsed their product in order to trick people into thinking that what they...

Singapore government gets into the network defense game

There is a common assumption in the infosec community that enormous breaches like those at Equifax, Anthem, and Target are the new norm. That the next mega breach is simply a matter of time. This is because large companies loathe spending money on things that are not directly profitable like secu...

A week in security (October 16 – October 22)

Last week was an eventful one in security, keeping our research and intel teams on their toes. Multiple security researchers homed in on suspicious and malicious apps on Google Play, affecting thousands of Android users. A new variant of Mac malware Proton was also found in the wild, this time...

How to create an intentional culture of security

In this day and age, companies great and small are vulnerable to potential attacks that they are exposed to every day. From insider threats to simple phishing, one is always left guessing if they know enough to handle them or are well prepared to face the risks. Educating your staff about basic...

Why is Malwarebytes blocking CoinHive?

If you've encountered a Malwarebytes web protection block for coinhive.com over the last few weeks, you are either glad about it, angry about it, or don't really care. Since September 19, the second most frequently blocked website for our customers has been coinhive.com, and when we observe that...

Junk Cleaner clears the clutter from your Android

Your phone is full again, and the warning appears at exactly the wrong moment. Suddenly you can't update apps, record a video, or save another photo. The cause is rarely one giant file. Storage disappears in a steady drizzle of leftovers: temporary files an app creates and forgets, caches that gr...

What’s your data worth on the dark web? (Lock and Code S07E15)

This week on the Lock and Code podcast… Twenty years ago, a British mathematician named Clive Humby popularized a phrase that came to describe data's relationship with the entire global economy: "Data is the new oil." Pithy as the phrase sounds, it is undeniably true. Data steers decisions at...

A week in security (June 22 – June 28)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Malware steals Chrome session cookies to take over your accounts Beware of "Parcel Expert" job offers: They’re parcel mule scams Update Chrome to patch critical browser security flaws Fake domain renewal emails trick website owners into paying scammers Elite networ...

Fake BlueWallet steals passwords, accounts, and crypto from Macs

A fake website impersonating BlueWallet a real Bitcoin wallet is targeting Mac users with a simple but effective attack. BlueWallet itself has not been compromised. Instead, cybercriminals have stolen the name and branding of the legitimate Bitcoin wallet to make a malicious download appear...

A week in security (May 25 – May 31)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Payment apps are watching what you say Lock and Code S07E11 Scammers pretending to be Microsoft had help from US executives 700+ education and tech websites hijacked in huge ClickFix malware campaign Fake software on GitHub and SourceForge distribute Deno RAT Fake...

Company bragged phone mics could listen to conversations. They couldn’t.

A media company and two of its marketing partners have been fined for selling a service which, they said, listened in to people's conversations through their phones. Actually they did nothing of the sort. Most people have worried at some point that their phone has been listening to them through t...

Microsoft Defender vulnerabilities are being exploited in the wild

Two Microsoft Defender vulnerabilities are being actively exploited in the wild. On May 20, 2026, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA added a notable set of actively exploited vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities KEV catalog. The KEV catalog tracks...

Attackers adopt JavaScript runtime Bun to spread NWHStealer

In our previous research, we analyzed a Windows infostealer we track as NWHStealer. The attackers behind this stealer are continuously finding new methods to distribute the stealer. During our hunting activities, we noticed how attackers are using a JavaScript runtime called Bun to help distribut...

New FCC router ban could leave home networks less secure

On Monday, the Federal Communications Commission FCC updated its list of insecure equipment, outlining its reasons for adding all consumer-grade routers made outside the US. Effectively, this would stop foreign-made routers from being imported unless their manufacturers obtain an exemption, due t...

A week in security (February 23 – March 1)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Public Google API keys can be used to expose Gemini AI data Inside a fake Google security check that becomes a browser RAT Fake Zoom and Google Meet scams install Teramind: A technical deep dive How to understand and avoid Advanced Persistent Threats The Conduent...

Fake 7-Zip downloads are turning home PCs into proxy nodes

A convincing lookalike of the popular 7-Zip archiver site has been serving a trojanized installer that silently converts victims’ machines into residential proxy nodes—and it has been hiding in plain sight for some time. “I’m so sick to my stomach” A PC builder recently turned to Reddit’s...

“Can you try a game I made?” Fake game sites lead to information stealers

The background and the IOCs for this blog were gathered by an Expert helper on our forums and Malwarebytes researchers. Our thanks go out to them. A new, malicious campaign is making the rounds online and it starts simple: Unwitting targets receive a direct message DM on a Discord server asking...

“Sad announcement” email implies your friend has died

Tech support scammers are again stooping low with their email campaigns. This particular one hints that one of your contacts may have met an untimely end. It all starts with an email titled “Sad announcement” followed by a full name of someone you know. The email may appear to come from the perso...

A week in security (June 3 – June 9)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Google will start deleting location history Advance Auto Parts customer data posted for sale Husband stalked ex-wife with seven AirTags, indictment says Microsoft Recall snapshots can be easily grabbed with TotalRecall tool Financial sextortion scams on the rise Sa...

Watch out for tech support scams lurking in sponsored search results

This blog post was written based on research carried out by Jérôme Segura. A campaign using sponsored search results is targeting home users and taking them to tech support scams. Sponsored search results are the ones that are listed at the top of search results and are labelled "Sponsored". They...

MFA bombing taken to the next level

Simply put, MFA bombing also known as “push bombing” or “MFA fatigue” is a brute force attack on your patience. Cybercriminals use MFA bombing to break into accounts that are protected by multi-factor authentication MFA. MFA normally requires a user to enter a six-digit code sent by SMS, or...