Why car location tracking needs an overhaul

Across America, survivors of domestic abuse and stalking are facing a unique location tracking crisis born out of policy failure, unclear corporate responsibility, and potentially risky behaviors around digital sharing that are now common in relationships. No, we’re not talking about stalkerware...

AT&T confirms 73 million people affected by data breach

Telecommunications giant AT&T has finally confirmed that 73 million current and former customers have been caught up in a massive dark web data leak. The leaked data includes names, addresses, mobile phone numbers, dates of birth, and social security numbers. Malwarebytes VP of Consumer Privacy,...

YouTube ordered to reveal the identities of video viewers

Federal US authorities have asked Google for the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and user activity of accounts that watched certain YouTube videos, according to unsealed court documents Forbes has seen. Of those users that weren’t logged in when they watched those videos between January 1 an...

No “Apple magic” as 11% of macOS detections last year came from malware

We’re going to let you in on a little cybersecurity secret… There’s malware on Mac computers. There pretty much always has been. As revealed in our 2024 ThreatDown State of Malware report, a full 11% of all detections recorded by Malwarebytes on Mac computers in 2023 were for different variants o...

Tax season is here, so are scammers

The Internal Revenue Service has announced that the 2024 tax filing season has officially begun, with an expected 146 million individual tax returns to be filed. While it is costly and complex for the IRS to process so many digital and paper documents, it can also be a headache for many Americans...

Bruce Schneier predicts a future of AI-powered mass spying: Lock and Code S05E03

This week on the Lock and Code podcast… If the internet helped create the era of mass surveillance, then artificial intelligence will bring about an era of mass spying. That’s the latest prediction from noted cryptographer and computer security professional Bruce Schneier, who, in December, share...

A true tale of virtual kidnapping: Lock and Code S05E02

This week on the Lock and Code podcast… On Thursday, December 28, at 8:30 pm in the Utah town of Riverdale, the city police began investigating what they believed was a kidnapping. 17-year-old foreign exchange student Kai Zhuang was missing, and according to Riverdale Police Chief Casey Warren,...

How does ThreatDown Vulnerability Assessment and Patch Management work?

Maintaining updated systems and applications is a challenge for any IT team—especially considering the sheer volume of vulnerabilities organizations must find and prioritize on a rolling basis. ThreatDown Vulnerability Assessment VA, now included for free in every ThreatDown bundle, simplifies th...

New MetaStealer malvertising campaigns

MetaStealer is a popular piece of malware that came out in 2022, levering previous code base from RedLine. Stealers have become a very hot commodity in the criminal space, so much so that there is competition between various groups. Threat actors have primarily used malspam as an infection vector...

Explained: Privacy washing

Question: Who said the sentence below? “Privacy is at the heart of everything we do.” Answer: Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet and its largest subsidiary Google. And if you look at the recent actions Google has announced, you’d be tempted to take his word for it: An initiative to let Chrome hid...

Judge rules it’s fine for car makers to intercept your text messages

A federal judge has refused to bring back a class action lawsuit that alleged four car manufacturers had violated Washington state’s privacy laws by using vehicles’ on-board infotainment systems to record customers’ text messages and mobile phone call logs. The judge ruled that the practice doesn...

Defeating Little Brother requires a new outlook on privacy: Lock and Code S04E23

This week on the Lock and Code podcast… A worrying trend is cropping up amongst Americans, particularly within Generation Z—theyre spying on each other more. Whether reading someones DMs, rifling through a partners text messages, or even rummaging through the bags and belongings of someone else,...

A week in security (October 30 – November 5)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Apache ActiveMQ vulnerability used in ransomware attacks YouTube launches "global effort" to block ad blockers Should you allow your browser to remember your passwords? Atlassian: "Take immediate action" to patch your Confluence Data Center and Server instances Wha...

A week in security (September 18 - September 24)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Emergency update! Apple patches three zero-days T-Mobile spills billing information to other customers Involved in a data breach? Heres what you need to know Steer clear of cryptocurrency recovery phrase scams DoppelPaymer ransomware group suspects identified The...

Password-stealing Chrome extension smuggled on to Web Store

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have demonstrated that Chrome browser extensions can steal passwords from the text input fields in websites, even if the extension is compliant with Chrome's latest security and privacy standard, Manifest V3. To prove it, they created a proof of...

A firsthand perspective on the recent LinkedIn account takeover campaign

Not long ago I wrote about a recent campaign to hold LinkedIn users' accounts to ransom. Shortly after I published the article, a co-worker, Pearce, reached out to me told me he'd been a target of the campaign. His story begins with an SMS text from LinkedIn telling him to reset his password. He...

Film companies lose battle to unmask Reddit users

An interesting case marking the limits of what data big business can expect to dig up has concluded its day or to be more accurate, many days in court. Ars Technica reports that film companies have lost their battle to make social site Reddit identify anonymous users discussing piracy. No fewer...

AI-powered content farms start clogging search results with ad-stuffed spam

A recent study by NewsGuard, trackers of online misinformation, makes some alarming discoveries about the role of artificial intelligence AI in content farm generation. If youve previously held your nose at the content mill grind, its probably going to become a lot more unpleasant. Content farms...

Fileless attacks: How attackers evade traditional AV and how to stop them

When you hear about malware, theres a good chance you think of sketchy executables or files with extensions like .DOCX or .PDF that, once opened, execute malicious code. These are examples of file-based attacks--and while they can be bad, theyre nothing compared to their fileless cousins. As the...

KFC, Pizza Hut owner employee data stolen in ransomware attack

Upon learning that attackers accessed and siphoned data in January, Yum! Brands, the fast-food chain operator behind The Habit Burger Grill, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, has begun sending Notice of Security Breach letters to employees whose data were potentially affected. "We are writing to...

Emotet adopts Microsoft OneNote attachments

Last week, Emotet returned after a three month absence when the botnet Epoch 4 started sending out malicious emails with malicious Office macros. While the extracted attachments were inflated to several hundred megabytes, it was surprising to see that Emotet persisted in using the same attack...

Samsung adds Message Guard protection against zero-click exploits

Samsung has announced the introduction of Message Guard for the Samsung Galaxy S23 series. It will be gradually rolled out to other Galaxy smartphones and tablets later this year. Message Guard works on images received in messages by the apps "Samsung Messages" and "Messages by Google" and...

Multilingual skimmer fingerprints 'secret shoppers' via Cloudflare endpoint API

One important aspect of data theft in criminal markets revolves around the authenticity of the data that is being resold. There are different services that exist to vet such things as credit card numbers so that buyers can purchase with confidence. Criminals are also very aware that anyone and in...

Riot Games refuses to pay ransom to avoid League of Legends leak

After confirming threat actors were able to steal some of its code, Riot Games has also revealed that it received a ransom email from its attacker. The attackers demanding $10 million to stop them leaking source code from League of Legend's and other games. Riot's reply? Today, we received a rans...

A private moment, caught by a Roomba, ended up on Facebook. Eileen Guo explains how: Lock and Code S04E03

In 2020, a photo of a woman sitting on a toilet--her shorts pulled half-way down her thighs--was shared on Facebook, and it was shared by someone whose job it was to look at that photo and, by labeling the objects in it, help train an artificial intelligence system for a vacuum. Bizarre? Yes...

Google to support the use of Rust in Chromium

In a blog by the Chrome security team we learned that the Chromium project is going to support the use of third-party Rust libraries from C++ in Chromium. This is good news because Rust is a so-called memory-safe programming language. So using it in a widespread program like Chrome and the other...

Calling in the ransomware negotiator, with Kurtis Minder: Lock and Code S03E20

Ransomware can send any company into crisis. Immediately following an attack, the notoriously disruptive malware can spread across networks and machines, locking up important files and rendering vital data almost useless for all employees. As we learned in a previous episode of Lock and Code, a...

Nearly 2,000 Signal users affected by Twilio phishing attack

New findings following the Twilio phishing attack revealed that Signal, one of its high-value clients and a popular encrypted messaging platform, was particularly affected. 1,900 of its users had their phone numbers and SMS registration codes exposed. However, Signal reassured users that the...

5 cybersecurity tips for students going back to school

The new school season is just around the corner. And while you are getting ready to go back to school, now is a good opportunity to check you are doing all you can to stay as safe as possible online. Make sure you are doing these five things: 1. Use multi-factor authentication MFA MFA has become ...

IconBurst software supply chain attack offers malicious versions of NPM packages

Researchers discovered evidence of a widespread software supply chain attack involving malicious Javascript packages offered via the npm package manager. The threat actors behind the IconBurst campaign used typosquatting to mislead developers looking for very popular packages. npm npm is short fo...

Cybersecurity agencies: You don’t have to delete PowerShell to secure it

Microsofts PowerShell is a useful, flexible tool that is as popular with criminals as it is with admins. Cybercrooks like it becasue PowerShell is powerful, available almost everywhere, and doesnt look out of place running on a company network. In most places it isnt practical to block PowerShell...

Don’t panic! “Unpatchable” Mac vulnerability discovered

Researchers at MITs Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab CSAIL found an attack surface in a hardware-level security mechanism utilized in Apple M1 chips. The flaw is unpatchable, but attackers would need to chain it with other vulnerabilities to make use of the attack method. The hardwa...

ChromeLoader targets Chrome Browser users with malicious ISO files

If you’re on the hunt for cracked software or games, be warned. Rogue ISO archive files are looking to infect your systems with ChromeLoader. If you think campaigns such as this only target Windows users, you’d sadly be very much mistaken. The attack sucks in several operating systems and even us...

Massive increase in XorDDoS Linux malware in last six months

Microsoft says its recorded a massive increase in XorDDoS activity 254 percent in the last six months. XorDDoS, a Linux Trojan known for its modularity and stealth, was first discovered in 2014 by the white hat research group, MalwareMustDie MMD. MMD believed the Linux Trojan originated in China...

“Chemical attack” email warnings deliver Jester Stealer malware

Jester Stealer, a malicious file capable of large amounts of data theft, is on the prowl again. The Ukrainian Computer Emergency Response Team CERT-UA has warned of a large distribution campaign abusing a "chemical attack" theme. Receiving an email like this in the invasion-affected regions of...

A scanning tool for open-sourced software packages? Yes, please!

The Open Source Security Foundation OpenSSF, a collective of industry leaders aimed at improving the security of open-source software OSS, recently announced the release of a prototype tool that scans for malicious packages in open source repositories. This tool, conveniently called Package...

Denonia cryptominer is first malware to target AWS Lambda

Security researchers at Cado Security, a cybersecurity forensics company, recently discovered the first publicly-known malware targeting Lambda, the serverless computing platform of Amazon Web Services AWS. Though Lambda has been around for less than ten years, serverless technology is considered...

Roblox Beamers steal items from kids

Roblox gamers are once again being warned to be on their guard against scammers plundering valuable digital items. Most multiplayer titles are all about customization. You won’t find many popular games where digital items aren’t up for grabs. Some games lock the items, such as outfits, weapons, o...

How a few PhD students revealed that phishing trainings might just not work: Lock and Code S03E03

Youve likely fallen for it before—a simulated test sent by your own company to determine whether or not its employees are vulnerable to one of the most pernicious online threats today: Phishing. Phishing has evolved in recent history, and as scammers have rolled out increasingly clever—and...

Segway store compromised with Magecart skimmer

In the early 2000s, the Segway company released a personal transporter that would become iconic. The Segway Human Transporter was quickly sold on Amazon and featured in a number of movies. Since 2015, Segway has been a subsidiary of Chinese-based company Ninebot and sells electric scooters under...

Data Privacy Day: Know your rights, and the right tools to stay private

Not all data privacy rights are the same. There’s the flimsy, the firm, the enforceable, and the antiquated, and, unfortunately, much of what determines the quality of your own data privacy rights is little more than your home address. Those in Chile, for example, enjoy a globally rare...

Ransomware targets Edge users

Unless youve been hiding under a rock for the last twenty years, youve probably heard the one about "keeping your software up to date". Applying software updates promptly is arguably the single most useful thing you can do to keep yourself secure online, and vendors, experts, pundits, and blogs...

Everything you always wanted to know about NFTs (but were too afraid to ask): Lock and Code S02E24

In August, the NFT for a cartoon rock sold for $1.3 million, and ever since then, much of the world has been asking: What the heck is going on? NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, have skyrocketed in popularity this year, with the NFTs for several artworks selling for more than $2 million each; the mos...

The importance of backing up

What does backing up something mean? Backing up is the act of making a copy or copies of a file. These files are stored somewhere other than where the originals are located. You may only need to back up a few files, or it might be a much bigger effort. Requirements may differ greatly depending on...

How social media mistakes can impact cybersecurity

We talked to members of our Malware Removal Support team and asked them what kind of problems they get asked to solve for our customers. To understand why they get to handle these questions, it is also necessary to know that the Malwarebytes software is unable to resolve the problems users are...

The joy of phishing your employees

Many companies set up phishing test programs for their employees, often as part of a compliance requirement involving ongoing employee education on security topics. The aim of these programs is to train employees on how to spot a malicious link, not click it, and forward it on to the appropriate...

Ransomware scammers target artists with fake Krita revenue deals

The Krita digital painting application is currently being targeted by ransomware authors. Available on Steam and other platforms, it’s a powerful tool with a very cheap purchase price and great reviews. A perfect bit of bait to start reeling in potential victims, in other words. How does the scam...

Tor vs VPN—What is the difference?

Our data is a precious commodity and there are plenty of people who would like to get their hands on it, from spouses and marketing teams to crooks and state-sponsored spies. Because of that, tools like Tor and Virtual Private Networks VPNs are growing in popularity. But while both tools can...

Apple delays plans to search devices for child abuse imagery

After the uproar from users and privacy advocates about Apple’s controversial plans to scan users devices for photos and messages containing child abuse and exploitation media, the company has decided to put the brakes on the plan. If you may recall, Apple announced in early August that it would...

T-Mobile customers, change your PINs

At the end of last week, T-Mobile was investigating reports of a “massive” customer data breach. A hacker claimed to stolen 100 million people’s data from T-Mobile’s servers, which included everything from names and driver licences to addresses and social security numbers. Its now confirmed...