Malwarebytes Premium Security stops 100% of malware during AV Lab test

Malwarebytes Premium Security has maintained its long-running, perfect record in protecting users against online threats by blocking 100% of the malware samples deployed in the AV Lab Cybersecurity Foundation’s “Advanced In-The-Wild Malware Test.” For its performance in the May 2024 evaluation,...

Google will start deleting location history

Google announced that it will reduce the amount of personal data it is storing by automatically deleting old data from "Timeline"—the feature that, previously named "Location History," tracks user routes and trips based on a phone’s location, allowing people to revisit all the places theyve been ...

Ransomware’s appetite for US healthcare sees known attacks double in a year

Following the February 21 attack on Change Healthcare, scores of people in the US have been living with the brutal, real-world effects of ransomware. Described by the American Hospital Association AHA President and CEO Rick Pollack as “the most significant and consequential incident of its kind...

How to update outdated software on Mac endpoints: Introducing ThreatDown VPM for Mac

ThreatDown is happy to announce that our Vulnerability Assessment and Patch Management VPM tool is now available for Mac endpoints. There are hundreds of third-party apps that Mac endpoint use on a daily basis—and with that large number of apps comes a dizzying amount of software updates to apply...

Data brokers admit they’re selling information on precise location, kids, and reproductive healthcare

Information newly made available under California law has shed light on data broker practices, including exactly what categories of information they trade in. Any business that meets the definition of data broker must register with the California Privacy Protection Agency CPPA annually. The CPPA...

Why ransomware gangs love using RMM tools—and how to stop them

One of the most alarming trends our ThreatDown Intelligence team has noticed lately is the increased exploitation of legitimate Remote Monitoring and Management RMM tools by ransomware gangs in their attacks. RMM software, such as AnyDesk, Atera, and Splashtop, are essential for IT administrators...

Nitrogen shelling malware from hacked sites

Nitrogen is the name given to a campaign and associated malware that have been distributed via malicious search ads. Its signature move is using Python and DLL side-loading to connect to the attackers command and control server. In this blog post, we look at a recent Nitrogen campaign and...

10 things to do to improve your online privacy

1. Set up two-factor authentication Do this for as many of your online accounts as you can, especially the major ones like your email and social media accounts. Two-factor authentication 2FA adds an extra step of protection and makes it much harder for attackers to login as you. We recommend usin...

Malicious ads for restricted messaging applications target Chinese users

An ongoing campaign of malicious ads has been targeting Chinese-speaking users with lures for popular messaging applications such as Telegram or LINE with the intent of dropping malware. Interestingly, software like Telegram is heavily restricted and was previously banned in China. Many Google...

Microsoft disables ms-appinstaller after malicious use

In what might be conceived as one of Microsoft’s new year resolutions, it has disclosed that its turned off the ms-appinstaller protocol handler by default. The change is designed to make installing apps easier, but it also makes installing malware easier. Typically, an app needs to be on a devic...

The top 4 ransomware gang failures of 2023

Ransomware gangs care about one thing: Stealing money. Over time, their craven, cybercriminal efforts have toppled businesses, destabilized hospitals, and ruined lives. Worst of all, they show no sign of slowing down, and their extortion attempts—which no longer focus on ransomware delivery...

State of Maine data breach impacts 1.3 million people

The US State of Maine says it has suffered a data breach impacting around 1.3 million people. According to the census from July 2022, thats more or less the the entire population of Maine. The State of Maine says it was compromised via a known vulnerability in secure transfer service MOVEit...

Patch…later? Safari iLeakage bug not fixed

Apple has released updates for its phones, Macs, iPads, watches, and TV streaming devices, fixing a bunch of security problems. But amid all that activity, one fix is notably absent—there is nothing to address the vulnerability dubbed iLeakage. iLeakage is a side-channel attack that can force the...

Food delivery robots give captured video footage to police

In what sounds like a new step towards Skynet, footage from a food delivery robot has been used as part of a criminal investigation. As 404 Media reports, the food delivery robots that are deployed for Uber Eats in Los Angeles are operated by Serve Robotics, which ultimately wants to deploy up to...

What does a car need to know about your sex life? Lock and Code S04E20

This week on the Lock and Code podcast... When you think of the modern tools that most invade your privacy, what do you picture? There's the obvious answers, like social media platforms including Facebook and Instagram. There's email and "everything" platforms like Google that can track your...

Prompt injection could be the SQL injection of the future, warns NCSC

The UK's National Cyber Security Centre NCSC has issued a warning about the risks of integrating large language models LLMs like OpenAIs ChatGPT into other services. One of the major risks is the possibility of prompt injection attacks. The NCSC points out several dangers associated with...

Chrome will soon start removing extensions that may be unsafe

Retroactive removals are finally on the way for malicious Chrome browser extensions. Beginning with Chrome 117, Chrome will "proactively highlight to users when an extension they have installed is no longer in the Chrome web store". Previously, if you installed an extension which was subsequently...

Catching up with WoofLocker, the most elaborate traffic redirection scheme to tech support scams

Back in January 2020, we blogged about a tech support scam campaign dubbed WoofLocker that was by far using the most complex traffic redirection scheme we had ever seen. In fact, the threat actor had started deploying infrastructure in earnest as early as 2017, about 3 years prior to our...

A new type of "freedom," or, tracking children with AirTags, with Heather Kelly: Lock and Code S04E17

"Freedom" is a big word, and for many parents today, it's a word that includes location tracking. Across America, parents are snapping up Apple AirTags, the inexpensive location tracking devices that can help owners find lost luggage, misplaced keys, and--increasingly so--roving toddlers setting...

Malicious ad for USPS fishes for banking credentials

We often think of malvertising as being malicious ads that push malware or scams, and quite rightly so these are probably the most common payloads. However, malvertising is also a great vehicle for phishing attacks which we usually see more often via spam emails. Threat actors continue to abuse a...

Elderly targeted in car accident scam, kingpin arrested

The head of a criminal network responsible for defrauding hundreds of elderly people has been arrested, Europol has announced. After a joint operation in Germany, Poland, and the UK, Europol says the suspect was arrested in London from where he ran a network of fraudsters targeting mainly German...

Software company accused of illegally profiling millions of mobile phone users

A digital rights and privacy organization has filed a complaint against software company TeleSign for gathering and selling information on millions of mobile phone users. The organization that filed the complaint is nyob. nyob is an Austrian based digital right organization that focusses on...

Warning: Victims' faces placed on explicit images in sextortion scam

The FBI has issued a warning about criminals digitally manipulating people's faces on to pornographic images--known as deepfaking--and then using those images to harass or extort money out of their victim in a practice known as sextortion. The FBI said the victims include children. From the...

Leaked Babuk ransomware builder code lives on as RA Group

The bones of long gone ransomware group Babuk continue to rattle in the breeze, in the form of reused code. Researchers from Cisco Talos have named this new team the "RA Group", a ransomware collective which may have only been up and running since last month. Babuk famously threatened to leak law...

Newspaper evades Russian censors, hides news in Counter-Strike map

A Finnish newspaper is making clever use of popular video game titles to promote press freedom and bypass Russian media restrictions regarding the invasion of Ukraine. The plan: Hide a secret room underneath a map, which players can stumble upon and see facts, figures, and photographs of whats be...

Google takes CryptBot to the wood shed

Google is in the midst of a legal campaign designed to take down the creators of a very persistent piece of malware called CryptBot. This malware, which Google claims compromised roughly 670k computers, set about infecting users of the Chrome browser. Unfortunately for the malware campaign...

iOS Lockdown Mode effective against NSO zero-click exploit

Apples Lockdown Mode feature alerted a victim to one of the latest NSO exploits, according to a report by Citizen Lab. image courtesy of Citizen Lab This is a huge deal since it shows how useful Lockdown Mode can be, even against exploits developed by one of the worlds most notorious commercial...

Malware authors join forces and target organisations with Domino Backdoor

Theres a new ransomware gang in town, stitched together from members of well known threat creators to push a new kind of malware focused on punishing unwary organisations. The malware family, called "Domino", is the brainchild of FIN7 and ex-Conti ransomware members. Domino has been seen in attac...

A whirlwind adventure: Malwarebytes' 15-year journey in business cybersecurity

As we raise a glass to toast Malwarebytes' 15th anniversary of boldly venturing into the realm of business cybersecurity, we're feeling nostalgic. It's time to buckle up and embark on a whimsical journey through the twists and turns of Malwarebytes' evolution. From modest beginnings to becoming a...

Beware: Fake IRS tax email delivers Emotet malware

Tax season is upon us and, as with every year, we're seeing tax scammers rearing their heads. Below, we have an example of a tax scam currently in circulation along with some suggestions for avoiding these kinds of attacks. An IRS W-9 tax form scam A Form W-9 is a form you fill in to confirm...

Ransomware attack hits ANOTHER school

In what is likely Vice Society's handiwork, the UK's largest state boarding school Wymondham College has announced it has become the victim of a "sophisticated cyberattack". The school didn't provide additional information, but Jonathan Taylor, chief of the school's parent company Sapientia...

How to set up two-factor authentication on Twitter using an app

If you use text based authentication as an additional level of security for your Twitter account, you may be aware that this option will be reserved for paying Twitter Blue subscribers come mid-March. This post will explain how to enable app based authentication. We found it easier to do on our...

Ryuk ransomware laundering leads to guilty plea

Ryuk, a mainstay of the ransomware scene for some years until it transformed into Conti and then split off into other groups after that, is back in the news again... though not in the way you might have imagined. Its not a compromise, or a surprise comeback. What we have is a guilty plea, as a...

T-Mobile reports data theft of 37 million customers in the US

T-Mobile has announced that an attacker has accessed "limited types of information" on customers. It says it is informing impacted customers. According to the press release, no passwords, payment card information, social security numbers, government ID numbers or other financial account informati...

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...

Watch out for this triple threat PayPal phish

ZDNet reports an interesting form of PayPal scam sent to one of their own writers. The scam is a so-called "triple threat" phish, in that it gives the scammer three different ways to potentially collect some ill gotten gains from potential victims. The idea is that if one of the three tactics...

Snapchat gives Californians more power over their personal data

There's a new toggle switch in Snapchat that, once enabled, limits the use of sensitive personal information. TechCrunch reports that the switch is a new privacy feature Snapchat will be rolling out to comply with the California Privacy Rights Act CPRA, also known as Proposition 24. The act, whic...

Point-of-sale malware used to steal 167,000 credit cards

In the 19 months between February 2021 and September 2022, two point-of-sale POS malware operators have stolen more than 167,000 payment records, mainly from the US, according to researchers at Group-IB. The researchers were able to retrieve information about infected machines and compromised...

Android and iOS leak some data outside VPNs

Virtual Private Networks VPNs on Android and iOS are in the news. Its been discovered that in certain circumstances, some of your traffic is leaked so it ends up outside of the safety cordon created by the VPN. Mullvad, the discoverers of this Android "feature" say that it has the potential to...

Bogus job offers hide trojanised open-source software

Microsoft researchers are warning of fake job offers where the only actual compensation available is a golden handshake of malware and trickery. The campaign targets those with technical know-how because, despite what some may think, scams are for everybody, not just people unfamiliar with tech...

Romance scammer deepfakes Mark Ruffalo to con elderly artist

Deepfakes have settled into a groove, as most scam techniques do. It seems most deepfakers have decided to make as much cash as possible from unsuspecting victims instead of doing anything particularly earth-shattering with their technology. One curious twist we may not have seen coming is the...

Why (almost) everything we told you about passwords was wrong

I have an embarrassing confession to make: I reuse passwords. I am not proud of it, but honestly its a relief to finally get it off my chest. I am not a heavy re-user, nothing crazy, I use a password manager to handle most of my credentials but I still reuse the odd password from time to time. It...

4 times students compromised school cybersecurity

For many students school can be a tough time, and we've all heard stories about bored or frustrated kids compromising school cybersecurity to change grades. Sometimes the students are celebrated, and other times it ends in them being expelled from school, or even prosecuted. Of course, these acts...

Kiwi Farms breached, user data potentially exposed

The operators of a site known to most observers for being in a recent state of flux have announced a forum breach. Kiwi Farms, which gained a reputation for sophisticated trolling and doxxing, was recently dropped by Cloudflare after a sustained campaign to have the DDoS mitigation and cloud...

A week in security (August 29 - September 4)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Twilio data breach turns out to be more elaborate than suspected Playing Doom on a John Deere tractor with Sick Codes: Lock and Code S03E18 Chromium browsers can write to the system clipboard without your permission British Airways customers targeted in lost luggag...

Reset your password now! Plex suffers data breach

In an email sent to its users, Plex has revealed that a cybercriminal accessed some customer data, including emails and encrypted passwords. From the email that was sent out by the Plex security team: Yesterday, we discovered suspicious activity on one of our databases. We immediately began an...

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...

Introducing Malwarebytes Cloud Storage Scanning: How to scan for malware in cloud file storage repositories

Were excited to announce Malwarebytes Cloud Storage Scanning, a new service that extends Nebula malware scanning options to include files stored on cloud storage repositories that are part of your organizations digital ecosystem. Today, the service supports scanning of files under 100Mb in size...

Wrestling star Mick Foley’s Twitter compromised, selling PS5 consoles

One of the biggest wrestling stars around, Mick Foley, had his Twitter account hijacked in an attempt to legitimize a very popular scam. When a well known individual has their social media accounts compromised, disaster looms, as everything from phishing to malware distribution waits in the wings...

A week in security (July 4 – July 10)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: My Body, My Data Act would lock down reproductive and sexual health data "Free UK visa" offers on WhatsApp are fakes HackerOne insider fired for trying to claim other people’s bounties Update now! Chrome patches ANOTHER zero-day vulnerability Cloud-based malware is...