When a sextortion victim fights back

When Katie Yates suddenly started receiving nude photos of her friend, Natalie Claus, over on Snapchat, she instantly recognized that Claus had just become a victim of a sextortion attack. She also knew how Claus should respond. This happened in December 2019 when Claus was a sophomore. Both were...

Demo: Your data has been encrypted! Stopping ransomware attacks with Malwarebytes EDR

It’s no secret that ransomware is one of the most pressing cyber threats of our day. What worse, ransomware gangs have increased their attacks on a range of vulnerable industries, with disruptions to business operations, million-dollar ransom demands, data exfiltration, and extortion. With...

Lock down your Neopets account: Data breach being investigated

Bad news for players of long-time virtual pet management title Neopets. Word is spreading of a compromise claimed to have accessed around 69 million user accounts. This compromise, posted to a hacking forum, is said to include both the database and around 460 MB of compressed source code from...

The winding road to compliance

“Here are the keys. Buy milk and bread. Drive safely.” These are important instructions for a new driver tasked with running an errand. But unless the driver knows where they are going, a bit of guidance on how to get to the store can only help. Without it, the driver may complete the errand...

Fraudulent cryptocurrency investment apps are duping investors

Together with the Department of Homeland Security DHS and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency CISA, the FBI has released a warning about cybercriminals creating fraudulent cryptocurrency investment apps in order to defraud cryptocurrency investors. The threat actors convince...

When good-faith hacking gets people arrested, with Harley Geiger: Lock and Code S03E14

When Lock and Code host David Ruiz talks to hackers—especially good-faith hackers who want to dutifully report any vulnerabilities they uncover in their day-to-day work—he often hears about one specific law in hushed tones of fear: the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Ac...

AstraLocker 2.0 ransomware isn’t going to give you your files back

Reversing Labs reports that the latest verison of AstraLocker ransomware is engaged in a a so-called "smash and grab" ransomware operation. Smash and grab is all about maxing out profit in the fastest time. It works on the assumption by malware authors that security software or victims will find...

Amazon Photos vulnerability could have given attackers access to user files and data

Amazon has patched a flaw in the Amazon Photos app which could have allowed an attacker to steal and use a users unique access token that verifies their identity across multiple Amazon APIs. That would give attackers access to a trove of information, since many of these APIs contain personal data...

You only have nine months to ditch Exchange Server 2013

Microsoft has posted a reminder that Exchange Server 2013 reaches End of Support EoS on April 11, 2023. Thats a little more than 9 months from now. A useful and timely reminder, since we all realize that it takes some time to migrate to a different system. Every Windows product has a lifecycle. T...

A week in security (June 6 – June 12)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: FBI warns of scammers soliciting donations for Ukraine Microsoft autopatch is here…but can you use it? Prometheus ransomwares flaws inspired researchers to try to build a near-universal decryption tool Rotten apples banned from App store Hackers can take over...

Rotten apples banned from the App store

Apple’s App Review process may have received ill wishes from many benevolent developers, but Apple has now revealed how effective it is and why it is so stringent. According to its review of the year 2021, Apple protected customers from nearly $1.5 billion in potentially fraudulent transactions,...

More than a quarter of Americans fell for robocall scam calls in past year

More and more Americans have been falling victim to phone scams since 2019. According to the latest report from Truecaller Google Docs upload of the entire report, separate blog here, a known spam blocker and caller ID app, 68.4 million Americans were victimized in the last 12 months, a substanti...

WhatsApp accounts hijacked by call forwarding

In a short post on LinkedIn Rahul Sasi, founder and CEO of CloudSEK, explains how WhatsApp account takeovers are possible. The methods consists of several steps and it takes some social engineering skills, but it’s good to be aware of the possibility and how it works. It starts with the threat...

Fake reCAPTCHA forms dupe users via compromised WordPress sites

Researchers at Sucuri investigated a number of WordPress websites complaining about unwanted redirects and found websites that use fake CAPTCHA forms to get the visitor to accept web push notifications. These websites are a new wave of a campaign that leverages many compromised WordPress sites...

OpenSea warns of Discord channel compromise

OpenSea, the primary marketplace for buyers and sellers of non-fungible tokens NFTs, has reported major problems with its Discord support channel. How major? Well, theres a "potential vulnerability" which allowed spambots to post phishing links to other users. A problem that lead OpenSea Support ...

It’s business as usual for REvil ransomware

After the FBS arrested 14 of its members in January, and a subsequent lull in action, the REvil ransomware gang appears to be back. We say "appears" because its still unclear whether the groups operations have indeed restarted. To the trained eye, REvils movements seem out of sorts. When REvils o...

Fake USA for UNHCR site wants your Ukraine donations in Bitcoin

Since Russia began invading Ukraine in late February, many organizations have set up donation pages to aid the most heavily affected: Families who were forced out of their homes due to bombings and children separated from grown-ups who decided to stay and take arms. Weve also seen a considerable...

Beware of fake Twitter philanthropists offering to put $750 into your Cash App account

Twitter philanthropists are a controversial emergence on the social media platform. In essence, Twitter-based philanthropy is about incredibly rich people helping out those who need it. The help is random, and often focused around performing a task like listening to a podcast or simply retweeting...

SMS group spam promises free gifts in return for bill payment

We’re seeing lots of examples of peculiar SMS messages sent to random groups of people. Most of these messages promise free gifts and/or offers after having paid bills. Nobody has asked for these texts, and they’re not being sent by providers of any services. What’s going on? The set up Most of t...

Colibri Loader combines Task Scheduler and PowerShell in clever persistence technique

This blog post was authored by Ankur Saini, with contributions from Hossein Jazi and Jérôme Segura 2022-04-07: Added MITRE ATT&CK mappings 2022-04-07: Changed the name of the final payload from Vidar to Mars Stealer Colibri Loader is a relatively new piece of malware that first appeared on...

A week in security (March 28 – April 3)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: New UAC-0056 activity: There’s a Go Elephant in the room Globant suffers network breach due to LAPSUS$ compromise Update now! Apple patches two zero-day vulnerabilities that may have been actively exploited Hive ransomware impacts California non-profit health...

FBI catches up with one of its Most Wanted, arrests head of advance-fee crime network

Some dont mind putting extra effort into making their crime appear as legitimate as possible by perpetuating more lies as long as they are guaranteed money in the end. Osondu Victor Igwilo is one such Nigerian scammer. The "catchers" 52-year-old Igwilo has been on the Federal Bureau of...

DDoS barrage against Israel described as the “largest ever” cyberattack its faced

Several government websites in Israel—those using the .gov.il domain—were inaccessible after a distributed denial of service DDoS attack hit Israels telecommunication provider, Cellcom. NetBlocks, a network disruption watchdog, initially detected "a significant disruption" aimed at the provider,...

Google and Microsoft accused of feeding smaller search engines spam ads

Google and Microsoft appear to have been flooding their smaller search engine rivals with spam ads, to limit the number of higher-value ads that appear on them, according to data viewed by POLITICO. Ads are considered "spam" if they appear in search results but have little to no relevance to the...

“We absolutely do not care about you”: Sugar ransomware targets individuals

Ransomware tends to target organizations. Corporations not only house a trove of valuable data they cant function without, but they are also expected to cough up a considerable amount of ransom money in exchange for their encrypted files. And while corporations struggle to keep up with attacks,...

News Corp falls victim to cyberattack

Media giant News Corp says it has fallen victim to a cyberattack. First analysis indicates that the attack was a state sponsored attack, aimed at emails and documents of News Corp employees, including journalists. News Corp says data was stolen, but that it didnt include financial data or...

How to speed up your computer or laptop

Why do machines always throw a tantrum when you are in a hurry? It’s called Murphy’s Law which some people may know as the butter side down rule. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. And usually at a time when it is most inconvenient. That being said, there are ways to speed things up. Let’s...

Ransomware attacks Finalsite, renders 8,000 school sites unreachable for days

Finalsite, a popular platform for creating school websites, appears to have recovered significant functionality after being attacked by a still-unknown ransomware on Tuesday, January 4, 2022. At least 8,000 schools are said to have been affected by the resulting outage. An important message from...

Patchwork APT caught in its own web

Patchwork is an Indian threat actor that has been active since December 2015 and usually targets Pakistan via spear phishing attacks. In its most recent campaign from late November to early December 2021, Patchwork has used malicious RTF files to drop a variant of the BADNEWS Ragnatela Remote...

Hackers take over 1.1 million accounts by trying reused passwords

The New York State Office of the Attorney General has warned 17 companies that roughly 1.1 million customers have had their user accounts compromised in credential stuffing attacks. Credential stuffing is the automated injection of stolen username and password pairs in to website login forms, in...

When a deepfake “empire” continues to grow

I’ve been quite vocal on the impact of deepfakes, in terms of where the most harm takes place. Back in 2019, we looked at malign interference campaigns. I took the line that, other than revenge porn, this was where deepfakes were likely to have the most influence. Although people keep talking abo...

A week in security (Dec 6 – 12)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Log4j zero-day “Log4Shell” arrives just in time to ruin your weekend Click “OK” to defeat MFA Fake job interviews plague major game developers like Riot Games and Rockstar Has your WordPress site been backdoored by a skimmer? What is a search engine and why does...

The Internet is not safe enough for women, and Sue Krautbauer has some ideas about why: Lock and Code S02E22

Decades ago, the promise of the Internet was clear: No one, depending on their age, gender, race, income, or place of birth, would be unwelcome from expressing their thoughts and ideas. Today, that promise has been largely unfulfilled. As Malwarebytes discovered earlier this year, the Internet is...

Facebook shoots own foot, hits Instagram and WhatsApp too

Mark Zuckerberg was left counting the personal cost of bad PR yesterday about $6 billion, according to Bloomberg on a day when his company couldnt get out of the news headlines, for all the wrong reasons. The billionaire Facebook CEOs bad day at the office started with whistleblower Frances Hauge...

Parents and teachers believe digital surveillance of kids outweighs risks

Schools in the US have been using surveillance software to keep an eye on their students, and such software has grown significantly in popularity since the COVD-19 pandemic closed campuses nationwide. And this is fine—at least according to new research released by the Center for Democracy &...

Parts of the Dark Web “awash” with school children’s personal data

NBC News has collected and analyzed a trove of childrens personal information it discovered on the Dark Web. Even though this information may not be as useful to cybercriminals as credit card details or login credentials, the information is still out there, where we don’t want it. So what is it,...

Sextortion on the rise, warns FBI

The pandemic saw a surge in sextortion cases in 2020. Fast forward 12 months, and the numbers continue to rise significantly. This revelation came from the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center IC3. Until 31 July 2021, it had received over 16,000 sextortion complaints, with victims losing a combine...

Lock and Code S1Ep19: Forecasting IoT cybersecurity with John Donovan and Adam Kujawa

This week on Lock and Code, we offer something special for listeners—a backstage pass to a cybersecurity training that we held for employees during Cybersecurity Awareness Month, which ended in October. The topic? The future of cybersecurity for the Internet of Things. Our guests, Chief Informati...

Risky business: survey shows majority of people use work devices for personal use

There’s no denying the coronavirus pandemic is having a significant impact on the way we use technology. Some changes feel like a subtle acceleration of behavioral shifts that were already well underway i.e. more online shopping and more streaming TV/movies. Other changes are more extreme and we’...

A week in security (August 31 – September 6)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we dug into security hubris on the Lock and Code podcast, explored ways in which Apple’s notarization process may not be hitting all the right notes, and detailed a new web skimmer. We also explained how to keep distance learners secure, talked about PCI DSS...

Cloud workload security: Should you worry about it?

Due to the increasing use of the cloud, organizations find themselves dealing with hybrid environments and nebulous workloads to secure. Containerization and cloud-stored data have provided the industry with a new challenge. And while you can try to make the provider of cloud data storage...

Online credit card skimming increased by 26 percent in March

Crisis events such as the current COVID-19 pandemic often lead to a change in habits that captures the attention of cybercriminals. With the confinement measures imposed in many countries, for example, online shopping has soared and along with it, credit card skimming. According to our data, web...

Stalkerware developer dealt new blow by FTC

Last week, the US Federal Trade Commission FTC interpreted its broad consumer protection mandate to file a first-of-its-kind enforcement action against the developer of three mobile stalkerware applications. The developer was banned from further selling the apps unless significant changes were ma...

Of princes and perpetrators: Beware of getting ensnared in 419 scams

We've mentioned before that 419 scams don't always originate from Nigeria. It's a very simple and popular scam that can be attempted by pretty much anyone with a flair for social engineering. Indeed, 419 scams are so associated with the region that many scammers in non-Nigerian countries know the...

Explained: the Dark Web

You may have seen the Dark Web referenced in popular TV shows and have gotten the wrong idea, or if you already knew about it, you may have snorted in derision. It’s also sometimes called the Deep Web, when in fact the Dark Web is only a part of the Deep Web. Terminology Surface Web is what we...

Solution Corner: Malwarebytes Incident Response

Unless you’ve been stuck at a fiery music festival, I don’t need to tell you the threat landscape is constantly evolving and that threats have become increasingly sophisticated at evading detection. Recent Malwarebytes Labs reports, including the 2017 State of Malware shine a light on just how fa...

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...

What happens if you visit a WordPress site hacked through wp2shell?

WordPress has patched a serious core vulnerability chain known as wp2shell, and site owners are understandably focused on updating their own sites. But there’s another question worth asking: what happens to ordinary visitors when they land on a compromised site? Because a hacked website becomes a...

How to use GitHub safely

GitHub is rapidly becoming the go-to platform for sharing software. Originally built for developers to collaborate on code, it now hosts millions of projects ranging from hobby scripts to widely used applications. That popularity, however, has also made it an attractive delivery platform for...

Fake crypto gift card sites are getting harder to spot

You want to turn some crypto into a gift card. You search, click a promising result, and land on a site that looks polished and legitimate: a dark theme, trust badges, and promises of instant delivery and no ID checks. You wouldn't think to question it. But a professional-looking website isn't...