A week in security (August 4 – August 10)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Adult sites trick users into Liking Facebook posts using a clickjack Trojan Facebook users targeted in ‘login’ phish TeaOnHer, the male version of Tea, is leaking personal information on its users too How Google, Adidas, and more were breached in a Salesforce scam...

Allianz Life says majority of 1.4 million US customers’ info breached

Insurance company Allianz Life was breached, exposing the data of most of its 1.4 million American customers. According to Allianz, an attacker gained access to a third-party, cloud-based Customer Relationship Management CRM system through social engineering. The company filed a data breach...

iPhone vs. Android: iPhone users more reckless, less protected online

The smartphone wars have a winner, and it’s Android. No, this isn’t about which device has the best camera, the snappiest processor, or the flashiest AI features—this is about which device owners are safer online, and in many ways, it is Android users who take the crown. According to a new analys...

Introducing the smarter, more sophisticated Malwarebytes Trusted Advisor, your cybersecurity personal assistant

You ever get that feeling when you double-check the locks, but still wonder if you’ve missed something? That’s what a lot of people feel about cybersecurity. That’s where Malwarebytes Trusted Advisor comes in. You can see it as your very own cybersecurity personal assistant, giving you real-time...

WeTransfer walks back clause that said it would train AI on your files

File sharing site WeTransfer has rolled back language that allowed it to train machine learning models on any files that its users uploaded. The change was made after criticisms from its users. The company had quietly inserted the new language in the terms and conditions on its website. Sometime...

Chrome fixes 6 security vulnerabilities. Get the update now!

Google has released an update for its Chrome browser to patch six security vulnerabilities, including one zero-day. This update is crucial since it addresses one actively exploited vulnerability which can be abused when the user visits a malicious website. It doesn’t require any further user...

Ransomware negotiator investigated over criminal gang kickbacks

If someone is going to negotiate with criminals for you, that person should at least be on your side. That might not have been the case at Digital Mint, a ransomware negotiation company where one worker allegedly went rogue. According to Bloomberg, Digital Mint is cooperating with the US Departme...

Free certificates for IP addresses: security problem or solution?

Let’s Encrypt has announced its issued its first certificate for an IP address. Why that’s significant deserves a little explanation. You may have run into Let’s Encrypt certificates many times without realizing it. When you see a padlock icon in your browser’s address bar, it means the site is...

Drug cartel hacked cameras and phones to spy on FBI and identify witnesses

The "El Chapo" Mexican drug cartel snooped on FBI personnel through hacked cameras, and listened in on their phone calls to identify and kill potential witnesses, the US Department of Justice has said. And seven years on, the Bureau's defenses against this kind of surveillance are still inadequat...

Gmail’s multi-factor authentication bypassed by hackers to pull off targeted attacks

Russian hackers have bypassed Google's multi-factor authentication MFA in Gmail to pull off targeted attacks, according to security researchers at Google Threat Intelligence Group GTIG. The hackers pulled this off by posing as US Department of State officials in advanced social engineering attack...

23andMe raked by Congress on privacy, sale of genetic data

In a Senate hearing adequately titled “23 and You: The Privacy and National Security Implications of the 23andMe Bankruptcy,” 23andMe executives addressed concerns about the privacy implications of the company’s sale and the handling of associated genetic data. For those who missed the latest...

How to update Chrome on every operating system

We often write about important updates for the most popular browser, Google Chrome. Since it would be out of scope to post elaborate update instructions for every possible platform and operating system OS—like iOS, macOS, Windows, Android, etc.—we decided to turn this topic into a separate post...

Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn block access in France, VPN use set to soar

VPNs Virtual Private Networks are suddenly popular in France. Not because France has suddenly become super privacy conscious, but because Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn, have blocked access in France. But why? Last year, France enacted a law mandating that pornographic sites implement stricter...

Fake AI video generator tools lure in Facebook and LinkedIn users to deliver malware

Cybercriminals are taking advantage of the public’s interest in Artificial Intelligence AI and delivering malware via text-to-video tools. According to researchers at Mandiant, the criminals are setting up websites claiming to offer “AI video generator” services, and then using those fake tools t...

Lumma information stealer infrastructure disrupted

The US Department of Justice DOJ and Microsoft have disrupted the infrastructure of the Lumma information stealer infostealer. Lumma Stealer, also known as LummaC or LummaC2, first emerged in late 2022 and quickly established itself as one of the most prolific infostealers. Infostealers is the na...

Meta sent cease and desist letter over AI training

EU privacy advocacy group NOYB has clapped back at Meta over its plans to start training its AI model on European users' data. In a cease and desist letter to the social networking giant's Irish operation signed by founder Max Schrems, the non-profit demanded that it justify its actions or risk...

4.7 million customers’ data accidentally leaked to Google by Blue Shield of California

Blue Shield of California leaked the personal data of 4.7 million people to Google after a Google Analytics misconfiguration. The tech giant may have used this data for targeted advertising, according to Blue Shield, which is one of the largest health insurers in the US. In a data breach notice o...

Amazon disables privacy option, will send your Echo voice recordings to the cloud

Amazon has announced its Echo devices will no longer have the option to store and process requests on the device itself, meaning your voice recordings will now be sent to the cloud for processing. In an email sent to customers, Amazon explained that the feature "Do Not Send Voice Recordings" will...

Don’t let your kids on Roblox if you’re not comfortable, says Roblox CEO

In response to growing worries about the safety of children using Roblox, the CEO of the company has said to parents: "My first message would be, if you're not comfortable, don't let your kids be on Roblox." Roblox is one of the most popular gaming platforms, especially among young children...

How ads weirdly know your screen brightness, headphone jack use, and location, with Tim Shott (Lock and Code S06E05)

This week on the Lock and Code podcast … Something's not right in the world of location data. In January, a location data broker named Gravy Analytics was hacked, with the alleged cybercriminal behind the attack posting an enormous amount of data online as proof. Though relatively unknown to most...

Ransomware threat mailed in letters to business owners

Business owners and CEOs across the United States received customized ransomware threats this month from the most unusual of places—letters in the mail. The letters, which were first reported by multiple cybersecurity researchers, claim to come from a ransomware group called BianLian. But since...

PayPal scam abuses Docusign API to spread phishy emails

PayPal scammers are using an old Docusign trick to enhance the trustworthiness of their phishing emails. We've received several reports of this recently, so we dug into how the scam works. The Docusign Application Programming Interface API allows “customers” to send emails that come from genuine...

Hard drives containing sensitive medical data found in flea market

Somebody bought a batch of 15 GB hard drives from a flea market, and during a routine check of the contents they found medical data about hundreds of patients. After some more investigation in the Netherlands, it turned out the data came from a software provider in the medical industry which had...

Three privacy rules for 2025 (Lock and Code S06E02)

This week on the Lock and Code podcast… It’s Data Privacy Week right now, and that means, for the most part, that you’re going to see a lot of well-intentioned but clumsy information online about how to protect your data privacy. You’ll see articles about iPhone settings. You’ll hear acronyms for...

The great Google Ads heist: criminals ransack advertiser accounts via fake Google ads

Table of contents Overview Criminals impersonate Google Ads Lures hosted on Google Sites Phishing for Google account credentials Victimology Who is behind these campaigns? Fuel for other malware and scam campaigns Indicators of Compromise Overview Online criminals are targeting individuals and...

5 million payment card details stolen in painful reminder to monitor Christmas spending

Another day, another exposed S3 bucket. This time, 5 million US credit cards and personal details were leaked online. The Leakd.com security team discovered that 5 terabytes of sensitive screenshots were exposed in a freely accessible Amazon S3 bucket. An S3 bucket is like a virtual file folder i...

Europol takes down criminal data hub Manson Market in busy month for law enforcement

A coordinated action between several European law enforcement agencies shut down an online marketplace called Manson Market that sold stolen data to any interested cybercriminal. What made this market attractive for cybercriminals was that they could buy data sorted by region and account balance...

No company too small for Phobos ransomware gang, indictment reveals

The US Department of Justice has charged a Russian national named Evgenii Ptitsyn with selling, operating, and distributing a ransomware variant known as “Phobos” during a four-year cybercriminal campaign that extorted at least $16 million from victims across the world. The government’s indictmen...

Malicious QR codes sent in the mail deliver malware

Physical letters that contain a QR code to trick people into downloading malware are being sent through the mail, according to a warning issued by The Swiss National Cyber Security Centre NCSC. The letters are sent as if they come from the official Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology and...

City of Columbus breach affects around half a million citizens

A ransomware attack against the City of Columbus, Ohio—which drew public scrutiny following the city government's attempt to silence a researcher who told the public about the attack—has received a little more detail from an unexpected source: The Attorney General for the state of Maine. In a dat...

Robot vacuum cleaners hacked to spy on, insult owners

Multiple robot vacuum cleaners in the US were hacked to yell obscenities and insults through the onboard speakers. ABC news was able to confirm reports of this hack in robot vacuum cleaners of the type Ecovacs Deebot X2, which are manufactured in China. Ecovacs is considered the leading service...

Browser Guard now flags data breaches and better protects personal data

Two things are true of data online: It will be collected and, just as easily, it will be lost. But a major update to Malwarebytes Browser Guard will better protect users from opaque data collection that happens every day online, as well as raising their awareness about corporate data breaches tha...

Telegram will hand over user details to law enforcement

Last month we reported how Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was indicted on charges of complicity in the distribution of child sex abuse images, aiding organized crime, drug trafficking, fraud, and refusing lawful orders to give information to law enforcement. Now, in a potentially related development,...

Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover: A new way to help scrub personal data online

There’s an awful lot about you online that some awful groups want to exploit. The right combination of personal data points could help an identity thief fool a bank into opening a new, fraudulent line of credit in your name. Your alma mater, salary, and email address could help an online scammer...

23andMe to pay $30 million in settlement over 2023 data breach

Genetic testing company 23andMe will pay $30 million to settle a class action lawsuit over a 2023 data breach which ended in some customers having information like names, birth years, and ancestry information exposed. In October 2023, we reported on how information belonging to as many as seven...

Facebook scrapes photos of kids from Australian user profiles to train its AI

Facebook has admitted that it scrapes the public photos, posts and other data from the accounts of Australian adult users to train its AI models. Unlike citizens of the European Union EU, Australians are not offered an opt-out option to refuse consent. At an inquiry as to whether the social media...

PartnerLeak scam site promises victims full access to “cheating” partner’s stolen data

Earlier this week, we reported on a new type of scam that tells you your partner is cheating on you. However, we hit a dead end because we were unable to get hold of an original copy of the email. That was until the scammers were “kind enough” to send one to one of our co-workers. your partner is...

What the arrest of Telegram’s CEO means, with Eva Galperin (Lock and Code S05E19)

This week on the Lock and Code podcast… On August 24, at an airport just outside of Paris, a man named Pavel Durov was detained for questioning by French investigators. Just days later, the same man was charged in crimes related to the distribution of child pornography and illicit transactions,...

A week in security (September 2 – September 8)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Lowe’s employees phished via Google ads Planned Parenthood partly offline after ransomware attack "Hello pervert" sextortion scam includes new threat of Pegasus—and a picture of your home How to avoid election related scams London’s city transport hit by...

TDECU data breach affects half a million people

The Texas Dow Employees Credit Union TDECU has filed a data breach notification, reporting that the data of 500,474 people has been accessed in an external system breach. TDECU is the largest Houston-area credit union, and the fourth largest in the state of Texas. The credit union was founded by...

Move over malware: Why one teen is more worried about AI (re-air) (Lock and Code S05E18)

This week on the Lock and Code podcast… Every age group uses the internet a little bit differently, and it turns out for at least one Gen Z teen in the Bay Area, the classic approach to cyberecurity—defending against viruses, ransomware, worms, and more—is the least of her concerns. Of far more...

A week in security (August 19 – August 25)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Millennials’ sense of privacy uniquely tested in romantic relationships Hacked GPS tracker reveals location data of customers "We will hold them accountable": General Motors sued for selling customer driving data to third parties Why you need to know about ransomwa...

Fraudulent Slack ad shows malvertiser’s patience and skills

In the past year alone, we have reported almost five hundred unique malvertising incidents related to Google search ads. While it can be difficult to attribute each incident to a specific threat actor, we usually notice similarities between campaigns. Some malvertisers go to great lengths to bypa...

Toyota confirms customer and employee data stolen, says breach at third party to blame

Last week, a cybercriminal using the handle ZeroSevenGroup dumped 240GB of data on the infamous stolen data site BreachForums, that they said came from a hack on the US branch of car manufacturer Toyota. ZeroSevenGroup claims the dump includes customer and employee data. ZeroSevenGroup posted the...

Data theft forum admins busted after flashing their cash in a life of luxury

Two men without a clear source of income landed cyberfraud charges after being so flash with their ill-gotten cash that it gained the attention of the authorities. In 2022, Russian national Pavel Kublitskii and Kazakhstan national Alexandr Khodyrev arrived in Florida and requested asylum, which w...

AI girlfriends want to know all about you. So might ChatGPT (Lock and Code S05E17)

This week on the Lock and Code podcast… Somewhere out there is a romantic AI chatbot that wants to know everything about you. But in a revealing overlap, other AI tools—which are developed and popularized by far larger companies in technology—could crave the very same thing. For AI tools of any...

Scammers are impersonating cryptocurrency exchanges, FBI warns

The Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI issued a public service announcement warning the public about scammers impersonating cryptocurrency exchange employees to steal funds. There are many types of crypto related scams, but in this case, the FBI provided an advisory about scammers that contact t...

SIEM is not storage, with Jess Dodson (Lock and Code S05E16)

This week on the Lock and Code podcast… In the world of business cybersecurity, the powerful technology known as "Security Information and Event Management" is sometimes thwarted by the most unexpected actors—the very people setting it up. Security Information and Event Management—or SIEM—is a te...

Meta takes down 63,000 sextortion-related accounts on Instagram

Meta announced the take-down of 63,000 sextortion-related Instagram accounts in Nigeria alone. The action was directed against a group known as Yahoo Boys, a loosely organized set of cybercriminals that largely operate out of Nigeria and specialize in different types of scams. Meta took down a ho...

Heritage Foundation data breach containing personal data is available online

The Heritage Foundation this month denied that it had suffered an earlier system breach and the subsequent leaking of internal data. But the organization had to admit that cybercriminals gained access to an archive of Heritages affiliated media site, The Daily Signal, dating back to 2022. That...