Malwarebytes acquires AzireVPN to fuel additional VPN features and functionalities

Today I have great news to share: We've acquired AzireVPN, a privacy-focused VPN provider based in Sweden. I wanted to share with you our intentions behind this exciting step, and what this means for our existing users and the family of solutions they rely on to keep them private and secure...

LinkedIn bots and spear phishers target job seekers

Microsoft's social network for professionals, LinkedIn, is an important platform for job recruiters and seekers alike. It's also a place where criminals go to find new potential victims. Like other social media platforms, LinkedIn is no stranger to bots attracted to special keywords and hashtags...

Comcast and Truist Bank customers impacted by debt collector’s breach

A data breach at Financial Business and Consumer Solutions FBCS, a US debt collection agency, has led to the loss of data of some Comcast Cable Communications and Truist Bank customers. FBCS is in the business of collecting unpaid debts on behalf of its customers. The data breach occurred in...

A week in security (September 30 – October 6)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Facebook and Instagram passwords were stored in plaintext, Meta fined Android users targeted on Facebook and porn sites, served adware Fake Disney+ activation page redirects to pornographic scam Radiology provider exposed tens of thousands of patient files Not Blac...

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...

Tor anonymity compromised by law enforcement. Is it still safe to use?

Despite people generally considering the Tor network as an essential tool for anonymous browsing, german law enforcement agencies have managed to de-anonymize Tor users after putting surveillance on Tor servers for months. Before we go into the what the agencies did, let's take a look at some...

Walmart customers scammed via fake shopping lists, threatened with arrest

Shopping online or attempting to get in touch with a store is a little bit like walking on a minefield: you might get lucky or take a wrong step and get scammed. Case in point, a malicious ad campaign is abusing Walmart Lists, a kind of virtual shopping list customers can share with family and...

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...

Payment provider data breach exposes credit card information of 1.7 million customers

Payment provider Slim CD has disclosed a security incident that may have exposed the full credit card information of anyone paying at a merchant that uses Slim CD’s services. The Florida-based gateway system, which allows merchants to take any kind of electronic payment, said on June 15 it notice...

Your partner “is cheating on you” scam asks you to pay to see proof

As if they weren’t annoying enough already, scammers have recently introduced new pressure tactics to their sextortion and scam emails. Last week we reported how cybercriminals are using photographs of targets homes in order to scare them into paying money. Now theyre throwing in the name of...

How to avoid election related scams

With the US election campaigns at full throttle, scammers have taken a renewed interest in the ways this can be used to defraud people, often using the same tactics legitimate campaigns leverage for support emails, text messages, phone calls, and social media pleas. The lure that we have seen the...

Man certifies his own (fake) death after hacking into registry system using stolen identity

A 39-year-old man has been sentenced to 81 months in jail after hacking governments systems to fake his own death to dodge paying child support. Yes, you read that right. The press release by the US Attorneys Office, Eastern District of Kentucky, paints a detailed picture of what went down. In...

X accused of unlawfully using personal data of 60 million+ users to train its AI

In what may come as a surprise to nobody at all, theres been yet another complaint about using social media data to train Artificial Intelligence AI. This time the complaint is against X formerly Twitter and Grok, the conversational AI chatbot developed by Elon Musks company xAI. Grok is a large...

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...

“Amazon got hacked” messages are a false alarm

Amazon customers have been seeing a message on social media that has caused some alarm. Most of the posts look like one of these depending on the social media platform: “PSA!! Amazon got hacked. For USA based people, check your Amazon account. Hackers added HUB lockers as your default delivery...

FTC bans SpyFone and its CEO from continuing to sell stalkerware

Nearly two years after the US Federal Trade Commission first took aim against mobile apps that can non-consensually track people’s locations and pry into their emails, photos, and videos, the government agency placed restrictions Wednesday on the developers of SpyFone—which the FTC called a...

Hidden prompt turns Microsoft Copilot into an AI worm

A security researcher has demonstrated how Microsoft Copilot for Word can be tricked into spreading a self‑propagating prompt‑injection “AI worm.” The attack silently alters documents and embeds its own hidden instructions into newly created files, allowing it to spread through normal...

OpenAI explains how its AI agent breached Hugging Face

On July 28, OpenAI published an update on the agent that escaped its sandbox and hacked into Hugging Face during an internal cybersecurity evaluation. In the update, OpenAI reiterates that the “rogue” system was a more capable, pre‑release research model, not something intended for public...

Microsoft fixes RoguePlanet zero-day in Defender

Microsoft issued a security update that fixes the zero-day vulnerability known as RoguePlanet in Microsoft Defender. RoguePlanet is tracked as CVE-2026-50656, a Microsoft Defender elevation of privilege EoP vulnerability. As we reported last month, if successfully exploited, RoguePlanet can allow...

Malicious trading website drops malware that hands your browser to attackers

During our threat hunting, we found a campaign using the same malware loader from our previous research to deliver a different threat: Needle Stealer , data-stealing malware designed to quietly harvest sensitive information from infected devices, including browser data, login sessions, and...

Browser Guard gets even better with Access Control

Have you ever been on a website when a pop-up suddenly asked for access to your camera, microphone, location, or notifications? Whether you clicked “allow,” dismissed it, or just wondered why it appeared, those permission requests aren’t always harmless. Some sites can abuse those permissions. Wi...

Scammers pose as Amazon support to steal your account

Cybercriminals using the so-called "spray and pray" tactic love to impersonate well-known brands. Especially ones with huge customer bases. Amazon reportedly has around 310 million active customers, so they certainly qualify as a brand worth impersonating. And it shows in the sheer volume of scam...

Russian hacking group targets home and small office routers to spy on users

British security officials found that a group linked to the Russian military is spying on users of compromised Small Office/Home Office SOHO routers in a broad cyber espionage campaign. A Microsoft blog goes into the technical details of these attacks. The group, which we’ll refer to as APT28, bu...

Timeshare owners warned to watch out for cartel-linked scams

If you own a timeshare and have been searching for a way out, you need to know who may be targeting you. In February, the US Treasury Department announced sanctions against a timeshare fraud network linked to a major Mexican drug cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel CJNG. These aren’t your...

Traffic violation scams swap links for QR codes to steal your card details

As soon as people start to get to grips with a certain type of scam, criminals deploy new tactics to keep stealing money. Now people have learned to distrust links in text messages, scammers have changed the bait, and in 2026 the “new link” is often a QR code tucked inside a fake notice. The late...

Killer robots are here. Now what? (Lock and Code S07E07)

Big news : Lock and Code is nominated for a Webby Award! You can help us win the People's Voice Award by voting here. Vote now! This week on the Lock and Code podcast … We have to talk about killer robots. No, not the Terminator, and not some Boston Dynamics robot run amok. We have to talk instea...

Apple expands “DarkSword” patches to iOS 18.7.7

Apple widened its latest iOS 18 security update to cover far more iPhones and iPads, specifically to stop real‑world DarkSword attacks that can compromise a device from a single website visit. After researchers published their findings about the DarkSword attacks and an exploit kit abusing the...

WhatsApp on Windows users targeted in new campaign, warns Microsoft

Microsoft researchers found a campaign that abuses WhatsApp attachments to sneak a script onto Windows machines which will lead to the attacker gaining remote control. WhatsApp offers a desktop application for Windows and macOS, which users can synchronize with their mobile devices. Desktop...

Axios supply chain attack chops away at npm trust

Researchers found that compromised Axios versions installed a Remote Access Trojan. Axios is a promise-based HTTP Client for node.js, basically a helper tool that developers use behind the scenes to let apps talk to the internet. For example, Axios makes requests such as “get my messages from the...

Bogus Avast website fakes virus scan, installs Venom Stealer instead

A fake website impersonating Avast antivirus is tricking people into infecting their own computers. The site looks legitimate, runs what appears to be a virus scan, and claims your system is full of threats. But the results are fake: when you’re prompted to “fix” the problem, the download you’re...

The March Madness scam playbook

March Madness is the annual men's and women's NCAA Division I basketball tournament, where 68 teams play in a single-elimination bracket for the US national championship. But March Madness doesn’t just bring buzzer beaters and busted brackets. It also kicks off a short, intense season for scammer...

Inside a network of 20,000+ fake shops

We mapped a sprawling fake shop operation of over 20,000 domains, dozens of shared IP addresses and identical storefronts with different names pasted on top. They exist for one purpose: to steal your payment details and personal data. The thread that ties them all together is a browser tab title...

Fake Pudgy World site steals your crypto passwords

A phishing site impersonating the newly-launched Pudgy World browser game is targeting crypto users with a technique that goes well beyond a convincing logo and matching color scheme. Pudgy World is a free-to-play browser game built around the Pudgy Penguins NFT brand. Players explore a virtual...

How searching for a VPN could mean handing over your work login details

This blog is about how trying to do the “right thing” can lead you straight into a trap. People searching for a VPN ended up downloading credential-stealing malware. From the victim’s perspective, their trust was exploited at every step: trust in search engines, in familiar logos, in digital...

Zombie ZIP method can fool antivirus during the first scan

A researcher published “Zombie ZIP,” a simple way to change the first part header of a ZIP file so it falsely claims its contents are uncompressed while they are actually compressed. Many antivirus products trust that header and never properly decompress or inspect the real payload. In tests...

Delete doesn’t mean gone. Here’s how File Shredder fixes that

You have done it a thousand times. Right-click. Delete. Empty Trash. Done. Except it's not done. That file, your tax return, your private photos, that EmbezzlementPlan.doc… it's all still sitting on your drive. Invisible to you, but not to anyone with a $30 recovery tool downloaded from the...

Watch out for fake Malwarebytes renewal notices in your calendar

We’ve become aware of a scam campaign sending fake calendar invites that impersonate Malwarebytes and attempt to trick recipients into calling a scam “billing support” number. We have written before about how calendar invites can be abused for phishing, and even about how Google Calendar invites...

[updated] Google patches two Chrome zero-days under active attack

Update March 16, 2026 Earlier this week, Google incorrectly reported that an actively exploited vulnerability in Chrome had been fixed, and has now announced it will roll out a new update to protect users against the vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-3909. Original content: Google has released an...

How to understand and avoid Advanced Persistent Threats

By definition, an advanced persistent threat APT is a prolonged, targeted attack on a specific victim with the intention to compromise their system and gain information from or about that target. About a decade ago, the term was mostly used for state-sponsored threat actors. I used threat actors...

A week in security (February 16 – February 22)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Age verification vendor Persona left frontend exposed, researchers say Facebook ads spread fake Windows 11 downloads that steal passwords and crypto wallets AI-generated passwords are a security risk Intimate products maker Tenga spilled customer data Meta patents ...

Outlook add-in goes rogue and steals 4,000 credentials and payment data

Researchers found a malicious Microsoft Outlook add-in which was able to steal 4,000 stolen Microsoft account credentials, credit card numbers, and banking security answers. How is it possible that the Microsoft Office Add-in Store ended listing an add-in that silently loaded a phishing kit insid...

Google will pay $8.25m to settle child data-tracking allegations

Google has settled yet another class-action lawsuit accusing it of collecting children’s data and using it to target them with advertising. The tech giant will pay $8.25 million to address allegations that it tracked data on apps specifically designated for kids. AdMob's mobile data collection Th...

Regulators around the world are scrutinizing Grok over sexual deepfakes

Grok’s failure to block sexualized images of minors has turned a single “isolated lapse” into a global regulatory stress test for xAI’s ambitions. The response from lawmakers and regulators suggests this will not be solved with a quick apology and a hotfix. Last week we reported on Grok's apology...

One million customers on alert as extortion group claims massive Brightspeed data haul

US fiber broadband company Brightspeed is investigating claims by the Crimson Collective extortion group that it stole sensitive data belonging to more than 1 million residential customers, including extensive personally identifiable information PII, as well as account and billing details...

Disney fined $10m for mislabeling kids’ YouTube videos and violating privacy law

Disney will pay a $10m settlement over allegations that it violated kids' privacy rights, the Federal Trade Commission FTC said this week. The agreement, first proposed in September 2025, resolves a dispute over Disney's labeling of child-targeted content on YouTube. The thousands of YouTube vide...

A week in security (December 29 – January 4)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: How AI made scams more convincing in 2025 In 2025, age checks started locking people out of the internet 2025 exposed the risks we ignored while rushing AI Malware in 2025 spread far beyond Windows PCs Stay safe! We don 't just report on privacy—we offer you the...

2025 exposed the risks we ignored while rushing AI

This blog is part of a series where we highlight new or fast-evolving threats in the consumer security landscape. This one looks at how the rapid rise ofArtificial Intelligence AI is putting users at risk. In 2025 we saw an ever-accelerating race between AI providers to push out new features. We...

Two Chrome flaws could be triggered by simply browsing the web: Update now

Google issued an extra patch addressing two security vulnerabilities in Chrome, both of which can be triggered remotely by an attacker when a user visits a specially crafted, malicious web page. Chrome is by far the world’s most popular browser, with an estimated 3.4 billion users. That makes it ...

Photo booth flaw exposes people’s private pictures online

Photo booths are great. You press a button and get instant results. The same can’t be said, allegedly, for the security practices of at least one company operating them. A security researcher spent weeks trying to warn a photo booth operator about a vulnerability in its system. The flaw reportedl...

The US digital doxxing of H-1B applicants is a massive privacy misstep

Technology professionals hoping to come and work in the US face a new privacy concern. Starting December 15, skilled workers on H-1B visas and their families must flip their social media profiles to public before their consular interviews. It’s a deeply risky move from a security and privacy...