7-Zip gets Mark of the Web feature, increases protection for users

One of the most popular zip programs around, 7-Zip, now offers support for "Mark of the Web" MOTW, which gives users better protection from malicious files. This is good news. But what does that actually mean? In the bad old days, opening up a downloaded document could be a fraught exercise...

Watch out for the email that says “You have a new voicemail!”

A phishing campaign is using voicemail notification messages to go after victims Office 365 credentials. According to researchers at ZScaler, the campaign uses spoofed emails with an HTML attachment that contains encoded javascript. The email claims that you have a new voicemail and that you can...

DFSCoerce, a new NTLM relay attack, can take control over a Windows domain

A researcher has published a Proof-of-Concept PoC for an NTLM relay attack dubbed DFSCoerce. The method leverages the Distributed File System: Namespace Management Protocol MS-DFSNM to seize control of a Windows domain. Active Directory A directory service is a hierarchical arrangement of objects...

Russia’s APT28 uses fear of nuclear war to spread Follina docs in Ukraine

This blog post was authored by Hossein Jazi and Roberto Santos. In a recent campaign, APT28, an advanced persistent threat actor linked with Russian intelligence, set its sights on Ukraine, targeting users with malware that steals credentials stored in browsers. APT28 also known as Sofacy and Fan...

You can be tracked online using your Chrome browser extensions

A researcher has found a way to generate a fingerprint of your device from your installed Google Chrome extensions, and then use that fingerprint to track you online. Fingerprinting is a way of figuring out what makes your device unique and then using that to identify you as you move around the...

Security vulnerabilities: 5 times that organizations got hacked

Businesses and governments these days are relying on dozens of different Software-as-a-Service SaaS applications to run their operations — and it’s no secret that hackers are always looking for security vulnerabilities in them to exploit. According to research by BetterCloud, the average company...

Client-side Magecart attacks still around, but more covert

This blog post was authored by Jérôme Segura We have seen and heard less buzz about Magecart during the past several months. While some marketing playbooks continue to rehash the same breaches of yesteryear, we have been wondering if some changes took place in the threat landscape. One thing we...

Internet Safety Month: 7 tips for staying safe online while on vacation

Going on vacation has never been more talked about and anticipated. I mean—for many of us, its been a while. But before you get lost in dreamy thoughts of sun, sea, and sand, you might want to set aside some time to plan on how to keep your devices, and your data, safe while you are relaxing Your...

DDoS-for-hire service provider jailed

Matthew Gatrel, a 33-year-old man from St. Charles, Illinois, has been sentenced to two years in prison for running websites that provide powerful distributed denial-of-service DDoS attacks against internet users and websites. This sentencing resulted in the seizure of his websites, making the...

LinkedIn scams are a “significant threat”, warns FBI

Digital currency fraud is a growing issue on social media, and LinkedIn is no different. In fact, according to according to Sean Ragan, the FBI’s special agent in charge of the San Francisco and Sacramento, California, field offices, cryptocurrency scams are big business on LinkedIn. "It’s a...

A week in security (June 13 – June 19)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Serious vulnerabilities found in ITarian software, patches available for SaaS products Update Chrome now: Four high risk vulnerabilities found Taking down the IP2Scam tech support campaign Don’t panic! “Unpatchable” Mac vulnerability discovered Introducing...

Securing the software supply chain, with Kim Lewandowski: Lock and Code S03E13

At the start of the global coronavirus pandemic, nearly everyone was forced to learn about the "supply chain." Immediate stockpiling by an alarmed and from a smaller share, opportunistic public led to an almost overnight disappearance of hand sanitizer, bottled water, toilet paper, and face masks...

ALPHV squeezes victim with dedicated leak site for employees and customers

Eyebrows were raised this week when the ALPHV ransomware group created a leak site dedicated to just one of its victims. The site was aimed at the employees and guests of a hotelier that had been attacked, and allowed them to see if their personal details had been leaked. The new tactic seems to ...

Hertzbleed exposes computers’ secret whispers

Hertzbleed is the name for a vulnerability that can be used to obtain cryptographic keys and other secret data from Intel and AMD CPUs, remotely. It works by monitoring changes in power consumption, which can be deduced by the careful timing of known workloads, thanks to a processor power saving...

Interpol’s First Light operation smashes crime on a global scale

A large-scale Interpol operation has resulted in arrested and ill-gotten gains seizures galore. Operation First Light took place between March and May of this year. It involved 76 countries taking social engineers and telecommunications fraudsters to task, with multiple wins for those involved...

Photos of kids taken from spyware-ridden phones found exposed on the internet

A stalkerware-type app that boasts "the best free phone spying software on the market," has exposed the data it snooped on from the phones it was installed in. The data exposed by TheTruthSpy included GPS locations and photos on victims phones, and images of children and babies. This news, first...

Stealthy Symbiote Linux malware is after financial institutions

Symbiote, a new "nearly impossible to detect" Linux malware, targeted financial sectors in Latin America—and the threat actors behind it might have links to Brazil. These findings were revealed in a recent report, a joint effort between the Blackberry Research Team and Dr. Joakim Kennedy, a...

Record breaking HTTPS DDoS attack

Last week, Cloudflare blocked the largest HTTPS DDoS attack on record. The attack amassed some 26 million requests per second rps. The previous record for a HTTPS DDoS attack was 15.3 million rps. The attack targeted an unnamed Cloudflare customer and originated mostly from Cloud Service Provider...

Firefox stops advertisers tracking you as you browse, calls itself the most “private and secure major browser”

Cookies are in the news as Mozilla rolls out significant privacy changes for Firefox. The idea is to dramatically lessen the risk of privacy-invading tracking across websites without your knowledge. Tracking cookies have been a hot topic in recent months, as advertisers try switching to other...

Update now!  Microsoft patches Follina, and many other security updates

The June 2022 Patch Tuesday may go down in history as the day that Follina got patched, but there was a host of other important updates. And not just from Microsoft. Many other software vendors follow the pattern of monthly updates set by the people in Redmond. Microsoft Microsoft released update...

It’s official, today you can say goodbye to Internet Explorer. Or can you?

Today, the Internet Explorer IE 11 desktop application goes out of support and will be retired for certain versions of Windows 10. The retirement consists of two phases. During the first phase—the redirection phase—devices will be progressively redirected from IE to Microsoft Edge over the...

Email compromise leads to healthcare data breach at Kaiser Permanente

At least 69,000 people have been impacted by a data breach at Kaiser Permanente, a long-running managed healthcare consortium. The latest in a long-running series of healthcare attacks, the road to stolen data began on April 5 this year with an email compromise. The direct path to data A...

Karakurt extortion group: Threat profile

The FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation, together with CISA Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other federal agencies, recently released a joint cybersecurity advisory CSA about the Karakurt data extortion group also known as Karakurt Team and Karakurt Lair. Like RansomHouse,...

Instagram scam steals your selfies to trick your friends

What would you do if a friend of yours set up a NSFW account, and then used it to follow you on Instagram? Would you check it out? We recently learned of a group of friends who had to ask themselves exactly that. Fortunately, they realised that something was off. The account wasnt the real owners...

“Multiple adversaries” exploiting Confluence vulnerability, warns Microsoft

Microsoft has warned that "multiple adversaries and nation-state actors" are making use of the recent Atlassian Confluence RCE vulnerability. A fix is now available for CVE-2022-26134. It is essential users of Confluence address the patching issue immediately. Confluence vulnerability: Background...

Introducing Malwarebytes Vulnerability Assessment for OneView: How to check for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs)

Malwarebytes is happy to announce our Vulnerability Assessment module for OneView, our multi-tenant console where you can manage Malwarebytes Nebula accounts, subscriptions, invoicing, and integrations. This module enables our MSPs to scan, identify, and assess vulnerabilities in customers’ digit...

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...

Taking down the IP2Scam tech support campaign

Tech support scams follow a simple business model that has not changed much over the years. After all, why change a recipe that continues to yield large profits. We see countless such campaigns and block them indiscriminately to protect our customers from being defrauded by a fraudulent tech...

Update Chrome now: Four high risk vulnerabilities found

Users of Chrome have been advised to apply updates as soon as possible related to seven security vulnerabilities. CISA has also warned that the vulnerabilities could be used to take control of affected systems. Although no detailed explanation of how these vulnerabilities work has been released,...

Serious vulnerabilities found in ITarian software, patches available for SaaS products

Dutch research group DIVD has identified multiple vulnerabilities in ITarian products. In cooperation with DIVD, ITarian has made patches available to deal with these vulnerabilities for its SaaS platform. Software as a service SaaS is a software distribution model in which a cloud provider hosts...

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...

WhatsApp spam offers up “B&Q Father’s Day Contest 2022”

Fathers Day in the UK June 19 is almost upon us, and scammers are taking advantage of it—and the fractional possibility of some nice weather—using a barbeque-themed lure. A mysterious WhatsApp message The barbeque bait arrives out of the blue, from a somebody who has your number, as a random...

Cloud data breaches: 4 biggest threats to cloud storage security

Just about anywhere you look, organizations are using the cloud in some form—and they’re not all large enterprises. Small and medium businesses SMBs are also reaping the many benefits that the cloud offers over on-premise software, especially the lowered IT costs, increased scalability, and large...

ASyncRat surpasses Dridex, TrickBot and Emotet to become dominant email threat

Earlier this year Malwarebytes released its 2022 Threat Review, a review of the most important threats and cybersecurity trends of 2021, and what they could mean for 2022. Among other things it covers the years alarming rebound in malware detections, and a significant shift in the balance of emai...

Facebook users targeted in massive phishing campaign

Facebook is once again the launchpad for a large-scale phishing campaign, according to researchers at PIXM. The campaign, which first shows signs of life back in September 2021, has generated millions of page views and ad referral revenue "estimated to be millions of USD at this scale of...

BlackBasta is the latest ransomware to target ESXi virtual machines on Linux

BlackBasta, an alleged subdivision of the ransomware group Conti, just began supporting the encryption of VMwares ESXi virtual machines VM installed on enterprise Linux servers. Because more and more organizations have begun using VMs for cost-effectiveness and easier management of devices, this...

Update now! Patch against vulnerabilities in Meeting Owl Pro and Whiteboard Owl devices

After a decent amount of pressure, Owl Labs has finally released updates for vulnerabilities in Meeting Owl, and Whiteboard Owl cameras. The vulnerabilities were reported to Owl Labs in January, One of the vulnerabilities, CVE-2022-31460 has been added to the Known exploited vulnerabilities catal...

Apple’s passkeys attempt to solve the password problem

The recent Apple Worldwide Developers Conference WWDC revealed another teasing of what has been referred to as "the end of passwords forever". Passkeys are a "new biometric sign-in standard". Biometrics in security circles are used for things like identity cards, building access, and so on. This...

MakeMoney malvertising campaign adds fake update template

Malware authors and distributors are following the ebbs and flow of the threat landscape. One campaign we have tracked for a numbers of years recently introduced a new scheme to possibly completely move away from drive-by downloads via exploit kit. In this quick blog post, we will look at this ne...

Awful 4chan chat bot spouts racial slurs and antisemitic abuse

“A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm” Science fiction readers, and many others, will recognize Asimov’s first law of robotics. After reading about a bot called GPT-4chan I was wondering whether we should include: “A bot may not insult a...

5 Linux malware families SMBs should protect themselves against

There’s no shortage of reasons why an SMB might use Linux to run their business: There are plenty of distros to choose from, it’s generally free, and perhaps above all — it’s secure. The common wisdom goes that Linux malware is rare, and for the most part this is true. Thanks to its built-in...

SSNDOB stolen data marketplace shut down by global law enforcement operation

The United States Department of Justice has announced a major takedown of a criminal marketplace that traded Personally Identifiable Information PII. Not just any old marketplace; this was a major, years-long operation with several failsafes to prevent permanent takedown. It took quite the...

Coffee app in hot water for constant tracking of user location

A mobile app violated Canadas privacy laws via some pretty significant overreach with its tracking of device owners. The violation will apparently not bring the app owners, Tim Hortons, any form of punishment. However, the fallout from this incident may hopefully serve as a warning to others with...

Ransomware Task Force priorities see progress in first year

This blog is part of our live coverage from RSA Conference 2022: US President Joseph R. Biden Jr., The White House, and law enforcement agencies across the world paid close attention last year when a group of more than 60 cybersecurity experts launched the Ransomware Task Force, heeding the group...

Hackers can take over accounts you haven’t even created yet

Account hijacking has sadly become a regular, everyday occurrence. But when it comes to hijacking accounts before they are even created? Thats something youd never think possible—but it is. Two security researchers, Avinash Sudhodanan and Andrew Paverd, call this new class of attack a...

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,...

Prometheus ransomware’s flaws inspired researchers to try to build a near-universal decryption tool

This blog is part of our live coverage from RSA Conference 2022: Prometheus—a ransomware build based on Thanos that locked up victims’ computers in the summer of 2021—included a major “vulnerability” that led security researchers at IBM to try and build a one-size-fits-all ransomware decryptor th...

Microsoft Autopatch is here…but can you use it?

Updating endpoints on a network can be a daunting task. Testing before rollout can take time. Delays to patches going live can cause all manner of headaches. Windows Autopatch aims to tackle some of these issues, and is now live for public preview. The release comes with a few caveats which youll...

FBI warns of scammers soliciting donations for Ukraine

The FBI recently issued an announcement about a fraudulent scheme that proves there is no low thats too low for scammers. "Criminal actors are taking advantage of the crisis in Ukraine by posing as Ukrainian entities needing humanitarian aid or developing fundraising efforts, including monetary a...

A week in security (May 30 – June 5)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Intuit phish says "We have put a temporary hold on your account" The Quad commits to strengthening cybersecurity in software, supply chains Double-whammy attack follows fake Covid alert with a bogus bank call Microsoft Office zero-day "Follina"—its not a bug, its a...