Ransomware: March 2022 review

The Malwarebytes Threat Intelligence team continuously monitors the threat landscape to stay on top of existing and emerging attacks. In this March 2022 ransomware review, we go over some of the most successful ransomware incidents based on both open source and dark web intelligence. The March da...

Denonia cryptominer is first malware to target AWS Lambda

Security researchers at Cado Security, a cybersecurity forensics company, recently discovered the first publicly-known malware targeting Lambda, the serverless computing platform of Amazon Web Services AWS. Though Lambda has been around for less than ten years, serverless technology is considered...

Old Play Store apps served notice by upcoming API level changes

Starting very soon, old and outdated apps on the Google Play Store will no longer be available to download. A major clearout is coming, and if you’re an app developer it may be time to overhaul your product or face Android-centric oblivion. What’s happening? Android makes use of APIs application...

Credential-stealing malware disguises itself as Telegram, targets social media users

A credential-stealing Windows-based malware, Spyware.FFDroider, is after social media credentials and cookies, according to researchers at ThreatLabz. The version analyzed by the researchers was packed with Aspack. The spyware is offered on download sites pretending to be installers for freeware...

A week in security (April 4 – 10)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Why data protection and privacy are not the same, and why that matters: Lock and Code S03E09 YouTube channels of Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Harry Styles, and other musicians compromised Successful operations against Russian Sandworm and Strontium groups targeting...

Why data protection and privacy are not the same, and why that matters: Lock and Code S03E09

Theres a mistake commonly made in the United States that a law that was passed to help people move their healthcare information to a new doctor or provider was actually passed to originally implement universal, wide-ranging privacy controls on that same type of information. This is the mixup with...

YouTube channels of Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Harry Styles, and other musicians compromised

Some of the biggest stars around have seen content placed on their YouTube accounts without permission over the last couple of days. Taylor Swift has around 40 million subscribers. Justin Bieber? 68 million. Harry Styles, a respectable 12 million. You can even add Eminem and Michael Jackson to th...

Successful operations against Russian Sandworm and Strontium groups targeting Ukraine revealed

The US Department of Justice DoJ and Microsoft have taken the sting out of two operations believed to be controlled by the Russian Federation’s Main Intelligence Directorate GRU. On Wednesday, the DOJ announced that it had disrupted GRU’s control over thousands of internet-connected firewall...

Don’t enter your recovery phrase! Phishers target Ledger crypto-wallet users

Ledger is one of the biggest hardware cryptocurrency wallets around and scammers have noticed. Phishing mails are in circulation, hoping to snag Ledger users with a sneaky request for passphrases. What is a Ledger recovery phrase? A recovery phrase is an incredibly important combination of words...

Watch out for fake WhatsApp “New Incoming Voicemessage” emails

Thanks to the Threat Intelligence team for their help with this article. Security researchers from Armorblox, a cybersecurity company specializing in email-based threats, have encountered a fake WhatsApp email with the subject "New Incoming Voicemessage." The spoofed WhatsApp voicemail notificati...

Cash App breached by a former employee could affect millions

In December last year, the customer information of Cash App users was accessed by a former employee of Block, the company behind the popular mobile payment service app. This was revealed in a very recent filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission SEC, which shows that the former employee...

Beware Ukraine-themed fundraising scams

Unfortunately scammers continue to focus on the invasion of Ukraine to make money. A flurry of bogus domains and scam techniques are spreading their wings. They appear to focus on donation fakeouts but there’s a few other nasty surprises lying in wait too. The lowest of the low There are few lowe...

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...

CISA advises D-Link users to take vulnerable routers offline

On April 4 2022, the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency CISA added CVE-2021-45382 to its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog. But since the affected products have reached end of life EOL, the advice is to disconnect them, if still in use. CISA catalog The CISA catalog of known...

GitLab issues security updates; watch out for hard coded passwords

GitLab has issued several critical security updates, with users of the version control software urged to upgrade their installations as soon as possible. One of the fixes is for a hard coded password issue. What is distributed version control? Distributed version control is a way for an...

5 ways to spring clean your security

It is now officailly spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and with spring and the longer days comes the inescapable urge to shake off the lethargy of Winter and embrace the need to go through your stuff, throw a bunch of it out, and give the rest of it a shiny new lustre. And in our increasingly...

“Free easter chocolate basket” is a social media scam after your personal details

Holidays inspire fraudsters and scammers to create timely and effective ways to string people along and get them to give up either their money or their personal information. This is the case in this chocolate-themed scam. Cadbury UK has issued a warning to its 315,000 followers on Twitter about a...

Update now! Zyxel patches critical firewall bypass vulnerability

In a security advisory Zyxel has urged customers to update because a security flaw can lead to the circumvention of firewall protection in several Zyxel products. Zyxel is a Taiwanese producer of modems and other networking equipment and its products are sold in over 150 countries. The...

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...

New UAC-0056 activity: There’s a Go Elephant in the room

This blog post was authored by Ankur Saini, Roberto Santos and Hossein Jazi. UAC-0056 also known as SaintBear, UNC2589 and TA471 is a cyber espionage actor that has been active since early 2021 and has mainly targeted Ukraine and Georgia. The group is known to have performed a wiper attack in...

Globant suffers network breach due to LAPSUS$ compromise

Globant, an IT and software development firm with offices all around the globe, admitted in a press statement Wednesday that it has suffered a breach in its network. Affected data includes but may not be limited to some source code and certain project documentation of clients. "We have recently...

Update now! Apple patches two zero-day vulnerabilities that may have been actively exploited

Apple has released security updates for macOS Monterey 12.3.1, iOS 15.4.1, iPadOS 15.4.1, tvOS 15.4.1, and watchOS 8.5.1. The update patches two vulnerabilities about which the advisory states that Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited for both vulnerabilitie...

Hive ransomware impacts California non-profit health organisation

Ransomware authors are once again targeting health services, holding important files to ransom and impacting potentially vital services. On this occasion, the victims are a non-profit organisation assisting people with their healthcare needs in California. When Hive ransomware strikes The victim,...

MITRE ATT&CK® Evaluation results: Malwarebytes’ efficiency, delivered simply, earns high marks

Cybersecurity can be complex work, as security teams need to regularly decipher and prioritize alerts, protect against daily threats, and possibly implement product configuration changes, all while staying abreast of the latest intelligence on new and evolving threats. For organizations that lack...

Phishers make a date with your calendar apps

Calendars are a rich source of bad behaviour for scammers and spammers. They’re one of the most prolific tools the workplace has for collaborative actions and general cross-purpose messaging. They’ve been misused by bad actors for many years now, most commonly spamming unwary potential victims an...

Tech support scam campaign targets Japanese visitors to PornHub

The Malwarebytes Threat Intelligence team has identified a malvertising campaign targeting Japanese users. The campaign they discovered was found to be using a cloaking technique to lure visitors of popular adult site PornHub to a decoy site at the domain mixhd.club. Cloaking Cloaking is a method...

URI spoofing flaw could phish WhatsApp, Signal, Instagram, and iMessage users

Update: We were informed by Sick Codes that, although Signal already has a fix for this URI flaw here, it hasnt been pushed out to market yet. Well further update this post once there is new development. Theres a flaw in the way many of the worlds most popular messaging and email platforms—such a...

Ukraine shuts down disinformation bot farm

Given current world events, there’s an incredible amount of misinformation and disinformation around at the moment. Whether we’re talking 5G, the pandemic, vaccines, or invasions, there’s a lot out there. One of the biggest problems where bad information placed online is concerned is bot farms. A...

Update now! Google launches Chrome version 100 and fixes 28 vulnerabilities

Google has launched Chrome version 100 which, among other things, fixes 28 vulnerabilities. Other new security features include Safety Check, Enhanced Safe Browsing, and the ability to control website access to your location and device. Of the 28 vulnerabilities, none have been marked as critical...

“A little gift for you” SMS spam appears to come from your own phone number

If youve received a spam SMS message sent from your own phone number, dont panic. No, you werent hacked. And youre not the only one who has received such a message, which looks a bit like this: A colleague received this same spam SMS message that has been going around more frequently these past f...

Watch out for LinkedIn fakes who want to get connected

Despite continued warnings of deepfake chaos during major events, things haven’t worked out the way some thought. Those video deepfakes are bad, and they remain bad. Quite simply, nobody is fooled - or at least, nobody able to make a mistaken snap judgement in a way that matters. As much as we ov...

New spear phishing campaign targets Russian dissidents

This blog post was authored by Hossein Jazi. -- Updated to clarify the two different campaigns Cobalt Strike and Rat Several threat actors have taken advantage of the war in Ukraine to launch a number of cyber attacks. The Malwarebytes Threat Intelligence team is actively monitoring these threats...

Attacks on Ukraine communications are a major part of the war

Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the war on the battlefield has been accompanied by cyber attacks. Those attacks against critical infrastructure have knocked out banking and defense platforms, mostly by targeting several communication systems. In a timeline set up by NetBlocks,...

Looking over your shoulder: when small mistakes have big consequences

People up to no good get themselves caught in an endless number of ways. This has always been the case in the real world, and continues to be true online. No matter how talented, how daring the schemes, greed and the desire for fame often win out. This has disastrous consequences for those caught...

Satellites are critical infrastructure and need to be cybersecured

In the context of this article we will use the term satellite for a machine that is launched into space and moves around Earth. And there might be a lot more of them than you would expect—this live map tracks a huge number of satellites. Originally most of earth’s satellites were launched for...

Telling stories securely, with Runa Sandvik: Lock and Code S03E07

In 2017, a former NSA contractor named Reality Winner was arrested for allegedly leaking an internal report to the online news outlet The Intercept. To verify the report itself, a journalist for The Intercept sent an image of the report to the NSA, but upon further inspection, it was revealed tha...

Update now! Google releases emergency patch for Chrome zero-day used in the wild

Google has urged its 3 billion+ users to update to Chrome version 99.0.4844.84 for Mac, Windows, and Linux to mitigate a zero-day that is currently being exploited in the wild. This is in response to a bug reported by an anonymous security researcher last week. The flaw, which is tracked as...

Tech support fraud is still very much alive, says latest FBI report

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center IC3 has released its annual report. In 2021, IC3 continued to receive a record number of complaints from the American public: 847,376 reported complaints, which was a 7% increase from 2020, with potential losses exceeding $6.9 billion. Among the complaint...

A week in security (March 21 – 27)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Anti-war open-source software developer targets Russians and Belarussians with “protestware” Elden Ring exploit traps players in infinite death loop Update now! Many HP printers affected by three critical security vulnerabilities White House urges US businesses:...

Anti-war open-source software developer targets Russians and Belarussians with “protestware”

Russia is in the midst of its fourth week of attack against Ukraine. People worldwide have been increasingly and passionately showing support for Ukrainians since day one while condemning the atrocities of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Russian military, and Belarus, its allied country...

Elden Ring exploit traps players in infinite death loop

Back in January, we wrote about how the Dark Souls games had their online components switched off for PC gamers. This is because someone figured out how to execute code remotely on the target’s PC. Given that the multiplayer angle of Souls games is rather important, this was quite a body blow for...

Update now! Many HP printers affected by three critical security vulnerabilities

In two security advisories, HP has alerted users to the existence of security vulnerabilities in several of its printer models. In total, four vulnerabilities were patched, but three of those vulnerabilities are rated critical, and all of them can lead to remote code execution RCE when exploited...

White House urges US businesses: Protect against potential Russian cyberattacks

On Monday, the White House told US business leaders to toughen up their cybersecurity defenses against a potential cyberattack from Russia. "The Biden-Harris Administration has warned repeatedly about the potential for Russia to engage in malicious cyber activity against the United States in...

Okta admits 366 customers may have been impacted by LAPSUS$ breach

Through its usual means of communication, its Telegram channel, the LAPSUS$ group has posted screenshots of what appears to be superuser access to the Okta management console. As such, the group claims to have acquired "superuser/admin" access to Okta.com and gained access to Oktas customer data,...

A new rootkit comes to an ATM near you

Its not unusual to hear about malware created to affect automated teller machines ATMs. Malware can be planted at the ATMs PC or its network, or attackers could launch a Man-in-the-Middle MiTM attack. Recently, a new rootkit, which the Mandiant Advanced Practices team have named CAKETAP, was foun...

Facebook users wary of security mail find themselves locked out of accounts

It’s not unusual for sites and services to offer additional forms of protection on top of regular security features. Some of the bigger ones even go the extra mile, protecting from attacks up to a potential nation state level. The most famous example of this recently is likely Google. Its Advance...

Fake Esports voting sites looking to phish Steam users

We’ve seen Esports occasionally become the focus of gaming or Steam scams. One particular tactic of note was to claim joining an official league is an easy process. Links to third-party hosted files would offer up a supposedly cracked ESEA Esports league client. In reality, it was a data stealing...

AvosLocker ransomware uses Microsoft Exchange Server vulnerabilities, says FBI

The FBI has issued an advisory about the AvosLocker ransomware. Notably the FBI has noticed that several victims have reported Microsoft Exchange Server vulnerabilities as the intrusion vector. AvosLocker is a Ransomware as a Service RaaS affiliate-based group that has targeted victims across...

Facebook phish claims “Someone tried to log into your account”

Watch out for bogus Facebook phishing messages winging their way to your mailbox. The ruse is quite simple: The mail senders are relying on the recipient’s sense of panic to respond without thinking about it. The mail looks professional enough, and seeks to imitate what would be a fairly typical...

A week in security (March 14 – 20)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Beware of this bogus and phishy “Instagram Support” email Meet Exotic Lily, access broker for ransomware and other malware peddlers Double header: IsaacWiper and CaddyWiper How to protect RDP Online Safety Bill’s provisions for “legal but harmful” content described...