Infamous dark net carding site UniCC to close

UniCC, the largest site on the dark web that sells credit card and debit card information, will close up shop for good, taking its affiliate site, LuxSocks, with it, too. According to Elliptic, a company that offers risk solutions for cryptoassets, the unknown UniCC administrators have made an...

REvil ransomware gang busted by Russian Federal Security Service

Eight members of the REvil ransomware group have been arrested in Russia and will be pressed with criminal charges. Russias intelligence bureau, the FSB, announced on Friday that it had conducted an operation together with the Interior Ministry in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and the regions of Moscow...

A week in security (January 10 – 16)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Ransomware cyberattack forces New Mexico jail to lock down Some Android users can disable 2G now and why that is a good thing Phishers on the prowl with fake parking meter QR codes Update now: Microsoft patches 97 bugs including 6 zero-days and a wormable one...

Ransomware cyberattack forces New Mexico jail to lock down

Five days after the new year, the Metropolitan Detention Center MDC in Bernalillo County, New Mexico suddenly went on lockdown. The reason? A ransomware cyberattack has knocked the jails internet connection offline, rendering most of their data systems, security cameras, and automatic doors...

Some Android users can disable 2G now and why that is a good thing

The Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF has happily informed people that Google has quietly pushed a new feature to its Android operating system allowing users to optionally disable 2G at the modem level in their phones. This is beneficial because 2G uses weak encryption between the tower and devi...

Phishers on the prowl with fake parking meter QR codes

QR codes come and go as a threat. The last time we wrote about them they were causing problems at gas stations, and by sheer chance this latest outing shares vehicular related subject matter. Law enforcement in the US is sounding the alarm regarding parking meters. A quick refresher QR Quick...

[updated] You can update now: Microsoft patches 97 bugs including 6 zero-days and a wormable one

How time flies sometimes. Microsoft yesterday released the first patch Tuesday security updates of the year 2022. The update includes fixes for six zero-day vulnerabilities and a total of 97 bugs. This includes two Remote Code Execution RCE vulnerabilities affecting open source libraries. None of...

Software engineer hacked webcams to spy on girls—Here’s how to protect yourself

A 32 year-old software engineer has been sentenced to two years and two months in prison for remotely accessing chat logs, photos, videos, and webcams of his female victims. For nine years, between 2010 to 2019, Robert Davies used malware to infiltrate his targets devices and access their data...

FIFA 22 phishers tackle customer support with social engineering

Players of smash hit gaming title FIFA 22 have become the target of a wave of attacks focused on account compromise. Up to 50 “high profile” accounts were hijacked by what may have been the same group. FIFA games are, traditionally, a big draw for scammers and phishers. Many sports titles offer...

Ransomware targets Edge users

Unless youve been hiding under a rock for the last twenty years, youve probably heard the one about "keeping your software up to date". Applying software updates promptly is arguably the single most useful thing you can do to keep yourself secure online, and vendors, experts, pundits, and blogs...

Intimate photo hacker spared from jail, said he “liked the detective work”

Michael Grime, a British games programmer, has escaped jail after using stolen credentials to access several womens personal email accounts and social media accounts in order to steal their private and intimate photos. Grime was caught by the National Crime Agency NCA as part of an operation...

The Facebook Pixel Hunt aims to unravel Facebook’s tracking methods. Will you join?

Browser developer Mozilla has announced a research project to provide insights into, and data about, a space that’s opaque to policymakers, researchers and users themselves. Tracking the trackers is the name of the game. Give up some of your data voluntarily to stop the involuntary collection by...

How to share your Wi-Fi password safely

You may not have as many people visiting your home due to the pandemic, but restrictions are a hit-and-miss affair. Its possible your region has opened up a little, and youre seeing folks in your home for the first time in a long time. They may well be bringing new devices to your home, and you m...

Night Sky: the new corporate ransomware demanding a sky high ransom

Theres a new ransomware in town—isnt there always?—and its, unsurprisingly, after corporation-sized businesses. Its called Night Sky, and it was first spotted and revealed by MalwareHunterTeam, a group on Twitter who hunts malware online, on the first day of 2022. First day of the year, and a new...

Attackers are mailing USB sticks to drop ransomware on victims’ computers

Physical objects as security threats are in the news at the moment. The oft-touched upon tale of rogue USB sticks is a common one. Being wary of random devices found on the floor, or handed out at events is a smart move. You simply don’t know what’s lurking, and it’s hard to find out safely witho...

A week in security (January 3 – 9)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Ransomware attacks Finalsite, renders 8,000 school sites unreachable for days Patchwork APT caught in its own web Sophisticated phishing scheme spent years robbing authors of their unpublished work Google and Facebook fined $240 million for making cookies hard to...

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...

Sophisticated phishing scheme spent years robbing authors of their unpublished work

Three years ago on Quora, someone asked what writers do to keep their manuscripts from being stolen. One of the top answers reads as follows: You’re joking, right? It’s hard enough to get people to read your novel once it’s out on Amazon, much less reading it before it’s finished…unless you’re...

Google and Facebook fined $240 million for making cookies hard to refuse

French privacy watchdog, the Commission Nationale de lInformatique et des Libertés CNIL, has hit Google with a 150 million euro fine and Facebook with a 60 million euro fine, because their websites—google.fr, youtube.com, and facebook.com—dont make refusing cookies as easy as accepting them. The...

New iPhone malware spies via camera when device appears off

When removing malware from an iOS device, it is said that users need to restart the device to clear the malware from memory. That is no longer the case. Security researchers from ZecOps have created a new proof-of-concept PoC iPhone Trojan capable of doing "fun" things. Not only can it fake a...

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...

Intercepting 2FA: Over 1200 man-in-the-middle phishing toolkits detected

Two-factor authentication 2FA has been around for a while now and for the majority of tech users in the US and UK, it has became a security staple. Indeed, wake up calls brought about by data breaches have stirred others out of their comfort zones into finally adopting 2FA and making it part of...

Card skimmers strike Sotheby’s in Brightcove supply chain attack

Over 100 real estate websites have been compromised by the same web skimmer in a supply chain attack. So what happened? On Monday, January 3, Palo Alto said it had found a supply chain attack that used a cloud video platform to distribute skimmer campaigns. The attacker injected the skimmer’s...

Careful! Uber flaw allows anyone to send an email from uber.com

On New Years Eve, Seif Elsallamy @0x21SAFE on Twitter, a bug bounty hunter and security researcher, pointed out a phish-worthy security flaw he found on Uber’s email system. The flaw allowed anyone to send emails on behalf of Uber, meaning they would end with "@uber.com", just like the one below:...

$10m of funds goes missing in what appears to be a cryptocurrency rug-pull

There’s a lot of concern in the cryptocurrency realm at the moment. A yield farming platform "utilizing arbitrage to gain optimal yield with low risk" has gone AWOL. Site down, Twitter account deleted, no word from the team behind it explaining what happened. Worst of all, some $10 million worth ...

Customer support scammers take aim at NFT enthusiasts

Adidas has been making waves in the NFT space with a collection of footwear/bored ape crossover sales. WEN? EARLY ACCESS MINTING STARTS NOW First look of the collaborative NFT with @gmoneyNFT @punkscomic and @BoredApeYC Good luck and TracksuitUp pic.twitter.com/REYOSdRbNT -- adidas Originals...

Purple Fox rootkit now bundled with Telegram installer

The Purple Fox rootkit is being spread as an installer for the popular Telegram instant messaging app for Windows, according to researchers. Its not clear how the installer in this case was distributed, although it seems like at least some were delivered via email. Common distribution methods for...

What angered us most about cybersecurity in 2021: Lock and Code S03E01

We are just three days into 2022, which means what better time for a 2021 retrospective? But rather than looking at the biggest cyberattacks of last year—which we already did—or the most surprising—like we did a couple of years ago—we wanted to offer something different for readers and listeners...

What is IP sniffing?

IP sniffers, also known as packet sniffers, network analyzers, or protocol analyzers, are tools which play an essential role in the monitoring of networks, and in troubleshooting network-related issues. In essence, IP sniffing is monitoring traffic over a TCP/IP network. IP sniffers intercept the...

The three most significant cyberattacks of 2021

People that predict tomorrow’s weather by looking at today’s are often right. Cloudy today? Itll probably be cloudy tomorrow. The same is often true for cybersecurity threats. Looking back at 2021 it looks a lot like 2020: A lot of ransomware attacks. So, when I was asked to write about the three...

A week in security (Dec 20 – 26)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: When a deepfake “empire” continues to grow Everything you always wanted to know about NFTs but were too afraid to ask: Lock and Code S02E24 Police forces pipe 225 million pwned passwords into ‘Have I Been Pwned?’ Logistics giant warns of scams following ransomware...

Dridex affiliate dresses up as Scrooge

Threat actors are hoping to catch a few more victims before they leave work for the Christmas holidays. The recent malicious spam campaigns malspam we and others have observed appear to have been created by someone who wants to play Scrooge and add onto peoples already heightened state of anxiety...

FBI traces and grabs back $150 million theft that was turned into bitcoins

On December 1, 2021, the Tokyo police arrested an employee of Sony Life Insurance on suspicion of fraudulently obtaining 17 billion yen through an illegal money transfer from an overseas unit. On the same day 3,879 bitcoins, worth about $150 million, were seized by law enforcement, and on the...

Logistics giant warns of scams following ransomware attack

German logistics giant Hellmann Worldwide Logistics has issued a warning that data was stolen from the company when it was hit with a ransomware attack on December 9, 2021. It is not entirely clear what type of data was extracted, but the company says it is warning partners and customers to doubl...

Police forces pipe 225 million pwned passwords into ‘Have I Been Pwned?’

On his blog, Troy Hunt has announced a major milestone in the ‘Have I Been Pwned?’ project, thanks to the contributions of two of the worlds foremost law enforcement agencies, the FBI and the NCA the UK equivalent of the FBI, the National Crime Agency. This enormous injection of used passwords ha...

Everything you always wanted to know about NFTs (but were too afraid to ask): Lock and Code S02E24

In August, the NFT for a cartoon rock sold for $1.3 million, and ever since then, much of the world has been asking: What the heck is going on? NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, have skyrocketed in popularity this year, with the NFTs for several artworks selling for more than $2 million each; the mos...

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 13 – 19)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs: Spear phish, whale phish, regular phish: What’s the difference? Kronos crippled by ransomware, service may be out for weeks 5 security lessons from 18 months of working from home What SMBs can do to protect against Log4Shell attacks After Log4j, December’s Patch...

Grindr fined for selling user data to advertisers

Dating network Grindr has been slapped with a US$7.7 million fine by Norwegian regulator Datatilsynet for sharing data with advertisers. Grindr—which call itself the worlds largest social networking app for gay, bi, trans, and queer people—sold data which includes GPS, IP address, age, and gender...

After Log4j, December’s Patch Tuesday has snuck up on us

For anyone about to sit back after checking their environment for the Log4j vulnerabilities and applying patches where needed, here are some more things that need patching. Microsoft In 2021’s final Patch Tuesday, Microsoft included a total of 67 fixes for security vulnerabilities. The total set ...

What SMBs can do to protect against Log4Shell attacks

As you may already know, the business, tech, and cybersecurity industries have been buzzing about Log4Shell CVE-2021-44228, aka Logjam, the latest software flaw in an earlier version of the Apache Log4j logging utility. As the name suggests, a logger is a piece of software that logs every event...

5 security lessons from 18 months of working from home

A little more than 20 months ago, many people around the world were asked or instructed to work from home to help slow the spread of COVID-19. It caused a seismic change to the way we all do business. Now, our latest research reveals how IT decision makers security concerns have been changed by...

Kronos crippled by ransomware, service may be out for weeks

Human resources platform provider UKG has put out a statement saying its fallen prey to ransomware that has disrupted the Kronos Private Cloud. It expects the service to be out for several weeks. The statement came after the company posted a message on the Kronos community message board, explaini...

Spear phish, whale phish, regular phish: What’s the difference?

There are many types of phishing attack nowadays, to the extent it can be tricky to keep up with them all. We have unique names for mobile attacks, postal attacks, threats sent via SMS and many more besides. However, we often see folks mix up their spears and their whales, and even occasionally...

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...

[Update: CISA issues Log4j vulnerabilities scanner] Log4j zero-day “Log4Shell” arrives just in time to ruin your weekend

If youre running a service that relies on Apache Struts or uses the popular Apache Log4j utility we hope you havent made plans for the weekend. An exploit listed as CVE-2021-44228 was made public on December 9, 2021. The exploit is simple, easy to trigger, and can be used to perform remote code...

Click “OK” to defeat MFA

Researchers have discovered that Nobelium—the threat actor behind the infamous SolarWinds supply-chain attack, the Sunburst backdoor, TEARDROP malware, GoldMax malware, and other malicious activities—has found a way to use stolen credentials even when they require multi-factor authentication that...

Fake job interviews plague major game developers like Riot Games and Rockstar

If you’re job hunting at the moment, be on your guard. The pandemic is still around. Lots of people are in need of employment. Scammers are all too happy to string folks along with bogus employment offers, as is the case here. How have they managed to snare prospective job hunters? Riding on the...

Has your WordPress site been backdoored by a skimmer?

Skimmers and other threat actors are backdooring websites, and WordPress instances in particular, according to a recently released report. Researchers at Sucuri say attackers have developed methods to make sure that their grip on the infected site is not easily removed by applying the next update...