Good bots, bad bots: friend or foe?

One of the most talked about technologies online today is the ubiquitous bot. Simultaneously elusive yet also responsible for all of civilisation’s woes, bots are a hot topic of contention. If we went purely by news reports, we’d assume all bots everywhere are evil, and out to get us or just...

A week in security (February 11 – 17)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs we discussed the return of the Sextortion Bitcoin scams, we gave you an early overview of the exploit kits in the winter of 2019, we talked about the destruction of VFEmail service, for consumers we discussed whether you should remove yourself from social media, for...

Crack hunting: not all it’s cracked up to be

People sometimes ask us in the forums if a keygen or software crack is safe to use. Sometimes, these programs do what they say on the tin. Other times, they’re not what they say they are. In this post, I’ll describe what happened when I went crack hunting, and why it is often unsafe to carry out...

Tackling the shortage in skilled IT staff: whole team security

Is your IT department understaffed, overworked, and are you looking for reinforcements in vain? Maybe these hard-to-hire reinforcements can be hired from within, rather than having to outsource or hire expensive, short-term extra help. While this was usually only done if your own staff was fallin...

Should you delete yourself from social media?

You're feeling like you've had enough. All the recent news—from Facebook's Cambridge Analytica snafu to various abuses of Twitter vulnerabilities—has you wondering: Should I delete myself from social media? Social networking does have its positive aspects. You can stay in touch with distant or no...

Hacker destroys VFEmail service, wipes backups

An email service called VFEmail was essentially put out of business after a hack intended to delete everything in and out of sight. "Yes, @VFEmail is effectively gone. It will likely not return. I never thought anyone would care about my labor of love so much that they’d want to completely and...

Businesses: It’s time to implement an anti-phishing plan

Businesses: phishers aren’t just coming for you. They’re coming for your employees and your customers, too. Phishing attacks are on the rise this year, thanks in part to massive Emotet and TrickBot campaigns, which make use of phishing emails to deliver their payloads. If you don't already have o...

Exploit kits: winter 2019 review

Active malvertising campaigns in December and the new year have kept exploit kit activity from hibernating in winter 2019. We mostly observed Fallout and RIG with the occasional, limited GrandSoft appearance for wider geo-targeting. In addition, narrowly-focused exploit kits such as Magnitude,...

Sextortion Bitcoin scam makes unwelcome return

Heads up: a particularly nasty sextortion Bitcoin scam from at least the middle of 2018 is making the rounds once again. The scam involves making use of old breach dumps, then emailing someone from the list and reminding them of their old password. When something lands in your mailbox with “Hey,...

A week in security (February 4 – 8)

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs, we took a closer look at the technical and reputational challenges for Facebook as it tries to integrate secure messaging across Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram. We explored Google’s latest attempts to change how the public sees—literally—web browser URLs, gave...

Compromising vital infrastructure: communication

Have you ever been witness to a Wi-Fi failure in a household with school-aged children? If so, I don’t have to convince you that communication qualifies as vital infrastructure. For the doubters: when you see people risking their lives in traffic just to check their phone, you'll understand why...

Merging Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram: a technical, reputational hurdle

Secure messaging is supposed to be just that—secure. That means no backdoors, strong encryption, private messages staying private, and, for some users, the ability to securely communicate without giving up tons of personal data. So, when news broke that scandal-ridden, online privacy pariah...

Google Chrome announces plans to improve URL display, website identity

“Unreadable gobbledygook” is one way to describe URLs today as we know them, and Google has been attempting to redo their look for years. In their latest move to improve how Chrome—and of course, how the company hopes other browsers would follow suit—displays the URL in its omnibox the address ba...

New critical vulnerability discovered in open-source office suites

A great number of attack techniques these days are using Microsoft Office documents to distribute malware. In recent years, there has been serious development on document exploit kit builders, not to mention the myriad of tricks that red-teamers have come up with to bypass security solutions. In...

How to browse the Internet safely at work

This Safer Internet Day, we teamed up with ethical hacking and web application security company Detectify to provide security tips for both workplace Internet users and web developers. This article is aimed at employees of all levels. If you’re a programmer looking to create secure websites, visi...

Movie stream ebooks gun for John Wick 3 on Kindle store

We discovered a novel spam campaign over the weekend, targeting fans of John Wick on the Amazon Kindle store. The scam itself involves paying for what appears to be the upcoming third movie, turns into a bogus ebook, and goes on to hyperlink potential victims to a collection of third-party...

A week in security (January 28 – February 3)

Last week, we ran another in our interview with a malware hunter series, explained a FaceTime vulnerability, and took a deep dive into a new stealer. We also threw some light on a Houzz data breach, and what exactly happened between Apple and Facebook. Other cybersecurity news Kwik Fit hit by...

Houzz data breach: Why informing your customers is the right call

Houzz is an online platform dedicated to home renovation and design. Today February 1, 2019, they notified their customers about a data breach that reportedly happened in December 2018. Data breaches unfortunately have become a common event. In fact, we dubbed 2018 the year of the data breach...

Apple pulls Facebook enterprise certificate

It’s been an astonishing few days for Facebook. They've seen both an app and their enterprise certificate removed and revoked with big consequences. What happened? Apple issue enterprise certificates to organizations with which they can create internal apps. Those apps don’t end up released on th...

Analyzing a new stealer written in Golang

Golang Go is a relatively new programming language, and it is not common to find malware written in it. However, new variants written in Go are slowly emerging, presenting a challenge to malware analysts. Applications written in this language are bulky and look much different under a debugger fro...

Apple’s FaceTime privacy bug allowed possible spying

Social media caught fire yesterday as the news of a new Apple bug spread. It seemed that there was a flaw in FaceTime that allowed you to place a call to someone, but listen in on their microphone if they didn't pick up. Worse, as the news spread, it turned out that there was also a way to captur...

Interview with a malware hunter: Jérôme Segura

In our series "Interview with a malware hunter," our feature role today goes to Jérôme Segura, Malwarebytes’ Head of Threat Intelligence and world-renowned exploit kits researcher. The goal of this series is to introduce our readers to our malware intelligence crew by involving them in these Q&A...

A week in security (January 21 – 27)

Last week on the Malwarebytes Labs blog, we took a look at Modlishka, the latest hurdle in two-factor authentication 2FA, the potential for abuse of push notifications, a malware-phishing combo by the name of CryTekk ransomware, and why we detect PUPs, but enforce the power of users' choice. We...

What does ‘consent to tracking’ really mean?

Thanks to Jerome Boursier for contributions. Post GDPR, many social media platforms will ask end users to consent to some form of tracking as a condition of using the service. It's easy to make assumptions as to what that means, especially when the actual terms of service or data policy for the...

Sly criminals package ransomware with malicious ransom note

Ransomware continues to show signs of evolution. From a simple screen locker to a highly-sophisticated data locker, ransomware has now become a mainstream name, even if historically, it has been around far longer than we want to look back. Although the criminals behind ransomware campaigns are...

A user’s right to choose: Why Malwarebytes detects Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs)

Potentially Unwanted Programs PUPs: the name says it all. While the programs themselves might have legitimate uses, their vendors often use inappropriate methods to drive downloads or hide within a program bundle. At Malwarebytes, we feel we have an obligation to help protect our customers from...

2019 State of Malware report: Trojans and cryptominers dominate threat landscape

Each quarter, the Malwarebytes Labs team gathers to share intel, statistics, and analysis of the tactics and techniques made popular by cybercriminals over the previous three months. At the end of the year, we synthesize this data into one all-encompassing report—the State of Malware report—that...

Browser push notifications: a feature asking to be abused

“I’m seeing a lot of ads popping up in the corner of my screen, and the Malwarebytes scan does not show there is anything wrong. It says my computer is clean. So what's happening?” Our support team runs into questions like this regularly, but the volume seems to be increasing lately. In most of...

A week in security (January 14 – 20)

Last week on the Malwarebytes Labs blog, we took a look at how the government shutdown is influencing cybersecurity jobs, Advanced Persistent Threats group APT10, the comeback of Fallout EK, the hosting of malicious sites on legitimate servers, and the Collection 1 data breach. Other cybersecurit...

Has two-factor authentication been defeated? A spotlight on 2FA’s latest challenge

Multiple news reports about the defeat of two-factor authentication 2FA have been making rounds lately. In November 2018, our friends at ESET discovered a purported Android battery utility tool called “Optimization Android” from a third-party app store. This app was designed to steal money from a...

Collection 1 data breach: what you need to know

Yesterday, news broke that the largest data dump in history had been discovered, with more than 770 million people's Personally Identifiable Information PII decrypted, catalogued, and up for grabs on the Internet. The files, which are being dubbed Collection 1, were originally found on cloud...

Hosting malicious sites on legitimate servers: How do threat actors get away with it?

How do threat actors manage to get their sites and files hosted on legitimate providers’ servers? I have asked myself this question many times, and many times thought, “The threat actors pay for it, and for some companies, money is all that matters.” But is it really that simple? I decided to fin...

Improved Fallout EK comes back after short hiatus

Edit 2019-01-24 Fallout EK introduces a new dropper to facilitate the final payload retrieval. This update replaces the plain MZ we saw for a little while. -- After a short hiatus in early January, the Fallout exploit kit is back in business again with some new features for the new year. During i...

The Advanced Persistent Threat files: APT10

We've heard a lot about Advanced Persistent Threats APTs over the past few years. As a refresher, APTs are prolonged, aimed attacks on specific targets with the intention to compromise their systems and gain information from or about that target. While the targets may be anyone or anything—a...

How the government shutdown is influencing cybersecurity jobs

As of this writing, the government shutdown of 2019 is the longest ever in America. The only good news about this situation is that, with each passing day, a new group of people in the country seems to rediscover just how essential government services are, now that they're unavailable. The next...

A week in security (January 7 – 13)

Last week on the Malwarebytes Labs blog, we took a look at the Ryuk ransomware attack causing trouble over the holidays, as well as a ransom threat for an Irish transportation company. We explored the realm of SSN scams, and looked at what happens when an early warning system is attacked. Other...

Government shutdown impacts .gov websites, puts Americans in danger

If you are in the United States, then you likely already know that we are on our 24th day of a government shutdown. While it is considered a "partial" shutdown, there are still plenty of government workers who are furloughed, which impacts the services they run—both online and off. Last week,...

Luas data ransom: the hacker who cried wolf?

In a terrible start to the year for Irish tram firm Luas, their site was compromised a week ago and adorned with a stark ransom warning: Click to enlarge You are hacked. Some time ago I wrote that you have serious security holes. You didn’t reply. The next time someone talks to you, press the rep...

Social Security Number scammers are at it again

The Federal Trade Commission FTC once again sounded the alarm in mid-December about the latest Social Security Number SSN scam that continues to affect thousands of Americans. While most of us were only able to read about this type of scam in the past, the FTC now has an audio recording of an SSN...

Ryuk ransomware attacks businesses over the holidays

While families gathered for food and merriment on Christmas Eve, most businesses slumbered. Nothing was stirring, not even a mouse—or so they thought. For those at Tribune Publishing and Data Resolution, however, a silent attack was slowly spreading through their networks, encrypting data and...

Australia’s Early Warning Network compromised

An early warning network designed to notify subscribers about dangerous weather in Australia has been compromised. The hacker sent many bogus messages via phone, SMS, and email, telling users that the service had been hacked. Early Warning Network, a service used by local governments to send...

A week in security (December 31, 2018 – January 6, 2019)

Last week on Labs, we looked back at 2018 as the year of data breaches, homed in on pre-installed malware on mobile devices, and profiled a malicious duo, Vidar and GandCrab. Other cybersecurity news 2019's first data breach: It took less than 24 hours. An unauthorized third-party downloaded 30,0...

Vidar and GandCrab: stealer and ransomware combo observed in the wild

We have been tracking a prolific malvertising campaign for several weeks and captured a variety of payloads, including several stealers. One that we initially identified as Arkei turned out to be Vidar, a new piece of malware recently analyzed in detail by Fumik0 in his post: Let’s dig into Vidar...

The new landscape of pre-installed mobile malware: malicious code within

Here's a scary thought: Mobile devices may soon come with pre-installed malware on required system apps. While it might sound like a grim foretelling, pre-installed mobile malware is an unfortunate reality of the future. In the past, we’ve seen pre-installed malware with the notorious Adups threa...

2018: The year of the data breach tsunami

It’s tough to remember all of the data breaches that happened in 2018. But when you look at the largest and most impactful ones that were reported throughout the year, it paints a grim picture about the state of data security today. The consequences of major companies leaking sensitive data are...

Using the blockchain to create secure backups

“Oh no! I’ve got a ransomware notice on my workstation. How did this happen?” “Let’s figure that out later. First, apply the backup from a few minutes ago, so we can continue to work.” Now that wasn't so painful, was it? Having a rollback solution or a recent backup could make this ideal post...

Assessing the security of a portable router: a look inside its hardware, part deux

In part two of our blog assessing the security of a portable router, we will acquire the tools and equipment to make a copy of the firmware on our target router so that we can assess the full firmware. Sometimes, the manufacturer has an updated firmware that is available on their website. It coul...

A week in security (December 17 – 23)

Last week on Labs we looked at Fuchsia OS as a possible alternative for Android, explained all the reasons why cybercriminals want to hack your phone, discussed a flaw in Twitter form that may have been abused by nation states, gave you a Christmas tech scams roundup, revealed why many online...

Underminer exploit kit improves in its latest iteration

One of the most interesting exploit kits we track is also a bit of an elusive one, and as such does not receive the same scrutiny as its RIG and Fallout counterparts. Underminer was mentioned in our Fall 2018 round up, and at the time was using CVE-2018-8174 Internet Explorer and CVE-2018-4878...

Smart speakers: Christmas treat or lump of coal?

Christmas is nearly upon us, and thoughts are perhaps turning to various digital presents of a “smart” nature. Home security, hubs, speakers, cameras, and mashups of all of those and more besides. With regards to speakers, the most immediate pieces of your home are theoretically at your beck and...