When an “Outstanding” rating from CNET isn’t enough

The editors at respected tech site CNET/Download.com recently awarded Malwarebytes for Windows with an “outstanding” rating of 4.5 stars out of five. In the review, editor Tom McNamara recommended Malwarebytes because the scanning engine is of “high quality,” it works well with Windows 10, and do...

Why is Malwarebytes blocking CoinHive?

If you've encountered a Malwarebytes web protection block for coinhive.com over the last few weeks, you are either glad about it, angry about it, or don't really care. Since September 19, the second most frequently blocked website for our customers has been coinhive.com, and when we observe that...

Exhibition: it-sa Nuremberg

Scroll down for the German version of this post. Since 2009, security professionals, developers, and product providers have shared their ideas and platforms at it-sa, a security exhibition in the Exhibition Centre in Nuremberg, Germany. This year, it-sa featured 629 exhibitors including...

Release the KRACKen: flaw in Wi-Fi security leaves users vulnerable

A serious flaw in the wireless protocol that secures all modern protected Wi-Fi networks has been discovered. How serious? If your device supports Wi-Fi, it is most likely affected. This feasible attack, dubbed KRACK, could abuse design or implementation flaws in the Wi-Fi standard, not some...

Old MS Office feature weaponized in malspam attacks

There have been a lot of talks recently following a write up and proof of concept about a Microsoft Office feature that can be misused and weaponized by malicious actors. The protocol, known as Dynamic Data Exchange.aspx DDE, has actually been around for a long time, and allows applications to...

Yet more mobile adware found in Google Play

Finding an adware variant that made its way past the Google Play store is out of the ordinary. So when two adware variants slip by in one week, we take notice. Last week, we added two new Ad SDKs to our growing list of adware detections—Adware.Solid and Adware.Cootek. Both Ad SDKs were found in a...

A week in security (October 9 – October 15)

Last week on the Labs blog, we talked about GDPR as part of our series in the National Cyber Security Awareness Month NCSAM. We also discussed a new method for phishing Apple ID passwords and the possible ramifications. We analyzed the malvertising chain due to a script that was found on popular...

Phishes, pseudophishes, and bad email

Everyone knows about phishing. We’ve all heard that the solution to phishing is to educate the user as, after all, it must be the user’s fault for stupidly clicking on the thing. But what about when perverse incentives make clicking the phish seem logical? What about the enterprise pseudophish—wh...

Mobile Menace Monday: despicable adware

Are you wondering how that mysterious icon ended up on your Android phone's start screen? Annoyed at the ads clogging your notification bar? You aren't alone. Thousands of Android apps now include software that shoves marketing icons onto your phone's start screen or pushes advertising into your...

Decoy Microsoft Word document delivers malware through a RAT

In this post, we take a look at a Microsoft Word document which itself is somewhat clean, but is used to launch a multi-stage attack that relies on the hyperlink feature in the OpenXML format. This then loads another document that contains an exploit. Most malicious Microsoft Office documents...

Malvertising on Equifax, TransUnion tied to third party script (updated)

Update 10-16-2017: More information regarding the third-party script fireclick.js and the domain it contacted netflame.cc was revealed by the Wall Street Journal. That domain once was used by Digital River Inc., an e-commerce and digital-marketing vendor, for a now-defunct web-analytics product...

Labs report: summer ushers in unprecedented season of breaches

In this edition of the Malwarebytes Cybercrime Tactics and Techniques report for the third quarter of 2017, we saw a number of high profile breaches targeting the personal information of hundreds of millions of people. While the Equifax breach may have dominated the news cycle, notable attacks...

A new kind of Apple phishing scam

In a recent blog post, Felix Krause revealed a method for phishing Apple ID passwords on iOS that would be quite indistinguishable from a real iOS password request. This got us thinking about the ramifications—how else could this tactic be used in the Apple ecosystem, and what kind of damage coul...

Make way for the GDPR: Is your business ready?

In Week 2 of National Cyber Security Awareness Month NCSAM, the spotlight is on businesses—particularly, their more profound need to take cybersecurity seriously in this age of breaches. And what better way for them to start this off than to think about how they can improve on handling and storin...

A week in security (October 02 – October 08)

Last week, we gave you some tips for National Cybersecurity Awareness Month, walked through an exploration of a small adware file, and explored the complicated world of the Homograph attack. Here's what else happened in security. VB2017 Many of our team members attended VB2017 in Madrid, one of t...

Out of character: Homograph attacks explained

In April, Xudong Zheng, a security enthusiast based in New York, found a flaw in some modern browsers in the way they handle domain names. While Chrome, Firefox, and Opera already have security measures in place to cue users that they might be visiting a destination they thought was legitimate, a...

Using ILSpy to analyze a small adware file

My curiosity was triggered when the telemetry of our heuristic scanner started showing a multitude of reports about a small file called grandfather.exe, so I went out to grab a copy and have a look at it. As you can probably tell from some of the detection names at Virustotal, this is a MSIL...

National cybersecurity awareness month: simple steps for online safety

With each new devastating breach of security—Equifax, Deloitte, and Sonic, to name a few recent cyber fails—the need for increased cybersecurity awareness has never been more apparent. It’s a good thing, then, that this month is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month NCSAM. Observed every October...

A week in security (September 25 – October 01)

Recently, we talked about the hacking incident at Deloitte, one of the 'big four' global accounting firms. It was reported that client email addresses, usernames, and passwords were exposed. This also brought to light weaknesses in their policies and lack of threat intelligence to recover leaked...

BlueBorne – Bluetooth’s airborne influenza

Armis Labs has discovered a new attack vector that targets any device that has Bluetooth capability. This includes mobile, desktop, and IoT — roughly accounting for 8.2 billion devices. All operating systems are susceptible — Android, iOS, Windows, and Linux. Dubbed BlueBorne, it exposes several...

Deloitte breached by hackers for months

On September 25, 2017, Deloitte announced that they detected a breach of the firm’s global email server via a poorly secured admin email in March of this year. Further, the attackers most likely had control of the server since November of 2016. Deloitte’s initial statement indicated that only six...

Tech support scammers abuse native ad and content provider Taboola to serve malvertising (updated)

A large number of publishers - big and small - are monetizing their sites by selling space for companies that provide so-called native advertising, cited as more effective and engaging than traditional banner ads. Indeed, on a news or entertainment site, users are more inclined to click on links...

Elaborate scripting-fu used in espionage attack against Saudi Arabia Government entity

This post was co-authored by David Sánchez and Jérôme Segura We recently came across a campaign targeting a Saudi Arabia Government entity via a malicious Word document which at first reminded us of an attack we had previously described on this blog. In our previous research, we detailed how an...

Keychain vulnerability in macOS

On Monday, Patrick Wardle, a respected security researcher at Synack and owner of Objective-See, sent a tweet about a keychain vulnerability he had found in macOS High Sierra. As his tweet showed, it is possible for a malicious app to extract, and then exfiltrate, keychain data from High Sierra,...

Drive-by mining and ads: The Wild Wild West

There seems to be a trend lately for publishers to monetize their traffic by having their visitors mine for cryptocurrencies while on their site. The idea is that you are accessing content for free and in exchange, your computer its CPU in particular will be used for mining purposes. The Pirate B...

A week in security (September 18 – September 24)

Last week, we kept you updated on our blog about the infected versions of CCleaner that were offered as downloads on the official servers. We also warned you against a fake IRS notice that delivers a customized spying tool, some of the threats currently facing gamers, and a Netflix scam that has...

Netflix scam warning

Always be on your toes While we are used to receiving scam attempts pretending to be from banks, online shops, credit card companies, and international courier services that does not mean all the other emails are safe. Far from it. To demonstrate this point we will show you a scam aimed at Netfli...

Don’t let these gaming threats give you a Game Over

With EGX, the biggest gaming event in the UK opening its doors today, we thought it'd be timely to remind you of some of the threats currently facing gamers. No matter what type of game, client, or system you use, there's always something waiting to try and give you a bad day where the safety of...

Fake IRS notice delivers customized spying tool

While macro-based documents and scripts make up for the majority of malspam attacks these days, we also see some campaigns that leverage documents embedded with exploits. Case in point, we came across a malicious Microsoft Office file disguised as a CP2000 notice. The Internal Revenue Service IRS...

FTC providing partial refunds for Advanced Tech Support victims

Last month, the FTC announced the recovery of 10 million dollars from Advanced Tech Support, one of the most successful US-based tech support scammers ever. This money will be put towards partial refunds for victims of ATS who purchased products or services from them between April 2012 and Novemb...

How to tell if your Mac is infected

There are a lot of reasons Mac users don’t sweat getting infected. One: They’ve got a built-in anti-malware system called XProtect that does a decent job of catching known malware. Two: Macs are not plagued by a high number of attacks. Most cybercriminals are focused on infecting PCs. And three:...

A week in security (September 11 – September 17)

Last week, we dug into phishing campaigns done via Linkedin accounts, remediation versus prevention, issues with smart syringe pumps, and advised you to go patch against a Word 0day. We had some tips regarding identity theft protection, explored crowdsourced fraud, and explained YARA rules...

[Updated] Infected CCleaner downloads from official servers

Update 9/19/2017: Avast posted a clarification explaining what happened and giving a timeline of the events. One point we should take note of is that the breach preceded the take-over of Piriform by Avast. Users that are unsure whether they were affected by this and whether their data may have be...

Explained: YARA rules

YARA rules are a way of identifying malware or other files by creating rules that look for certain characteristics. YARA was originally developed by Victor Alvarez of Virustotal and is mainly used in malware research and detection. It was developed with the idea to describe patterns that identify...

Crowdsourced fraud and kickstarted scams

Crowdsourced funding opportunities via Kickstarter, Patreon, and GoFundMe have removed many structural roadblocks for people to access capital quickly and conveniently. But they’ve also lowered the barrier to entry for many very old scams. So how do you tell the difference between a great cause o...

Equifax aftermath: How to protect against identity theft

Who here is scrambling around in the aftermath of the recent breach at Equifax to figure out if you've been compromised? Who here is wondering what to do about it if you are? If you're one of the 143 million Americans whose data was accessed by cybercriminals, then you probably raised your hand...

PSA: New Microsoft Word 0day used in the wild

Microsoft has just patched an important vulnerability in Microsoft Word during its latest patch Tuesday cycle. According to the security firm that found it 1, this new zero-day CVE-2017-8759 was used in targeted attacks to install a piece of malware known as FinFisher. Microsoft Office has been i...

Multiple flaws found in smart syringe pump

A syringe pump is a small infusion pump that delivers liquids, either medication or nutrients, in small quantities into the patient's system. Hospitals, nursing homes, and homes with residents under acute or palliative care use them. Accurate and safe delivery of dosage from a variety of syringes...

Remediation vs. prevention: How to place your bets

Building a security environment for businesses these days is a gamble: layer on too much and your programs may be canceling each other out or causing redundancy and your leaders may be wondering why you're spending so much. Invest too little and get breached: it's snake eyes for you. Whether you...

Compromised LinkedIn accounts used to send phishing links via private message and InMail

Phishing continues to be a criminals' favorite for harvesting user credentials with more or less sophisticated social engineering tricks. In this post, we take a look at a recent attack that uses existing LinkedIn user accounts to send phishing links to their contacts via private message but also...

A week in security (September 4 – September 10)

Last week, we looked into expired domain names being used for malvertising, delved into dubious Facebook apps, and checked out Chinese seminar scams. We also explained the whys and wherefores of false positives, explained what Google is doing with HTTPs, warned you away from a fake DHS email, and...

Fake DHS email – “Give us $350 in the next 24 hours”

Who likes threats? Nobody, as it turns out. That hasn't stopped scammers from jumping on the menacing email train - next stop, your inbox. Every now and then, we see the 419 "Hitman deployed to kill you" missive doing the rounds. On a similar threatening note, we have a fake DHS notification...

Equifax breach: What you need to know [updated]

updates 9/14/2017 Equifax has released information and confirmed the vulnerability CVE-2017-5638 that was used in this breach after several days of intense scrutiny around Apache Struts. To make matters worse, there already was a patch available for this flaw in March 2017, two months prior to th...

Google reminds website owners to move to HTTPS before October deadline

With the release of Chrome v62 in less than 3 months, Google will begin marking non-HTTPS pages with text input fields—like contact forms and search bars—and all HTTP websites viewed in Incognito mode as "NOT SECURE" in the address bar. The company has started sending out warning emails to web...

Explained: False positives

What are false positives? False positive, which is sometimes written as f/p, is an expression commonly used in cybersecurity to denote that a file or setting has been flagged as malicious when it’s not. In statistics, false positives are called Type I errors, because they check for a particular...

Nigerian scams without the Nigerians

Users in English speaking countries are quite familiar with the Nigerian scam: an important guy in Nigeria needs your help getting his money out of the country and if you assist with some transaction fees, a chunk of his fortune could be yours. But what about non-English speaking countries? What...

Facebook worries: I didn’t post that

It is my assumption that most Facebook users don’t look at their own profile often. With your own profile, I mean the timeline that shows up when you click your own name or avatar in the Facebook menu. That’s because we think we know exactly what is posted there, so why bother to look at it? Afte...

Expired domain names and malvertising

In Q1 and Q2 of 2017, we noticed a sharp decline in drive-by downloads coming from compromised websites. The campaigns of the past are either gone Pseudo Darkleech or have changed focus EITest using social engineering techniques. Malvertising - which has remained steady and is currently the main...

A week in security (August 28 – September 3)

Last week, we looked at what actions Kronos can perform in the final installment of a 2-part post. We also dived into Locky, again, a ransomware that just made a comeback, and found that its latest variant as of this writing has anti-sandboxing capabilities. This means that once Locky has...

Insider threats in your work inbox

Recently, our friends at Barracuda found a new phishing campaign that banks on the popularity of cloud services used in most businesses, such as Microsoft Office 365. According to their blog post, this latest scheme takes advantage of the natural trust employees place on messages they receive fro...