The Verge reports that Eiliko, a small AI robot companion made by Energize Lab, has serious security flaws that expose private conversations and let an attacker remotely change what the toy says.
According to The Verge, researcher Sammy Azdoufal could access 13 million conversations and what appeared to be the entire active worldwide fleet of 68,000 robots. The publication reports that the US is the largest market, with more than 31,000 profiles belonging to children there.
Azdoufal found multiple security flaws in Energize Lab’s service:
The service analyzes conversations to build profiles containing names, ages, birthdays, relationships, occupations, and assessments of personality and emotional vulnerability. They are stored alongside email addresses, IP addresses, and searchable conversation transcripts, potentially giving scammers detailed information to exploit.
Some photos, including apparent images of children from a related camera-equipped device, and short audio recordings were accessible at public web addresses. Retaining audio conflicts with the company’s privacy policy, which says recordings are deleted immediately after processing.
It is possible to remotely manipulate the AI: Azdoufal altered The Verge reporter Sean Hollister’s robot’s memory and behavior, making it invent personal details, insist the Earth is flat, and later deliver sexually explicit, abusive dialogue. The researcher says similar manipulation could affect the entire fleet simultaneously.
The reporter contacted Energize Lab through 10 email addresses and LinkedIn, without receiving substantive answers.
How to stay safe
We have reported on safety problems with AI-powered toys before. Manufacturers are responsible for securing their products, but there are steps you can take to reduce the risks.
You’ll see “AI-powered” on almost everything right now, but there are ways to make safer choices.
Already own an Eiliko? As a precaution, disconnect it from Wi-Fi while seeking confirmation that the reported flaws have been fixed.
Always research: Check for third-party safety reviews before buying any AI-enabled product marketed for kids.
Test and supervise: Interact with the device yourself before giving it to children. Monitor usage for odd or risky responses. A safe response during testing doesn’t guarantee safe responses later.
Use parental controls: If available, enable all content filters and privacy protections.
Report problems: If devices show inappropriate content, report it to manufacturers and consumer protection groups.
Check data practices: Find out what the device collects, who it shares data with, and what it uses the information for.
But above all, remember that “smart” doesn’t mean safe. AI may be everywhere, but designers and buyers alike need to put safety, privacy, and common sense ahead of the technological wow factor. Before buying a connected toy, check how the manufacturer handles security updates, privacy, and reports of problems.
Browse like no one’s watching.
Malwarebytes Privacy VPN encrypts your connection and never logs what you do, so the next story you read doesn’t have to feel personal. Try it free →
AI can help you send more job applications. But when you lose track of where you’ve applied, a fake recruiter’s message can start to look like the reply you’ve been waiting for.
Job hunting can feel like shouting into the void. You send applications, rewrite cover letters, and wait for replies that may never arrive. Then a message lands on your phone: someone wants to talk about a job.
But was it one of the jobs you applied for? It is hard to keep track when you’ve sent out a lot of them.
Two reports highlight an uncomfortable overlap. The BBC describes jobseekers using AI to apply for large numbers of roles, a strategy known as “spray and pray.” Meanwhile, research reported by The Independent suggests many young adults are receiving unsolicited job offers and worry that ignoring those offers could mean missing a real opportunity.
Neither report establishes that mass applications cause people to fall for recruitment scams. But together, they point to a useful security question: When you’re expecting replies from practically everywhere, how do you recognize a message from someone you never contacted?
There are many more, unfortunately. These examples illustrate some of the risks of a bogus recruitment approach: financial fraud, malware installation, and account theft.
An anonymized message submitted to Scam Guard, which appears to falsely claim to be from legitimate UK marketing firm The Goat Agency, showed signs of a possible task scam:
“Hello! I’m a representative from the HR team at goatagency. We’ve recently reviewed your CV and believe you could be a great fit for a remote online opportunity we’re currently offering. This is a flexible part-time or full-time remote position, with responsibilities focused on assisting merchants by providing product reviews. The work is straightforward, and we will provide full training to help you get started quickly. Work just 60-90 minutes per day Daily earnings range from £500 to £1,000, depending on your availability Work anytime, from anywhere If you’re interested in joining us, please contact us via WhatsApp:”
But scammers don’t even need to offer a dream salary. Almost half of UK 18- to 24-year-olds surveyed in research commissioned by Virgin Media O2 said they had received messages offering jobs they had never applied for. Without the obvious red flag of an “easy cash” promise, a scam message can look even more like a legitimate contact from a recruitment agency.
The approach can also start with a phone call. The Independent reports warnings about automated calls asking recipients to add a number on WhatsApp, sometimes in connection with supposed part-time work.
Other approaches use a familiar employer’s name to make requests look credible. We previously reported on fraudulent job postings that imitate real businesses and seek applicants’ personal information or money, including supposed payments for office equipment.
How to stay safe
One simple rule can spare a lot of harm: Keep the applications and verify anyone who contacts you about a job. You don’t need to abandon AI-assisted applications or assume every recruiter is fake, but a plausible opportunity still needs checking
Keep a simple application log. Record the employer, role, application date, and original listing so you can check when someone contacts you.
Verify both the vacancy and the recruiter independently. Find the employer’s website yourself and use its published contact details. The existence of a real vacancy doesn’t prove the person messaging you represents that employer.
Never pay to unlock earnings. A request to deposit money before you can withdraw supposed commissions is a hallmark of a task scam.
Pause before sharing sensitive information, installing software, or signing in through a recruitment link. Verify the approach first, especially if it arrives unexpectedly.
Enable multi-factor authentication on your important accounts to make them harder to take over, even if someone steals your password.
Use up-to-date anti-malware protection with real-time scanning to help detect and block malicious downloads.
An application log can help you check whether a message relates to a job you applied for. Even when it does, verify who’s on the other end before sharing information or taking the next step.
From reporting threats to removing them.
Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.
OpenAI is facing separate legal challenges over how ChatGPT interacts with children.
The Guardian reports that eight US states accuse the company of misleading parents about the chatbot’s safety and exposing vulnerable users to dangerous conversations. Separately, CNET reports that a mother suing on behalf of her two children alleges that OpenAI collected and used children’s sensitive personal information without valid parental consent.
The cases raise serious questions about what happens when children trust a chatbot with their most private thoughts, and what responsibility the company behind it has for the conversations that follow.
The accusations are serious, but we have to remember they are allegations in lawsuits, not established court findings.
Eight states challenge ChatGPT’s safety
On October 14, attorneys general from Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho, and Montana filed separate lawsuits against OpenAI. The coordinated action accuses the company of deceiving parents about ChatGPT’s safety and violating state consumer protection laws.
The states allege that the chatbot has been designed to be “overly agreeable and feign human compassion.” The attorneys point to examples of ChatGPT allegedly endangering vulnerable users, including children, by coaching them to commit suicide or harm others.
OpenAI says it has built age-specific protections into its products and will continue developing safeguards.
A separate lawsuit focuses on children’s private information
The day before the states filed their cases, a Hawaii mother brought a proposed class action on behalf of her 12-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son. Filed in federal court in San Francisco, the lawsuit alleges that OpenAI obtained sensitive information from children who signed up for ChatGPT without valid parental permission.
OpenAI’s terms require users under 18 to have a parent or legal guardian’s permission. But the complaint alleges that children can create accounts without OpenAI verifying that permission. It also describes a child under the service’s minimum age of 13 continuing to use the chatbot after explicitly telling it her age.
The plaintiffs allege that the company used children’s information to train its AI models without valid parental consent. They also claim that OpenAI collected information to construct personal profiles.
OpenAI disputes the claims, calling the lawsuit “misguided” and pointing to its protections for younger users.
Parental controls
OpenAI has introduced ChatGPT for Teens, with additional parental controls and alerts intended to notify linked parents in limited situations involving serious self-harm concerns. But the effectiveness of those safeguards is itself under scrutiny. Common Sense Media rated ChatGPT for Teens an “unacceptable risk” earlier this month, reporting that its testing found failures to alert parents during conversations involving suicide, self-harm, or eating disorders.
OpenAI disputes the findings and says its safety alerts cover limited situations and may not identify every concern. But for now, parental controls remain part of the dispute.
How to help keep your children safe
Parents shouldn’t have to compensate for unsafe product design. Unfortunately, we can’t treat parental controls as a safety guarantee. So here are practical steps families can take to reduce the risks:
Explain that a chatbot is software, not a friend or therapist. A warm tone doesn’t mean it understands your child or has their best interests at heart. Set a clear boundary: Questions about mental health, self-harm, or personal safety should go to a trusted adult or qualified professional, not a chatbot.
Talk about what your child uses AI for, without making it an interrogation. Ask them to show you the apps they use and what they like about them. Make clear that they can talk to you about any upsetting or inappropriate conversation without being blamed. If they don’t feel comfortable talking to you, help them identify another trusted adult.
Encourage children to keep personal information out of their prompts. This includes names, school details, addresses, private photographs, and sensitive health or family information. For ChatGPT, parents with linked teen accounts can also disable model training and saved memory. While these settings reduce certain uses of their information, they are not a reason to treat a chatbot as a confidential diary.
Watch for growing emotional reliance on AI. If you find your child increasingly turns to AI for reassurance, friendship, or emotional support, check in and help them reconnect with people they trust.
If your child mentions self-harm or suicide, take it seriously and seek human help promptly. Contact a qualified healthcare professional or crisis service. If there is immediate danger, contact local emergency services. Don’t wait for a chatbot or a parental notification to tell you to act.
Let’s face it, an incognito window can only do so much.
Breaches, dark web trading, credit fraud. Malwarebytes Identity Theft Protection monitors for all of it, alerts you fast, and comes with identity theft insurance.
Most users are on Chrome’s Stable channel. The desktop update brings Chrome to versions 155.0.8059.79/.80 for Windows and Mac and 155.0.8059.79 for Linux. The update includes 37 security fixes, including seven rated Critical.
On the same day, Google released version155.0.8059.79 for Android. It may not be available on Google Play for everyone yet but keep an eye out for it. Google says it also includes stability and performance improvements.
Updates will roll out over the coming days and weeks.
How to update Chrome
The easiest option is to allow Chrome to update automatically. But you can end up lagging behind on updates if you never close your browser or if something goes wrong, such as an extension preventing the update.
If you don’t want to wait for the rollout to reach you, manually updating is easy. Open About Google Chrome from Chrome’s settings or Help menu. Chrome will check for updates. If one is available, click Relaunch to apply it.
ul.menu .wp-block-kadence-advancedbtn .kb-btn400740_68fb6a-2d.kb-button{width:initial;}.wp-block-kadence-advancedbtn .kb-btn400740_68fb6a-2d.kb-button{color:var(--color-neutral-10);background:var(--color-brand-blue-60);border-top-left-radius:40px;border-top-right-radius:40px;border-bottom-right-radius:40px;border-bottom-left-radius:40px;box-shadow:1px 1px 2px 0px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2);}.wp-block-kadence-advancedbtn .kb-btn400740_68fb6a-2d.kb-button:hover, .wp-block-kadence-advancedbtn .kb-btn400740_68fb6a-2d.kb-button:focus{box-shadow:0px 4px 0px 0px var(--color-brand-blue-90);}Try it now
The first is tracked as CVE-2026-110152, a buffer overflow in ANGLE in Google Chrome on Android. It could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code outside the sandbox via a crafted HTML page.
ANGLE is Chrome’s graphics-translation layer. A buffer overflow occurs when a program puts more data into an area of memory than it can hold, overwriting data in adjoining memory. An attacker can exploit this to make the vulnerable process run malicious code.
Chrome vulnerabilities that enable remote code execution outside the browser sandbox are particularly valuable to attackers because they can turn a visit to a malicious or compromised website into direct code running on the underlying operating system, often without requiring additional exploitation steps.
Then I spotted two use-after-free vulnerabilities in the PDF component. CVE-2026-110136, rated Critical, could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code outside the sandbox via a crafted HTML page. CVE-2026-110147, rated High, could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code inside the sandbox via a crafted HTML page.
A use-after-free vulnerability occurs when a program attempts to access a memory location after it has been freed. That can cause crashes or, in some cases, allow an attacker to run their own code.
Inside the sandbox means the malicious code would run in a restricted, sealed-off environment designed to limit access to the rest of your device. That limits what the attacker can do as it constrains them to the browser, lowering the impact compared with code running outside the sandbox. However, attackers often chain multiple vulnerabilities together to escape the sandbox and achieve a more serious compromise. So, the phrase describes an important security limitation, but it does not mean the vulnerability is harmless.
Stop threats before they can do any harm.
Malwarebytes Browser Guard blocks phishing pages and malicious sites automatically. Free, one click to install. Add it to your browser →
Maybe it’s a text saying your package couldn’t be delivered, with a link to reschedule. Or an email from your bank asking you to verify your account. Or perhaps it’s an invitation from someone you know to view a document.
The message looks real enough, but something about the link feels fishy. Do you click it?
Simply paste the link into Scam Link Check, and Malwarebytes will scan it for signs of phishing, scams, malware, and other online threats. You’ll know within seconds whether the link appears safe or might be dangerous.
What is Malwarebytes Scam Link Check?
When you paste a link, Malwarebytes Scam Link Check analyzes the website using our threat intelligence technology. Along with a safety verdict, you’ll learn more about what we found, including:
Information about the website’s domain and reputation
Signs that the site may be impersonating a known brand
Where the link ultimately leads
A preview of the website
Recommended next steps
When should you check a link?
Scam links can show up pretty much anywhere: text messages, emails, social media posts, messaging apps, QR codes, and even search results.
It’s a good idea to check a link whenever you’re unsure about where it may lead, especially if the message asks you to log in, make a payment, share personal details, or act quickly.
For instance, you might want to investigate a link if you receive a message claiming:
You missed a package delivery
There’s a problem with your bank account
You need to reset a password or verify your identity
You owe a toll, fine, or other payment
You’ve won a prize or are eligible for a refund
How to check if a link is safe
Using Malwarebytes Scam Link Check is simple and takes just a few steps:
Copy the suspicious link without opening it.
Paste the link into the tool.
Wait while Malwarebytes scans the site for potential threats.
Review the results.
If we can’t determine whether a link is safe, it’s best not to click it yet. Instead, reach out to the company using the contact details listed on its official website.
Check before you click
Scammers are getting more adept at creating convincing copies of a brand’s site, making it even harder to decipher what’s real and what’s not.
With Malwarebytes Scam Link Check, you don’t have to figure it out on your own.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has filed a complaint accusing Digital Forensics Corporation of exploiting people already targeted by sextortionists.
We have talked about sextortion and recovery scams in the past, but we never looked specifically at the combination. Apparently, there is a lot of money to be made for those ruthless enough to take money from victims already in a state of panic.
The FTC has accused Digital Forensics Corporation, its owner Dmitry Belkin, and affiliated companies of misleading sextortion victims into paying at least $60 million for assistance that, in numerous instances, they did not provide. A federal court has temporarily halted the defendants’ activities while the case proceeds.
Most of the time, sextortion emails are a bluff sent to a large number of targets to see if one takes the bait. But sextortion can also involve intimate images that someone really possesses. In those cases, a criminal threatens to share the material unless the victim pays, sends more images, or complies with other demands.
In those cases, victims can feel desperate, especially when the demands keep coming, and may look for help to make it stop. According to the FTC, Digital Forensics targeted people searching for that help through advertisements on Google, YouTube, X, and other platforms. The company allegedly claimed it could track down criminals worldwide, identify perpetrators, and provide law enforcement with evidence needed to make arrests.
Digital Forensics allegedly charged between $1,499 and $20,000 for a “Phase 1” package. That was supposed to include communicating with the sextortionist, tracking their location, producing an investigative report, and reporting the crime to law enforcement.
According to the FTC, Digital Forensics Corporation changed the victims’ account settings to block the sextortionist, fabricated chat transcripts, and presented pre-saved coordinates, often in Nigeria or the Philippines, as the sextortionist’s location.
After collecting the first payment, the company allegedly pressured customers to purchase “Phase 2” services, supposedly providing ongoing account monitoring and further assistance. The FTC says the company did not follow through on those promises either.
Another huge red flag was that the company also allegedly discouraged victims from blocking their blackmailers, contrary to law enforcement and expert advice.
The allegations against Digital Forensics Corporation have not yet been decided by the court.
How to stay safe
Be wary of anyone who promises to stop the threats or pressures you to pay immediately. Help should offer clear information and realistic options. It should not turn your fear into another payment deadline.
If someone is threatening to share intimate images, you do not have to handle it alone.
Preserve the threats and account details. Keep the messages, usernames, and payment demands. Block the offender but do not delete your account or the messages, since they may help real investigators.
Stop communicating and block the blackmailer. Do not pay them or give them access to your devices or financial accounts. Report the account using the platform’s safety tools.
Tell someone you trust about the sextortion. A friend, family member, counselor, or other trusted adult can provide support while you decide what to do next.
Report the crime. Contact local police. In the US, you can also report sextortion to the FBI. If it involves a minor, report it through the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline.
If you have already paid a service that you believe misled you, keep its ads, messages, contract, and receipts, and report your experience to the FTC through ReportFraud.ftc.gov.
If you’re unsure whether something is a scam or not, ask Malwarebytes Scam Guard. It can help you assess it and provide advice on next steps.
Something feel off? Check it before you click.
Malwarebytes Scam Guard helps you analyze suspicious links, texts, and screenshots instantly.
Photos you take with your phone and some digital cameras can contain hidden information, including where they were taken. You can strip that data out before sharing a photo with someone, which would help to protect your location. But the image itself may still give you away.
A company called Graylark says its Raven AI tool can match an indoor photo to a specific property using visual clues alone. No GPS data or view out of the window required.
We’ve seen this company before. Its tool, GeoSpy, could work out where a photo was taken by analyzing features in the image, such as vegetation, buildings, and other landmarks.
Graylark itself grew out of experiments founder Daniel Heinen and his brothers carried out after reading about using AI to play GeoGuessr, a geography game in which people look at street-level images and try to work out where they were taken.
The company has since taken it further. According to 404 Media, Graylark has renamed the tool as Raven and expanded it to identify indoor locations as well. It uses visual clues in the image, without needing location metadata.
The tool works by matching images against property photos. An image of something as banal as a washer/dryer sitting in a nook can return a list of ranked results. The tool’s Short-Term Rental ID feature can search what Graylark describes as millions of rental listings worldwide, using an interior photo or a frame from a video.
However, the system targets more than just rental properties. Its Find Property feature searches for properties using exterior photos and, now, interior ones in supported cities.
This is more than just reverse image search, which can help you see if the same photo you’re looking at has been used elsewhere. The service can match different views of the same property by identifying features ranging from the shapes of wall tiles to the structure of a room and the color of its surfaces.
Law enforcement is already using the tool, for which founder Daniel Heinen landed $10.7m in seed funding in August. 404 Media said that Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office and the Los Angeles Police Department bought access to the product.
According to Heinen’s social media posts, Raven can now tell which hotel you stayed in from a single photo. He cited a feature called HotelID that isn’t yet listed on the website. The Raven website also cites other uses. For example, it can tell you a car’s exact make, model, and year from a picture of its interior.
The tool works from identifiers such as email addresses, too. Investigators can find public photos on linked accounts and then use those photos to look for location clues. Graylark says this does not give investigators access to private accounts or messages.
Heinen says the short-term rental feature uses images from millions of rental listings around the world. According to 404 Media, Airbnb said it had no relationship with Graylark, and Zillow said scraping was against its terms of service. Those statements don’t confirm how Graylark obtained its imagery.
Heinen’s ambitions don’t seem to stop here. On September 8, he mentioned that he was experimenting with recent footage from tens of thousands of dashcams.
He has said that this kind of system can help combat human trafficking. A George Mason University study found that in around 80% of federal sex trafficking cases active in 2018 and 2019, victims were exploited at hotels or motels. And perhaps AI can help with unsolved crimes if used properly. Any suggested location still needs to be checked against other evidence.
But technology can also be misused, particularly when it comes to stalking. Heinen said on X that Raven is only available to enterprises, government, and law enforcement agencies. Other websites and consumer apps use the GeoSpy name, but Graylark says third-party products using that name are not operated by or affiliated with the company.
This brings us to what you can do to protect yourself should someone use this kind of tool for nefarious purposes.
How to keep your home more private
Think before publishing interior or exterior pictures of your home online. Even Google Photos can estimate where a photo was taken using landmarks and similarities with your other photos that have known locations, it says.
Check the frame for distinctive features before posting. Look for distinctive tiles, room layouts, views through windows, house numbers, or mail showing your address. Crop these out where practical.
Limit who can see your photos. Review the audience for your social posts and photo albums, including older ones. When traveling, consider waiting until you’ve left before posting recognizable accommodation photos.
Review old property listings. Ask your agent and the relevant property websites whether they can remove interior photos from old listings. Removal cannot recall copies already downloaded or collected. If you’re advertising a rental, use approximate-location settings where available, but remember that the listing photos themselves may still identify the property.
Remove location metadata before sharing. This won’t prevent visual matching, but it removes another way to find where a photo was taken. Don’t assume every service removes it for you.
Apple users can do this directly on iOS: When sharing from Photos, tap Options and turn off Location.
Google Photos lets you remove estimated or manually added locations, but not those recorded by your camera. Check location-sharing settings for each album, link, or conversation. Photos downloaded and shared outside Google Photos may still contain the original location data.
Samsung users can choose to remove location data when sharing from Samsung Gallery, where the option is available.
Browse like no one’s watching.
Malwarebytes Privacy VPN encrypts your connection and never logs what you do, so the next story you read doesn’t have to feel personal. Try it free →
Your streaming box might not look like much of a computer. But connect enough inexpensive devices together, and they can run an AI model.
Researchers at Anthropic demonstrated this by running a Google Gemma model across 15 off-brand Android TV boxes. They warn that small models could soon spread across vulnerable internet-of-things (IoT) devices, including smart ovens and TV boxes, stating:
“Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self-replicate on commercial internet-of-things (IoT) devices, like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes.”
In this scenario, AI isn’t simply helping an attacker write malicious code. It becomes part of the software carrying out the replication.
Anthropic breaks that process into four stages:
Find another device.
Gain the ability to execute code on it.
Set up the software needed to run an AI model.
Continue spreading from the new host.
The researchers tested whether AI agents could complete this sequence. They did not demonstrate a small model spreading and running independently on compromised household devices.
The tests used Android emulators with unauthenticated debugging access, making it much easier for the agents to gain access than it would be on properly secured devices. Large file transfers and sustained communication between devices could make real-world replication easier to detect, while limited computing power could slow it. Crucially, the experiments did not demonstrate a model that was both capable enough to complete the replication process and small enough to run on the consumer hardware being targeted.
Anthropic projects that smaller models could reach the necessary capability by the end of 2026 if improvement continues at its historical rate.
Varun Chandrasekaran, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, told AFP that the findings were consistent with related research but cautioned that Anthropic’s work had not been independently verified. He identified people using AI to improve attacks as the bigger current threat, rather than AI systems going rogue.
Smart-device botnets are already a problem.
Criminals hijacking connected devices is nothing new. Mirai and its descendants have recruited routers, security cameras, and digital video recorders into botnets used to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, overwhelming services with traffic. BADBOX 2.0 illustrates another form of abuse: compromised consumer devices used for activities including residential proxy services, which route other people’s traffic through victims’ internet connections.
Neither demonstrates autonomous AI replication, but both show that connected devices can become infrastructure for criminals.
What you can do now
The practical response is to reduce the opportunities for any attacker to misuse your connected devices:
Keep operating systems, software, and firmware up to date to reduce exposure to known vulnerabilities.
Buy from reputable vendors that provide ongoing firmware and security updates. A bargain device is less attractive if you cannot trust its software or obtain security fixes.
Avoid unofficial app stores promising free streaming content. The FBI specifically flags these marketplaces in its BADBOX 2.0 guidance.
Don’t disable protections to make an app work. Requests to turn off Google Play Protect are a warning sign, as are Android devices without Play Protect certification.
If you notice something suspicious, disconnect the device from your network while you investigate.
Put smart devices that are unable to run security software on a separate network isolated from your computers and phones, such as a guest network.
Scammers know more about you than you think.
Malwarebytes Mobile Security protects you from phishing, scam texts, malicious sites, and more. With real-time AI-powered Scam Guard built right in.
Microsoft’s October Patch Tuesday release addresses a record-breaking 1,413 vulnerabilities, including an actively exploited Windows Shell zero-day and two other publicly disclosed flaws.
Just when you thought a previous record would stand for a while, Microsoft comes out again with the largest monthly Patch Tuesday release. Microsoft has said its growing use of AI to find and fix security vulnerabilities means users should expect more fixes in its monthly updates.
How to apply patches and check if you’re protected
These updates fix security problems and help keep your Windows PC protected. Here’s how to make sure you’re up to date:
Click the Start button, then open Settings.
Select Windows Update (usually at the bottom of the menu on the left).
Click Check for updates. Windows will search for the latest security updates. If you’ve enabled Get the latest updates as soon as they’re available under More options, you may be prompted to restart immediately to complete the update.
Otherwise, continue to the next step.
If updates are available, they’ll start downloading automatically. When they’re ready, click Install or Restart now if prompted. Your computer may need a restart to finish the update.
After restarting, go back to Windows Update and check again. If it says You’re up to date, you’re all set.
Technical details
As usual, we’ve selected a few vulnerabilities to highlight for readers interested in the technical details.
The security feature it can bypass is the Mark of the Web (MOTW) defense, which can warn users about potentially unsafe downloaded files.
Successful exploitation requires user interaction. For example, in an email or instant message attack, the attacker could send the targeted user a specially crafted file designed to exploit the vulnerability, but the user would have to click a link or open an attachment.
Another one to keep an eye on is CVE-2026-108398 (CVSS score 8.8 out of 10), where an untrusted search path in .NET Framework allows an authorized attacker to bypass a security feature locally. The bypassed feature is Windows Defender Application Control (WDAC), which could lead to the ability to run unauthorized applications on target systems. This vulnerability was publicly disclosed before the patch.
Another publicly disclosed vulnerability is CVE-2026-92707 (CVSS score 5.3 out of 10). The flaw can let an unauthenticated remote attacker exhaust memory in affected applications that process specially crafted MessagePack data. MessagePack-CSharp is a software component that helps applications pack and unpack data in a compact format, making it efficient to store or exchange information. Exposure depends on how a service uses the library to pack and unpack the information.
From reporting threats to removing them.
Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.
We found a wave of websites posing as Calendly booking pages for job interviews at Meta. Visitors pick a slot for a 30-minute phone call with a recruiter, fill in their details, and pass what looks like a CAPTCHA.
Then the page asks them to log in to Facebook.
The interview is fake. The pages are designed to steal the visitor’s Facebook login details, including the two-factor authentication (2FA) codes meant to protect the account. Visitors are then asked to sign in to their Google account too, supposedly “for security.”
These pages are not affiliated with Meta, Calendly, or Google. If you’ve already entered a password or approved a sign-in prompt, secure the affected accounts straight away. See “How to stay safe” below.
Why Calendly makes a convincing disguise
Calendly is a widely used scheduling tool, and recruiters use it to book interviews. Clicking a booking link, picking a time, and typing in your name and email is something people do without a second thought. There’s no account to create and nothing to download.
That routine makes it a good disguise. By the time the page asks for something unusual, the visitor has already picked a slot and shared their details. Going along with one more step can feel easier than starting to doubt the whole thing.
For someone who has sent out application after application without hearing back, an invitation to interview at Meta may be exactly the kind of message they hope for. Excitement, and the fear of missing a rare chance, can push people to move quickly instead of checking who actually sent the link.
Job seekers are also used to sharing personal details with strangers. Handing your name, email, and phone number to a recruiter you’ve never met is a normal part of applying, so a form asking for them may not raise any alarms.
A job interview that starts with a calendar
The fake page copies Calendly’s booking screen, titled “Calendly | Meta Careers.” It shows a monthly calendar, a time zone picker, and a 30-minute “Phone call.” The available times are loaded from the attackers’ server, so the calendar looks like a real recruiter’s schedule.
After the visitor picks a time, the page walks them through a series of steps:
Your details. A form asks for your name, email address, and phone number, plus anything that “will help prepare for our meeting.”
A fake CAPTCHA. A grid of images asks you to “Select all images with…”. It makes the page feel legitimate, and it may also stop automated security scanners from seeing what comes next.
A Facebook login. A window within the page copies Facebook’s login page. It even draws its own fake address bar showing a Facebook web address, so it looks like a genuine browser pop-up. The copy comes complete with realistic error messages such as “The login information you entered is incorrect.” The page also asks visitors to sign up for a “Career Profile.”
Your Facebook security code. If the account has 2FA, the page asks for the code from your authentication app, text message, WhatsApp, or email.
A Google sign-in. The page claims “Facebook requires you to sign in to the Gmail address” on your account. To make the request seem harmless, the page adds that “Facebook will not share any of your data with your Google Account.” Fake Google screens, again under a fake address bar, ask for your password and then whatever Google asks for: a tap on a phone prompt, a code from Google Authenticator, a text message code, or your recovery email address. Everything you type into these screens, including the Google password, is sent to the attackers’ collection server.
A fake confirmation. Finally, the page says a calendar invitation has been sent and that you’ll hear back within 90 minutes. By the time you start wondering, the attackers may already be inside your accounts.
How the scam can get past two-factor authentication
Many phishing pages simply collect a password and stop. This one keeps going.
While the visitor is on the page, it keeps checking in with the attackers’ server and waits to be told which screen to show next. That allows the attackers to try the stolen password on the real Facebook site right away. If Facebook asks for a code, the fake page asks the visitor for the same code, and the attackers can use it before it expires. If the code doesn’t work, the page simply says “Incorrect code. Please try again.”
The Google screens support the same approach. If Google sends a sign-in prompt to the visitor’s phone, the fake page can tell them to “tap Yes,” potentially approving the attackers’ login.
The visitor sees the fake page while the attackers attempt to sign in to the real service out of sight.
Codes and phone prompts still make accounts much harder to take over, so keep them turned on. But a code entered into a fake page, or a prompt approved for someone else’s login, can let attackers in. Passkeys and compatible hardware security keys are tied to the genuine website, so a fake page like this cannot relay them in the same way. That protection won’t help if you instead choose a password-and-code fallback and give those details to the attackers.
Signs of a reusable phishing kit
The code carries a version number (0.8.0), detailed error logging, and a “campaign key” sent with every message to the attackers’ server. These features suggest a reusable kit with support for identifying different campaigns.
The collection address uses Amazon API Gateway in AWS’s Singapore region, ap-southeast-1. A comment left in the code is written in Vietnamese. It translates to:
“Change the key here when deploying to production.”
Neither the hosting region nor the language of a code comment establishes who is behind the pages or where they operate.
Facebook accounts, especially those linked to business pages or ad accounts, are valuable to criminals. Taking over the Google account as well could expose email and other data, and let attackers reset passwords for accounts linked to that address.
The domains are another warning sign. All 11 follow the same pattern: join plus a recruiting-sounding word, such as joinhire, joinquest, or jointheteam, on the .cfd, .info, and .works top-level domains. None mention Calendly or Meta. These generic names could also be reused for other companies’ job lures.
How to stay safe
Check the address, not the design. Direct Calendly booking links use calendly.com, although legitimate forms can also be embedded on other websites. Treat an unfamiliar recruiting domain as a reason to verify the invitation independently.
Don’t give a booking page your Facebook password. Scheduling a call doesn’t require handing your social media password to a recruiter. If a booking flow suddenly asks you to sign in elsewhere, verify both the request and the actual login domain.
Look at your browser’s real address bar. These fake login windows draw their own address bars showing Facebook or Google web addresses. For a separate pop-up, check the address displayed by the browser itself. A login window that cannot be dragged outside the webpage may be part of the page rather than a separate browser window.
Verify the recruiter and role. Go directly to the company’s official careers site. A genuine job listing doesn’t prove the person contacting you represents the company, so verify unexpected invitations through an independent contact.
Don’t share codes or approve unexpected prompts. Only enter a code on the genuine service for a login you initiated. Never approve a phone prompt just because a recruiter or booking page tells you to.
Use passkeys or a security key where you can.They resist this kind of phishing. Be wary if a page pushes you to use a password and code instead.
Already entered a password or approved a prompt? From a trusted device, go directly to the affected service and change your password. Sign out other sessions and check your security methods, recovery email, and phone number. If both accounts were affected, secure your Google account promptly because email access can help attackers reset other passwords. Check Gmail for unfamiliar forwarding rules and filters, and review any Facebook business pages or ad accounts you manage. Change the password anywhere else you reused it.
Malwarebytes Browser Guard can block phishing and scam sites before you interact with them. That matters in campaigns like this one, where the page closely copies a service people use every day.
If you receive an interview link and aren’t sure about it, Malwarebytes Scam Guard can help assess the link before you click.
Claude’s Haiku 4.5 model filed a false tip in an unsolved Philadelphia homicide via the police department’s online public tip form, Anthropic disclosed. The tip was flagged as spam and didn’t reach investigators.
AI’s latest “what does this button do?” moment happened during an internal test on randomly chosen web pages, the company said.
Claude submitted the tip on July 18 at 11:27 pm through PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com, according to police. Tips submitted there can inform real homicide investigations. A fabricated account could send investigators chasing something that never happened.
Here’s what Claude Haiku wrote:
“I may have information regarding this case. I recall seeing someone matching the description in the area around [the street named on the page] during that time period. Please contact me if this information is relevant.”
The agent didn’t provide any description of the person that it didn’t actually see. Neither did it leave any contact details before hitting submit.
Haiku did this as part of Anthropic’s internal testing. It had to invent and perform sample tasks on random web pages with live internet access so the company could see how it behaved.
There was a list of prohibited actions to go along with the test. Anthropic told the agents not to log in, create accounts, enter personal data, make purchases, or submit “anything destructive.” The instructions did not explicitly rule out form submissions.
The spam filter caught this one. Philadelphia police said the report never reached its Real-Time Crime Center for review or distribution to investigators. The department did not explain why it was flagged as spam.
All tips go through human review before going out to investigators. That safeguard limited the impact of the incident, the department said, but did not diminish the seriousness of an AI system presenting made-up information as though it came from someone with knowledge of a crime.
“Unsolved cases involve real victims, grieving families and investigators working to secure answers.”
Anthropic discovered the false tip on September 28 and notified police on October 7, according to the department. Police called the two-month delay in detecting and reporting the incident “unacceptable.” It is coordinating with the City Law Department, its Office of Innovation and Technology, and the Mayor’s executive team, the department added.
Anthropic described the real-world impact of the incidents in its report as minimal. It has now disabled live internet access across its internal evaluations until it confirms that its safeguards reliably catch this behavior.
The company said the transcript suggested Haiku was just trying to produce example content rather than trying to deliberately mislead the cops. But it also admitted that we can’t completely rely on a model’s account of its own reasoning. That leaves its explanation provisional, however reassuring it might sound.
An allowlist could offer a tighter boundary for tests like these, limiting agents to approved sites and actions. A live police tip form should hardly be a testing ground.
The homicide tip was not the only unwanted submission.
Anthropic noted that federal, state, and local government websites also got visits from Claude, which repeatedly tried to fill out forms. Although Anthropic didn’t go into detail, a State Department official said that it got 20 visa applications from a testing model (19 in August, and one in May). None of them were processed, the official added.
When an AI gives you fake information about who Beyoncé is married to, it might be irritating but it might only affect your team’s fortunes in a trivia night.
The stakes get much higher when we’re dealing with intelligence that can inform law enforcement actions or public policy.
In August, the head of the UK’s Police AI center warned law enforcement there to pause plans for AI use in criminal justice work. This came after the UK’s West Midlands Police apologized to members of Parliament over false evidence involving an invented soccer match. The error arose from the use of Microsoft Copilot.
Anthropic’s latest incident raises a further concern: AI agents can put invented information into real systems themselves. What would happen if someone deliberately sent agents to flood police tip lines?
This time, the false account stayed in spam. The people relying on those tip lines deserve safeguards that hold up when the next submission gets through.
“One of the best cybersecurity suites on the planet.”
Norway’s privacy regulator Datatilsynet has fined advertising technology company Xandr 92 million Norwegian kroner, approximately $9.6 million, for unlawfully processing and sharing sensitive information about Grindr users.
While the decision concerns users in Norway, the data-sharing practices were not confined to Norwegian users. BleepingComputer reports that information about Grindr users in other countries was also exposed through the advertising system.
Between July 2018 and April 2020, Xandr handled real-time advertising auctions involving Grindr users. These automated auctions let advertisers bid to display an ad, but also involved circulating information about the person who would see it. Sensitive information revealing sexual orientation could potentially reach thousands of companies.
Crucially, users did not have to disclose their sexual orientation in their profiles. Datatilsynet said that simply being identified as a Grindr user was information that indicated sexual orientation.
According to the regulator, Xandr relied on Grindr to obtain consent without checking whether that consent was valid. As a company jointly responsible for the processing, Xandr had its own obligations. It was not enough to simply assume the app had obtained the explicit consent required.
This was not a case of hackers breaking into a dating app. The information was flowing through an advertising business without a valid legal basis. Privacy group noyb, which filed the complaint in cooperation with the Norwegian Consumer Council, says such systems use tracking identifiers to build profiles of people’s interests, habits, and behavior.
Although Xandr now belongs to Microsoft, the misconduct predates its acquisition. Microsoft completed its purchase of Xandr from AT&T on June 6, 2022, more than two years after the period covered by the fine. Microsoft told BleepingComputer it was reviewing the decision and assessing its options.
How to protect your privacy
This is a Norwegian enforcement action, but the data-sharing practices crossed borders. Users in the US and elsewhere shouldn’t assume their information stayed private just because the fine was issued in Norway.
You can limit how much additional information you disclose by giving a dating app only what you need to use it.
Leave optional profile fields blank when the information feels too personal.
Avoid publishing your workplace, home address, regular schedule, or other details that make you easy to locate.
Review location permissions and advertising settings and limit them where possible.
Think carefully before linking social accounts that reveal more of your identity.
Don’t use dating apps on company-issued devices.
These precautions cannot guarantee privacy. Responsibility for unlawful sharing lies with the companies involved. This case shows that sensitive information can come from using the service itself, not just from what you write in your bio.
Scammers don’t need to hack you. They just need you to click once.
A cyberattack has forced hundreds of supermarkets across France to throw away refrigerated and frozen food after attackers interfered with the systems that keep it cold.
The attack caused significant financial losses and food waste. Some installations reportedly reached temperatures of around 50°C (122°F), with damaged equipment and reports of fires adding to the disruption.
The attack, which struck overnight from October 11 to 12, affected stores belonging to Intermarché, Netto, Coopérative U, Carrefour, E.Leclerc, and Monoprix. These stores do not share a single parent company, but they all use refrigeration-control equipment supplied by Danish manufacturer Danfoss.
These commercial refrigeration-management systems let operators manage the equipment that keeps supermarket food refrigerated or frozen. Le Monde reported that the attackers extended defrost cycles from one hour to eight hours, delaying alarms and giving staff less opportunity to intervene before stock was ruined.
Danfoss told AFP that most affected equipment consisted of legacy products that no longer receive software or security updates. It identified AK-SM800 and AK-SC355 systems among those affected and said it had long advised customers to move away from obsolete models and keep supported equipment updated.
Les Mousquetaires, the group behind Intermarché and Netto, has estimated its losses at several million euros. The damage goes beyond spoiled food. The Paris prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation to establish the connection between the attack and reported stock losses and fires.
For customers, the disruption can mean closed departments, temporarily closed stores, and gaps on shelves while replacement stock arrives. Some affected stores have already resumed operations, but restoring refrigeration does not immediately replace everything that had to be discarded.
The technical recovery involves more than resetting temperatures. France’s national cybersecurity incident response center, CERT-FR, recommends disconnecting or filtering access to affected controllers. Where compromise is suspected, it advises operators to:
Restrict network access to necessary service providers
The attackers have not been publicly identified, and French media have reported no claim of responsibility.
At around the same time, Ahold Delhaize, the retailer behind Albert Heijn and Delhaize, announced a security issue within its network. The company said it had taken some systems offline to protect them while assessing and mitigating the problem, and that stores remained open. Online grocery orders and deliveries were also disrupted
But a similar timeline is not evidence of a shared attack: no connection between Ahold Delhaize’s network incident and the French refrigeration attack has been established.
What consumers can do
Check before you travel. Look for updates from your local supermarket about opening hours and the availability of refrigerated and frozen goods.
Follow product-specific advice from the retailer. If it issues a warning or recall, follow its advice about returning or discarding affected food.
Be cautious with unexpected refund or “order recovery” messages. As a general precaution, check directly through the retailer’s official website or app before providing payment or login details.
For now, the confirmed damage centers on refrigeration, spoiled stock, and disrupted store operations. But the attack demonstrates how tampering with connected equipment can turn a cybersecurity incident into spoiled food, empty shelves, and physical damage—problems that restoring a backup alone can’t fix.
Something feel off? Check it before you click.
Malwarebytes Scam Guard helps you analyze suspicious links, texts, and screenshots instantly.
Scammers are finding different ways to use personal details exposed in data breaches to lure people into conversations.
Last week, we showed how a Facebook Marketplace listing used the recipient’s name to make a text asking “Is this still available?” more convincing.
The one we got this week was a lot simpler. No suspicious link. No overdue payment. No warning that your account is about to be closed. No fake images.
Just your name, followed by a question mark.
It’s a remarkably small opening for what could become a much bigger problem. A message like this invites an almost automatic response: “Yes?” Or perhaps, “Who’s this?”
That’s because a scammer needs to get you to engage before they can persuade you to hand over money or personal information. Sometimes, the first thing they ask you to give them is simply a reply. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has warned about similarly brief, apparently harmless messages that scammers use to start conversations.
The text in our example gives the recipient very little information, but leaves an obvious question unanswered: Who wants to know? Using the correct name makes that question more compelling. This is not just a generic “Hello” that could have gone to anyone. It looks as though the sender is trying to reach you specifically.
It’s tempting to think, “They have my name and number, so this must be someone I know.” But having those details is not evidence they know you. As we discussed in the Marketplace article, name-and-phone-number combinations can come from breached data traded by cybercriminals.
What follows depends on the scheme. The first message doesn’t tell us which route this scammer planned to take. But documented scams show how an innocuous introduction can develop:
A supposed wrong-number exchange becomes a friendly conversation.
The sender builds a relationship rather than immediately asking for money.
An investment opportunity eventually enters the discussion.
The victim is encouraged to send money to a fraudulent investment scheme.
The FBI describes how cryptocurrency investment scammers build trust before introducing fake investments, and identifies unsolicited texts as one way they approach victims.
Even if the conversation goes no further, your reply can still be useful to the scammer. As we explained in our earlier article on wrong-number texts, it shows that you are willing to engage. Your number can then be reused or sold for other scam campaigns.
How to stay safe
A scam doesn’t have to begin with an outrageous promise or an urgent threat. Sometimes it begins with something much more ordinary: your name, a question mark, and the expectation that you will be polite enough to answer.
Don’t reply. Even “Who’s this?” or “Wrong number” tells the scammer you are willing to respond. If you think it might be someone you know, contact them through a number or channel you already trust.
Report before you block. Use your messaging app’s reporting option, then block the sender. If you have already replied, stop engaging.
Make yourself harder to profile. Review privacy settings on messaging apps and social media. Limit who can see your profile photo, status, last seen, and phone number.
Run a Malwarebytes Digital Footprint Scanto check for personal information exposed in known breaches and on the dark web. It helps to be aware of what can be used to target you.
An attacker reportedly used a leaked password to abuse a company’s legitimate access to Denmark’s population register (CPR). The weak password is remarkable, but the failure to spot millions of unusual searches made the breach worse.
The CPR administration states it identified a serious security incident. By abusing a Danish company’s authorized access to the CPR system, unauthorized people gained access to the names, addresses, CPR numbers, and other information belonging to around 8.8 million people registered in the system. CPR numbers are Denmark’s personal identification numbers.
How could a password so weak that it should have been rejected by the system open the door to so much personal information?
The attacker reportedly gained access through Pays ApS, an IT company based in Odense. According to TV 2, Pays has confirmed that its authorized access to search the CPR system was abused. Pays offers services including data updates and “CPR cleansing,” allowing customers to check records against the register to update addresses, identify people who have died, and obtain information about changes of address.
The attacker reportedly used a leaked password associated with a former Pays employee. TV 2 says an email containing the password 123456 had appeared in a larger data leak, and that this account of the initial access matches its own research.
The attackers had access for 21 days before it was shut down on October 2, although the suspicious activity appears to have stopped on September 20. An unusually large bill for around 14 million searches drew attention to the breach.
Politiken reports that the data stolen in those searches belonged to approximately 5.5 million living and 3.3 million deceased people.
A weak, leaked password opened an authorized route into a sensitive register. That access allowed millions of searches, and the activity was discovered only after an unusually large bill drew attention to it.
How to stay safe
If your organization handles sensitive data:
Don’t reuse passwords or use personal passwords for work accounts. Use a password manager to create and remember strong, unique passwords for you.
For systems that give access to sensitive data, enforce authentication that would reject weak passwords and make multi-factor authentication mandatory.
Monitor for unusual activity. That many searches from one account should have been noticed earlier.
If your data may have been exposed in this breach:
Keep an eye on official updates about the incident.
Be alert to phishing and other scams. Scammers could use personal details to make their messages more convincing.
You ignored the suspicious email. You didn’t open the attachment, click the link, or reply to the sender.
Then you asked your AI assistant to summarize your inbox.
Could the message you wisely avoided find its way back onto your to-do list—only this time presented as an urgent recommendation from a tool you trust?
That’s the risk behind phishing emails containing hidden instructions aimed at AI assistants. Instead of relying only on persuading you, attackers are also trying to influence the software that reads your messages. Recent research from Barracuda describes emails designed to target both audiences at once.
For the human recipient, there was a password-protected attachment, with the password supplied in the email. For an AI assistant processing the message, there were hidden instructions intended to influence how it summarized or handled the content.
By including a prompt injection, attackers give themselves another way to reach you. The malicious instructions could try to make the assistant describe the email as legitimate or urgent, encouraging you to revisit it.
In another example, a hidden block instructed a summarizing AI to add a fake priority action: Change a vendor’s payment details. That could result in an employee sending money to an attacker’s account.
The attacker isn’t simply asking the AI to repeat a fraudulent request. They’re trying to turn that request into the assistant’s recommendation.
How prompt injection works
Prompt injection means planting instructions in material an AI system is supposed to read, hoping it will follow those instructions instead of treating them as part of the material. When the instructions arrive through an outside source, such as an email or webpage, it’s often called indirect prompt injection.
The malicious instructions don’t have to appear as ordinary, readable paragraphs. Barracuda identified concealment techniques including comments in the email’s underlying HTML code, text made invisible through styling, encoded content, and invisible “zero-width” characters. These can obscure instructions from a person viewing the message while leaving content available for an AI system to process. Whether that content actually reaches the model depends on how the particular tool extracts and prepares the email.
That means this problem cannot be solved simply by asking people to look more carefully at their emails. Part of the defense must sit inside the tools handling those messages.
“The real flaw is that the model can’t tell the difference between text it’s supposed to read and instructions it’s supposed to follow. Stripping hidden content before it reaches the model is worth doing, and every vendor should do it. But it’s an arms race. Each new encoding trick is a new hole.”
He adds:
“People have learned to distrust the email. They haven’t learned to distrust their AI assistant. So, the defense has to live inside the tools. I’d go one step further: some of it has to live inside the model itself. Wrappers, filters, sandboxing and human sign-off on payments are all necessary.”
Before taking action
An assistant that summarizes messages could mislead you about which email deserves attention or what action it requires.
An assistant with additional permissions could create a more serious problem. Depending on its capabilities and safeguards, malicious instructions might try to make it carry out unauthorized actions or disclose sensitive information.
You don’t need to abandon AI tools that help with email. But you do need to consider what you trust them to do and what permissions you give them.
The familiar phishing advice still applies. When an assistant reads your inbox on your behalf, check its recommendations before acting:
Check the original message before acting on a recommendation involving money or sensitive information. If a summary tells you to pay an invoice, change account details, or share sensitive information, don’t treat the summary itself as verification.
Always verify payment changes through a separate, established channel. Contact the person or organization using details you already trust, rather than relying on information supplied in the suspicious message.
Keep your AI assistant’s permissions limited to what you need and, at work, what your organization allows. An assistant used to summarize emails should not need broad authority to carry out unrelated actions. Limiting access can reduce the consequences if it follows malicious instructions.
Require human approval for high-impact actions like payments and changes to vendor payment details. Approval should include checking the underlying request, not simply accepting the assistant’s recommendation.
From reporting threats to removing them.
Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.
The customer data stolen from global fashion retailer ASOS includes more than just names and contact details, raising questions about its early reassurances.
As we reported earlier this week, ASOS customers received a push notification through the ASOS app alleging that the company had been hacked.
ASOS has confirmed that attackers accessed customer information after tricking an employee into handing over login credentials. While the retailer says payment card information and customer passwords were not accessed, reporting by the BBC shows the stolen information includes more than the “basic personal information” initially mentioned by the company.
The stolen login details were used to access information on third-party platforms used by ASOS. The company says it locked down the affected platforms and launched an investigation with internal and external specialists. It also says it has strengthened its security controls.
What data was stolen?
In our initial coverage, we highlighted the potentially detailed customer profiles associated with ASOS’s marketing setup. The BBC’s findings now establish that at least some shopping-related information was taken.
According to the BBC, which received a sample from the attackers, the exposed data includes:
Names and home addresses
Phone numbers and email addresses
Customer numbers and dates of birth
Searches customers made on the ASOS website
Details such as when a customer started using ASOS
The BBC reported search terms including “reclaimed vintage,” “glamorous wide fit,” and “Asos petite.” That makes this more than a stolen contact list. The information can also reveal customers’ shopping interests and their relationship with the retailer.
The attackers’ original notification named Snowflake, a data storage and analysis platform. They subsequently told the BBC that they accessed the information through Simon AI, a platform built on Snowflake that ASOS uses for customer personalization.
Snowflake said it had found no compromise of its platform. Using stolen credentials to access a customer’s account or a connected service does not necessarily mean the underlying platform was breached. The available reporting does not establish a vulnerability in Snowflake or Simon AI.
ASOS’s communication with customers
Customers first heard about the breach from the cybercriminals, rather than the retailer. The attackers’ decision to send a notification through the ASOS app may have made that unavoidable.
But the Independent reported that ASOS’s full statement followed roughly five hours of silence, leaving customers alarmed by the notification and waiting for an explanation.
Security expert Kevin Beaumont criticized the response:
“ASOS are experiencing the exact same PR gaffs as Co-op and M&S by not being honest with customers. If you’re dealing with Advanced Persistent Teenagers you need much better crisis plans.”
While the attackers are threatening to release the data, ASOS says its full investigation will continue over the coming weeks. It will contact customers directly where it believes further information, support, or action is required.
Reportedly, the group gave ASOS two weeks to make contact and said it wanted a ransom in exchange for deleting customer information. ASOS did not disclose whether it would pay.
How to stay safe
ASOS says its website and app remain safe to use, and that payment card information and customer passwords were not accessed. But the stolen details and shopping searches could help scammers make targeted phishing messages more convincing.
A message that knows your name, or what you searched for, isn’t proof it came from ASOS.
Be wary of unexpected emails, texts, or calls about the breach, refunds, deliveries, or problems with your ASOS account.
Don’t follow links in unexpected messages, and don’t follow the Telegram link in the attackers’ message or engage with them. Go directly to the ASOS website or app to check your account.
Don’t share passwords, security codes, or payment details in response to an unsolicited message or call. ASOS says it will never ask you to do this.
Your name, address, and phone number may already be for sale.
Data brokers collect and sell your personal details to anyone willing to pay. Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover finds them and gets your information removed, then keeps watch so it stays that way.
According to Google, attackers compromised infrastructure behind three country-code domain namespaces—.gh (Ghana), .sl (Sierra Leone), and .as (American Samoa)—and used it to obtain unauthorized HTTPS certificates for Google domains and other organizations. These domain endings aren’t limited to sites serving those countries, so the risk can extend to users elsewhere.
This wasn’t a break in encryption, and Google’s systems weren’t compromised. Instead, attackers manipulated the internet’s addressing infrastructure so they could pass the checks required to obtain certificates for domains they didn’t legitimately control.
The Domain Name System (DNS) helps direct internet traffic to the right destination. Control over DNS can also provide a way to demonstrate apparent control of a domain when requesting an HTTPS certificate.
By controlling DNS records, attackers can pass domain verification checks. The authority can then issue a genuine, signed certificate to someone who has hijacked the domain’s infrastructure.
Combined with the ability to redirect a victim’s traffic to an attacker-controlled server, that could enable cybercriminals to create a convincing impersonation of the real service.
Google initially blocked unauthorized certificates for its own properties in Chrome and worked with the issuing certificate authorities to revoke them. It later blocked suspicious certificates for other organizations in Chrome, too.
How to stay safe
Google points out that its actions do not offer complete protection:
“Due to the complexity of DNS hijacks, we cannot guarantee that our analysis identified every affected domain, nor do Chrome interventions reliably protect non-Chrome users.”
At the base level, this is an infrastructure problem that requires an infrastructure-level response. But these precautions can help:
Keep your browser and operating system updated. Install available updates so you receive the latest security fixes.
Don’t bypass certificate or secure-connection warnings. If your browser reports a certificate problem, stop rather than force the page to load.
If a service you use has an address ending in .gh, .sl, or .as, check for security notices from the provider before logging in, making payments, or sharing sensitive information.
Don’t treat HTTPS as an all-clear. An encrypted connection—even at the correct address—doesn’t guarantee you’re connected to the legitimate service if attackers have hijacked its DNS and obtained a valid certificate.
Be cautious with unexpected or unusual requests, even if they appear to come from a service you trust. Before acting, verify the request through a separate, trusted channel, not through links or contact details provided in the request itself.
These precautions are not a complete defense. The lasting fix depends on domain operators restoring control, preventing further unauthorized certificates from being issued, and ensuring existing ones are revoked or blocked.
Stop threats before they can do any harm.
Malwarebytes Browser Guard blocks phishing pages and malicious sites automatically. Free, one click to install. Add it to your browser →
Amazon’s “About You” page reveals what it thinks it knows about you—and you can’t simply switch it off.
Dexerto reports that one shopper discovered her profile included the observation:
“has flat buttocks”
She suggested this might relate to a previous purchase of “butt scrunch leggings.” Whatever the connection, buying clothes doesn’t mean you expect the retailer to start describing your body.
What is Amazon’s About You?
About You is a page where customers can review and edit the personal details Amazon uses to shape their shopping recommendations. Amazon introduced it in May as a way to make personalization more visible and easier to manage.
According to Amazon, the information behind its personalized shopping experience includes:
Your purchase history
Your searches
Items saved to Lists
Product reviews you have written
Conversations with Alexa for Shopping
The resulting profile can contain categories such as “Home and Family,” “Interests and Hobbies,” “Brands,” and “Product Preferences.” Some entries describe straightforward shopping preferences. Others go further, making assumptions about how people live.
Amazon’s information categories
Amazon presents this as helpful. If you regularly buy non-dairy milk, for example, it might recommend other non-dairy products. But a useful recommendation and an accurate description of a person are not the same thing.
After all, a purchase might be a gift. An item on a list might be something you’re researching for someone else. A product search might reflect curiosity rather than a personal need.
Amazon has offered personalized recommendations for years. About You makes some of the information behind them visible and gives you a chance to see where its assumptions miss the mark.
How to find your information
To check what Amazon thinks it knows about you, log in to your Amazon account.
Hover over your name above Account & Lists, near the top-right corner.
Select Account.
Find the tile Ordering and shopping preferences, and select Your Shopping preferences.
From there, scroll to the bottom of the page and select Manage your information.
In the Amazon app, it works like this:
After logging in, tap You at the bottom
Tap Account > Account Settings > Shopping preferences > About You
Managing your information
To remove an entry:
Select a category to see what Amazon has listed about you, either because you volunteered it or Amazon assumed it based on your buying behavior.
Select Remove. You don’t need to select a reason. Select Remove again in the confirmation prompt.
Removing one entry from Amazon’s About You
Buying something should not be treated as volunteering every personal detail a retailer can infer from it. It’s good that these assumptions are visible and that you can remove them, but customers shouldn’t have to correct a profile they never deliberately filled out.
A meaningful privacy choice would let customers decline personal inferences, not merely delete them one at a time. It would also explain what deletion does. Is the information removed from Amazon’s servers or just moved out of your sight?
Amazon says you can remove information you don’t want used for personalization. Its announcement does not explain whether that also deletes the underlying data, or whether similar assumptions could be made again as you continue shopping. Nor does it describe a master opt-out from About You.
For now, checking your profile lets you see (and challenge) some of the conclusions Amazon has drawn about you.
Browse like no one’s watching.
Malwarebytes Privacy VPN encrypts your connection and never logs what you do, so the next story you read doesn’t have to feel personal. Try it free →
If you thought that having companies trawling your social media, browsing history, and TV habits for behavioral clues was bad, sit tight. Meta is just getting started. Its Muse personal AI agent is taking surveillance to the next level.
TIME magazine analyzed the software’s internal instructions and found that it maintains constantly updated dossiers on users and the people they know.
Meta released Muse last month, positioning it as a digital assistant that can handle different parts of your life. It can organize your emails, handle your grocery shopping, and cancel your subscriptions. It is available for free, with paid plans for people who want to do more.
Muse has already been downloaded more than five million times. Its ability to handle mundane online tasks could be bad news for businesses that rely on consumers not canceling their subscriptions. Some people think it will liberate thousands of consumers from low-interest bank accounts.
But Muse won’t just help you stick it to the man; it also is the man.
Have I got some bad Muse for you
You have to let Muse access all your systems before it can help organize them for you. Depending on what you connect and the permissions you grant, that can give it access to your calendar, emails, messages, and other personal information.
In doing so, it accesses data. Lots of it. An analysis by Surfshark late last month put it second only to Meta’s AI chatbot among the apps reviewed, with its App Store disclosures listing collection of 31 of 35 data types.
Those disclosures include Apple’s “Sensitive Info” category, which covers information such as racial or ethnic data, sexual orientation, pregnancy, disability, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, political opinion, genetic information, and biometric data. That doesn’t mean Muse collects every one of those details about every user, but it does show how broad its declared collection can be.
According to TIME’s analysis, Muse’s instructions call for it to refresh personal dossiers every hour. These can record how users met their contacts, along with arguments or tensions within social groups.
Somehow even creepier than that is its nightly review of your recent conversations, which it uses to guide future conversations. For example, it learns when a quick nudge for your attention will be most successful.
Meta uses Muse interactions to train its AI models by default, unless you opt out in the app’s settings.
Oh, and Muse stores these files in Meta’s cloud, where Meta can access them. The company says it will offer encryption that keeps them private even from Meta, but that option isn’t available yet, according to TIME.
Meta says Muse’s conversations and stored data are not shared with its advertising systems. It also says users choose how much access Muse gets and can tell it to forget specific things it has learned.
The magazine points out that simply not using Muse might not save you, because Muse can collect data on people that its users interact with. If you send a Muse user a message and the AI has access to that messaging system, your message can become part of what it reads.
Privacy nonprofit the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) points out that Meta has pulled a similar trick before, by building shadow profiles of people who aren’t signed up for its services.
When permissions become real-world harm
This would be scary enough were it not for other stories about Muse privacy invasions. Researcher Patrick Wardle found a way to compromise the software and turn it into a Mac backdoor.
Another team of reporters used it to compile personal details for members of vulnerable groups online. After first declining some of these requests, it capitulated when the prompts were reworded, they said.
Muse also invited a Marketplace buyer to someone’s home last month after accepting a lowball offer on a product that he was selling. Matt Robb, a YouTube tech reviewer, had clicked an “Allow Always” button, assuming that the AI would still ask before sharing his address with strangers. It didn’t. Instead, he said, it arranged the pickup without telling him. The buyer, who traveled half an hour to pick up the product, was not pleased.
If you use Muse, review the accounts it can access, the actions it can take without approval, and whether your interactions are being used for AI training. Give it only the access it needs for the task.
Google has published security fixes for Android. The October updates are available for Android operating system versions 14, 15, 16, 16-qpr2, and 17 where “qpr” stands for Quarterly Platform Release. QPRs are interim updates Google pushes out between major yearly cycles.
These Android security bulletins contain valuable information for Android users. The updates are important as they fix several vulnerabilities rated as Critical, which can be exploited without users even doing anything.
However, we don’t write about them very often. The main reason for that lack of attention is that many Android users aren’t able to get the updates immediately and lots of others will never see them.
Google’s October fixes list Android 14 and newer, but a substantial share of the Android ecosystem still runs older software. In the distribution figures reported about last year, roughly four in ten devices were running Android 12 or earlier. This was while Android 13 still received updates which ended early March 2026.
And then there is the patch gap caused by device vendors meaning that even phones that remain supported may have to wait until the vendors test and sometimes modify the patches, so they work with their devices. And other vendors are on a different stride. For example, Samsung lists devices including the Galaxy S22 series and several Galaxy A models on a quarterly rather than a monthly security-update schedule.
You can imagine that cybercriminals love to get their hands on known vulnerabilities that many users have not yet been able to patch. Looking at the number of users that are unable to patch immediately that makes for an enormous target group.
How to stay safe
Get the updates as soon as they are made available to you is the most important word of advice here.
For most Android phones this is the general idea: open Settings, find Software update or System update (sometimes under System or About phone), check for updates, and follow the instructions to download, install, and restart. The menu names vary between vendors and even models, but the process is broadly the same.
If that doesn’t work for you or you can’t find instructions for your specific device, post what you’re looking for in the comments. We have lots of helpful readers.
In August, the Malwarebytes research team reported on a new malicious turnkey kit that makes it possible for almost anyone to launch a sophisticated online scam. The kit was not simply a fake website. It bundled the command center, victim tracking, and administrative tools into a ready-to-use package, reducing the technical knowledge needed to operate a scam.
The discovery highlights an important feature of the cybercrime economy: criminals don’t necessarily need to build their own infrastructure from scratch. Instead, they can buy ready-made services that handle much of the complicated work for them.
The same pattern is well established in phishing. Scam emails are no longer limited to poorly written, easily spotted phishing attempts. Cybercriminals now use complete, subscription-based platforms that make launching convincing attacks as easy as signing up for a monthly service.
One of the most dangerous examples of this trend is BlueKit, a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) toolkit designed to automate and scale account hijacking.
BlueKit allows attackers to manage entire phishing campaigns through a single dashboard without needing deep technical knowledge.
BlueKit thread on underground cybercrime forum“petrushka” (Russian for parsley), the operator behind BlueKit
BlueKit’s origins
The Malwarebytes research team has been tracking BlueKit’s development since the service first appeared on a prominent cybercrime forum in April.
Rather than simply documenting its initial capabilities, our researchers followed its evolution over time, watching how the service developed and what its growing capabilities could mean for cybercriminal operations.
BlueKit offered by the threat actor “petrushka”
A template library targeting familiar brands
As of September, BlueKit boasts an extensive template library supporting 97distinct brands across 176variants. The service’s operators describe these phishing pages as:
“pixel-perfect and ready to deploy in one click.”
The offer of “BlueKit” (extended)BlueKit’s websitePhishing kits list on BlueKit’s website
Our analysis shows that the platform targets both consumer and business platforms. Its phishing kit templates include:
Consumer services: Templates impersonating major providers, including Amazon, Booking.com, Google/Gmail, and Apple.
Finance and cryptocurrency: Templates impersonating financial institutions such as American Express and Bank of America, alongside numerous cryptocurrency exchanges.
Social media and communications: Templates impersonating major social media platforms including TikTok, Facebook, and X.
Generative AI platforms: Templates designed to steal login details for services including OpenAI and Anthropic.
Below is a video demo of a phishing page impersonating the crypto wallet provider Trezor:
.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44 > .kt-inside-inner-col{display:flex;}.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44{max-width:801px;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;}.wp-block-kadence-column.kb-section-dir-horizontal:not(.kb-section-md-dir-vertical)>.kt-inside-inner-col>.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44{-webkit-flex:0 1 801px;flex:0 1 801px;max-width:unset;margin-left:unset;margin-right:unset;}.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44 > .kt-inside-inner-col,.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44 > .kt-inside-inner-col:before{border-top-left-radius:0px;border-top-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-right-radius:0px;border-bottom-left-radius:0px;}.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44 > .kt-inside-inner-col{column-gap:var(--global-kb-gap-sm, 1rem);}.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44 > .kt-inside-inner-col{flex-direction:column;justify-content:center;align-items:center;}.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44 > .kt-inside-inner-col > .kb-image-is-ratio-size{align-self:stretch;}.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44 > .kt-inside-inner-col > .wp-block-kadence-advancedgallery{align-self:stretch;}.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44 > .kt-inside-inner-col > .aligncenter{width:100%;}.kt-row-column-wrap > .kadence-column471581_a23f77-44{align-self:center;}.kt-inner-column-height-full:not(.kt-has-1-columns) > .wp-block-kadence-column.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44{align-self:auto;}.kt-inner-column-height-full:not(.kt-has-1-columns) > .wp-block-kadence-column.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44 > .kt-inside-inner-col{flex-direction:column;justify-content:center;}.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44 > .kt-inside-inner-col:before{opacity:0.3;}.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44{position:relative;}@media all and (min-width: 1025px){.wp-block-kadence-column.kb-section-dir-horizontal>.kt-inside-inner-col>.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44{-webkit-flex:0 1 801px;flex:0 1 801px;max-width:unset;margin-left:unset;margin-right:unset;}}@media all and (max-width: 1024px){.kt-row-column-wrap > .kadence-column471581_a23f77-44{align-self:center;}}@media all and (max-width: 1024px){.kt-inner-column-height-full:not(.kt-has-1-columns) > .wp-block-kadence-column.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44{align-self:auto;}}@media all and (max-width: 1024px){.kt-inner-column-height-full:not(.kt-has-1-columns) > .wp-block-kadence-column.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44 > .kt-inside-inner-col{flex-direction:column;justify-content:center;}}@media all and (max-width: 1024px){.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44 > .kt-inside-inner-col{flex-direction:column;justify-content:center;align-items:center;}}@media all and (max-width: 767px){.kt-row-column-wrap > .kadence-column471581_a23f77-44{align-self:center;}.kt-inner-column-height-full:not(.kt-has-1-columns) > .wp-block-kadence-column.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44{align-self:auto;}.kt-inner-column-height-full:not(.kt-has-1-columns) > .wp-block-kadence-column.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44 > .kt-inside-inner-col{flex-direction:column;justify-content:center;}.wp-block-kadence-column.kb-section-sm-dir-vertical:not(.kb-section-sm-dir-horizontal):not(.kb-section-sm-dir-specificity)>.kt-inside-inner-col>.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44{max-width:801px;-webkit-flex:1;flex:1;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;}.kadence-column471581_a23f77-44 > .kt-inside-inner-col{flex-direction:column;justify-content:center;align-items:center;}}
Beyond consumer-oriented attacks, BlueKit also presents an acute threat to businesses by providing the tools necessary to target corporate logins.
Our team found support for critical business infrastructure and single sign-on (SSO) gateways. This includes customer relationship and marketing automation platforms, such as Salesforce and HubSpot, developer and source control environments like GitHub, and security services including Check Point, Citrix, Cloudflare, and Cisco.
Business-oriented phishing templates on BlueKit’s website
A toolkit that never stops updating
One of the interesting things about BlueKit is that its creators are constantly adding new features, much like a legitimate software company releasing updates for its apps.
For example, on July 26, the BlueKit team used its official Telegram channel to announce an upcoming upgrade: a built-in SMS sender. Less than a month later, on August 10, they announced its release.
The new tool allows scammers to send text messages directly from the BlueKit dashboard. Alongside phishing emails, attackers can now easily send scam texts (called “smishing”) to trick people into clicking malicious links.
The operators say the update even lets attackers use local US phone numbers, which could make the messages appear more trustworthy. It gives them an entirely new, highly effective way to deliver scams from one control panel.
SMS sender announcement in BlueKit’s Telegram channelSMS sender module on BlueKit’s website
But BlueKit’s creators aren’t just focused on adding shiny new tools like the SMS sender. They’re also constantly working behind the scenes to improve their core product. A September update, for example, improved their fake website templates to make them look even more convincing, and upgraded the hidden technology they use to steal and manage sessions.
BlueKit’s September updates
Three ways BlueKit makes phishing easier for scammers
After monitoring BlueKit’s development and analyzing its capabilities, our research team identified three ways the service lowers the barrier to launching sophisticated phishing attacks: setting up a site, capturing account access, and using AI to support the attack.
1. Quick setup
BlueKit is an “easy-to-install” phishing service, highlighting just how quickly sophisticated phishing infrastructure can be deployed.
According to its operators, an attacker can connect a domain and have a phishing site ready in around 10 minutes. The cheapest subscription costs $250 for seven days, and an attacker could potentially go from purchasing the service to launching a sophisticated phishing campaign in a matter of minutes.
Description of BlueKit’s easy setup procedure
2. More than password theft
When most people think of phishing, they picture a scammer tricking them into handing over a username and password. But BlueKit goes much deeper than a basic smash-and-grab.
Behind the scenes, this tool secretly collects a complete digital profile of your computer , including a device fingerprint, cookie sessions, and even passkeys.
Device fingerprint: BlueKit records your IP address, web browser details, and device characteristics. Together, details such as screen size, operating system, and hidden hardware settings can form a “fingerprint” that helps distinguish one browser or device from another.
Many modern security systems look for familiar devices to double-check that it’s really you trying to log in. So by stealing this background information alongside your password, an attacker can mimic your device to bypass security checks.
Session cookies: When you log into a website like your email or online bank, the site doesn’t make you retype your password every time you open a new page. Instead, it places a tiny file on your device called a session cookie to recognize that you’ve already signed in.
Think of a session cookie like a VIP wristband given to you at a concert entrance. Once the guard checks your ticket—your login—they give you a wristband. While you’re wearing that wristband, you can walk freely in and out of the venue without showing your ticket again.
Instead of just stealing your ticket, BlueKit also steals thewristband itself. Once the attacker takes your session cookie, they can paste it into their own browser and walk straight into your active account. They don’t need to guess your password, and they don’t need to ask for a two-factor code. The website already thinks they are you.
Description of BlueKit’s data-capturing capabilitiesLive demos using real credentials, shared by the BlueKit team
3.A built-in AI assistant
What makes BlueKit especially interesting right now is that it comes with its own built-in, “no-rules” artificial intelligence.
Think of it like a malicious version of ChatGPT, built directly into the scammer’s toolkit. Usually, AI tools have safety filters to prevent people from doing illegal things. BlueKit’s creators, however, have removed those guardrails, advertising that their custom AI will answer “even extreme prompts” and help with “fraud-related questions.”
Instead of writing convincing scam emails from scratch, an attacker can simply ask the AI to write phishing emails and fake text messages.
This is a huge development. BlueKit illustrates how advanced AI features are not just for legitimate businesses. They are being packaged and sold as standard features in cybercriminal services, making it easier for attackers to launch highly convincing attacks.
BlueKit’s advertised AI capabilitiesAI features advertised on BlueKit’s website
The business behind BlueKit
BlueKit’s claimed customer numbers also point to a potentially significant revenue stream. On August 29, the operators announced that the service had passed 1,000 customers.
Based on the advertised subscription prices, we can illustrate the potential revenue generated so far, although the actual distribution of subscriptions is unknown.
BlueKit’s announcement claiming more than 1,000 customers
If all 1,000 customers purchased one 7-day subscription at $250: $250,000 in gross revenue.
If all 1,000 customers purchased one 30-day subscription at $940: $940,000 in gross revenue.
If purchases were split roughly equally between the 7-day ($250), 14-day ($480), and 30-day ($940) plans: Approximately $557,000 in gross revenue.
These are hypothetical calculations, but even so, the figures are a striking example of the economics behind phishing-as-a-service: operators can potentially generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue by selling access to their infrastructure to other criminals.
BlueKit’s advertised subscription prices
What this means for you
Phishing has officially evolved beyond obvious scam pages filled with typos and blurry logos. BlueKit combines convincing login pages, a built-in AI assistant, and subscription access to tools that once required more technical skills.
Services like these make sophisticated phishing easier to launch, allowing scammers to generate a highly convincing, customized phishing attack from scratch in as little as 10 minutes.
Ultimately, services like BlueKit mean that advanced, highly deceptive cyberattacks are no longer limited to elite hackers. They are now fast, cheap, and accessible to anyone with a few dollars to spare.
Polished wording and familiar branding are not proof that a message or login page is genuine.
Open the app or website yourself. If a message asks you to sign in, use the official app or a saved bookmark rather than the link in the email or message.
Check the website address before signing in. Scammers can use lookalike addresses with small spelling changes, known as typosquatting. A password manager can help as it will only autofill logins on the correct site, while Malwarebytes Browser Guard can help block phishing pages.
Use passkeys where available, and keep two-factor authentication enabled. These are still valuable protections, although some phishing techniques can capture sessions after a user completes a login.
If you signed in through a suspicious link, secure your account through the official app or website. Change your password, review your account activity, and sign out of all sessions.
Pro tip: Malwarebytes Scam Guard can also help you assess a suspicious message before you act on it.
“One of the best cybersecurity suites on the planet.”
Google has released updates for the Chrome browser and the ChromeOS operating system.
On October 6, Google released a Stable Channel Update for Desktop. This is the most important one for desktop users. It brings Chrome to version 155.0.8059.39 for Linux and versions 154.0.8037.39/.40 for Windows and Mac. The update includes 247 security fixes including four rated Critical.
On the same day, Google released version 155.0.8059.39 for Android, to a small percentage of users. It may not be available on Google Play for everyone yet but keep an eye out for it. Google says it includes stability and performance improvements.
How to update Chrome
The easiest option is to allow Chrome to update automatically. But you can end up lagging behind on updates if you never close your browser or if something goes wrong, such as an extension preventing the update.
If you don’t want to wait for the rollout to reach you, manually updating is easy. Open About Google Chrome from Chrome’s settings or Help menu. Chrome will check for updates. If one is available, click Relaunch to apply it.
Connect to the internet. Your Chromebook automatically checks for updates and downloads when it connects.
At the bottom right, next to the date, find the “Update device” notification.
To complete the update, restart your Chromebook.
Technical details
In the fixed vulnerabilities, we found three that are likely high-impact flaws.
CVE-2026-106197: This is a use-after-free vulnerability in the Browser module, rated critical. This is a strong priority candidate because of its location in browser functionality rather than a specialist feature. Exploitation would allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code outside the sandbox via a crafted HTML page.
A use-after-free vulnerability occurs when a program attempts to access a memory location after it has been freed. That can cause crashes or, in some cases, allow an attacker to run their own code.
Chrome vulnerabilities that enable remote code execution outside the browser sandbox are particularly valuable to attackers because they can turn a visit to a malicious or compromised website into direct code running on the underlying operating system, often without requiring additional exploitation steps.
CVE-2026-106358: Another use-after-free vulnerability, this time in Navigation, also rated critical. Navigation is central to ordinary browsing, making this a potentially broadly exposed flaw if attacker-controlled pages or redirects can reach the vulnerable path. It also provides a remote attacker with the option to execute arbitrary code outside the sandbox via a crafted HTML page.
CVE-2026-106240: A type confusion vulnerability in V8, Chrome’s JavaScript engine. This one is rated High but does offer a remote attacker after successful exploitation to execute arbitrary code inside the sandbox via a crafted HTML page. And a flaw in the JavaScript engine is always a plausible candidate for attacks delivered through malicious web content.
Stop threats before they can do any harm.
Malwarebytes Browser Guard blocks phishing pages and malicious sites automatically. Free, one click to install. Add it to your browser →
The net is tightening around the Shiny Hunters cybercrime group following the reported arrest of a second member.
On Saturday, Reuters said that 16 year-old Saif al-Din Khader had been arrested in Jordan and was in FBI custody. This follows the arrest earlier in September of another member in the Netherlands. Third party reports named him as 24 year-old Pepijn van der Stap, an offensive security lead at Dutch company Neo Security.
The FBI posted a message following the Dutch arrest warning other ShinyHunter members that it was coming for them next. Cyber Division Assistant Director Brett Leatherman hinted that people already taken into custody had been talking. Then he said:
“You know how to find us, and we know how to find you. I suggest you reach out first while the choice is still yours.”
According to security blogger Brian Krebs, Khader (who goes by the nickname ‘Rey’), was the technical operator and public face of Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters, which he said was an amalgamation of three groups: Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$ and ShinyHunters.
Active since at least 2019, ShinyHunters focused on data theft and extortion. The group commonly uses social engineering to gain access to victims’ accounts on third-party services, but also exploits flaws in software.
Victims of the ShinyHunters group include Kodak, along with American healthcare and pharmaceuticals distributor McKesson. The gang also recently compromised rival cybercrime group Clop and defaced its leak site.
Shortly after the Clop attack, ShinyHunters hacked the FBI. The group said that this wasn’t financially motivated, but instead was a response to a May FBI advisory about its activities. That announcement followed ShinyHunters’ own cyberattack on Instructure, which runs the Canvas online educational system.
The FBI attack targeted the agency’s jobs site, and is said to have exploited a vulnerability in PeopleSoft, HR software owned by Oracle. The data breach, which ShinyHunters claimed amounted to Terabytes, is said to have included a wide array of information on employees, ranging from names, addresses, and phone numbers through to badge numbers, job titles, and information on spouses. Other information included fitness-for-work medical records along with blood and urine test results, and doctors’ notes.
This data is said to include sensitive information on agents investigating targets including Russia, China, and the drug cartels. It would be catastrophic for law enforcement efforts, national intelligence, and individuals if this information fell into the wrong hands.
ShinyHunters has said that it won’t release the data, arguing that the intrusion wasn’t financially motivated. It criticized the FBI for what it said was disinformation in the May advisory. The FBI had said that the group had harassed victims’ family members and threatened to release embarrassing pictures.
The FBI also removed an Accenture contractor this week after they failed to apply a security patch to third-party software that it had been using. Insiders identified this software as PeopleSoft.
Thousands of global fashion retailer ASOS customers have received a push notification through the ASOS app this morning alleging that the company has been hacked.
The notification, addressed to ASOS’s data protection officer and IT, says:
“ASOS HACKED
Dear Asos DPO and IT, we have fully compromised the Snowflake instance. Engage with us, or we will leak it”
What we know so far
Snowflake is a cloud-based data platform that organizations use to store, process, and analyze data. We know that ASOS’s marketing team uses Simon AI from a blog posted by Simon. Simon AI specializes in personalization and runs on Snowflake. ASOS has described using Simon AI alongside Braze to personalize and trigger customer communications like push notifications to clients’ phones.
The apparent delivery of the message through ASOS’s own app makes this more concerning than an unsupported social-media claim. It suggests unauthorized use of the notification infrastructure, but does not confirm that the claimed Snowflake compromise occurred or that customer data was stolen.
According to Simon AI, typical customer profiles cover:
browsing history and products viewed
purchase history and customer value (first-time or high-value buyers)
demographic data
segments such as Premier status or customers who’ve stopped buying
geolocation and local weather
If the affected systems contain these profiles, a breach could expose a detailed picture of customers’ shopping habits and preferences. However, the published description of ASOS’s marketing setup does not establish what, if anything, the attackers accessed.
The Guardian reports that the group claiming the breach calls itself the “Xuanye group.” The Telegram channel operated by the group carried the message “Regarding Asos, payment information is not affected,” and the “app is safe to use” but those claims have not been independently verified.
Sky News reports that ASOS confirmed an “unauthorised customer notification” was sent at around 10 am today.
“We are investigating unauthorised activity involving third-party platforms that we use to communicate with customers,” it said in a statement.
The retailer said it immediately restricted access to the notification platforms and is working with specialists and relevant authorities.
It added:
“Basic personal information including name and contact details may have been accessed. We do not believe that payment-card information or account passwords, were impacted.”
How to stay safe
The website and app remain operational, and there is currently no verified evidence that customer databases, payment card information, passwords, etc. have been stolen.
So, it’s too early to say if and how much ASOS customer data the attackers could get their hands on, but the potential scope is significant. Customer data could be used in targeted phishing attacks to add credibility.
For the time being, postpone your purchases at ASOS until it’s clear what happened and whether ASOS has resolved the issue.
Be wary of unsolicited messaging about the breach or other ASOS related issues.
If you do not wish to see more push notifications from the Xuanye group, remove the ASOS app until their access has been removed.
Facebook users are reporting receiving a message with a fake Facebook Marketplace listing that has their name as the seller.
It works like this. You receive a message (in this case iMessage) asking “Is this still available for purchase?” Attached to the message is a fabricated Facebook Marketplace listing.
Tapping on the picture, you might notice that the seller’s name is the same as your name. This is known as a conversation lure, adding legitimacy to a message and giving you an additional reason to reply.
Interestingly in the example we received, even though the name of the seller matched the person who received the message, the profile picture did not. When I researched the profile picture, it turned out that it belongs to another Facebook user with the exact same name.
This likely means the attacker had a phone number associated with a name that they used to create the fake Marketplace listing. Receiving a message like that is very likely to provoke the natural corrective response: “That isn’t me.” Such a message will probably have a lot of receivers think that they are being impersonated by a scammer on Marketplace.
This method of approach may seem like a lot of work with a low chance of success, and this would have been true a few years ago. But with an AI agent and a list of matching names and phone numbers from a breach, this can be done relatively easy at scale. And that changes the return on time invested dramatically.
The name and phone number combination could come from any number of data breaches. On the dark web, cybercriminals buy and sell personal data for such purposes.
“For less than the cost of a cup of coffee, a cybercriminal can buy enough information to devastate someone’s financial life.”
The personalized screenshot would work very well as a reply trigger. Its psychological function is well thought out and likely very effective: it combines curiosity, reputational concern, and the recipient’s impulse to correct an apparent mistake.
But when you reply to a phishing text you are telling a scammer that this is a live number. Your phone number then increases in value for the scammer and can be resold to other scammers. Or it can be used in other cybercrimes, to download malware, to begin a relationship that leads to fraud, to take over your Facebook account, or many other reasons.
How to stay safe
While the exact motive behind this text is hard to establish without engaging, there are a few things you can do:
Limit what you share publicly on social media. Scammers can use information about you to increase the credibility of their attempts.
Do not respond to unsolicited messages of any kind when they come from people you don’t know.
If you do know the sender, but don’t trust the message, double check with them via a different channel that it was them who sent it.
Don’t click a link, call a number supplied in the conversation, scan a QR code, or share a one-time code or screenshot of a security message.
Open Facebook independently and inspect Marketplace activity, recent logins, messages, email addresses, phone numbers, and recovery settings. Use facebook.com/hacked if you find any signs of compromise.
If you find a profile truly impersonating you, preserve its URL and report the profile. Facebook says impersonating profiles violate its standards and provides an impersonation-reporting process.
If you’re unsure whether a message is a scam, use Malwarebytes Scam Guard. It will assist you in determining if it’s real or fake, and advise you on follow-up steps.
Domino’s Pizza customers tell us they have received emails saying they account has been accessed by a third party.
Domino’s says its internal systems weren’t breached, but that individual accounts were logged into using a password and email combination stolen from another online account owned by the customer. This is known as credential stuffing.
Here’s the email:
“We’re getting in touch to let you know that we believe a very small number of Domino’s customer accounts were accessed by an unauthorised third party, and unfortunately your account is one of those affected.
We want to reassure you that our security systems have not been breached. We also don’t store any payment details, so no financial information has been accessed.
It appears that you have used a password for your Domino’s account which you have used on other sites, which was already out there because of a previous data breach unrelated to Domino’s. An unauthorised third party has used this to obtain access to your account. As a precaution, we’ve reset your account. You can still place orders as normal, but the next time you log in you’ll need to set a new password using the ‘Forgotten password’ link. We recommend choosing a strong, unique password that you haven’t used elsewhere. Please avoid reusing your previous password.
Keeping your information safe is really important to us. We’ve reported this incident to the Information Commissioner’s Office and included some FAQs below if you’d like more detail.
If you have any questions, our Customer Services team will be happy to help on 0800 640 9071.”
Credential stuffing is an attack where criminals take usernames and passwords stolen from one website and try them on many other websites. They don’t guess the passwords. They already have them, often millions at a time, from old data breaches, from malware that steals saved logins from people’s computers, or from phishing sites.
These lists are bought and sold on criminal forums. Attackers then use automated tools that run through the list and try each email and password pair against a login page, such as a food delivery app, a web shop, or a streaming service.
The attack works because so many people reuse the same password on different sites. If you used the same email and password for a small online forum that was breached years ago and for your pizza ordering account, the criminals don’t need to hack the pizza company at all. They just log in as you. To the company, it looks like a normal login with the correct password. That’s why these attacks often show up as “accounts were accessed” and not “the company was hacked.”
Once they’re in, attackers can order food or goods using your saved payment card, use up loyalty points or gift card balances, or collect your name, address, and phone number. They can use those details for more convincing scams later, for example a text or email that seems to come from the company because it knows what you ordered. Accounts that are confirmed to work are also resold to other criminals, so one reused password can cause trouble long after the original breach.
How to stay safe
Use a different password for every account. That way, a breach at one site stays at that site.
Use a password manager to remember those passwords. Nobody can remember dozens of unique passwords, but a password manager can store all these for you.
Where it’s offered, turn on two-factor authentication (a code from an app or text message, or a passkey) so a stolen password alone isn’t enough to login to your account.
If you’ve reused a password on an account that may have been affected, change it there and on every other site where you used it, starting with accounts that have payment details saved.
Don’t follow links in emails or other unsolicited messaging. Log in directly on the official website or in the app.
Please note: Unsolicited “update your account” emails claiming to be from Domino’s are frequently phishing attempts designed to steal personal or financial information. When in doubt, Malwarebytes Scam Guard can help you determine whether a message is a scam or not and suggest follow-up steps.
What do cybercriminals know about you?
Use Malwarebytes’ free Digital Footprint scan to see whether your personal information has been exposed online.
Companies like Google and Microsoft are finding much bigger numbers of vulnerabilities in their own products as a result of AI. But the same technology is leading to public reporting programs becoming overwhelmed by the mass submission of speculative, duplicated, or hallucinated findings.
Now, Google’s announced it has temporarily stopped accepting submissions to its open source bug bounty program, OSS VRP.
“Why is this happening? This pause is due to a significant rise in automated submissions, the vast majority of which are not valid.”
We’ve seen this happen before. In early 2026, curl ended its HackerOne bounty program after low-quality, often AI-generated submissions overwhelmed its small security team.
Intel also launched a new bug bounty program on Intigriti but there are no longer bounties available, reportedly in order to stop a flood of AI generated reports.
Pros and cons
Bounties can be an incentive for mass-submitting behavior when generative AI lowers the cost of producing polished-looking submissions. So, it’s understandable that companies want to limit the number of incoming reports.
If most automated submissions are invalid, a temporary pause prevents Google engineers and open-source maintainers from spending disproportionate time disproving reports rather than fixing real issues.
A pause gives Google the time and chance to introduce better controls, such as mandatory proof-of-concept requirements, evidence thresholds, and rate limits without letting the current queue keep growing.
On the other hand, it may discourage legitimate researchers and make it harder for them to submit actual issues they’ve found.
It is hard to draw a line of what you will accept, because an AI-assisted report can be valid, just like a low-quality report is not necessarily AI-generated.
And as companies like Google and Microsoft have proven, AI assisted vulnerability discovery can also support real vulnerability discovery if it is coupled with validation, deduplication, and proof.
What about the future?
If we have learned anything it is that AI is not “breaking” vulnerability disclosure. It is exposing an older weakness in disclosure economics: the cost of filing a plausible report has fallen sharply, while the cost of proving or disproving it remains human-intensive.
The solution seems obvious. Let AI handle the submissions and only hand over those it can validate to the engineering teams. This will definitely frustrate some bug bounty hunters, because it will be like convincing a chatbot that you have a valid point and want to “talk to a human,” but hopefully it will bring down the number of less serious bug bounty hunters and create more room for those who know what they are doing.
Google has only promised an update in Q1 2027, so any redesign details would be speculative, but we do hope they find a way for responsible bug hunters to submit their findings.
From reporting threats to removing them.
Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.
Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are cameras that photograph passing vehicles, read their number plates, and typically log the time, location, and vehicle details. On their own, the images might be used to find a stolen car or locate a suspect.
But lately there have been a lot of concerns raised about the way they are used. The main worry is caused by what happens when many cameras feed data into a shared, searchable network: it can create a detailed record of where ordinary people travel.
Some agencies have already taken it upon themselves to act on these concerns, as well as those around inaccuracy. Data errors can have serious consequences. At a recent Senate hearing, Florida resident Lindsey Isaacs described being arrested and held for 13 days after data from an AI-enabled plate-reader system incorrectly implicated her in a fatal car crash.
As a result of all this, US lawmakers from both major political parties have introduced proposals aimed at restricting automatic license plate reader networks.
Most of the reasons brought up are about Flock Safety, one of the largest suppliers of these systems in the United States, but they would apply more broadly to other ALPR vendors as well.
Flock says it deploys only 120,000 cameras operating across the country, while a researcher cited by the Senate described a much larger network of connected devices and cameras. The exact size may be disputed, but the central concern is clear: Data from a camera in one location can potentially be searched by an agency elsewhere.
Two different approaches
Reportedly, there are two different proposed laws in the making, while Flock says it supports a legal framework for license-plate readers and argues that the technology can improve public safety when it is used with strong oversight and accountability.
The first proposal, the Stop Flock Abuse Act, doesn’t aim to banish ALPR systems outright, it would create rules for how government agencies and vendors can use them.
Among other measures, the bill would require written approval and a record for every search, regular supervisor audits, encryption, and deletion of most vehicle-location data after ten days. It would also prohibit sharing or selling the data to non-governmental third parties, prevent ALPR networks from incorporating facial-recognition technology, and require data to stay in the US.
A second proposal, the Ban Flock Act, takes a much harder line. It would prohibit US federal agencies from using ALPRs or accessing data they collect. It would also withhold federal grant money from state and local governments that use ALPR systems and allow people to sue the federal government if their rights are violated through ALPR deployment.
Both bills are proposals, not enacted laws. In the US system, each would need to pass both the House of Representatives and the Senate in matching form, then be signed by the President.
Going forward
There is no guarantee either bill will receive a vote, let alone become law. But their introduction shows that ALPR technology is moving from a local procurement issue to a national privacy and civil-liberties debate.
License plate data may seem less sensitive than phone-location data, but a long enough record can reveal a person’s routines, relationships, medical visits, religious activity, or attendance at protests. The debate is therefore not just about cameras on streets to fight crime and find criminals, it is about whether governments and private vendors should be able to build searchable records of everyday movement.
So for consumers, the key question is not only whether a camera is installed on a street or near a business. It is also how long the resulting data is retained, who can search it, whether those searches are logged and reviewed, whether the information can be shared beyond the original agency, and what recourse exists when the system is wrong or abused.
Your name, address, and phone number may already be for sale.
Data brokers collect and sell your personal details to anyone willing to pay. Malwarebytes Personal Data Remover finds them and gets your information removed, then keeps watch so it stays that way.
Free Mobile, one of France’s main cellular providers, was fined €27 million by France’s data protection regulator, the CNIL, in January over failures to protect customer data. The October 2024 breach allowed an unauthorized party to access sensitive customer records, including bank account details and login information. Since the breach, we’ve seen many poorly written scam campaigns targeting Free Mobile customers.
However, over the past few weeks, a well-written scam has appeared, closely copying the design of the official Free Mobile website and email templates.
One of our employees, who is a Free Mobile customer, received this phishing email on Wednesday, September 30. The message used the same logo and template as legitimate emails from the company, but came from the suspicious email address freemobile-regularisation[@]knowledgegrowthcenter[.]help. It included a link that appeared to point to regularisation.free.fr :
The email tells the user that an invoice of €9.99 needs to be paid to avoid having the customer’s service suspended. Clicking the link opens a redirection chain:
Malwarebytes can help protect you from these threats, but treat unexpected messages about your accounts and invoices with caution:
Don’t follow links in unsolicited emails. If a message concerns your account, open the official Free Mobile app or website directly, or call the official help line at 3244.
Check the actual domain in your browser’s address bar to see if it matches what you expect—https://mobile.free.fr in this case.
Free Mobile, one of France’s main cellular providers, was fined €27 million by France’s data protection regulator, the CNIL, in January over failures to protect customer data. The October 2024 breach allowed an unauthorized party to access sensitive customer records, including bank account details and login information. Since the breach, we’ve seen many poorly written scam campaigns targeting Free Mobile customers.
However, over the past few weeks, a well-written scam has appeared, closely copying the design of the official Free Mobile website and email templates.
One of our employees, who is a Free Mobile customer, received this phishing email on Wednesday, September 30. The message used the same logo and template as legitimate emails from the company, but came from the suspicious email address freemobile-regularisation[@]knowledgegrowthcenter[.]help. It included a link that appeared to point to regularisation.free.fr :
The email tells the user that an invoice of €9.99 needs to be paid to avoid having the customer’s service suspended. Clicking the link opens a redirection chain:
Malwarebytes can help protect you from these threats, but treat unexpected messages about your accounts and invoices with caution:
Don’t follow links in unsolicited emails. If a message concerns your account, open the official Free Mobile app or website directly, or call the official help line at 3244.
Check the actual domain in your browser’s address bar to see if it matches what you expect—https://mobile.free.fr in this case.
We found 70 websites that impersonate legitimate crypto projects that invite visitors to vote on the date of an upcoming rewards distribution.
The pages copy the look of the real sites closely, and on most of them the offer is small and believable: Cast a vote, and as an active voter you get a 1.25x boost when the rewards are paid out.
However, the vote is fake and clicking the Vote now button opens a wallet connection prompt. It’s the first step toward requests that could trick visitors into authorizing access to their tokens.
The brands being copied include xStocks from Kraken, Pendle, Zama, Kinetiq, Yield Basis, Firelight, and smaller platforms including Umia, Keeta, and NetNet. None of these pages are affiliated with the projects they imitate.
Copies of familiar brands
Each site is a close copy of the project it targets, down to the logo, menus, and colors. The Firelight copy even carries a real announcement about the protocol’s deposit cap, suggesting the pages were copied from the live sites rather than rebuilt from scratch.
Most use the same wording about voting on the rewards date to earn a boost, though a few vary the pitch. The Pendle copy adds fake dates and a countdown to create urgency, the Keeta copy promises points instead of a boost, and the NetNet copy skips the vote and warns that unclaimed tokens will be burned after 48 hours.
Why these brands
The choice of targets does not appear to be random. Several of the impersonated projects have held a token launch, airdrop, or public token sale within the past year. Others run points or rewards programs. Their communities are used to hearing about rewards, claims, and allocations, and are primed to act on them.
Zama ran a public token auction in January, and its token began trading in February. Kinetiq launched its governance token alongside an airdrop to early users in November 2025. Umia’s token auction ran from August 29 to September 2, only weeks ago. Firelight awards points to early depositors, and Pendle launched on Robinhood Chain on September 4.
A message about rewards from one of these projects would not sound strange to someone who follows it. The lure appears designed to appeal to people who already hold the token or have used the protocol, because they’re the ones who might expect a distribution and want a bigger share.
What happens when you click vote
The Vote button does not lead to a ballot. It opens a Connect Wallet window that is the same regardless of which brand the page imitates. It lists WalletConnect, MetaMask, Trust Wallet, OKX Wallet, Binance Wallet, Bitget Wallet, and Rabby, along with an option to browse more than 28 others.
This window resembles the connection prompts people see on legitimate crypto sites, which may make the request seem routine.
Connecting a wallet on its own shares the wallet’s address, allowing the site to look up its holdings. At this point, it does not give the site permission to spend your tokens.
The damage typically comes from what the site asks for next. In wallet-draining scams, a page may follow the connection with a request to sign a message or approve a transaction, presented as confirming the action the visitor came to take. A malicious approval or signature can give the attacker permission to move tokens out of the wallet without further confirmation.
Blockchain transactions generally cannot be reversed, so stolen funds are very difficult to recover.
Signs of a single operation
Several details suggest a shared operation or phishing kit. All of the domains listed at the end of this article follow the same pattern: sitemu followed by a string of apparently random characters, on the .xyz top-level domain.
The same templates are reused across several different brands, with the text appearing almost word for word whether the page is dressed up as Zama, Firelight, or Yield Basis—right down to writing the boost as 1,25x, with a comma in place of the decimal point. The wallet connection window behind the Vote button is identical across the brands as well.
Random domain names spare the operator the work of coming up with a convincing lookalike address for each brand, and losing any single site costs them little. They also make the address bar one of the clearest giveaways on these pages.
How to protect your wallet
Check any claimed vote or rewards distribution through the project’s official channels before connecting your wallet. A familiar logo is easy to copy.
Check the address, not the design. These pages closely copy the real thing, so branding alone cannot establish that they are genuine. If the domain is not the one the project officially uses, close the tab.
Go to the project directly. If a vote or a reward is genuine, it will be on the project’s official site or announced on its established social accounts. Use a bookmark or type the address yourself rather than following a link from a message, ad, or reply.
Read what your wallet asks you to sign. Voting should not require you to approve spending of your tokens. If a signature or transaction request mentions approvals, permits, or transfers, reject it. Wallets that preview the outcome of a transaction can help, but do not approve a request you cannot understand.
Be wary of boosts, bonuses, and deadlines. Promises of extra rewards and warnings that unclaimed tokens will be burned can pressure you to act before checking.
Keep most of your funds in a separate wallet. Use a wallet with a small balance for unfamiliar sites, and keep long-term holdings in a wallet that you don’t use for those connections.
If you already connected, disconnect from the site. If you also signed a message or approved a transaction, use your wallet’s approval-management feature or a trusted token approval checker to review and revoke suspicious permissions. Disconnecting alone does not revoke token approvals. If you suspect your recovery phrase or private key was exposed, move remaining funds to a new wallet created with a new recovery phrase.
How Malwarebytes helps
Malwarebytes Browser Guard can block known phishing and scam sites before you interact with them. That is useful in campaigns like this one, where the fake page closely resembles the real thing.
If you receive a link to a rewards vote, claim page, or airdrop and are unsure about it, Malwarebytes Scam Guard can help assess the link before you connect your wallet. Check the offer through the project’s official channels too.
Using an AI chatbot, assistant, or browser to speed up your work is tempting, but doing it without your employer’s knowledge can put sensitive data at risk.
You’re swamped, so you paste a long email thread into a free chatbot and ask for a summary. It works, it saves an hour, and nobody notices. But the thread may contain customer details or confidential plans you’ve just shared with an outside service.
If your employer hasn’t approved that tool or how you’re using it, that’s shadow AI.
“the use of AI technology which isn’t captured in an organisation’s approved systems and processes.”
A Microsoft study published in 2025 found that 71% of UK employees surveyed said they had used AI tools at work their employer hadn’t approved. Most people aren’t doing this to cause trouble. They want to get their work done faster, and the tools are right there.
Shadow AI isn’t limited to chatbots. It can also be:
A browser extension that “improves your writing.”
A meeting-notes bot that joins your calls.
An AI feature quietly switched on inside an app you already use.
A small automation you built yourself that sends data to an AI service.
AI features are appearing in search engines, email apps, and phones. Instead of a helpful list of links, Google now tries to answer your question. Microsoft’s Copilot drafts replies to your boss before you’ve had coffee. Your phone summarizes conversations you don’t even remember having. That makes it easy to start using one without checking whether it’s approved for work.
Why it worries IT and security teams
When you enter data into a public AI tool, it leaves your company’s control. The service may keep that data or use it to improve its models, unless specific privacy controls are in place. That can lead to data breaches, lost intellectual property, and regulatory problems.
There is also a security angle. AI assistants and agents—tools that can take actions on your behalf—are complex software and can have serious vulnerabilities. If an attacker exploits one, they may gain access to the data and services the tool has.
IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach research found that one in five organizations reported a breach linked to shadow AI. Only 37% had policies to manage AI or detect shadow AI. Organizations with a lot of shadow AI paid roughly $670,000 more per breach.
In a survey of our newsletter readers, 90% of respondents said they were worried about AI using their data without consent. Company data deserves the same care as your own.
How to use AI more safely at work
You don’t need to avoid AI altogether. Think carefully about which apps and services you use before you share data. Start by talking to your employer, then follow these steps:
Ask for an approved tool. Security leaders say the best way to reduce shadow AI is to offer something better and safer, such as an enterprise AI platform with guardrails.
Use your work account, not a personal one. Work accounts are the ones your IT team can protect and govern.
Find out what’s off-limits. Customer details, financial data, HR records, source code, and confidential meeting content may be restricted. Ask which kinds of data you may and may not use with AI.
Check the privacy settings. Look at whether the tool stores your inputs or uses them to train its models.
Register your use case. Many organizations keep a list of approved AI tools and uses. A quick approval process makes it easier to stay on the right side of the rules.
Be careful with agents and plug-ins. Tools that connect to your email, files, or calendar should be reviewed by your IT or security team first.
Speak up. If the approved tools aren’t meeting your needs, say so. The NCSC recommends open conversations about security to help reduce reliance on unapproved tools.
If you manage a team, remember that banning AI outright tends to push the use further out of sight. Find out why people are turning to unapproved tools. Providing useful, approved options and clear rules can help staff work faster while protecting company data.
Browse like no one’s watching.
Malwarebytes Privacy VPN encrypts your connection and never logs what you do, so the next story you read doesn’t have to feel personal. Try it free →
Every few months, Malwarebytes gets a chance to test its mettle against real-world threats in an independent laboratory setting. And the latest round of results gives us plenty to celebrate.
Malwarebytes earned a perfect 18 out of 18 and received another Top Product award from AV-TEST. We also achieved Level 1 Certification from MRG Effitas, and we stopped 100% of threats before they could run in the two latest tests from AVLab Cybersecurity Foundation.
AV-TEST Windows Consumer Security Product Test
With 18 out of 18 points in AV-TEST’s latest Windows Consumer Security Product Test, Malwarebytes nabbed the organization’s Top Product award for the July/August test cycle.
AV-TEST evaluates security products across three key areas: protection against malware, impact on device performance, and the frequency of false positives. Products need at least 17.5 out of 18 points to earn AV-TEST’s Top Product award, and Malwarebytes received full marks across the board.
Since we first began participating in the test in 2018, we’ve secured the Top Product award more than a dozen times.
The malware test used 300 live, in-the-wild samples, including Trojans, spyware, ransomware, backdoors, malicious scripts, and financial malware. Malwarebytes blocked every one of them, stopping 99% before they had the chance to run, and the remaining 1% after they began behaving maliciously.
Our product also generated zero false positives across 100 legitimate apps and blocked all five live phishing sites included in the test.
Malwarebytes was one of just two products to earn Level 1 Certification, the highest level awarded in the assessment.
AVLab Cybersecurity Foundation Advanced In-the-Wild Malware Test
Meanwhile, the results from AVLab Cybersecurity Foundation’sAdvanced In-the-Wild Malware Test brought more good news: Malwarebytes keeps getting better at stopping threats before they can run.
As part of the test, AVLab Cybersecurity Foundation uses threats circulating online and delivers them in ways designed to replicate how people encounter attacks in the real world.
During both the May and July 2026 tests, Malwarebytes stopped 100% of threats before they could run.
These latest results join a growing list of honors, including a Best of CNET award and ZDNET’s Editor’s Choice award.
Independent testing helps keep us sharp. We’re proud to see our work recognized, and even prouder to keep delivering the top-notch protection our customers have come to rely on.
“One of the best cybersecurity suites on the planet.”
The US government is alerting millions of people that their personal information was stolen during a breach of the Pentagon’s personnel records at the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC).
The DMDC is a central US Department of Defense (DoD) organization that manages personnel records, ID credentials, and benefit entitlements for military and civilian staff, veterans, and their families. It maintains over 60 million records for US military and civilian staff and their family members to help determine benefits and entitlements, such as healthcare and retirement.
Reportedly, cybercriminals had access from October 2025 to July 2026. CNN reports that the Pentagon confirmed the breach affects 2.76 million living individuals, potentially including current and former defense personnel or their dependents, and 294,000 deceased individuals.
“A small number of unauthorized users accessed files on a server containing unencrypted PII.”
PII means personally identifiable information. The attackers gained access by exploiting a security vulnerability in an unspecified file-sharing system. The Pentagon says it has “no indication” of misuse. It hasn’t explained how it reached that conclusion or what it considers misuse, and it doesn’t rule out future misuse of the exposed information.
The exposed data is said to include Social Security numbers, names, dates of birth, sex, race, and service details. Some records also include contact information and occupational specialty.
Besides the risk that this data could help foreign intelligence services track US personnel, affected people face a lasting risk of identity theft. Birth dates cannot be changed, and Social Security numbers can only be changed in limited circumstances.
Breaches happen every day. Don’t be the last to know.
The Pentagon is offering 12 months of credit monitoring through IDX. If you receive a notification letter, take up the offer and consider a credit freeze with all three major credit bureaus: Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion. A freeze is free and restricts access to your credit report, helping prevent someone from opening new credit accounts in your name.
Other recommendations are:
Get an IRS Identity Protection PIN to prevent someone else from filing a federal tax return using your Social Security number.
Be suspicious of unexpected calls, emails, and texts, especially ones that mention your unit, rank, or job. Attackers can use the stolen details to make phishing attempts more convincing.
Verify requests through official channels you look up yourself, rather than through contact details in the message.
Follow instructions in the breach letter and further official communications and report any suspicious approach to your security officer.
Let’s face it, an incognito window can only do so much.
Breaches, dark web trading, credit fraud. Malwarebytes Identity Theft Protection monitors for all of it, alerts you fast, and comes with identity theft insurance.
Two separate investigations have raised concerns about betting site DraftKings’ marketing to target problem gamblers, including its use of AI. On September 19, the New York Times reported that the company’s machine learning model targeted people who were more likely to respond to betting promotions by gambling and losing more money.
The model crunched data on each customer, including how often they bet, how much they lost, and what their daily account balances were. According to the report, it used this information to send targeted advertising to lure those people back to the site with promotions. DraftKings uses promotions to entice users into betting more. These offers include profit boosts on winnings.
At news nonprofit ProPublica, journalist Jake Pearson made himself an experimental subject. He spent thousands of dollars betting on the DraftKings app in an experiment to see how the company’s marketing would play out. He reported receiving more promotions as his losses mounted.
After he lost nearly $1,800 betting on basketball in a single evening, DraftKings invited him to a VIP tryout. Full membership followed later.
DraftKings would occasionally send automated messages reminding him to bet responsibly, he said. But he found they were no match for the product design pushing him to do more gambling.
DraftKings denied unfair targeting of gambling customers, arguing instead that its promotions reward engagement rather than losses.
The company’s machine learning model, which former insiders say was developed starting in 2023, replaced a cruder system that crunched basic numbers to report on a user’s behavior.
The newer system dug through data on its own, assessing how much individuals would be likely to lose after receiving promotions. It created an “elasticity” score and used it to identify customers likely to lose more in response to offers, the Times said. This would help the company maximize its return on its promotional spending, said former employee Jayden Butts, who helped develop the system. Butts spoke to the Times as part of an investigation that included interviews with over 40 former employees, along with reviews of Slack communications, internal memos, and betting records.
Other employees attempted to get approval for another model at DraftKings. It would analyze gambling activity in a similar way, but with the opposite goal: to flag users whose gambling was getting out of hand and who were at risk of falling into crisis. According to the data scientists interviewed by the Times, the system showed promise at identifying customers who might need help with compulsive gambling, but DraftKings shut the project down after canceling a demo. Later attempts to develop similar systems within the company also failed.
Behavioral ads and gambling harm
Digital rights advocates warn that AI enables companies to process more data faster for digital advertising. The Electronic Frontier Foundation says this:
“supercharges the harms of online behavioral advertising.”
It’s particularly damaging when advertising encourages addictive behaviors such as gambling.
And online betting looks set to expand. Companies including DraftKings are now running online casino games in select jurisdictions, while prediction markets that allow people to trade forecasts on specific events are also flourishing.
The statistics on gambling are alarming. The World Health Organization estimates that 1.2% of the world’s adult population has a gambling disorder, and that people betting at harmful levels generate around 60% of gambling losses. People struggling with gambling might find it difficult enough to stay away from gambling venues, but mobile gambling apps with hard-to-ignore push notifications and emails can increase the temptation.
What users can do
If you gamble, monitor your gambling activity and set limits, avoid chasing losses, give yourself timeouts from gambling, and talk to someone if you’re struggling with compulsive gambling.
“Arizona’s court system was targeted by a cyber attack from criminal hackers or their bots.”
This is how the Arizona Supreme Court announced that hackers had attacked the state’s court system and stolen the personal information of “many Arizonans.”
The court says the attack began with a phishing email containing a malicious link that a court employee clicked. The attackers copied sensitive backup files containing records related to protective orders and foster care cases.
The court says it has no evidence, so far, that information about jurors, witnesses, or court employees was included in the copied files. It has not identified the attackers or a motive. It says the case is under investigation with the FBI, and no ransomware group has publicly claimed responsibility.
In an update, the court revealed that the attackers copied more than 150,000 recommendation reports created by Arizona’s Foster Care Review Board. The reports cover current and past cases involving children’s care and protection, dating back to 2010.
Those documents can include information about children, names of involved parties, case materials considered by the board, findings, and recommendations for courts, parents, and the Arizona Department of Child Safety. The court says the reports do not contain contact information such as addresses or telephone numbers.
The copied files were backups stored in a highly compressed format, kept for recovery after ransomware and other destructive incidents.
Information associated with protective orders can raise particularly serious safety and privacy concerns. These orders can protect people from abuse, harassment, or threats. Even where some records are public, combining names, case details, locations, and other sensitive context could create risks for people who are trying to limit their exposure to an abusive or threatening individual.
Breaches happen every day. Don’t be the last to know.
The court currently says it has no evidence that the information has been shared. As with many breach investigations, however, this can change as investigators determine exactly what was taken and monitor for publication, sale, or misuse of the data.
Arizona has about 8,000 children currently in foster care, according to the court. It is contacting people believed to have been affected.
What to do if you’re affected
Check the court’s advice. Every breach is different, so check its dedicated webpage for updates and follow any specific advice it offers.
Watch out for impersonators. Cybercriminals may contact you posing as the Arizona Supreme Court, another government agency, or someone you know. Verify anyone who contacts you through a separate, trusted channel.
Take your time. Phishing attacks often impersonate people or brands you know and pressure you to act urgently, using themes such as missed deliveries, account suspensions, and security alerts.
Get an early warning if your information appears on the dark web. If you’ve been notified that your information was copied in the Arizona court breach, identity monitoring can help you watch for signs of exposure and get support if you become a victim of identity theft.
Let’s face it, an incognito window can only do so much.
Breaches, dark web trading, credit fraud. Malwarebytes Identity Theft Protection monitors for all of it, alerts you fast, and comes with identity theft insurance.
A study testing 21 cars from 19 brands and 30 companion apps found connections to advertising and tracking companies, and evidence that some apps shared sensitive personal data.
Modern cars can unlock remotely, route around traffic, stream entertainment, summon roadside help, and cool or heat the cabin before you get in. But those conveniences come with a privacy cost that drivers may struggle to see and are unable to refuse.
We’ve covered cars and privacy a few times before, especially after Mozilla researchers described cars as a “privacy nightmare.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton investigated car manufacturers seeking details of their data collection and sharing practices, and sued General Motors over allegations that it sold customer driving data to third parties.
Researchers from Northeastern University, working with Consumer Reports, tested vehicles from model years 2022 through 2025 and companion apps, observing network traffic while cars were stationary, driven, and used through their apps. The results reinforce an uncomfortable reality: connected vehicles are data-collection platforms on wheels.
The results in a nutshell:
Both vehicles and companion apps contacted third-party domains, including those associated with advertising and tracking.
19 of 21 vehicles contacted at least one third party over Wi-Fi.
7 of 30 apps transmitted sensitive identifiers to third parties associated with advertising and tracking.
The troubling part is not that a car talks to its manufacturer. After all, a connected vehicle needs some network access for safety alerts, navigation, account functions, and maintenance. The bigger issue is the potential combination of identifiers. A vehicle identification number (VIN) can link a particular vehicle to its owner, while precise location can reveal highly sensitive patterns: where someone sleeps, works, worships, seeks medical care, spends time with friends, or travels. Add an email address or a name, and that information can be easier to connect to the detailed consumer profiles held by advertisers and data brokers.
Consent is a weak safeguard when drivers have to accept extensive terms to use functions advertised as part of the vehicle. Several manufacturers said their connected services were opt-in, but declining can mean losing useful functionality. For example, Consumer Reports noted a Tesla warning that refusing its agreement may result in:
“reduced functionality, serious damage, or inoperability.”
That hardly sounds like freely given, informed consent.
There was one sign that scrutiny can matter: after researchers presented their findings, Honda told Consumer Reports it had directed vendor Amplitude to delete location data it received and stopped sending it going forward. But consumers should not need an academic study to discover who their car or its app is sharing data with.
Especially when Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft—companies that already know plenty about us—were among the leading recipients of the driver data.
Until automakers collect less data and provide clear privacy settings, meaningful opt-outs, and deletion controls, drivers should treat a connected car, and especially its companion app, as another privacy-sensitive device. Review app permissions, turn off optional data-sharing settings, avoid linking unnecessary accounts, and ask manufacturers what data they retain, share, and delete.
Browse like no one’s watching.
Malwarebytes Privacy VPN encrypts your connection and never logs what you do, so the next story you read doesn’t have to feel personal. Try it free →
A Facebook Marketplace buyer arrived at a seller’s apartment to collect a keyboard. The seller wasn’t home and didn’t know anyone was coming. Meta’s AI assistant Muse had handled the conversation, shared his address, and arranged the visit without telling him.
We often write about AI misalignment and how to use AI agents and browsers safely. That can sound theoretical, but this is an example of the real-world risk when an agent is allowed to act on someone’s behalf.
Muse is Meta’s semi-autonomous AI assistant, released in the US in September. Meta promotes it as a personal assistant that can help users automate tasks, including responding to Facebook Marketplace messages. Unlike a conventional chatbot, which waits for a prompt and produces an answer, an AI agent may be authorized to take actions within connected apps.
We’ve written about a separate weakness in Muse that researchers considered dangerous. Reportedly, Muse was downloaded 3 million times in its first week.
According to Business Insider, a Facebook Marketplace seller turned on Muse to help handle a keyboard listing. He entered his address as the pickup location and approved automatic replies. Muse then shared that address with a prospective buyer, negotiated over the item, and arranged a visit, the seller said. He says Muse did not ask permission to share his address or arrange the visit, and did not tell him it was happening. The buyer arrived at the seller’s apartment expecting to complete the purchase, but the seller wasn’t home. The sale didn’t happen.
The reported incident is more than a privacy failure. It illustrates a broader AI-agent risk: An agent may treat permission to reply automatically as permission to share sensitive information or commit you to an in-person meeting. Meta says it is looking into the report.
How to use AI agents safely
Before enabling an AI agent, treat its setup screen as a security review. Do not assume that an integration with a trusted platform means the agent will understand your intentions or apply sensible limits automatically.
Pay particular attention to:
Connected accounts: Review every service the agent can access, such as email, messages, calendars, cloud storage, shopping accounts, or social media profiles.
Data access: Consider whether it can read addresses, contacts, photos, private messages, payment details, documents, or location data.
Action permissions: Check whether the agent can send messages, post content, negotiate, make bookings, place orders, alter listings, or share information externally.
Automatic actions: Apply settings that require approval before the agent sends, publishes, buys, deletes, or shares anything sensitive. Check how it will notify you about the plans it makes on your behalf.
Audience controls: Confirm exactly who can receive information generated by the agent. “Anyone who messages me” is very different from “people I approve.”
Give an AI agent the least access necessary for the task. If you only want help writing replies, do not enable automatic sending. If you want an AI agent to manage a listing, use a public meeting location or a separate pickup address rather than your home address.
Browse like no one’s watching.
Malwarebytes Privacy VPN encrypts your connection and never logs what you do, so the next story you read doesn’t have to feel personal. Try it free →
Apple has released updates for iPhones, iPads, and Macs to fix a flaw that could let an attacker run code when a device processes a malicious file. Apple says it may have been used in highly targeted attacks against iPhone users running versions of iOS before iOS 27.
The fix is in iOS and iPadOS 26.7.1, as well as macOS Sequoia 15.8.1 and macOS Tahoe 26.7.1. Check Software Update on each of your Apple devices and install the latest version offered.
Updates for your particular device
The table below shows which relevant updates are available and links to Apple’s security information for each one.
iPhone 11 and later, iPad Pro 12.9-inch 3rd generation and later, iPad Pro 11-inch 1st generation and later, iPad Air 3rd generation and later, iPad 8th generation and later, and iPad mini 5th generation and later
To check if you’re using the latest software version, go to Settings > General > Software Update. You’ll see if an update is available and be guided through installing it.
Turn on Automatic Updates if you haven’t already—you’ll find it on the same screen.
Available update options on iPad
How to update macOS on any version
To update macOS on any supported Mac, use Software Update:
Click the Apple menu in the upper-left corner of your screen.
Choose System Settings (or System Preferences on older versions).
Select General in the sidebar, then click Software Update on the right. On older macOS, look for Software Update directly.
Your Mac will check for updates automatically. If updates are available, click Update Now (or Upgrade Now for major new versions) and follow the on-screen instructions. Before you upgrade to macOS Tahoe 26, read Apple’s instructions.
Enter your administrator password if prompted, then let your Mac finish the update. It may need to restart.
Make sure your Mac stays plugged in and connected to the internet until the update is done.
Technical details
The bug, CVE-2026-86950, affects CoreGraphics, an Apple framework used throughout its operating systems and apps to display and process visual content such as images and PDFs.
It’s an out-of-bounds write issue, which Apple addressed with improved bounds checking. This type of bug happens when software writes data beyond the limits of its allocated area of memory. It can overwrite other data in memory, interfere with the normal operation of the program, cause a crash, or even let an attacker take control of the affected process. In this case, processing a maliciously crafted file may lead to an attacker running their own code.
Apple says it is aware of a report that the issue may have been exploited in an “extremely sophisticated attack” against specific people using versions of iOS before iOS 27. Although the reported attack was highly targeted, other attackers could try to exploit the flaw now that it has been disclosed.
Scammers know more about you than you think.
Malwarebytes Mobile Security protects you from phishing, scam texts, malicious sites, and more. With real-time AI-powered Scam Guard built right in.
Apple announced its first foldable iPhone on September 9, and scammers were ready to ‘deliver’ one before anyone could buy it.
Most of what we found around the launch of the iPhone Duo and iPhone 18 Pro was familiar fraud.
But one fake preorder page was different.
The fake Apple-style page offers a $500 voucher and a ticking preorder deadline.
Behind its Apple-style design and $500 voucher, the page uses the leaked DarkSword exploit chain to try to break into vulnerable iPhones. If it succeeds, a separate payload attempts to steal saved credentials, cryptocurrency wallet data, and notes.
You don’t have to fill in the form, tap a download, or approve anything. Opening the page is enough to start the attempt.
The form asks for contact details and offers Duo models and colors that do not match Apple’s.
But Apple doesn’t open iPhone Duo preorders until October 16. You cannot place an Apple preorder now. It offers 6.3-inch and 6.9-inch models in colors Apple doesn’t sell for the Duo. Its countdown starts over whenever the page loads, and its privacy, terms, and sales policy links go nowhere.
In the version we captured, submitting the form doesn’t place an order. Its submission handler doesn’t read or send the details entered, and the page generates its own “Pre-Order Successful” message. The exploit attempt has already begun in the background.
How the attack starts when the page opens
Visitors using browsers the script doesn’t recognize as Safari see a “Browser Restricted” notice. On iPhones, the page also tries to reopen the link in Safari, the browser the exploit chain targets. That steers visitors toward the intended browser, although background resources may still load in others.
Visitors shown this notice are urged to open the page in Safari.
An invisible frame checks the visitor’s iOS version and selects the next code to load. DarkSword then attempts to get past the iPhone’s protections and, if successful, gain deep access to the phone. It doesn’t wait for a button press or form submission.
What attackers could take from an iPhone
If the exploit succeeds, the payload attempts to contact its server. Its first message includes a device identifier, device information, and status. It also attempts to send a list of installed apps and the contents of Apple Notes.
The code looks for cryptocurrency wallets, including MetaMask, Phantom, Trust Wallet, Coinbase Wallet, Exodus, and Tonkeeper. It also attempts to recover saved credentials from the phone’s keychain. If it finds a targeted wallet and the first exchanges with its server succeed, it attempts to upload wallet files, recovered keychain data, and photo thumbnails. Exposure of wallet files or credentials could put funds at risk.
The captured code checks for installed cryptocurrency wallet apps. This is part of the list.
The payload also tries to access files containing messages, call history, contacts, voicemail, email, calendar entries, and cached location data.
The payload can then repeatedly contact its server for instructions. Its commands can list directories, retrieve files and full-size photos, gather app information, and run JavaScript supplied by the server. The payload also tries to cover its tracks by deleting diagnostic reports that could help investigators spot the attack.
The beacon sends a device identifier, device information and status to the configured server. The command loop uses the response to obtain instructions.
The code is designed to run inside a system process, but may stop before the phone restarts. We found no mechanism that automatically brings it back after a reboot.
We analyzed the captured code, but did not test it on an iPhone or observe data leaving one.
Which iPhones could be at risk?
Several parts of the captured code match the DarkSword chain described by Google in March. Apple has patched the vulnerabilities Google reported.
When DarkSword was disclosed in March, iVerify estimated that up to 270 million devices were running the iOS 18.4 through 18.6.2 versions targeted by the variant it analyzed. That is not a current count or a measure of how many phones this page could compromise. We haven’t confirmed this page’s exact range; its files also contain code for older iOS versions.
The lure fits the exploit: someone considering a new iPhone may still be using an older, unpatched one. That could make them vulnerable simply by opening the preorder page.
Keep your iPhone updated. Go to Settings > General > Software Update and install the latest version available. Turn on Automatic Updates there too. Apple says updated devices are protected against the reported DarkSword attacks.
Check offers without opening unfamiliar links. Go directly to Apple or a retailer you know by typing its address yourself. A preorder link in an ad, message, or social post could start an exploit attempt as soon as the page opens.
Opened this page? Restart your iPhone after updating it. We found no code that automatically brings the payload back after a reboot. Restarting cannot undo any data already taken.
Keep a cryptocurrency wallet on that phone? Take precautions from a trusted device. If the phone may have been compromised and you keep a wallet on it, create a new wallet with a new recovery phrase and move the funds. For an exchange account, secure the account and contact the exchange.
Change potentially exposed passwords from a trusted device. Start with email, your Apple Account, banking, and crypto accounts, and turn on two-factor authentication.
Report the page. Save its URL and any screenshots without reopening it, and report it to your national cybercrime reporting service.
Check a suspicious offer before you act.Scam Guard can give a verdict on a screenshot or link. On desktop, Browser Guard blocks the fake preorder page we analyzed; web protection in Malwarebytes Premium blocks it too.
Indicators of compromise
pnmrud[.]cc — command-and-control and collection server
cloud[.]cmatgldn[.]click — ad click and conversion tracker
“One of the best cybersecurity suites on the planet.”
A reminder for anyone who thinks their AI chats are private: A human may see what they upload. A report from 404 Media this week describes contractors reviewing Copilot users’ photos, editing requests, and the images Copilot produces. Some of what they see is disturbing.
The third-party companies hired to conduct these reviews present their workers with an original photo and a user’s request for an edit. They are also shown two potential AI edits and asked to judge each on technical merit. Because this is the internet, this goes well beyond requests to put your cat in a Halloween costume. Many of the requests are sexual in nature and some involve children, the report said. The faces in the original photos are not censored, meaning reviewers can see who the subjects are.
Editing requests and results that reviewers are asked to evaluate include requests to shorten skirts, enlarge body parts, and place people in sexual positions. In many cases, the edits appear nonconsensual. For example, one contractor mentioned being shown multiple sets of upskirt photos. Another said they were asked to rate foot-fetish images of children’s cartoon characters. Users had asked Copilot to create pictures of Ariana Grande suffering from anorexia. Images depicting animal sacrifice crossed one reviewer’s desk.
Interviewees told 404 Media that contractors are paid to rate the output quality of an image, but not to flag inappropriate content. They check things like whether instructions were followed properly, whether parts of the image were preserved or distorted, and the overall look of the image. They don’t make legal or safety judgments about the content.
Microsoft uses customer data from some accounts to help improve its products. But when 404 Media asked, it didn’t say whether users can exclude uploads from these rating tasks.
In its Privacy FAQ for the older consumer version of Copilot, Microsoft says it keeps conversations for 18 months by default, although users can delete them at any time. It also says it may use data “including the images or files you upload” for AI training. Eligible users can opt out of training, but the FAQ says an opt-out from certain human reviews is not available. It does not say whether that includes the image-rating tasks described by 404 Media.
Microsoft says the updated consumer Copilot app, available since August 18, does not use prompts, responses, or uploaded file contents to train foundation models. That still leaves the question 404 Media put to Microsoft: Can users keep their uploads out of human image reviews?
Copilot’s previous image issues
Microsoft insiders have warned about Copilot’s propensity to produce questionable images in the past.
In early 2024, machine learning engineer Shane Jones went public with concerns over the ability to bypass guardrails in the software’s text-to-image tool DALL-E 3. He had previously asked the company to remove Copilot Designer, which used the tool, from public use for three months but said Microsoft had refused. Its feedback team received over 1,000 product feedback messages daily and was only dealing with the most serious of them, he told CNBC at the time.
Microsoft isn’t the only company that hires contractors to review AI chats. OpenAI does the same as part of its Project Lily initiative. If you want more information about how AI assistants use your conversation data to improve themselves and what you can do to stop them, read Malwarebytes’ guide to AI training on user content.
From reporting threats to removing them.
Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.
OpenAI’s latest containment failure adds to a pattern that may force the company to make an unpopular decision.
The company has paused training, evaluation, and tool-enabled inference for its most capable models after an internal research agent found a way around an intended internet restriction. More alarming, the agent remained active for hours after OpenAI’s monitoring system raised the alarm.
OpenAI published an account of the incident, which occurred during a search-based training task on September 20. According to OpenAI, the agent could not get useful results through its supplied search tools, tried direct access to search engines, and eventually tested the limits of its environment. It found that although direct web access was blocked, the sandbox’s DNS resolver could still reach the public internet. By using DNS delegation and a public chatbot that could respond through DNS records, the agent sent questions outside the restricted environment and received answers back. It subsequently sent 18 additional queries along the same route.
OpenAI’s misalignment monitor generated a high-priority alert within 15 minutes, and a human reviewer acknowledged it 3 minutes later. But the run did not stop automatically as expected. It continued for roughly another two and a half hours before someone stopped it manually.
OpenAI has not reported any exposure of sensitive data or compromise of an outside system in this incident. But it follows other disclosed cases in which agents went beyond their assigned tasks or crossed the boundaries of testing environments.
The New York Times reports that OpenAI agents also interacted with US government websites this summer without the company’s knowledge:
“OpenAI’s artificial intelligence went rogue and meddled with the websites for the Education Department, the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission this summer without the A.I. lab’s knowledge, according to security researchers and a person familiar with the episodes.”
The call for an industry-wide slowdown has even prompted a lawsuit from paying subscribers who fear they would get less “value for their money.” Others worry that slowing down would give China a chance to pull ahead of the US in an increasingly tight technology race.
Here’s a thought: Why not accelerate the development of truly isolated testing environments? Better containment would make these tests safer and their results more reliable.
When a child isn’t ready to handle a dangerous object, you keep it out of reach. Why give an AI agent access it isn’t ready to use safely?
How to use AI agents safely
Treat an agent like an enthusiastic but fallible junior employee with access to your computer. Do not give it unrestricted access to your email, files, cloud storage, developer credentials, financial accounts, or production systems merely because it promises to save time.
Use separate accounts with minimal permissions. Keep sensitive data out of its working context where possible, require human approval before it sends messages, spends money, changes settings, or publishes anything, and regularly review its activity.
An AI agent does not need malicious intent to cause harm. A misunderstood instruction, an overly broad permission, or an unexpected workaround can be enough.
From reporting threats to removing them.
Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.
BBC News reports it has seen samples of stolen FBI agents’ medical examinations. The “fitness-for-work” reports identify FBI agents by name and address, and reveal even more personal details. They include blood and urine test results and doctors’ notes mentioning high cholesterol, blood in the urine, and even a shellfish and banana allergy.
As we reported last week, extortion group ShinyHunters claims to have breached the FBI. After reportedly taking over ransomware group Clop’s leak site, ShinyHunters says it attacked the FBI to punish the agency for spreading what it calls false information about the group.
The BBC’s findings raise the stakes: The alleged theft includes highly sensitive medical records, not just staff identity and contact data. ShinyHunters shared samples with journalists as proof of its claims.
The BBC states:
“The samples shared with journalists appear genuine and include names, addresses, phone numbers, badge numbers, job titles and information about spouses.”
ShinyHunters claims it accessed several systems, including FBI MedLink, which stores medical records, and FBI BEAST, which handles background checks on employees and applicants, but the FBI has not confirmed these claims. The FBI has acknowledged an incident affecting FBIJobs-related systems and says it is investigating whether its own environment or a third-party provider was compromised.
The group’s stated demand remains non-financial: It wants the FBI to retract or remove a May advisory that ShinyHunters calls false and defamatory. It says it will release the data within five days if its demands are not met.
The cybercriminals also raised the number of affected people. ShinyHunters nows claims to hold sensitive information on around 60,000 current and former FBI staff. Medical histories could make affected people vulnerable long after the immediate incident: Unlike a stolen password, a medical record cannot be changed.
What to do if you’re affected
The FBI has not yet confirmed what information was accessed or who was affected. If you are a current or former FBI employee, a relative of one, or have applied for an FBI job:
Check the FBI’s advice. Every breach is different, so check FBI.gov for updates and follow any specific advice it offers.
Change your password. If you have an FBI Jobs account and reuse its password elsewhere, change it on those other accounts. Choose a strong password that you don’t use for anything else. Better yet, let a password manager choose one for you.
Enable two-factor authentication (2FA). If you can, use a FIDO2-compliant hardware key, laptop, or phone as your second factor. Some forms of 2FA can be phished just as easily as a password, but 2FA that relies on a FIDO2 device can’t be phished.
Watch out for impersonators. Cybercriminals may contact you posing as the FBI, another government agency, or someone you know. Verify the identity of anyone who contacts you.
Take your time. Phishing attacks often impersonate people or brands you know and use themes that require urgent attention, such as missed deliveries, account suspensions, and security alerts.
Let’s face it, an incognito window can only do so much.
Breaches, dark web trading, credit fraud. Malwarebytes Identity Theft Protection monitors for all of it, alerts you fast, and comes with identity theft insurance.
LinkedIn is adding trust and verification features aimed at making fake professional identities, invented work histories, and company impersonation harder to pull off.
The company is responding to an environment in which generative AI enables imposters to create an entirely made-up professional persona. It reduces the cost of creating convincing headshots, biographies, résumés, outreach messages, and recommendations.
LinkedIn’s new features use verified people and company Pages to help check other users’ claims.
Colleague and classmate vouching: People can confirm that they worked or studied with someone during the period listed on that person’s profile. This confirms an affiliation; it does not rate the person’s ability or recommend them.
Employer control over false affiliations: Admins of verified company Pages can remove people who falsely claim to work there from the company’s associated people and search results. This doesn’t remove the person’s profile or erase the claim from it.
Workplace verification requirement (in testing): LinkedIn is testing a setting that would require people who want to associate themselves with a company Page to verify their workplace, for example, through a work email address.
Verified identity beyond LinkedIn: LinkedIn is extending partnerships that let users display their LinkedIn-verified identity elsewhere. New partners include Truecaller and PeerSpot, alongside Adobe and UserTesting.
LinkedIn hopes that multiple visible signals such as identity verification, workplace verification, peer corroboration, and company Page controls will make a fabricated profile less persuasive. It says its existing verification tools have verified 115 million members and more than 700,000 companies.
LinkedIn VP of Product Oscar Rodriguez told TechCrunch:
“We’ve been invested in [verification] because we believe that authenticity will be the single most valuable currency on the internet.”
These new affiliation checks cannot tell a job seeker whether an opportunity is genuine. A scammer does not always need to impersonate a major employer. They can invent a convincing startup, build a polished company Page, and use fake job listings or recruiters to lure applicants. The checks may be less helpful if the supposed employer itself is part of the scam.
As we’ve seen in recent research, criminals pose as both well-known companies and appealing new ventures offering the kind of role a job seeker hopes to find. The new checks may help someone determine whether a supposed recruiter is affiliated with a company they recognize. They may be less helpful when the company itself is part of the scam.
Verification is therefore a useful signal, not a guarantee. Job seekers should still be wary of unsolicited approaches, pressure to move conversations off LinkedIn, requests to install software or share identity documents, and job offers that arrive before a credible interview process. Check a recruiter’s affiliation, visit the employer’s website independently, and confirm that its contact details and job listing match.
LinkedIn’s changes acknowledge a growing problem: AI can make a fake professional identity look remarkably polished. Verified accounts, workplace affiliations, and colleague confirmations may become more valuable to criminals, too. They may try to exploit those signals through stolen accounts, manipulated verification, or carefully constructed networks of fraudulent profiles. Verification can raise the cost of deception, but it cannot replace healthy skepticism.
Scammers don’t need to hack you. They just need you to click once.
We discovered an undocumented remote-access Trojan (RAT) called Kothamine Agent. It supports more than 30 commands and it gives attackers control of an infected Windows computer: they can run commands, read and change files, and add new capabilities. Some versions can also steal browser data and record through the camera and microphone.
We found Kothamine linked to malicious npm packages, which could put users and developers who install those packages at risk. In recent versions, the malware uses tailcat, an open-source tool from Tailscale, to receive commands over an encrypted connection. That makes its communications harder to inspect and gives defenders no conventional command-and-control (C2) domain to block.
Based on VirusTotal uploads and GitHub commits, Kothamine appears to have been in development or distribution since at least July. Earlier versions used the Tailscale VPN instead of tailcat. Depending on the build, the malware includes the networking tools or downloads them from sources including GitHub.
How to stay safe
Before installing an unfamiliar npm package, check its repository, maintainers, dependencies, and recent releases. Search for reports of malicious activity, and favor packages with an established history and regular maintenance.
Check the name carefully. Make sure you aren’t downloading a fake package with a similar name.
Check the developer or organization and make sure the publisher appears legitimate. Check, for example, if it has a website or a GitHub repository.
Read some reviews, issues and reports. Search for the package name on Google and check for reports of detected potential malware.
Look at how popular it is. A package with many downloads and users is generally easier to verify than a brand-new package with almost no history.
Technical analysis
Kothamine and the malicious npm packages
Kothamine is written in C and C++. In the majority of the samples we analyzed, it consists of an injector and a DLL containing the agent. The agent supports more than 30 commands, allowing the operator to control the infected system and load additional DLLs to extend its capabilities.
Kothamine Agent execution
Kothamine Agent has undergone some changes over time. Earlier versions we found on VirusTotal used the Tailscale VPN rather than tailcat, and the strings were not encrypted. Some features, including a User Account Control (UAC) bypass and stealer commands, were detected only in certain builds.
In some versions, Kothamine downloaded Tailscale files from the official Tailscale website or a GitHub repository instead of including them in the agent.
The same GitHub repository is cited in an advisory about a malicious npm package named dotnet-runtime-base. The package download npm-sc-legit.exe from that repository. At the time of writing, two other packages published by the same developer had been removed.
The developer’s removed npm packages
The authors behind these campaigns made a mistake and published instructions for compiling kothamine-stub-cpp in one of the packages. The guide also discusses loading .NET assemblies, which we did not observe in the samples we analyzed.
Instructions for compiling and publishing Kothamine
The npm-sc-legit.exe executable is a compiled version of Kothamine that also contains commands for stealing data. We did not find a panel or builder for Kothamine, but the features present across different builds suggest that operators can enable particular functions and commands as needed.
Executables and DLL hosted on GitHub
The following analysis focuses on a recent Kothamine Agent sample that uses tailcat for C2 communication.
How Kothamine Agent works
In the analyzed versions, an executable internally referred to as Kothamine Injector injects the Kothamine Agent DLL, typically into explorer.exe. We also refer to earlier versions to show how the agent has changed.
1. Kothamine Injector
Kothamine Injector performs the following operations:
Adds Windows Defender exclusions using PowerShell
Copies itself to %ROAMING%\MicrosoftEdgeUpdateCore.exe
Extracts the agent DLL to %ROAMING%\MicrosoftEdgeUpdateCore.dll
Creates up.ps1 in %TEMP% for persistence
Injects the agent DLL into explorer.exe using OpenProcess, VirtualAllocEx, WriteProcessMemory, CreateRemoteThread, and LoadLibraryA
The Kothamine Agent DLL injected into explorer.exe
The up.ps1 script creates a scheduled task to achieve persistence using the Injector executable:
Some of the detected builds do not have encrypted strings. Others, however, have strings encrypted using a simple XOR operation and a dedicated XOR key for each string.
An earlier version with unobfuscated strings showing executed commandsPartial output of the script that decrypts the strings in recent versions
C2 communication using tailcat
The distinctive feature of Kothamine is not technical complexity, the agent functionality or obfuscation, but its use of tailcat and Tailscale VPN to receive commands to execute. This gives the agent a resilient, encrypted communication channel.
Tailcat is a recent open-source project released by the Tailscale team. Tailcat uses Tailscale’s data plane (WireGuard, NAT traversal and DERP) but without its control plane. According to official documentation, this means that tailcat has no IP addresses, accounts, admins, users, administrative controls, or governance. These characteristics therefore make it an attractive tool for use in malware.
Unlike Tailscale VPN, tailcat does not require an account or device registration. Its developers designed it for short-lived connections.
Since there are no accounts, access is based on possession of a tailcat address and the public keys used to identify the connecting devices. This does not make the connection completely anonymous: hosted relays may retain metadata logs.
The tc-address passed with the forward flag enables the client to obtain the information necessary to correctly route the request. In addition, tailcat does not require privileged access to the machine, as it uses the CLI tool and userspace libraries.
In recent Kothamine versions, the agent extracts tailcat from its resources and saves it as %ROAMING%\TailscalePortable\tailcat.exe.
Kothamine Agent extracting tailcat from its resources
The tailcat executable is launched with the CreateProcessA function and the following parameters (internally referred to as spawn_tailcat_forward phase):
This command makes tailcat server ports available as standard local TCP ports (18080 in this case) and the requests are forwarded to the port 4444 of the operator’s node. Kothamine uses socket functions to connect to 127.0.0.1:18080, where tailcat is listening.
If the agent ID string is not empty, the agent sends a profile request encrypted containing the following information (run_c2_loopphase):
After, the agent enters an infinite loop to receive commands to execute from the C2 (run_c2_loop phase). The agent waits for new commands to execute using the select socket function and periodically sends KEEP-ALIVE messages if a command is not received.
The messages exchanged with the C2 are encrypted and decrypted using AES-GCM (aes_encrypt phase).
The 32-byte AES key is base64-decoded from the string (c2_key phase):
mrowPsW2P5kzFGCNWeKAd+kYpo8Yy5c2pzaOSRuzisU=
Supported commands
In this build, the Kothamine agent supports 30 commandsrelated to:
Interaction with processes
Interaction with file and directory
Execute shell commands
Extend agent capability based on received DLLs
Command Name
Description
sysinfo/systeminfo, curpid
Return system information, such as PID, current path, hostname, and OS (hardcoded).
tasklist, kill
Returns the processes obtained via “tasklist /FO CSV /NH“. Terminates the process specified by the PID using “taskkill /F /PID”.
ping
Liveness check, “Pong” returns to C2.
ipconfig
Executes the “ipconfig /all” command and returns the result.
exec, shell_exec
Executes shell commands with _popen() and send the output back.
Writes and loads a base-64 encoded DLL received. The DLL is loaded using LoadLibraryA, and the “GetFeatureApi” method, resolved via GetProcAddress, is executed. Save the function pointers required to execute the function.
It interacts with loaded features to view, execute, or remove them.
Given that the other commands are common to the other agents, the focus of the analysis is on the “plugin” system that allows the operator to receive DLLs and extend the agent’s functionality.
Plugin system
To load a new DLL, the operator uses the command:
load_feature
At a high level, the process works as follows. The code and variable names below are reconstructed from usage and output logs.
First, the agent checks whether the functionality has already been loaded and unloads it if so:
if (g_features.find(name) != g_features.end()) {
send_text("[!] " + name + " already loaded, unloading first");
unload_feature(name);
}
It attempts to create the received DLL in a location obtained through GetTempPath or SHGetFolderPathA, or in the hardcoded path C:\Windows\Temp. It writes the decoded DLL and loads it with LoadLibraryA.
Resolves and executes the GetFeatureApi method of the loaded DLL:
pGFA = GetProcAddress(hModDLL, "GetFeatureApi");
if (!pGFA) {
send_text("[!] GetProcAddress(GetFeatureApi) failed, lastError= …");
FreeLibrary(hMod);
return 0;
}
api = pGFA();
We did not find a DLL that would allow us to fully analyze the structure returned by GetFeatureApi. However, by analyzing the code and the strings, we identified these fields:
/* Function used for C2 callback */
typedef void (*FeatureSendCb)(void *data, int len);
struct FeatureApi {
char *version;
char *name;
void (*init)(FeatureSendCb send);
void (*exec)(char *args, FeatureSendCb send);
void (*cleanup)(void);
};
The pointers to the loaded DLL and the returned structure are saved in the globalvariable internally called g_features, using this structure:
struct LoadedFeature {
void *hModule; /* Loaded DLL */
struct FeatureApi *api; /* Pointer returned by GetFeatureApi() */
};
Executes the init function contained in the returned structure, passing it the function used for C2 communication:
After the feature is loaded, the operator can execute the loaded feature using the command:
exec_feature [args]
Code that retrieves the structure and executes the exec function
Different Kothamine builds: Tailscale VPN, UAC Bypass and stealer commands
As previously mentioned, we detected versions of Kothamine with different capabilities.
Earlier versions used the Tailscale VPN before tailcat was released. They downloaded and ran the installer from the Tailscale website with the /quiet and /silent flags, or downloaded the required files directly from GitHub. These included tailscaled.exe, tailscale.exe, tailscale-ipn.exe, and wintun.dll.
A Kothamine version that downloads executables and DLLs from GitHub
Some versions bypass User Account Control (UAC) using fodhelper.exe to run elevated.ps1. In the example below, the PowerShell script starts a Tailscale VPN connection:
The agent then connects to port 4444 at a Tailscale network IP address (100.x.x.x) and starts receiving and executing commands.
A Kothamine version that bypasses UAC using fodhelper.exe
Finally, as we mentioned earlier, different builds of Kothamine support other commands. For instance, the version uploaded to GitHub includes additional commands including getdiscord, getsessions, screenshot, screenshare, and camera. These allow operators to:
Steal cookies from various browsers
Steal gaming-related JSON files, including files associated with Steam and Minecraft
Take screenshots and record through the camera and microphone
Access clipboard contents
Indicators of compromise
SHA-256 hashes
ec4219a7ecf132c29080fbb20e4ab410c57faa85aeed7acade1eb15d905a6ee0: Kothamine Injector analyzed in the blog
74eca3973ad72a6ddc9397aff8250d9ee287211fc9a055d5ee290d01cf76a70c: Kothamine Agent analyzed in the blog
URLs
https://github[.]com/cphc811-ui/: Repository used to download executables and DLLs associated with the Tailscale VPN
A domain that has long appeared in software documentation, code examples, and developer test material is now being used to push a ClickFix attack against Windows users.
A placeholder domain stands in for a website in an example. The best-known is probably example.com. Another, third-party[.]com, has often been used in documentation to represent an external website, API, or service.
However, there is a very important difference between the two: example.com is reserved for documentation, while third-party[.]com is an ordinary domain. Anyone could register it, and someone did. Every document, test, and skill that hardcoded it now points readers and users to the attacker’s infrastructure.
Researchers at Manifold Security found that third-party[.]com was serving a fake Cloudflare-style verification page to Windows visitors. The page tries to persuade them to open the Windows Run box and paste a command it has copied to their clipboard.This command is designed to download and execute a PowerShell script. At the time of writing the domain hosting the script is not resolving.
ClickFix is a social-engineering technique that turns the victim into the malware installer.
Instead of relying on a malicious attachment or an obvious executable download, the attacker convinces someone to run a command themselves. Common lures include:
A browser error that claims it needs a “manual fix.”
A bogus video-player, document-viewer, or popular software download.
A support scam page that tells the visitor to paste a command into Run, Command Prompt, Terminal, or PowerShell.
ClickFix works because the command often uses legitimate Windows or Mac tools to download and execute the next stage. It also runs with the permissions of the person who has been convinced to enter it.
The consequences can range from information theft to more serious compromise of a company network. In a recent campaign called TerminalFix, a fake Cloudflare CAPTCHA led victims to paste a PowerShell command into Windows Terminal or PowerShell.
How to stay safe
With ClickFix running rampant—and it doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon—it’s important to be aware, careful, and protected.
Slow down. Be wary of a webpage that urges you to run commands on your device, especially if it uses a countdown or other pressure tactic.
Don’t run commands or scripts from untrusted sources. Never run code or commands copied from websites, emails, or messages unless you trust the source and understand the action’s purpose. Verify instructions independently. If a website tells you to execute a command or perform a technical action, check through official documentation or contact support before proceeding.
Check what you’re pasting. A website may copy a command to your clipboard without showing you the full text. Don’t paste it into a command window.
Secure your device. Use an up-to-date, real-time anti-malware solution with a web protection component.
Educate yourself on evolving attack techniques. Understanding that attacks may come from unexpected vectors and evolve helps maintain vigilance. Keep reading our blog!
Pro tip: The free Malwarebytes Browser Guard extension warns you when a website tries to copy something to your clipboard.
Stop threats before they can do any harm.
Malwarebytes Browser Guard blocks phishing pages and malicious sites automatically. Free, one click to install. Add it to your browser →
Login
