IT NEWS

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released two actionable Capacity Enhancement Guides (CEGs) to help users and organizations improve mobile device cybersecurity.

Consumers

One of the guides is intended for consumers. There are an estimated 294 million smart phone users in the US, which makes them an attractive target market for cybercriminals. Especially considering that most of us use these devices every day.

The advice listed for consumers is basic and our regular readers have probably seen most of it before. But it never hurts to repeat good advice and it may certainly help newer visitors.

• Stay up to date. Make sure that your operating system (OS) and the apps you use are up to date, and enable automatic updating where possible.
• Use strong authentication. Make sure to use strong passwords or pins to access your devices, and biometrics if possible and when needed. For apps, websites and services use multi-factor authentication (MFA) where possible.
• App security:
  • Use curated app stores and stay away from apps that are offered through other channels. If they are not good enough for the curated app stores, they are probably not good for you either.
  • Delete unneeded apps. Remove apps that you no longer use, not only to free up resources, but also to diminish the attack surface.
  • Limit the amount of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) that is stored in apps.
  • Grant least privilege access to all apps. Don’t allow the apps more permissions than they absolutely need in order to do what you need them to do, and minimize their access to PII.
  • Review location settings. Only allow an app to access your location when the app is in use.
• Network communications. Disable the network protocols that you are not using, like Bluetooth, NFC, WiFi, and GPS. And avoid public WiFi unless you can take the necessary security measures. Cybercriminals can use public WiFi networks, which are often unsecured, for attacks.
• Protection. – Install security software on your devices. – Use only trusted chargers and cables to avoid juice jacking. A malicious charger or PC can load malware onto smartphones that may circumvent protections and take control of them. A phone infected with malware can also pose a threat to external systems such as personal computers. Enable lost device functions or a similar app. Use auto-wipe settings or apps to remove data after a certain amount of failed logins, and enable the option to remotely wipe the device.
• Phishing protection. Stay alert, don’t click on links or open attachments before verifying their origin and legitimacy.

Organizations

The guide for organizations does duplicate some of the advice given to consumers, but it has a few extra points that we would like to highlight.

• Security focused device management. Select devices that meet enterprise requirements with a careful eye on supply chain risks.
• Use Enterprise Mobility Management solutions (EMM) to manage your corporate-liable, employee-owned, and dedicated devices.
• Deny access to untrusted devices. Devices are to be considered untrusted if they have not been updated to the latest platform patch level; they are not configured and constantly monitored by EMM to enterprise standards; or they are jailbroken or rooted.
• App security. Isolate enterprise apps. Use security container technology to isolate enterprise data. Your organization’s EMM should be configured to prevent data exfiltration between enterprise apps and personal apps.
• Ensure app vetting strategy for enterprise-developed applications.
• Restrict OS/app synchronization. Prevent data leakage of sensitive enterprise information by restricting the backing up of enterprise data by OS/app-synchronization.
• Disable user certificates. User certificates should be considered untrusted because malicious actors can use malware hidden in them to facilitate attacks on devices, such as intercepting communications.
• Use secure communication apps and protocols. Many network-based attacks allow the attacker to intercept and/or modify data in transit. Configure the EMM to use VPNs between the device and the enterprise network.
• Protect enterprise systems. Do not allow mobile devices to connect to critical systems. Infected mobile devices can introduce malware to business-critical ancillary systems such as enterprise PCs, servers, or operational technology systems. Instruct users to never connect mobile devices to critical systems via USB or wireless. Also, configure the EMM to disable these capabilities.

While you may not feel the need to apply all the advice listed above, it is good to at least know about it and consider whether it fits into the security posture that matches your infrastructure and threat model.

Stay safe, everyone!

The post Improving security for mobile devices: CISA issues guides appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Google’s Cybersecurity Action Team has released a Threat Horizons report focusing on cloud security. It’s taken some criticism for being surprisingly straightforward and less complex than you may expect. On the other hand, many businesses simply don’t understand many of the threats at large. Perhaps this is a way of easing the people the report is aimed at into the wider discussion.

At any rate, the report is out and I think it’s worth digging into. They may be taking the “gently does it” approach because so many of their customers are falling foul to bad things. It makes sense to keep it simple in an effort to have people pay attention and nail the basics first. After all, if they can’t do that then complex rundowns stand no chance.

Key features of the report

The executive summary lists a number of key points. There’s a strong focus on issues and concerns for people using Google services. For example:

“Of 50 recently compromised GCP instances, 86% of the compromised cloud instances were used to perform cryptocurrency mining, a cloud resource-intensive, for profit activity. Additionally, 10% of compromised cloud instances were used to conduct scans of other publicly available resources on the internet to identify vulnerable systems, and 8% of instances were used to attack other targets”.

In case you’re wondering, GCP means Google Cloud Platform.

Elsewhere, the summary mentions Google cloud resources were used to generate bogus YouTube view counts. This sounds interesting, and would probably be useful to know more about it. Unfortunately there are no details in the summary, and the full report doesn’t go into the nitty-gritty of what happened either. Given this one is a clear and easily understandable way to explain how [bad thing in cloud] equals [bad knock-on effect for service everyone you know uses], it seems strange to keep us guessing.

Google also references the Fancy Bear/APT28 Gmail phishing attack, which we covered last month. While this isn’t exactly a common concern for most people, it is good to reiterate the usefulness of multiple Google security settings. 2FA, apps, backup codes, and advanced security settings are always better to have up and running than not at all.

It’s not just Google services up for discussion…

The report also briefly branches out into other realms of concern. Bogus job descriptions posing as Samsung PDFs were deliberately malformed, leading to follow up messages containing malware lurking at the links provided by the sender.

This campaign is apparently from a North Korean government-backed group, which previously targeted security researchers. There’s also a lengthy rundown of Black Matter ransomware, and (again) various tips for Google specific cloud products in terms of keeping the Black Matter threat at arm’s length.

The full report is a PDF weighing in at 28 pages long. Yes, it’s a bit light on details. However, it’s quite possible to send people running for the hills with 80+ pages of heavy-duty security information. If people are making rudimentary mistakes, why not make a gesture of highlighting said mistakes?

Simply does it

As we heard in our recent Lock and Code episode, the basics are no laughing matter. Many organisations don’t have the time, money, or resources available. They’re unable to tackle what some would consider to be incredibly obvious issues. There’s plenty of detailed security information out there already on multiple Google pages. Maybe it’s possible that this back to basics approach will pay off in the long run.

If Google’s main concern seems to mostly be “script kiddy with a cryptominer”? Then a script kiddy with a cryptominer focus we shall have. For now, we’ll just have to wait and see what kind of uptake this new approach receives and go from there.

The post Google’s Threat Horizons report: Will the straightforward approach get results? appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

The UK’s top cybercops are urging owners of small online shops to “protect their customers and profits” by guarding against card skimmers in the frenetic shopping period that starts with Black Friday, which lands on November 26 this year.

The warning comes from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC)—which is part of GCHQ, the UK’s equivalent to the NSA—which says it identified 4,151 compromised online shops up to the end of September.

Card skimmers, also know as web skimmers, are bits of malicious software that are injected into legitimate websites, so they can steal shoppers’ credit card details. The skimmers read the details as users type them into the sites’ payment forms, or replace the payment forms with convincing fakes.

The longer that cybercriminals can keep their card skimmers on a website before its customers or owners notice, the more money they will make, so they take care to be as unobtrusive as possible. Unsurprisingly, Malwarebytes’ own research has shown that card skimming activity tends to ramp up on the busiest shopping days, when the most money changes hands. And some of the biggest shopping days of the year are nearly upon us, starting with Black Friday, the biggest of them all.

For the uninitiated, Black Friday is the annual celebration of peak capitalism that commemorates the symbolic moment that retailers go “in to the black” for the year and start to make a profit. If you’re wondering why shoppers would be so keen to celebrate the mechanics of retail accountancy, it’s because shops mark the occasion (the Friday that follows Thanksgiving in the US) with extravagant sales, offers, and deals.

The NCSC is rightly concerned that with record amounts of money expected to slosh about on the Internet in the next few days, cybercriminals will be hard at work, spoiling everyone’s fun.

Yes, you

It is worth noting that the NCSC’s announcement uses the word “small” no less than four times— “small online shops”; “small business sites”; “small online retailers”; “small and medium-sized online retailers”—in a short announcement that also mentions “SMEs” twice, and says it is written for “small & medium sized organisations”.

On the off-chance the point still hasn’t landed, let me spell it out for you: The NCSC would like you to know that no online business is small enough to ignore the threat of card skimmers.

I will add a personal note to that too. If you assume you are too small to be attacked by a card skimmer and your customers later find out their card details were stolen while on your site, they will expect you to have cared a great deal more. At least that’s how I felt when it happened to me.

Not just Magento

Although its guidance is aimed at all e-commerce retailers, the NCSC makes specific mention of sites built on the Magento platform, which it says has been particularly popular with cybercriminals lately:

The majority of the online shops used for skimming identified by the NCSC had been compromised via a known vulnerability in Magento, a popular e-commerce platform.

However, your takeaway after reading that should not be “Magento” so much as “known vulnerability”. Cybercriminals do not care that you’re running Magento, they only care that you are running a system they can exploit because it contains a known vulnerability, and any system with a known vulnerability will do, thanks. It so happens that Magento has been a prime target recently, but every decent e-commerce system has known vulnerabilities. Not using Magento is no protection whatsoever.

What really matters is whether or not ecommerce sites are patched promptly when fixes for vulnerabilities are made available. Which is why the NCSC’s headline guidance is “Retailers are urged to ensure that Magento—and any other software they use—is up to date”.

Keeping website software up to date will certainly take you a very long way indeed in terms of protecting against card skimmers, but there is more to it than that.

For the “more to it than that”, the NCSC point readers to the British Retail Consortium’s Cyber Resilience Toolkit for Retail, and its own website, which is full of useful cybersecurity advice, although neither resource is specifically about card skimming.

I would like to humbly suggest that readers should also consult our own guidance on how to defend your website against card skimmers. Our easy-to-digest advice is aimed at preventing card skimming specifically and explains how card skimming gangs find victims; why everyone is a potential target; how to avoid a website breach; how to protect your customers from a card skimmer if you are breached; and how to detect card skimmers as quickly as possible.

The post Beware card skimmers this Black Friday appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

As Microsoft’s Head of Deception, Ross Bevington is responsible for setting up and maintaining honeypots that look like legitimate systems and servers.

Honeypot systems are designed to pose as an attractive target for attackers. Sometimes they are left vulnerable to create a controllable and safe environment to study ongoing attacks. This provides researchers with data on how attackers operate and enables them to study different threats.

In Bevington’s words:

“I develop and lecture on these technologies with emphasis on the human behind the keyboard and how to integrate Deception into general security posture.”

Now, Bevington has released information gathered from Microsoft honeypots of over 25 million brute force attacks against SSH.

SSH and RDP

Secure Shell (SSH) is a protocol optimized for Linux server access, but it can be used across any operating system’s server. Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is almost exclusively used for accessing Windows virtual machines and physical Windows servers. Based on data provided by Bevington, which were taken from more than 14 billion brute-force attack attempts against Microsoft’s network of honeypot servers until September this year, attacks on Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) servers have seen a rise of 325%.

RDP is one of the most popular targets because it is a front door to your computer that can be opened from the Internet by anyone with the right password. And because of the ongoing pandemic, many people are working from home and may be doing so for a while to come. Working from home has the side effect of more RDP ports being opened.

The data

What the research data analysis looked at were the credentials that were attempted during more than 25 million brute force attacks against the Microsoft honeypot systems, which roughly represents a period of 30 days.

Some highlights of these results:

• 77% of the passwords were between 1 and 7 characters long
• Only 6% of the passwords were longer than 10 characters
• 39% of the passwords contained at least one number
• None of the attempted passwords contained a space

Passwords

The data above can help you determine whether a password is more secure than another. But, there are some caveats. Passwords need to be long and complex because it’s their length, complexity and uniqueness that determines how difficult they are to crack.

However, you can have the longest password in the world, but if it has been leaked in a breach there is a chance that an attacker will add it to their dictionary. This is the reason we tell you not to re-use your passwords. It’s inconvenient to lose one in a breach, but if that means having to change your password on multiple sites and services, it’s a major inconvenience.

In an older study by Microsoft, it was determined that users should spend less effort on password management issues for don’t-care and lower consequence accounts, allowing more effort on higher consequence accounts. Unless you are using a password manager doing the work for you, of course. Your efforts to come up with a strong password are wasted at sites that store passwords in plaintext or reversibly encrypted.

Sites that require minimum length and/or use other complexity standards have always been a major annoyance. Not only because every site uses a different standard, some of which have been made obsolete, they also encourage users to come up with simple passwords that just barely meet the standard. Am I right, MyDogsName1 and P@$$w0rd?

One of the recommendations of the earlier Microsoft study was that organizations should invest their own resources in securing systems rather than simply offloading the cost to end users in the form of advice, demands or enforcement policies that are often pointless.

The fact that none of the attempts contained a space looks favorable for insights that recommend using three random words separated by spaces. Easy to remember, type in (especially on smaller devices) and harder to guess.

Passwordless future

Not too long ago, Microsoft announced that as of September 15, 2021 you can completely remove the password from your Microsoft account and use the Microsoft Authenticator app, Windows Hello, a security key, or a verification code sent to your phone or email to sign in to Microsoft apps and services. We talked that over with a world expert on passwords, Per Thorsheim, and while we will welcome the passwordless future, there are some concerns when it comes to account recovery and what may happen when people lose access to their choice of authenticator.

How to protect your organization from brute force attacks

The ground rules of protecting against remote online attacks are basically:

• Limit the number of open ports
• Restrict the access to those that need it
• Enhance security of the port and the protocol

There are applications that can help you accomplish these basic tasks if you feel the built-in tools are too hard to configure.

Restricting the access is the point of this post. Telling us that a password alone is not always enough. And when you rely on passwords make sure to choose them wisely.

Stay safe, everyone!

The post Password usage analysis of brute force attacks on honeypot servers appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Facebook recently announced it would give up on its facial recognition system. Facebook, or Meta, was using software to automatically identify people in images posted to its social network. Since facial recognition has become an increasingly toxic concept in many circles and Facebook was having enough to deal with as it is, it shut the “feature“ down.  But that doesn’t mean that the technology no longer exists, or even that it isn’t used anymore.

Let’s establish first what we consider facial recognition to be.

By definition: A facial recognition system is a technology capable of matching a human face from a digital image or a video frame against a database of faces, typically employed to identify and/or authenticate users.

In layman’s terms, facial recognition is technology to recognize a human face.

How does facial recognition work?

There are different systems and algorithms that can perform facial recognition, but at the basic level they all function the same—they use biometrics to map facial features from a photograph or video. The image is captured and reduced to a set of numbers that describes the face that needs to be identified. The software analyses the shape of the face by taking certain measurements that, all put together, provide a unique characteristic for the face. The shape of the face is reduced to a mathematical formula, and the numerical code of that formula is called a “faceprint.” Such a faceprint can be quickly compared to those stored in a database in order to identify the person.

You can compare this to a person leafing through an enormous book of portraits to find a suspect. Only much faster because now it’s a computer comparing sets of numbers.

How is facial recognition used?

The most well-known example of facial recognition is the one that can be used to unlock your phone or similar. In those cases, your face is compared to the ones that are authorized to use the phone.

Another convenient method of facial recognition can be found in some major airports around the world. An increasing number of travelers hold a biometric passport, which allows them to skip the long lines and walk through an automated ePassport control to reach their gate faster. This type of facial recognition not only reduces waiting times but also allows airports to improve security.

A lot less consensual is the fact that in some countries mobile and/or CCTV facial recognition is used to identify any person, by immediately comparing an image against one or more face recognition databases. In total, there are well over 100 countries today that are either using or have approved the use of facial recognition technology for surveillance purposes. This has brought up a lot of questions about our privacy.

What is bad about facial recognition?

As we can see from the above, facial recognition is not always bad. And it can be used to improve our personal and public security. It becomes a privacy issue when the consensus from the person in the database is missing. People, especially in large cities, have become used to being monitored a lot of the time that they spend outside. But when facial recognition adds the extra layer of tracking, or the possibility to do so, it becomes worrying.

China, for example, is already a place deeply wedded to multiple tracking/surveillance systems. According to estimates, there are well over 400 million CCTV cameras in the country, and they do not shy away from using facial recognition in public shaming to crack down on people that are jaywalking and other minor traffic offenders.

It’s because of the privacy implications that some tech giants have backed away from the technology, or halted their development. Many groups like American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have made objections against facial recognition technology as it is considered a breach of privacy to use biometrics to track and identify individuals without their consent. Many feel that there is already more than enough technology out there that keeps track of our behavior, preferences, and movement.

Can I use facial recognition to find someone?

For an individual to identify another individual would require access to a large database or an enormous amount of luck. As we explained, the faceprints are compared with those in a database. And that database has to contain a pretty large subset of the population you are looking in.

But there are other ways to identify an individual if he is nowhere to be found in the database. A picture can be compared to one that is openly posted on social media. Some organizations have built quite the databases just from harvesting pictures from social media. And you might be amazed about what a reverse image search could bring up. In essence, your chance of success finding a person based on a picture depends on how sophisticated your search algorithm is and how many pictures of your subject can be found on the Internet.

The other way around, if you do not want to be found, make sure that you don’t post your pictures everywhere, and when you do, make sure they are not publicly accessible. And stay out of the databases.

If you are interested in the subject of facial recognition, you may also want to listen to S1Ep6 of the Malwarebytes podcast Lock and Code where we talk with Chris Boyd about “Recognizing facial recognition’s flaws”

The post What is facial recognition? appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Sometimes the ways in which malicious code gets in the hands of cybercriminals is frustrating for those in the industry, and incomprehensible to those on the outside.

A quick summary of the events in the history of this exploit:

• A researcher found a flaw in Windows Installer that would allow an attacker to delete targeted files on an affected system with elevated privileges.
• Microsoft patched the vulnerability in November’s Patch Tuesday update.
• The researcher found a way to circumvent the patch and this time decided not to engage in responsible disclosure because he got frustrated with Microsoft’s bug bounty program.
• The researcher’s PoC is being tested in the wild and cybercriminals could be preparing the first real attacks exploiting this vulnerability.

Let’s have a look at what is going on and how it came to this.

The vulnerability

Publicly disclosed computer security flaws are listed in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database. Its goal is to make it easier to share data across separate vulnerability capabilities (tools, databases, and services).

The vulnerability in question was listed as CVE-2021-41379 and is a local Windows Installer Elevation of Privilege (EoP) vulnerability. If successfully exploited, the bypass could give attackers SYSTEM privileges on up-to-date devices running the latest Windows releases, including Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server 2022.

By exploiting this zero-day, threat actors that already have limited access to compromised systems can elevate their privileges and use these privileges to spread laterally within a target network.

The patch

Microsoft patched the vulnerability in the November Patch Tuesday updates. But according to the researcher, the bug was not fixed correctly. He discovered a new variant during the analysis of the CVE-2021-41379 patch.

With the new variant, an attacker will be able to run programs with a higher privilege than they are entitled to. To be clear, an attacker using the new variant must already have access and the ability to run code on a target victim’s machine, but now they can run the code with SYSTEM privileges thanks to the exploit.

The frustration

The researcher appears to have been so disappointed in Microsoft after he responsibly disclosed the vulnerability by means of the Trend Micro zero-day initiative, that he decided to skip that path altogether when he found the new method to bypass the patch. The researcher published a new version of the proof of concept (PoC) exploit, which is even more powerful than the original exploit.

Apparently the main reason for his frustration was the reward level.

““Microsoft’s rewards have been very bad since April 2020; the community wouldn’t make these kinds of decisions if Microsoft took its rewards seriously.”

In the wild

Several security vendors have noticed malware samples in the wild that are attempting to take advantage of this vulnerability. A quick search on VirusTotal showed dozens of different files that tried to do this. This may be some threat actors testing the exploit code to turn it into something they can use in their attacks, along with some researchers trying out different ways to use and stop the exploit. It is worrying nonetheless to see once again how quick attackers are able to weaponize publicly available exploit code.

Mitigation

The researcher recommends users wait for Microsoft to release a security patch, due to the complexity of this vulnerability, although he doesn’t seem confident that Microsoft will get it right this time.

“Any attempt to patch the binary directly will break windows installer. So you better wait and see how Microsoft will screw the patch again.”

Microsoft says it is working on it. In the meantime, Malwarebytes Premium and business users are protected, because our programs detect the files using this vulnerability as Exploit.Agent.

Stay safe, everyone!

The post Windows Installer vulnerability becomes actively exploited zero-day appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Gamers are a hot target for scammers, especially in the run up to Christmas. Major games are released throughout the last few months of any year, and the FOMO (fear of missing out) is strong. Especially if said titles offer pre-order exclusive bonuses, or deals and discounts for a few weeks after the game launches.

There’s a lot of big titles hitting digital storefronts at the moment. In the last few weeks alone we’ve seen the release of:

• Skyrim Anniversary Edition
• Forza Horizon 5
• Jurassic World Evolution 2
• Halo Infinite (portions of it, with more to come)
• Myth of Empires
• Battlefield 2042

Add other upcoming titles and older ones updated for the festive season into the mix, and it’s fertile ground for people up to no good.

Bogus YouTube videos promise much, deliver little

We’ve seen a lot of activity on YouTube in the last 24 hours in relation to dubious videos. They ride on the coat tails of common searches for “free” versions of popular titles like Skyrim, CSGO, PUBG, Cyberpunk, and more. Other videos focus on Call of Duty, GTAV, Fallout 4, and DayZ.

In all cases, “free Steam keys” are the name of the fake out game. No matter which of the many accounts post up these videos, they all typically link to the same download hosting site.

When free games lead to Malware

The file offered up for download is SteamKeyGeneration.rar, weighing in at 4.19MB. YouTube pages containing the link offer the following instructions:

“Download the ExLoader, open the RAR file, open the EXE file”

The .RAR is password protected, with the password being supplied in the YouTube description. Once the executable runs on the target system, it’s infected by the owner’s own hand.

We detect the file as Trojan.Malpack. This is a generic name given to files which have been packed suspiciously. The actual payload can be anything at all, but this form of packing files is not typically used for legitimate purposes. We’ve seen similar attacks like this previously. In 2018, Fortnite gamers were targeted by scammers pushing Trojan.Malpack files as Fortnite freebies. If the files were downloaded and run on the target system, the reward for doing so was data theft.

Part of a bigger campaign, or a standalone?

YouTube has definitely had some trouble along these lines recently. Researchers at Cluster25 spotted similar activity, targeting a multitude of interests including how-to guides, cryptocurrency, VPN software, and more. In those cases, activity seems to be primarily geared towards two infection paths.

Videos with bit(dot)ly links send victims to download sites such as Mega. Unshortened links redirect to taplink(dot)cc to push Racoon Stealer. Target machines are scanned for card details, passwords, cryptocurrency wallets and other forms of data. This is all harvested and sent on to the attacker.

There are similarities, despite the final destination links being different to those mentioned – such as the password requirement, the similarities in scam setup. Of course, this isn’t a particularly new or novel tactic for YouTube attacks. Including a link to an off-site compressed file on free file hosting, and disabling comments so nobody can point out they’ve had things stolen is video portal shenanigans 101.

You also tend to see one major campaign hit and enjoy success, and then lots of smaller would-be scammers jump on the bandwagon and before long everybody is doing it.

Tips to avoid scams

Whether this is part of the same campaign, a spin-off, or is simply inspired by it, you should avoid any promise of free games deploying these techniques on YouTube. The warning signs are:

1. Too good to be true claims of Steam (or another platform) being “hacked”, with free games being the end result.
2. Brand new accounts with no other content than these videos. Much older accounts which have been dormant until now, or display a sudden shift in content produced. Were they making videos of their cats until last week and now they’re all about hacked Skyrim downloads? Beware.
3. Comments disabled. Anybody linking to off-site files and turning off the comments may not have your best interests at heart.

Getting your hands on a cool new game at a discount is always good news, but sometimes the hidden cost is just too high.

The post “Free Steam games” videos promise much, deliver malware appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

With the holiday season around the corner, and Black Friday at the end of the week, we thought it was a good time to look at the dangers that come with gift cards.

Gift cards can be a an easy win in cases where you don’t know the receiver well enough to decide on a fitting gift, or when their wishes are out of your price range. But there are a few things to consider before you hand over your cash.

1. Fake gift cards

You will almost always need to pay full value for legitimate gift cards, so gift cards being offered for significantly less than the face value should be treated with extreme caution. Of course, it could be that they are from people that have no use for the gift cards they received, but it’s hard to tell who and who isn’t genuine. If you see websites offering all kinds of discounts on gift cards, you can be assured that these will turn out to be fakes or they have been acquired in an illegal way and you could be acting as a fence.

2. Gift card generators

One step up on the “scale of scammery” from fake gift cards are gift card generators. There are quite a few websites that claim to provide gift card generators that you can use to generate the code for all kinds of gift cards. Some of the major brand names that are used include Amazon, Roblox, Google, Xbox, PS5.

If you download a gift card generator and you are lucky, it will inform you just before you try it that it does not generate valid gift card codes, but only random codes for “educational purposes.” That is, after you have filled out endless surveys, and maybe even after given up some of your personal information.

In the worst case scenario, you will end up downloading a piece of malware to your system. In one case, researchers found a file titled “Amazon Gift Tool.exe” that was being marketed on a publicly available file repository site as a free Amazon gift card generator. In reality, the malware watched a user’s clipboard to find text that matches the normal length of a certain type of cryptocurrency wallet address. If other criteria were met, to ensure that the victim was involved in a Bitcoin Cash transfer, the malware replaced the string on the clipboard with the attacker’s Bitcoin Cash wallet address. The attacker was hoping that the victim wouldn’t notice the overwritten crypto wallet address when pasting it during the crypto transaction, and that the transfer would go to that of the cybercriminal instead of the intended recipient.

It always helps to keep in mind that if something sounds too good to be true, it is probably not true at all. This definitely applies to a tool that would allow you to create gift cards for free. That’s pretty much like having a money press in your basement.

3. Scammers like your gift cards

There is one group of people that does have a taste for gift cards, and that is scammers. Whether they claim to be with the IRS, Microsoft, or your service provider, if someone asks you to pay for something by putting money on a gift card, like a Google Play or iTunes card, you can safely assume that they’re trying to scam you. No real business or government agency will ever insist you pay them with a gift card.

We have seen live examples of business email compromise (BEC) attempts that ask for gift cards, like the one below:

Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a catch all term for a spoofed email pretending to come from an authority figure, with the intent to use social engineering to reach an outcome, usually financial gain, by convincing you to do something that you normally wouldn’t.

Not forgetting those gift cards that go unspent…

According to a Juy 2021 survey by Bankrate, more than half of US adults (51%) currently have unused gift cards, vouchers, or store credits totaling roughly $15 billion in outstanding value. Additionally, 49% of US adults have lost gift card/voucher/store credit value at some point because they let at least one of these expire (29%), they lost at least one (27%), or they failed to use at least one before the business closed permanently (21%).

Basically what it boils down to, is you are paying full value for something that only gets used roughly half of the time.

Conclusion

As one of my friends in the US used to say:

“The best gift cards have a number and a president on them.”

Even though it may seem unpersonal to give money as a present, the chance that the receiver will get something that they need or like is so much bigger than with a gift card. Should you still want to buy a gift card, make sure to get them from a reliable source and check that the receiver will make good use of it.

Stay safe, everyone!

The post Please don’t buy this! 3 gift card scams to watch out for this Black Friday appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

Domain name registrar giant and hosting provider GoDaddy yesterday disclosed to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it had suffered a security breach.

In the notice, it explained it had been compromised via an “unauthorized third-party access to our Managed WordPress hosting environment.” The unknown culprit behind the attack stole up to 1.2 million active and inactive customer data, including email addresses, original WordPress admin passwords, Secure File Transfer Protocol (sFTP) and database credentials, and SSL private keys.

The company said it has taken measures to secure accounts and the environment, such as resetting passwords and blocking the unauthorised third-party from accessing its system, and said it will be issuing new certificates for specific customers.

GoDaddy first detected suspicious activity in its Managed WordPress hosting environment on Wednesday last week. According to initial investigations, the intruder used a compromised password to access legacy code in GoDaddy’s environment to steal data. Investigations are ongoing.

“We are sincerely sorry for this incident and the concern it causes for our customers,” wrote Demetrius Comes, GoDaddy’s Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), “We, GoDaddy leadership and employees, take our responsibility to protect our customers’ data very seriously and never want to let them down. We will learn from this incident and are already taking steps to strengthen our provisioning system with additional layers of protection.”

According to researchers from Defiant Inc, developers of Wordfence—a plugin for securing WordPress sites—GoDaddy has been handling sFTP in a way that doesn’t follow standard practices: “It appears that GoDaddy was storing sFTP credentials either as plaintext, or in a format that could be reversed into plaintext. They did this rather than using a salted hash, or a public key, both of which are considered industry best practices for sFTP. This allowed an attacker direct access to password credentials without the need to crack them.”

GoDaddy customer? Here’s what to do

If you use GoDaddy’s hosting service and are unsure if your account might be one of those affected, do not leave this to chance. Act now before someone takes the opportunity to take over your account.

GoDaddy has provided a good list of steps to take to lock down an account that might be potentially compromised:

• Change your password and your PIN
• Enable two-factor authentication (2FA) if you haven’t already
• Change the payment methods you have stored in your account, and delete those you don’t use. It would also be good to keep an eye on your bank account transactions and be ready to flag those that are fraudulent.
• Remove delegate access for anyone you’ve allowed into your account
• Remove any unknown API keys by deleting them.
• Verify your domain contact information is correct to avoid someone taking it over
• Remotely log out of your GoDaddy account, which will sign you out of all devices and browsers.

Stay safe!

The post Millions of GoDaddy customer data compromised in breach appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.

A few short weeks ago, Microsoft launched the very latest version of its desktop operating system (OS), Windows 11. In security terms, Windows 11 is very much Windows 10 with knobs on. Or what Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel might describe as Windows 10 turned up to 11.

Unlike Tufnel’s description of his infamous “one louder” amps though, the Redmond software giant’s approach to security shows signs of intelligence at work. And its reassuringly sensible, evolutionary approach indicates that Microsoft thinks it is on the right track.

Its aim for Windows 11 is much the same as it was for Windows 10: To make changes that take entire classes of vulnerabilities off the table for attackers. In broad terms, its approach is to use virtualization to create safe, protected environments for sensitive operations, and to build trust from the ground up, on top of trustworthy hardware specs.

In fact, a lot of what makes Windows 11 better for security than Windows 10 is that Microsoft is simply making things that are optional in Windows 10 mandatory (or at least a default) in Windows 11.

So, unlike some of the previous transitions between major versions of Windows, there is a very obvious continuity between the two most recent versions, and a sense that Windows 11 is just the latest version of Windows 10.

And it seems that continuity is now flowing upstream as well as down.

Last week Microsoft used its announcement about the availability of the Windows 10 November 2021 Update to reveal that Windows 10 is ditching its twice-yearly release schedule and moving to the calmer annual release cycle of its sibling:

“We will transition to a new Windows 10 release cadence to align with the Windows 11 cadence, targeting annual feature update releases … The next Windows 10 feature update is slated for the second half of 2022.”

This is not a security announcement per se—sysadmins will still have to digest enormous patch furballs on the second Tuesday of every month when the LCU (Latest Cumulative Update) is released—but we reckon it is good for security.

I asked Malwarebytes’ Windows expert Alex Smith, the brains behind our recent, detailed assessment of whether or not Windows 11 is any good for security (spoiler alert: yes, it is) for his thoughts.

Smith’s take: This switch can only help security.

It will be a welcome change by most, especially software developers, IT admins, technicians, help desks, Microsoft itself, and end users. Having to plan for and support a new Windows OS build every six months was a chore and led to lots of late adoption or deferment, which could impact security.

Smith says the new release schedule should give everyone a little more breathing space to prepare, adopt, and react to Windows releases, which could lead to:

• Higher adoption rates of the latest builds.
• Reduced build fragmentation in the ecosystem.
• More time for Microsoft to stabilize its updates before releasing them.
• Fewer “headaches” for software developers, IT admins, support staff, and users.

Of course it is just breathing space, and there is no guarantee it will be used productively. Most businesses are more than capable of over-committing security and IT staff, and the window of opportunity will close quickly, but there is a window.

Perhaps it will provide an opportunity for some organizations to run the rule over Windows 11.

Alongside revealing its changes to the Windows 10 release schedule, Microsoft also announced it was increasing the pace of the Windows 11 rollout, “making the Windows 11 upgrade more broadly available to eligible Windows 10 devices”. This is also good news. Microsoft can only achieve its lofty aim of making classes of vulnerability obsolete when Windows 11 is predominant, but the operating system’s beefed-up security comes at the cost of eye-watering hardware demands, which seem likely to chill the pace of adoption.

Anything that gives them a bit of warming sunshine is to be welcomed.

The post Windows 10 chills out, gives sysadmins a break appeared first on Malwarebytes Labs.