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Don’t get fooled by TikTok resin art scams

24 July 2026 at 16:56

Resin art has become a popular corner of TikTok, with some videos attracting millions of views. But not every glossy, colorful post is what it claims to be. Scammers are using the look of handmade resin art to trick buyers, collectors, and even fellow artists into sending money for work that either doesn’t exist or wasn’t created by the person posting it.

There are plenty of genuine resin artists on TikTok. Unfortunately, the platform has also attracted scammers who steal videos and impersonate legitimate creators.

  • Fake resin art
  • Fake resin art
  • Fake resin art
  • Fake resin art
  • Fake resin art
  • Fake resin art

The scam is fairly straightforward. A TikTok account presents itself as a resin artist, posts satisfying videos, and invites people to “DM to order.” In some cases, the videos are stolen from other creators, the account has no real process footage, and the seller disappears after receiving payment.

One resin artist discovered that scammers were using their videos to impersonate them and scam TikTok users. They shared the following comment:

Ridiculous TikTok scammer…lol. Profile says they’re a resin artist and to DM them to order, but none of the videos are theirs. When I wrote to them asking them to take down the many videos of mine that they posted, passing them off as their own with no credit, their answer was that they aren’t a resin artist and are just sharing videos they like 🤣🤣 Literally about 1/4 of “their” videos are mine 🙄

These scams often rely on trust and urgency. The account may show polished clips of poured resin, finished coasters, trays, jewelry, or wall art, then push buyers to move the conversation into direct messages. Once the buyer moves to a different platform, the scammer typically requests a deposit, full payment, or personal details with little chance of being held accountable.

And real artists don’t just get their work ripped off. A scammer may contact a creator claiming to want to buy, feature, or license their work, but the real goal is to extract fees, banking information, or other sensitive data. Social media art scams are often repetitive because they are built from the same templates and scripts.

Script is similar across many videos in resin art scams
Different videos, same script

How to spot a TikTok resin art scam

The safest approach is the boring one: verify before you pay. If the artwork looks amazing but the seller’s identity is vague, the risk is real.

Check the TikTok account

Before ordering, look for signs that the artist is genuine:

  • The account didn’t appear overnight and has a history of original posts.
  • The same videos don’t appear under multiple creator names or belong to another artist.
  • The creator shows themselves making the artwork, with consistent process videos, a recognizable workspace, and works in progress.
  • The videos don’t contain obvious AI artifacts, such as impossible resin effects or objects moving after they’ve supposedly been sealed inside hardened resin.
  • Comments raising concerns haven’t been deleted or buried under generic praise.
  • The seller isn’t pushing you to order only through direct messages or asking for payment before you’ve verified who they are.

Check the website

If you do click through to a website, spend a few minutes checking it before you buy:

  • Look for a genuine returns and refunds policy, a physical business address, company or VAT details (where applicable), and consistent contact information.
  • Check how old the website is. Scam sites often use domains that were registered only weeks or months ago, especially when they claim to have been selling handmade products for years.
  • Search for recent independent reviews rather than relying on testimonials published on the site itself.
  • Run a reverse image search on the product photos to see whether they’ve been copied from another artist.
  • Only pay using a method that offers buyer protection, such as a credit card or PayPal. If a seller insists on a bank transfer, cryptocurrency, or another irreversible payment method, walk away.

Not every resin art account is a scam. Many belong to genuine artists, and that’s why impersonation scams can be so convincing.

If you’re unsure, paste the website address into Malwarebytes Scam Guard and ask whether it shows signs of being fraudulent. It can help identify suspiciously new domains and other common scam indicators.

Use Malwarebytes Scam Guard to check whether a social media post or website is part of a scam.

Use real-time web protection to block known fraudulent and malicious websites, like Browser Guard did for this web shop:

Browser Guard blocks the web shop due to likely fraud
Browser Guard blocks the fraudulent website

Both are free—making them much cheaper than sending money to a scammer.


Something feel off? Check it before you click.  

Malwarebytes Scam Guard helps you analyze suspicious links, texts, and screenshots instantly.  

Available with Malwarebytes Premium Security for all your devices, and in the Malwarebytes app for iOS and Android.  

Try it free → 

This is all it takes to stop a train (Lock and Code S07E06)

22 March 2026 at 23:02

This week on the Lock and Code podcast…

Forget the runaway train thrillingly shot in Buster Keaton’s 1926 film “The General,” and never mind the charging locomotive rescued by actors Denzel Washington and Chris Pine in the 2010 film “Unstoppable,” as there’s a far more frequent (and far less heart-pounding) railcar drama happening across California’s Bay Area: The repeated breakdown of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, all because of a few networking errors.

Opened in 1972, BART today carries about 175,000 people every weekday on five separate lines to 50 different stations placed across dozens of cities in the Bay Area, including San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, Daly City, Fremont, Richmond, and more. Its tracks and railcars travel both above ground and below, and it is one of the only public transit systems in the US that goes underwater—traveling through what is called the TransBay tube. It is likely the region’s largest public project, spanning 131 miles of track, with a fleet of more than 700 cars, proving vital to workers and residents everywhere, and on May 9, 2025, it all came grinding to a halt, due to what BART officials called a “computer networking problem.”

At the Glen Park station in San Francisco, would-be travelers found yellow caution tape at the entry gates. At the El Cerrito Plaza station, BART staff and police informed visitors that the system was down. And at the Rockridge station in Oakland, a reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle witnessed a small group of people sprinting up the stairs to try and catch a train that never came.

It was the kind of meltdown for public infrastructure that puts an entire system in peril.

And it happened again just months later.

In September, a network crash brought BART to a halt, repeating almost the exact same frustrations and delays for travelers left without transportation to work.

That’s the end of it, right? Wrong. In February 2026, another computer failure caused another outage.

So, in one of the wealthiest regions in America, the subway doesn’t always run, its network is prone to crash, and any money for technology often goes elsewhere. 

Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with San Francisco Chronicle transportation report Rachel Swan about what the BART outages revealed about the state of the system’s aging technology, why public infrastructure so often struggles to modernize, and what exactly went wrong in the three prior outages.

“One piece of equipment—and again, this is old equipment—one piece breaks down and they completely lose visibility, so they don’t know where any of the trains are.”

Tune in today to listen to the full conversation.

Show notes and credits:

Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)


Listen up—Malwarebytes doesn’t just talk cybersecurity, we provide it.

Protect yourself from online attacks that threaten your identity, your files, your system, and your financial well-being with our exclusive offer for Malwarebytes Premium Security for Lock and Code listeners.

Online shoppers at risk as Magecart skimming hits major payment networks

14 January 2026 at 13:03

Researchers have been tracking a Magecart campaign that targets several major payment providers, including American Express, Diners Club, Discover, and Mastercard.

Magecart is an umbrella term for criminal groups that specialize in stealing payment data from online checkout pages using malicious JavaScript, a technique known as web skimming.

In the early days, Magecart started as a loose coalition of threat actors targeting Magento‑based web stores. Today, the name is used more broadly to describe web-skimming operations against many e‑commerce platforms. In these attacks, criminals inject JavaScript into legitimate checkout pages to capture card data and personal details as shoppers enter them.

The campaign described by the researchers has been active since early 2022. They found a vast network of domains related to a long-running credit card skimming operation with a wide reach.

“This campaign utilizes scripts targeting at least six major payment network providers: American Express, Diners Club, Discover (a subsidiary of Capital One), JCB Co., Ltd., Mastercard, and UnionPay. Enterprise organizations that are clients of these payment providers are the most likely to be impacted.”

Attackers typically plant web skimmers on e-commerce sites by exploiting vulnerabilities in supply chains, third-party scripts, or the sites themselves. This is why web shop owners need to stay vigilant by keeping systems up to date and monitoring their content management system (CMS).

Web skimmers usually hook into the checkout flow using JavaScript. They are designed to read form fields containing card numbers, expiry dates, card verification codes (CVC), and billing or shipping details, then send that data to the attackers.

To avoid detection, the JavaScript is heavily obfuscated to and may even trigger a self‑destruct routine to remove the skimmer from the page. This can cause investigations performed through an admin session to appear unsuspicious.

Besides other methods to stay hidden, the campaign uses bulletproof hosting for a stable environment. Bulletproof hosting refers to web hosting services designed to shield cybercriminals by deliberately ignoring abuse complaints, takedown requests, and law enforcement actions.

How to stay safe

Magecart campaigns affect three groups: customers, merchants, and payment providers. Because web skimmers operate inside the browser, they can bypass many traditional server‑side fraud controls.

While shoppers cannot fix compromised checkout pages themselves, they can reduce their exposure and improve their chances of spotting fraud early.

A few things you can protect against the risk of web skimmers:

  • Use virtual or single‑use cards for online purchases so any skimmed card number has a limited lifetime and spending scope.
  • Where possible, turn on transaction alerts (SMS, email, or app push) for card activity and review statements regularly to spot unsolicited charges quickly.
  • Use strong, unique passwords on bank and card portals so attackers cannot easily pivot from stolen card data to full account takeover.
  • Use a web protection solution to avoid connecting to malicious domains.

Pro tip: Malwarebytes Browser Guard is free and blocks known malicious sites and scripts.


We don’t just report on threats—we remove them

Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.

Why iPhone users should update and restart their devices now

13 January 2026 at 13:55

If you were still questioning whether iOS 26+ is for you, now is the time to make that call.

Why?

On December 12, 2025, Apple patched two WebKit zero‑day vulnerabilities linked to mercenary spyware and is now effectively pushing iPhone 11 and newer users toward iOS 26+, because that’s where the fixes and new memory protections live. These vulnerabilities were primarily used in highly targeted attacks, but such campaigns are likely to expand over time.

WebKit powers the Safari browser and many other iOS applications, so it’s a big attack surface to leave exposed and isn’t limited to “risky” behavior. These vulnerabilities allowed an attacker to execute arbitrary code on a device after exploitation via malicious web content.

Apple has confirmed that attackers are already exploiting these vulnerabilities in the wild, making installation of the update a high‑priority security task for every user. Campaigns that start with diplomats, journalists, or executives often lead to tooling and exploits leaking or being repurposed, so “I’m not a target” is not a viable safety strategy.

Due to public resistance to new features like Liquid Glass, many iPhone users have not yet upgraded to iOS 26.2. Reports suggest adoption of iOS 26 has been unusually slow. As of January 2026, only about 4.6% of active iPhones are on iOS 26.2, and roughly 16% are on any version of iOS 26, leaving the vast majority on older releases such as iOS 18.

However, Apple only ships these fixes and newer protections, such as Memory Integrity Enforcement, on iOS 26+ for supported devices. Users on older, unsupported devices won’t be able to access these protections at all.

Another important factor in the upgrade cycle is restarting the device. What many people don’t realize is that when you restart your device, any memory-resident malware is flushed—unless it has somehow gained persistence, in which case it will return. High-end spyware tools tend to avoid leaving traces needed for persistence and often rely on users not restarting their devices.

Upgrading requires a restart, which makes this a win-win: you get the latest protections, and any memory-resident malware is flushed at the same time.

For iOS and iPadOS users, you can check if you’re using the latest software version, go to Settings > General > Software Update. It’s also worth turning on Automatic Updates if you haven’t already. You can do that on the same screen.

How to stay safe

The most important fix—however painful you may find it—is to upgrade to iOS 26.2. Not doing means missing an accumulating list of security fixes, leaving your device vulnerable to more and more newly found vulnerabilities.

 But here are some other useful tips:

  • Make it a habit to restart your device on a regular basis. The NSA recommends doing this weekly.
  • Do not open unsolicited links and attachments without verifying with the trusted sender.
  • Remember, Apple threat notifications will never ask users to click links, open files, install apps or ask for account passwords or verification code.
  • For Apple Mail users specifically, these vulnerabilities create risk when viewing HTML-formatted emails containing malicious web content.
  • Malwarebytes for iOS can help keep your device secure, with Trusted Advisor alerting you when important updates are available.
  • If you are a high-value target, or you want the extra level of security, consider using Apple’s Lockdown Mode.

We don’t just report on phone security—we provide it

Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your mobile devices by downloading Malwarebytes for iOS, and Malwarebytes for Android today.

How to Hack Hardware using UART

By: BHIS
3 September 2019 at 19:21

Raymond Felch // Preface: I began my exploration of reverse-engineering firmware a few weeks back (see “JTAG – Micro-Controller Debugging“), and although I made considerable progress finding and identifying the […]

The post How to Hack Hardware using UART appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

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