In early June, cybersecurity researchers discovered that a compromised version of the Israel-based Hola Browser for Windows (version 1.251.91.0) was secretly downloading a Monero crypto miner to users’ devices. Shortly after the discovery, Hola confirmed that it had fallen victim to a supply chain attack. In this article, we break down how the attack went down, how the crypto miner works, and what it means for affected users.

What is Hola Browser, and how was the malware discovered?

The Israeli company Hola is best known for its VPN service, which users primarily rely on to bypass geo-restrictions and access region-locked content. In addition to the VPN, the company develops Hola Browser — a Chromium-based browser that comes with built-in VPN and proxy features.

Researchers first spotted signs of trouble during a standard compliance check for the AppEsteem Windows Certified Application program. As part of this certification process, independent cybersecurity firms audit software to ensure it only contains the components it claims to have and is free of unwanted or malicious features. Even after a certificate is granted, apps are regularly re-evaluated to ensure they continue to meet AppEsteem’s strict guidelines.

It was during one of these routine follow-up checks that experts noticed an unauthorized file bundling itself with version 1.251.91.0 of Hola Browser for Windows. Once installed, the file saved itself to the hard drive at C:\Program Files\Hola\me{.}exe. The file immediately raised red flags for researchers due to a laundry list of suspicious characteristics: it wasn’t on the list of approved application files, lacked a timestamp, and had no digital signature. On top of that, its code was heavily obfuscated, and it possessed the ability to inject itself directly into system memory.

Interestingly, researchers noted that the file didn’t show up in every single installation. Because the infection wasn’t widespread across all users, experts suspected early on that a specific stage in the Hola Browser distribution pipeline had been compromised. Hola later confirmed this theory, admitting it had fallen victim to a supply chain attack.

As for the suspicious me{.}exe file itself, closer analysis revealed that it was a stealthy crypto miner configured to mine Monero. We’ll now dive into the technical details of how it works.

How did attackers use Hola Browser to mine Monero?

Crypto miners are programs that harness a computer’s processing power to mine cryptocurrency. While some users install this software intentionally to generate a bit of income, miners that run on a machine without the owner’s knowledge are typically classified as unwanted.

Running a hidden miner can noticeably slow down the device, spike the user’s electricity bill, and shorten the hardware’s lifespan. That being said, it’s worth noting that a crypto miner infection will not actually steal the owner’s cryptocurrency; the damage is strictly limited to the hijackers leeching your computer’s hardware resources to line their own pockets.

As we mentioned above, the malicious download bundled with Hola Browser sneaked a Monero crypto miner onto victims’ devices. Launched in 2014 and built on the CryptoNote protocol, Monero currently trades at around US$330 per coin.

Compared to heavyweights like Bitcoin or Ethereum, Monero is a bit exotic and lesser-known to the general public. This niche status shows in its relatively modest price growth and smaller market capitalization — which is roughly 200 times lower than Bitcoin’s. However, Monero has one defining feature: privacy. While Bitcoin and Ethereum operate on fully transparent, public blockchains, where anyone can trace transactions, Monero is a “privacy coin”. It uses advanced cryptographic mechanisms to mask the sender, receiver, and transaction amounts. This extreme anonymity is exactly why hackers love hidden Monero miners — it makes it difficult for law enforcement and cybersecurity professionals to follow the money trail.

Additionally, Monero’s underlying algorithm is explicitly designed to mine efficiently using standard computer processors (CPUs). This stands in stark contrast to many other popular cryptocurrencies, which require specialized ASIC hardware or high-end graphics cards (GPUs) to be profitable.

But let’s look closer at how this played out with Hola Browser. When researchers dissected the malicious me{.}exe code, they found it was automatically adding its own files to the Microsoft Defender exclusion list. By allowlisting itself, the malware successfully blinded Windows’ built-in antivirus, allowing the crypto miner to run in the background completely unhindered.

Once inside, the program made a copy of itself under the name HolaMonitorService{.}exe, and set up a persistent Windows background service called hola_monitor_svc. This maneuver allowed the malware to entrench itself in the system, automatically launching every time the computer restarted. To avoid raising any red flags with sudden massive performance drops, the miner was programmed to stay dormant, kicking into gear only when the computer was idle.

How to protect your device from crypto miners and malware

To their credit, Hola’s development team responded swiftly to the initial reports of the suspicious file. They confirmed the supply chain breach, but stated that the incident only impacted 0.1% of their user base. The company has since tightened up security around its update distribution pipeline to guarantee that users only receive approved, certified, and digitally-signed software components moving forward.

In light of this incident, we highly recommend that all Hola Browser users update to the latest version immediately — especially those running the application on Windows.

More broadly, this situation is a textbook reminder of why it’s so critical to keep all your software up to date and run a robust cybersecurity solution on all your gadgets. For instance, Kaspersky Premium provides real-time alerts about suspicious software behavior and blocks threats instantly. As an added bonus, a Kaspersky Premium subscription includes a secure and reliable VPN.

Don’t forget that malicious crypto miners don’t just target PCs; they also go after smartphones, often disguising themselves as anything from popular mobile games to official government service apps. Check out our previous posts to learn more:

• Android Trojan posing as government services and Starlink apps
• What happens if you download a cracked program?
• Miner inconvenience: how cybercriminals blackmail YouTubers into promoting malware
• Mario Forever, malware too: a free game with a miner and Trojans inside

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs:

• Could your face change what you pay? NYC wants limits on biometric tracking
• That “job brief” on Google Forms could infect your device
• A DarkSword hangs over unpatched iPhones
• Your tax forms sell for $20 on the dark web
• Researchers found font-rendering trick to hide malicious commands
• Apple patches WebKit bug that could let sites access your data
• Inside a network of 20,000+ fake shops
• Fake Pudgy World site steals your crypto passwords
• 90% of people don’t trust AI with their data
• How searching for a VPN could mean handing over your work login details
• Google cracks down on Android apps abusing accessibility
• Hacked sites deliver Vidar infostealer to Windows users
• Zombie ZIP method can fool antivirus during the first scan
• Delete doesn’t mean gone. Here’s how File Shredder fixes that

Stay safe!

---

We don’t just report on threats—we help safeguard your entire digital identity

Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Protect your, and your family’s, personal information by using identity protection.

Storm-2561 is distributing fake VPN clients through SEO poisoning, deploying trojans, and stealing login information.

The post Threat Actor Targeting VPN Users in New Credential Theft Campaign appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The idea of a “Great British Firewall” makes for a catchy headline, but it would be riddled with holes and cause huge problems.

The Guardian reports that the GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters), a UK intelligence, security, and cyber agency, is exploring the idea of a British firewall offering protection against malicious hackers. It falls within its remit, but one of the measures reportedly discussed—banning VPN software—raises practical and technical questions.

Here’s what you actually need to know, and why you shouldn’t panic about your VPN just yet.

• There are no current plans on the statute books to ban VPNs for everyone. Ministers and regulators explicitly acknowledge VPNs as lawful services with legitimate uses.
• The current political focus is on “online safety”, especially kids accessing porn and harmful content, and how VPNs can undermine the Online Safety Act’s age‑assurance and filtering regime.
• The latest move is an online‑safety consultation that explicitly mentions “options to age-restrict or limit children’s VPN use where it undermines safety protections”, not an outright nationwide ban.

So what may happen is tighter controls around minors, and perhaps pressure on app stores and platforms, rather than a blanket prohibition for adults.

Options

Technically speaking, these are some of the measures available to address VPNs bypassing geo-blocking and local legislation.

• App‑store and download pressure: Require Apple/Google to hide or age‑gate VPN apps for UK accounts, or block listing of some consumer VPNs. This raises friction for non‑technical users but is trivial to route around (sideloading where possible, non‑UK stores, manual configs).
• Commercial provider lists: Buy accounts at popular VPNs, enumerate exit IP ranges, and require ISPs or certain sites (e.g. porn sites) to block those IPs. This can catch a large chunk of mainstream VPN traffic but is high‑maintenance and easy to evade with IP rotation, residential proxies, self‑hosted VPNs, and lesser‑known services.
• Targeted site‑level blocking of VPNs: Require certain categories of sites (e.g. adult sites) to reject traffic that appears to come from VPN IPs, an idea already floated by some experts as more likely than an outright technology ban. That still leaves VPNs usable for everything else, including general browsing and work.
• Age‑based device/network controls: Mandate school networks, child‑oriented devices, or parental control routers to block known VPN endpoints and app traffic, as media regulator Ofcom and others have suggested may be possible at the home‑router level. Again, this targets minors rather than adults and is only as strong as the weakest network they connect to (a friend’s Wi‑Fi, mobile hotspot, etc.).

All of these are “making it harder” tactics rather than a hard technical kill switch.

Why a watertight VPN ban is essentially impossible

To comprehensively block VPNs, the government would need to require internet providers to inspect traffic, restrict apps from app stores, and attempt to cut off access to thousands of VPN servers worldwide. That would be a massive, expensive, and deeply complicated undertaking—and it still wouldn’t work.

Problem 1: VPNs are basically invisible

Modern VPNs are designed to look very similar to normal web browsing. When you load a website over HTTPS (the padlock in your browser) and when you connect to a VPN, the traffic flowing through your internet connection looks almost identical. Reliably telling them apart is a bit like trying to spot which cars on a motorway are taxis versus private vehicles based solely on their tire tread patterns at motorway speed, for every car, in real time. You’d end up accidentally blocking huge amounts of perfectly ordinary internet traffic in the attempt.

Problem 2: Too many legitimate users depend on VPNs

VPNs aren’t just for privacy-conscious consumers. They’re how millions of people securely connect to their workplace from home. The NHS (the UK’s National Health Service) uses them for remote access. Journalists use them to protect sources. Researchers use them to access academic resources. Any serious enforcement effort would have to grapple with the risk of collateral damage to businesses and public services.

Problem 3: The ban would be trivially easy to bypass

Even if the government successfully blocked every major commercial VPN app and service, technically skilled users could simply rent a cheap server anywhere in the world and set up their own private tunnel in under ten minutes. There are also tools designed to evade exactly this kind of blocking, disguising encrypted traffic as ordinary web activity.

We know this because Russia has been trying to block VPNs for years, using the full weight of state enforcement behind it. But VPN usage in Russia has surged, not declined. Blocked services pop up under new names and addresses and new tools emerge overnight. This track record suggests that long-term, comprehensive suppression is difficult, even with aggressive powers of enforcement.

What does this actually mean for UK citizens?

The government can probably make consumer VPN use slightly more inconvenient, removing apps from UK app stores, for instance, or creating legal grey areas for certain uses. But a genuine, technical ban on VPN software and encrypted connections is not realistically achievable without causing serious collateral damage to the UK’s digital economy and the millions of people who depend on this technology for entirely legitimate reasons.

Don’t ditch your VPN. The Great Firewall of Great Britain isn’t coming. And if it tried, it would have more holes than a fishing net.

Hat tip to Stefan Dasic and the Malwarebytes VPN team for their invaluable input.

---

We don’t just report on privacy—we offer you the option to use it.

Privacy risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep your online privacy yours by using Malwarebytes Privacy VPN.

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs:

• How AI made scams more convincing in 2025
• In 2025, age checks started locking people out of the internet
• 2025 exposed the risks we ignored while rushing AI
• Malware in 2025 spread far beyond Windows PCs

Stay safe!

---

We don’t just report on privacy—we offer you the option to use it.

Privacy risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep your online privacy yours by using Malwarebytes Privacy VPN.

If 2024 was the year lawmakers talked about online age verification, 2025 was the year they actually flipped the switch.​

In 2025, across parts of Europe and the US, age checks for certain websites (especially pornography) turned long‑running child‑protection debates into real‑world access controls. Overnight, users found entire categories of sites locked behind ID checks, platforms geo‑blocking whole countries, and VPN traffic surging as people tried to get around the new walls.​

From France’s hardline stance on adult sites to the UK’s Online Safety Act, to a patchwork of new rules across multiple US states, these “show me your ID before you browse” systems are reshaping the web. The stated goal is to “protect the children,” but in practice the outcome is frequently a blunt national block, followed by users voting with their VPN buttons.​

The core tension: safety vs privacy

The fundamental challenge for websites and services is not checking age in principle, but how to do it without turning everyday browsing into an identity check. Almost every viable method asks users to hand over sensitive data, raising the stakes if (or more likely when) that data leaks in a breach.​

For ordinary users, the result is a confusing mess of blocks, prompts, and workarounds. On paper, countries want better protection for minors. In practice, adults discover that entire platforms are unavailable unless they are prepared to disclose personal information or disguise where they connect from. No website wants to be the one blamed after an age‑verification database is compromised, yet regulators continue to push for stronger identity links.​

How age checks actually work

Regulators such as Ofcom publish lists of acceptable age‑verification methods, each with its own privacy and usability trade‑offs. None are perfect, and many shift risk from governments and platforms onto users’ most sensitive personal data.​

• Facial age estimation: Users upload a selfie or short video so an algorithm can guess whether they look over 18, which avoids storing documents but relies on sensitive biometrics and imperfect accuracy.​
• Open banking: An age‑check service queries your bank for a simple “adult or not” answer. It may be convenient on paper but it’s a hard sell when the relying site is an adult platform.​
• Digital identity services: Digital ID wallets can assert “over 18” without exposing full credentials, but they add yet another app and infrastructure layer that must be trusted and widely adopted.​
• Credit card checks: Using a valid payment card as a proxy for adulthood is simple and familiar, but it excludes adults without cards and does not cover lower age thresholds like “over 13.”​
• Email‑based estimation: Systems infer age from where an email address has been used (such as banks or utilities), effectively encouraging cross‑service profiling and “digital snooping.”​
• Mobile network checks: Providers indicate whether an account has age‑related restrictions. This can be fast, but is unreliable for pay‑as‑you‑go accounts, burner SIMs, or poorly maintained records.​
• Photo‑ID matching: Users upload an ID document plus a selfie so systems can match faces and ages. This is effective, but concentrates highly sensitive identity data in yet another attractive target for attackers.​

My personal preference would be double‑blind verification: a third‑party provider verifies your age, then issues a simple token like “18+” to sites without revealing your identity or learning which site you visit, offering stronger privacy than most current approaches.​

In almost every case, users must surrender personal information or documents to prove their age, increasing the risk that identity data ends up in the wrong hands. This turns age gates into long‑lived security liabilities rather than temporary access checks.​

Geoblocking, VPNs, and cross‑border frictions

Right now, most platforms comply by detecting user location via IP address and then either demanding age checks or denying access entirely to users in specific regions. France’s enforcement actions, for example, led several major adult sites to geo-block the entire country in 2025, while the UK’s Online Safety Act coincided with a sharp rise in VPN use rather than widespread cross-border blocking.

European regulators generally focus on domestic ISPs, Digital Services Act reporting, and large platform fines rather than on filtering traffic from other countries, partly because broad traffic blocking raises net‑neutrality and technical complexity concerns. In the US, some state proposals have explicitly targeted VPN circumventions, signalling a willingness to attack the workarounds rather than the underlying incentives.​

Meanwhile, network‑level filtering vendors advertise “cross‑border” controls and VPN detection for governments, hinting at future scenarios where unregulated inbound flows or anonymity tools are aggressively throttled. If enforcement pressure grows, these capabilities could evolve from niche offerings into standard state infrastructure.​

A future of less anonymity?

A common argument is that eroding online anonymity will also curb toxic behavior and abuse on social media, since people act differently when their real‑world identity is at stake. But tying everyday browsing to identity checks risks chilling legitimate speech and exploration long before it delivers any proven civility benefits.​

A world where every connection requires ID is unlikely to arrive overnight. Still, the direction of travel is clear: more countries are normalizing age gates that double as identity checks, and more users are learning to route around them. Unless privacy‑preserving systems like robust double‑blind verification become the norm, age‑verification policies intended to protect children may end up undermining both privacy and open access to information.​

---

We don’t just report on privacy—we offer you the option to use it.

Privacy risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep your online privacy yours by using Malwarebytes Privacy VPN.

What does it mean to work from home across your corporate VPN? What exactly is VPN? Is your home office prepared? How can you improve and better secure your home […]

The post Webcast: Pandemic Paradigm Shift: Remote Working is the New Normal appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

💾

Sally Vandeven // Back in November Beau Bullock wrote a blog post describing how his awesome PowerShell tool MailSniper can sometimes bypass OWA portals to get mail via EWS if […]

The post How to Bypass Two-Factor Authentication – One Step at a Time appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Jordan Drysdale // This article, like the IADGov link here has three major steps. First, acquire a Raspberry Pi and a VPS running CentOS 6.8. Second, configure the server and Raspberry […]

The post Turning a Raspberry Pi 3 Into a Cloaking Device With goSecure VPN appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Rick Wisser // I have been asked by some friends, (not very Linux proficient friends) to share this. I thought I would create a blog post and share with all. […]

The post It’s Always Nice to Have Cron-ies! appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

Ethan Robish // Ads serve an important function on the internet.  For many websites, ads are the main form of revenue that funds the site’s content or service.  This, however, […]

The post How to Block Ads on All Your Devices appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..

David Fletcher // On a recent internal penetration test engagement, I was faced with using a Juniper VPN to access the target network. One small problem, Juniper does not formally […]

The post Juniper Two Factor VPN & Linux appeared first on Black Hills Information Security, Inc..