Latest News

4th April 2017

Your ISP, browsing history, and what to do about it

In late March, Congress approved a bill lifting restrictions imposed on ISPs last year concerning what they could do with information such as customer browsing habits, app usage history, location data, and Social Security numbers. They additionally absolved ISPs of the need to strengthen their existing customer data holdings against hackers and thieves. For more on the particulars of the bill, you can see reports on the Washington Post and Ars Technica. Given that the repealed restrictions hadn’t yet come into effect, the immediate impact of the new bill is somewhat unclear. But given what typically happens with massive stores of aggregated, location-specific customer data, the prognosis is not good. So what’s the worst that can happen? Let’s run through a few probable outcomes: Ad retargeting We all might be familiar with this; when we buy a product online and then see ads for it relentlessly for a couple weeks thereafter. But with increased granularity of metadata, ad retargeting ..

8th December 2016

Announcing Malwarebytes 3.0, a next-generation antivirus replacement

I am thrilled to announce the launch of our next-generation product, Malwarebytes 3.0! This product is built to provide comprehensive protection against today’s threat landscape so that you can finally replace your traditional antivirus. Our engineers have spent the last year building this product from the ground up and have combined our Anti-Malware, Anti-Exploit, Anti-Ransomware, Website Protection, and Remediation technologies all into a single product which we simply call “Malwarebytes.” And it scans your computer 4 times faster! With the launch of Malwarebytes 3.0, we are confident that you can finally replace your traditional antivirus, thanks to our innovative and layered approach to preventing malware infections using a healthy combination of proactive and signature-less technologies. While signatures are still effective against threats like potentially unwanted programs, large portion of our malware detection events already come from our signature-less technologies like our ..

29th September 2016

Snapchat rebrands, introduces new ad platform and hardware

When Google Glass was first released in 2013, the Internet giant also pushed out a guideline for Glass Explorers, telling them “don’t be creepy”. It appears that it was this advice that Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel took to heart and acted upon, openly disassociating his company from Google and Facebook during last year’s pitch of Snapchat’s new 3V advertising platform at Cannes Lions, one of the world’s biggest marketing and advertising events. In a short video explaining what this ad platform is about, Spiegel reinforced their standpoint that it’s important for them to respect their community and their privacy. Recently, however, Snapchat has made moves that may make one wonder if the CEO suddenly had a change of heart about being “creepy”. According to the Wall Street Journal, Snapchat has begun allowing advertisers to target their consumers by offering three distinct products to choose from: Snap Audience Match allows marketers to make use of Snapchat’s own pool of users’ data and ..

13th June 2016

Introducing the brand new Malwarebytes Labs

Hey folks, Welcome to the new Malwarebytes Unpacked…err…Labs! It’s new, improved, and bigger than ever. Hope you like it. So why did we mess with a good thing? We decided that we wanted to provide you with even more opportunities for education, communication, and knowledge. So, we created Malwarebytes Labs, your one-stop shop for everything concerning cyberthreats. Here’s what’s new: Threat profiles This new section is like a wiki of threats. Each threat will have its own page that will list relevant information such as a short biography, history, removal, and avoidance procedures. The goal is to make it super easy to find out more about the kinds of malware and attacks that plague you and your family. The threat profile section is searchable, so it’s easy to find what you are looking for. We plan to link these profiles with stories on the blog, so you can look up background info on the threat while you are reading a post about a new development. This section is “living,” meaning ..

5th February 2016

DayZ in a Daze: Forum Breach Confirmed

Back in 2012, the team working on the DayZ mod had their forums and main email account compromised – with a piece of malware uploaded to “Less than 15 percent of game servers” being the final cherry on the zombie cake. In 2013, what might have seemed like a zombie curse struck again with a second bout of forum compromising action. By this point, DayZ was no longer a standalone mod maintained by an enthusiast but under the care of Bohemia Interactive and a fully fledged Alpha release videogame. Unfortunately, it appears that their run of “No hacks please, there’s zombies to deal with” has run aground and, once more, we have a breach. Usernames, passwords and emails are the name of the game, although they state that the passwords aren’t plaintext so that’s something. The notification email – which was actually preceded by a message posted to Twitter more than a week ago – reads as follows: Greetings, A security incident occurred on forums.dayzgame.com recently. According to our inves..