Lock and Code

Earlier this month, a group of hackers was spotted using a set of malicious tools—that originally gained popularity with online video game cheaters—to hide their Windows-based malware from being detected. Sounds unique, right?  Frustratingly, it isn't, as the specific security loophole that was abused by the hackers has been around for years, and Microsoft's response,...

The language of a data breach, no matter what company gets hit, is largely the same. There's the stolen data—be it email addresses, credit card numbers, or even medical records. There are the users—unsuspecting, everyday people who, through no fault of their own, mistakenly put their trust into a company, platform, or service to keep their information safe. And there are, of course, the criminals....

In the United States, when the police want to conduct a search on a suspected criminal, they must first obtain a search warrant. It is one of the foundational rights given to US persons under the Constitution, and a concept that has helped create the very idea of a right to privacy at home and online.  But sometimes, individualized warrants are never issued, never asked for, never r...

When you think about the word "cyberthreat," what first comes to mind? Is it ransomware? Is it spyware? Maybe it's any collection of the infamous viruses, worms, Trojans, and botnets that have crippled countless companies throughout modern history.  In the future, though, what many businesses might first think of is something new: Disinformation.  Back in 2021, in spe...

In May, a lawyer who was defending their client in a lawsuit against Columbia's biggest airline, Avianca, submitted a legal filing before a court in Manhattan, New York, that listed several previous cases as support for their main argument to continue the lawsuit. But when the court reviewed the lawyer's citations, it found something curious:  Several were entirely fabricated .  The...

On January 1, 2023, the Internet in Louisiana looked a little different than the Internet in Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas—its next-door state neighbors. And on May 1, the Internet in Utah looked quite different, depending on where you looked, than the Internet in Arizona, or Idaho, or Nevada, or California or Oregon or Washington or, really, much of the rest of the United States.  The cha...

Ransomware is becoming bespoke, and that could mean trouble for businesses and law enforcement investigators.  It wasn't always like this.  For a few years now, ransomware operators have congregated around a relatively new model of crime called "Ransomware-as-a-Service." In the Ransomware-as-a-Service model, or RaaS model, ransomware itself is not delivered to victims by the sa...

In January, a mental health nonprofit admitted that it had used Artificial Intelligence to help talk to people in distress.  Prompted first by a user's longing for personal improvement—and the difficulties involved in that journey—the AI tool generated a reply, which, with human intervention, could be sent verbatim in a chat box, or edited and fine-tuned to better fit the situa...

The list of people and organizations that are hungry for your location data—collected so routinely and packaged so conveniently that it can easily reveal where you live, where you work, where you shop, pray, eat, and relax—includes many of the usual suspects. Advertisers, obviously, want to send targeted ads to you and they believe those ads have a better success rate if they're sent to, say, some...

How many passwords do you have? If you're at all like our Lock and Code host David Ruiz, that number hovers around 200. But the important follow up question is: How many of those passwords can you actually remember on your own?  Prior studies  suggest a number that sounds nearly embarrassing—probably around six.  After decades of requiring it, it turns out that the passwor...

Becky Holmes knows how to throw a romance scammer off script—simply bring up cannibalism.  In January, Holmes shared on Twitter that an account with the name "Thomas Smith" had started up a random chat with her that sounded an awful lot like the beginnins stages of a romance scam. But rather than instantly ignoring and blocking the advances—as Holmes recommends everyone do in these types of s...

Government threats to end-to-end encryption—the technology that secures your messages and shared photos and videos—have been around for decades, but the most recent threats to this technology are unique in how they intersect with a broader, sometimes-global effort to control information on the Internet. Take two efforts in the European Union and the United Kingdom. New proposals there wo...

In November of last year, the AI research and development lab OpenAI revealed its latest, most advanced language project: A tool called ChatGPT. ChatGPT is so much more than "just" a chatbot. As users have shown with repeated testing and prodding, ChatGPT seems to "understand" things.  It can give you recipes that account for whatever dietary restrictions you have. It can deliver basic e...

In 2020, a photo of a woman sitting on a toilet—her shorts pulled half-way down her thighs—was shared on Facebook, and it was shared by someone whose job it was to look at that photo and, by labeling the objects in it, help train an artificial intelligence system for a vacuum. Bizarre? Yes. Unique? No.  In December, MIT Technology Review  investigated the data collection and sharing...

Last month, the TikTok user TracketPacer posted a video online called “ Network Engineering Facts to Impress No One at Zero Parties .”  TracketPacer regularly posts fun, educational content about how the Internet operates. The account is run by a network engineer named Lexie Cooper, who has worked in a network operations center, or NOC, and who’s earned her Cisco Certified Network Associate certif...

When did technology last excite you?  If Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is to be believed, your own excitement ended, simply had to end, after turning 35 years old. Decades ago, at first writing privately and later having those private writings published after his death, Adams had come up with "a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies." They were s...

On June 7, 2021, the US Department of Justice  announced a breakthrough : Less than one month after the oil and gas pipeline company Colonial Pipeline had paid its ransomware attackers roughly $4.4 million in bitcoin in exchange for a decryption key that would help the company get its systems back up and running, the government had in turn found where many of those bitcoins had gone, clawing back...

Decades ago, patching was, to lean into a corny joke, a bit patchy.  In the late 90s, the Microsoft operating system (OS) Windows 98 had a supportive piece of software that would find security patches for the OS so that users could then download those patches and deploy them to their computers. That software was simply called Windows Update.  But Windows Update had two big problems. One, it had to...

A cyberattack is not the same thing as malware—in fact, malware itself is typically the last stage of an attack, the punctuation mark that closes out months of work from cybercriminals who have infiltrated a company, learned about its systems and controls, and slowly spread across its network through various tools, some of which are installed on a device entirely by default.  The goal of cybersecu...

Last month, when Malwarebytes published joint research with 1Password about the online habits of parents and teenagers today, we  spoke with a Bay Area high school graduate on the Lock and Code podcast  about how she spends her days online and what she thinks are the hardest parts about growing up with the Internet. And while we learned a lot in that episode—about time management, about comparing...

A thief has been stalking London.  This past summer,  multiple women reported similar crimes to the police : While working out at their local gyms, someone snuck into the locker rooms, busted open their locks, stole their rucksacks and gym bags, and then, within hours, purchased thousands of pounds of goods. Apple, Selfridges, Balenciaga, Harrod's—the thief has expensive taste.  At first blush, th...

Growing up is different for teens today.  Issues with identity, self-expression, bullying, fitting in, and trusting your friends and family—while all those certainly existed decades ago, they were never magnified in quite the same way that they are today, and that's largely because of one enormous difference: The Internet.  On the Internet, the lines of friendship are re-enforced and blurred by co...

Ransomware can send any company into crisis.  Immediately following an attack, the notoriously disruptive malware can spread across networks and machines, locking up important files and rendering vital data almost useless for all employees. As we learned in a  previous episode of Lock and Code , a ransomware attack not only threatens an organization's clients and external custo...

The in-person cybersecurity conference has returned. More than two years after Covid-19 pushed nearly every in-person event online, cybersecurity has returned to the exhibition hall. In San Francisco earlier this year, thousands of cybersecurity professionals walked the halls of Moscone Center at RSA 2022. In Las Vegas just last month, even more hackers, security experts, and tech enthusiasts floo...

In 1993, the video game developers at id Software released  Doom , a first-person shooter that placed a nameless protagonist into the fiery depths of hell, equipped with an arsenal of weapons to mow down imps, demons, lost souls, and the intimidating "Barons of Hell."  In 2022, the hacker Sick Codes installed a modified version of Doom on the smart control panel of a John Deere tractor, with the v...