In July’s edition of cybersecurity news headlines, we primarily report on one of the biggest cybersecurity incidents of the year – the Twitter hack. We also discuss CouchSurfing suffering a data breach that exposed information of 17 million users, and countries considering following India’s example of banning viral video sharing app TikTok.…
Microsoft’s Windows Defender (aka Microsoft Defender) is currently flagging CCleaner’s free version as a potentially unwanted application (PUA).
Popular system optimization tool CCleaner, developed by Piriform and initially released 16 years ago, is now owned by anti-virus vendor Avast. It is the go-to tool for users looking to delete unwanted files, programs and junk, and fix registry problems But it appears…
After more than five months of inactivity, the Emotet botnet is back in action and is now distributing the QakBot (QBot) banking trojan. Emotet is known as one of the most notorious and most active cyber crime operations. Emotet first emerged in 2014 as a banking trojan that targeted banking credentials but has since evolved into a botnet that allows…
What is Searchmarquis.com
Searchmarquis.com is a highly questionable website that may be set as your homepage if your computer is infected with a browser hijacker. Browser hijackers are pretty harmless infections that don’t harm the computer directly. What they do is they change browser’s settings and set their promoted sites as homepages. In this case, it’s Searchmarquis.com that will load every…
What is COM surrogate
COM surrogate or dllhost.exe are processes part of the Windows operating system. If you open your Task Manager, you will likely see multiple COM surrogate processes running. This is completely normal. COM actually stands for Component Object Model, and COM object are plugged into other applications in order to extend them. It’s often used to create thumbnail…
What is Zeromax stealer
Zeromax stealer, discovered by malware analyst 3xp0rt, is a trojan that mainly focuses of data theft. This trojan primarily tries to steal login credentials for various accounts, such as online banking, email, and cryptocurrency. This data is stolen from browsers and other applications that may store login credentials. The stolen data may be used by the malware…
What is MPlayerX virus
MPlayerX virus refers to a free video player MPlayerX. It is classified as a potentially unwanted program (PUP) due to its installation methods and behaviour. While it’s technically not a correct classification, many users refer to it as virus. It doesn’t seem to be particularly harmful but it’s not harmless either, hence the classification PUP. It can…
What is PC Reviver
PC Reviver is advertised as a system optimization program but is classified as a potentially unwanted program (PUP) by some anti-virus programs. The program is promoted as a tool to repair, optimize and maintain a computer, and offers features such as startup managing, registry cleaning, windows updating, duplicates finding, driver updating, etc. It’s essentially a program that…