{"id":235297,"date":"2026-04-16T02:21:56","date_gmt":"2026-04-16T07:21:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/signed-software-abused-to-deploy-antivirus-killing-scripts"},"modified":"2026-04-16T02:21:56","modified_gmt":"2026-04-16T07:21:56","slug":"signed-software-abused-to-deploy-antivirus-killing-scripts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/signed-software-abused-to-deploy-antivirus-killing-scripts","title":{"rendered":"Signed software abused to deploy antivirus-killing scripts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/signed-software-abused-to-deploy-antivirus-killing-scripts.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A digitally signed adware tool has deployed payloads running with SYSTEM privileges that disabled antivirus protections on thousands of endpoints, some in the educational, utilities, government, and healthcare sectors.<\/p>\n<p>In a single day, researchers observed more than 23,500 infected hosts in 124 countries trying to connect to the operator\u2019s infrastructure, with hundreds of infected endpoints present in high-value networks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A digitally signed adware tool has deployed payloads running with SYSTEM privileges that disabled antivirus protections on thousands of endpoints, some in the educational, utilities, government, and healthcare sectors. In a single day, researchers observed more than 23,500 infected hosts in 124 countries trying to connect to the operator\u2019s infrastructure, with hundreds of infected endpoints [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,1490],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235297","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235297","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235297"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235297\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235297"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235297"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235297"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}