⚡ Weekly Recap: Proxy Botnets, Browser Ransomware, AI Agent Tricks, Fake PoC Malware and More
A streaming box should not need a threat model. Neither should a username field, a demo repo, a reset flow, or a browser permission prompt. That is the irritating part this week: the risky pieces were ordinary. Home devices became a routing cover. Clean code pulled dirt from a dependency. Identity shortcuts aged badly. AI systems trusted the wrong instructions. Same soft spot throughout: trust placed one layer too early. Below is the full recap, since this is apparently what counted as a normal week. ⚡ Threat of the Week NetNut Residential Proxy Network Disrupted — Google, in collaboration with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Lumen, and other partners, took action against the NetNut residential proxy network, also known as Popa, building upon its takedown of IPIDEA in January 2026. Google said it disabled Google accounts and associated Google services used by NetNut for malware command-and-control (C2) and updated Google Play Protect, in addition to disabling applications known to incorporate NetNut SDKs. The size of the network is estimated to be at least 2 million devices globally. "NetNut populates its botnet by distributing SDKs for devices commonly found in homes, such as smart TVs and streaming boxes," Google said, adding it "identified NetNut botnet plugin components for large-scale botnets such as BADBOX 2.0." The end goal is to leverage the route traffic through these devices, allowing bad actors to mask malicious activity. The devices are pre-installed with malware before purchase or because users unknowingly download applications containing hidden proxy code. Case Study: How 1Password Secured Canva's Path to 260M Users When Canva 5xed their headcount across 8 countries, they needed security that could scale as fast as their business. See how 1Password helped them onboard teams in minutes, eliminate secret sprawl, and keep engineering moving. Learn More ➝ 🔔 Top News WhatsApp Gets Usernames But Impersonation Concerns Are Raised — WhatsApp officially announced the start of global reservations of usernames with an aim to protect the privacy of more than three billion users on the messaging platform. The optional feature is designed to help users connect with someone on the service through usernames, as opposed to directly sharing their phone numbers. The feature is expected to be generally available later this year. The rollout marks a shift in how people identify one another on the messaging app. It has also drawn scrutiny in India, its largest market, over concerns it could be abused to impersonate public authorities, financial institutions, government departments, and other prominent figures. While Meta told TechCrunch it reserves usernames for public figures, government entities, and some of their variations so that only legitimate users can claim them, it's currently not clear how it decides which lookalike usernames get reserved and which don't. ChocoPoC RAT Targets Vulnerability Researchers with Fake PoC Exploit Repos — Security researchers on the lookout for Python-based proof-of-concept (PoC) repositories on GitHub claiming to exploit new CVEs are being tricked into executing malicious code that delivers ChocoPoC. While the PoC in itself looks clean, the actual malware sits inside a dependency named "skytext" pulled by the PoC. The malware is a full-featured trojan capable of harvesting passwords, cookies, autofill, and history from Chrome, Brave, Edge, and Firefox. It also captures text files, notes, local databases, shell history, network settings, and a list of running processes, as well as supports running arbitrary shell commands or Python code. 19-Year-Old Alleged Scattered Spider Suspect Extradited to the U.S. — Peter Stokes (aka Bouquet, Spencer, and Jordan), a 19-year-old man with dual U.S. and Estonian citizenship, was extradited from Finland to the U.S. to face criminal charges over his involvement in a criminal scheme in connection with the Scattered Spider hacking group. Finnish police arrested him in April 2026. Stokes and other Scattered Spider members are alleged to have breached an unspecified "luxury-jewelry retailer" in May 2025 and demanded an $8 million ransom in cryptocurrency. The company incurred at least $2 million in losses from business disruption, incident response, and recovery efforts. Stokes was involved in at least four Scattered Spider breaches, the Justice Department said. Stokes faces charges of fraud, conspiracy, and computer intrusion. Ousaban Banking Trojan Targets Spain and Portugal — A new Brazilian banking trojan called Ousaban has been observed using fake PDF documents containing a link to a malicious web page that scans the user's environment. "If they are in Spain or Portugal, the webpage downloads a VBS file to kickstart the next part of the attack," Fortinet said. "The final payload is an EXE file that is dropped onto the victim's computer and executed by the VBS script." Ousaban gets triggered when victims visit a banking site, at which point it captures screenshots and keystrokes, tampers with the clipboard, and enables remote control. AI-Generated Browser Ransomware Exploits Chromium File Access API — A new malware artifact generated using DeepSeek has constructed a novel attack path combining "unrealistic browser-malware concepts with a real browser capability" to turn it into a working ransomware technique that runs entirely inside the browser on Windows, Linux, macOS, and Android devices. The approach is limited to web browsers that expose the picker-based File System Access API. This includes Google Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers across Windows, macOS, ChromeOS, Linux, and Android. There is no evidence that the browser-native ransomware pattern has been abused in the wild. "What we are witnessing is a fundamental shift in how novel cyber attacks are born," Check Point said. "For the first time, we have evidence that an AI model can independently reason across legitimate platform features and surface a working attack technique that humans had only theorised about – without the attacker ever knowing the underlying API existed." 🔥 Trending CVEs Bugs drop weekly, and the gap between a patch and an exploit is shrinking fast. These are the heavy hitters for the week: high-severity, widely used, or already being poked at in the wild. Check the list, patch what you have, and hit the ones marked urgent first — CVE-2026-48276, CVE-2026-48283, CVE-2026-48277, CVE-2026-48281, CVE-2026-48316, CVE-2026-48282, CVE-2026-48313, CVE-2026-48315 (Adobe ColdFusion), CVE-2026-48286 (Adobe Campaign Classic), CVE-2026-50548, CVE-2026-50549 (Cursor), CVE-2026-46242 aka Bad Epoll (Linux Kernel), CVE-2026-6682, CVE-2026-6687, CVE-2026-6688 (FatFs), CVE-2026-8037 (Progress Kemp LoadMaster), CVE-2026-28701, CVE-2026-33560, CVE-2026-31928 (Daktronics Controller Firmware), CVE-2026-41120 (Dell Wyse Management Suite), CVE-2026-41492 (Dgraph), CVE-2026-55047 (Anthropic Buffa), from CVE-2026-13774 through CVE-2026-13788 (Google Chrome), CVE-2026-48519, CVE-2026-48520, CVE-2026-7528, CVE-2026-7524 (Langflow), CVE-2026-3199 (Sonatype Nexus Repository), CVE-2026-12166, CVE-2026-12167, CVE-2026-12168 (Little Orbits GameFirst Anti-Cheat driver), CVE-2026-56141, CVE-2026-56142, CVE-2026-50242, CVE-2026-50242 (JetBrains), CVE-2026-20213, CVE-2026-20214, CVE-2026-20215, CVE-2026-20216, CVE-2026-20217, CVE-2026-20243, CVE-2026-20244 (ClamAV), CVE-2026-20191 (Cisco Catalyst Center), CVE-2026-53917, CVE-2026-54475, CVE-2026-49877 (Apache ActiveMQ), CVE‑2026‑13050, CVE‑2026‑13053, CVE‑2026‑13054, CVE-2026-13079 (WatchGuard Fireware OS), CVE-2026-45504 (Microsoft Exchange Server), CVE-2026-14191 (WinRAR), CVE-2026-44024, CVE-2026-44025 (Fluentd), CVE-2026-55957, CVE-2026-55956 (Apache Tomcat), CVE-2026-13136, CVE-2025-15660 (Synology MailPlus Server), CVE-2026-22678, CVE-2026-49102, CVE-2026-49103, CVE-2026-42210, CVE-2026-56022 (Webmin), from CVE-2026-12044 through CVE-2026-12050 (pgAdmin), CVE-2025-66273, CVE-2025-66279, CVE-2026-22893 (QNAP QTS, QuTS hero, QuTS cloud, and QVP), CVE-2026-11310, CVE-2026-11999, CVE-2026-6679, CVE-2026-55958, CVE-2026-55960, CVE-2026-55961 (wolfSSL), CVE-2026-48611 (phpBB), and CVE-2026-20896 (Gitea). 🎥 Cybersecurity Webinars AI Attacks Are Moving Faster Than Your Defenses → AI is helping attackers write better lures, change tactics faster, and run campaigns at a scale many security teams are not built to handle. This webinar breaks down how AI-powered threats like Mythos gain access, move through environments, and expose the limits of traditional network-based defenses—then shows how teams can reduce attack surface, stop lateral movement, and contain risky behavior before it turns into a major incident. Your AI Agents Need a Kill Switch → AI agents can do more than make mistakes—they can expose credentials, bypass controls, and become a new attack surface inside the business. This webinar uses hands-on findings from OpenClaw testing to show where agentic AI breaks down, why guardrails are not enough, and how teams can reduce risk with identity-based governance, least-privilege access, short-lived secrets, logging, auditing, and visibility into shadow AI use. 📰 Around the Cyber World Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks Targets AI Agents for Typosquatting and Payment Scam — Threat actors are using indirect prompt injection (IPI) to hide instructions in websites, attempting to trick an AI agent into following the attacker’s instructions. "The observed campaigns combine SEO poisoning with CSS/HTML abuse to both manipulate search results and conceal prompt-style instructions that influence AI decision making," Zscaler said. "When AI agents misclassify malicious websites as legitimate, they increase the risk of context contamination and downstream Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) poisoning." Dropping Elephant Delivers In-Memory RAT — The threat actor known as Dropping Elephant (aka Patchwork) has been observed using a China-themed energy-sector contract lure to deliver a heavily reworked, in-memory remote access trojan (RAT). "This campaign demonstrates advanced evasion techniques, including DLL side-loading with a legitimate Microsoft binary (Fondue.exe) and the use of 'Donut' shellcode to map the RAT directly into memory, effectively bypassing traditional disk-based security controls," Rapid7 said. "The revamped RAT significantly complicates detection by using control-flow flattening, runtime API reconstruction, and hardened C2 communications." The malware supports directory listing, file upload/download, screenshot capture, and command execution capabilities. Microsoft Updates SSPR to Require Registered Authentication Methods — Starting September 7, 2026, Microsoft said Entra self-service password reset will require users to have explicitly registered authentication methods for password reset verification, while explicitly disallowing directory-sourced contact information unless registered. "Currently, SSPR may allow users to verify their identity using contact information stored in directory attributes such as mobile phone, business phone, and alternate email, even if those values were never explicitly registered as authentication methods," Microsoft said. "To strengthen identity security, SSPR will require explicitly registered authentication methods for verification. This change is part of Microsoft’s Secure Future Initiative and ensures password reset verification is based on trusted, user-validated methods rather than directory-sourced attributes." The development comes as the Windows maker has introduced jailbreak and root detection for Entra credentials in the Microsoft Authenticator app on both iOS and Android platforms, preventing Entra credentials from functioning on jailbroken/rooted devices. Scammers Exploit Trusted Brand Names to Drive Casino Traffic — Scam advertising campaigns are impersonating trusted brands to drive consumers to unrelated online gambling sites. "These campaigns utilize paid social ads, fake app store pages, and Progressive Web Apps to make users believe that well-known brands have launched 'official' casino or slot products," Netcraft said. "The scams begin with an ad on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. The ad claims that a recognizable brand has launched '[Brand] Slots' or a similar gambling product. Upon interacting with the ad, the user is taken to a fake landing page designed to look like an official app store listing or branded game page. Instead of installing a real app, the user is prompted to add a Progressive Web App to their device, which opens an unrelated online casino through affiliate tracking links." PhishLumos as a Way to Counter Cloaking-Based Phishing Threats — As phishing continues to be a persistent threat in cybersecurity, researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University and NTT Security Holdings have demonstrated PhishLumos to counter campaigns that evade automated scanners through cloaking and selective blocking techniques. "When content is missing, deceptive, or inaccessible, PhishLumos pivots to infrastructure evidence, including shared domains, IP addresses, certificates, and historical scan metadata," the researchers said. "It consolidates observations into a typed property graph knowledge base with a deterministic, idempotent merge operator and provenance for auditable investigations. A supervisor agent coordinates specialized agents and synthesis agents powered by large language models to profile campaigns and generate empirically validated detection rules for deployment in existing controls." CVE Explosion in the AI Era — With artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) accelerating vulnerability discovery, a new report from ProjectDiscovery has found that 30,550 CVEs have been published so far in 2026, a figure that's expected to eclipse 2025's 49,458 CVEs. Of these, 2,906 are rated critical, and 11,187 are rated high in severity. In contrast, a total of 30,361 CVEs were published in 2023. "The exploitable surface is doubling faster than defenders can absorb," ProjectDiscovery said. When the median time-to-exploit is days and the mean is negative, a 55-day critical-remediation cycle is not a process, it's an open door. If attackers are weaponizing bugs in minutes with AI, the response, finding them, proving they're real and handing developers a fix, has to run continuously and autonomously, not on a calendar." New ClickFix Campaign Uses Blockchain C2 — An active malware-as-a-service (MaaS) operation is abusing the Polygon (MATIC) blockchain as a resilient C2 configuration with a ClickFix lure. More than 130 compromised lure websites have been detected so far as part of the campaign. "Compromised websites are injected with a script named tracker.js, appearing as 'JokerStat Analytics Tracker,'" Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said. "In addition to the clipboard injection, this script performs screenshot and victim-session telemetry exfiltration every 2 minutes." When a victim visits a compromised site, the injected JavaScript performs a blockchain lookup to fetch the C2 server URL. "After C2 resolution, tracker.js starts collecting victim telemetry, including pageview events, heartbeat and screenshots," Unit 42 said. "The same tracker.js then injects the clipboard content personalized per victim. The victim sees a fake CAPTCHA overlay and follows the instructions leading to a ClickFix attack." The attack culminates with the deployment of an infostealer written in Ruby. 2 Venezuela Nationals Sentenced in ATM Jackpotting Attacks — Two illegal aliens from Venezuela, Carlos Javier Padron, 36, and Arnoldo Cabrera Torrealba, 37, were sentenced to 78 months in prison in the U.S. for their involvement in ATM jackpotting activities. The two individuals pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit bank burglary and one count of computer fraud and intentional damage to a protected computer. The defendants built and deployed a variant of the Ploutus malware on ATMs across the country and used it to withdraw money without authorization. "The conspiracy relied on individuals, including Padron and Torrealba, to deploy the Ploutus malware onto ATMs in person," the U.S. Justice Department said. "Once installed and activated, the malware permitted the co-conspirators to issue commands to the cash dispensing module of the ATM in order to force unauthorized withdrawals of currency." Padron and Torrealba were also ordered to jointly pay $1.53 million in restitution. More than 90 other defendants have been charged over their roles in the operation. Bypassing Microsoft Entra Conditional Access Policies — NetSPI said it found a way to bypass Microsoft Entra Conditional Access Policies by abusing Nested App Authentication to return access tokens for the Microsoft Graph API. "It was possible to use certain Nested App Authentication (or BroCI) flows to bypass any Conditional Access policy," security researcher Thomas Byrne said. "This vulnerability served mainly as a persistence mechanism as it would have required a successful phishing attack to return an initial refresh token before the vulnerable authentication flows could be carried out." A fix for the issue has since been rolled out by Microsoft. Threat Actors Target Laravel Livewire Flaw — More than 6,100 applications have been compromised as part of a campaign targeting CVE-2025-54068, a critical unauthenticated RCE vulnerability in Laravel Livewire, to deliver a credential stealer by means of a shell script. The stealer harvests database-related configurations, Stripe secret keys, SMTP passwords, Google OAuth client secrets, JWT secrets, and AWS IAM credentials from .env files and exfiltrates them to a remote server. The campaign is assessed to have been underway for several months. "Recovery and analysis of the attacker's exfiltration infrastructure revealed credentials harvested from 6,167 distinct applications spanning dozens of countries and sectors, from e-commerce and healthcare to financial services, education, and government," Imperva said. "The attacker’s FTP server contained 1,851+ database dumps and 18+ email lists with over 26 million addresses, indicating the stolen credentials were being actively exploited." The activity has been attributed to an Indonesian-origin threat actor. Booking.com Partner Firms Targeted in TONResolver Campaign — Attackers are targeting employees of Booking.com partner companies in Japan using phishing emails that impersonate guest complaints and review requests to trick hotel staff into executing malicious files. The emails are sent using the notification functionality of a scheduling tool service, allowing them to bypass SPF, DKIM, and DMARC checks. The attacks led to the deployment of TONResolver, which abuses the Open Network (TON) blockchain platform as a dead drop resolver. "In this attack, a ZIP file was downloaded by accessing a hyperlink to a suspicious website, and the infection began when the user clicked a shortcut link file (LNK) disguised as a photo file within the ZIP archive," Trend Micro said. This triggers the execution of PowerShell that fetches and runs the JavaScript-based TONResolver malware using "node.exe," a core executable file for Node.js. The malware then connects to the C2 server obtained from the TON platform for additional attack execution and sends commands. Mamont Android Malware Dissected — An Android malware called Mamont is distributed via dropper apps masquerading as dating services to facilitate financial fraud. "The dropper and its embedded companion APK work in tandem to silently install, launch, and maintain control over the victim device while performing financial reconnaissance and awaiting attacker instructions," NCC Group said. A second variant of the malware has been found to serve phishing overlays inside Android WebView components at runtime, while also initiating phone calls, collecting installed applications, gathering device/network information, and manipulating system behavior to suppress notifications. "Additionally, it can execute commands dynamically based on input, indicating remote control functionality, and it reports execution results back through an internal handler or communication channel," security researcher Vamsi Pavuluri said. 2 Campaigns Deliver AsyncRAT — Phishing emails containing a Dropbox URL as well as macro-laced spreadsheets to distribute AsyncRAT malware. "When the recipient clicks on the link, a ZIP file is downloaded," Forcepoint said. "This file contains an Internet shortcut file in a .URL format. Opening this file leads to downloading multiple malware payloads in the background while the user is deceived by a legitimate-looking PDF opening. This file leads to a .lnk file, which then leads to a JavaScript file. This JS file links to a .BAT file, which hosts malicious content that ultimately delivers another ZIP file. This new ZIP file houses the Python script used to execute the AsyncRAT malware." The second campaign, detailed by LevelBlue, involves the use of generic emails targeting sales, procurement, and vendor management staff with a malicious spreadsheet that uses an embedded macro to download an HTA script, which then performs environment checks before delivering AsyncRAT or Remcos RAT. Clubfoot Wolf and Fluffy Wolf Targets Russia — BI.ZONE has disclosed cyber attacks mounted by an intrusion set it tracks as Clubfoot Wolf targeting a wide range of Russian sectors using spear-phishing emails to deliver NetSupport RAT to establish persistent remote access. A second threat cluster dubbed Fluffy Wolf has leveraged malicious email attachments and GitHub repository URLs to redirect recipients to ZIP archives that deliver PureLogs Stealer, PureRAT, and the Pay2Key ransomware. Also put to use in the attacks is a previously unreported C++ downloader called PowerLoader to fetch malicious PowerShell scripts from the C2 server over HTTP. In this attack chain, the loader is responsible for retrieving PureCrypter, which then launches the final payload. Multiple PhaaS Kits Spotted in the Wild — A number of phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) toolkits have been identified: CodeStorm (which is a tenant-aware Microsoft 365 phishing kit), ARToken (a fully-featured PhaaS operator panel that shares overlaps with EvilTokens, a device code phishing toolkit), Console (for harvesting AWS console credentials), Mirage2FA (which uses short-lived HTML smuggling and obfuscated JavaScript-loaders to deliver fake Microsoft 365 login pages), and Bluekit (which uses browser-in-the-middle technique to load the legitimate login page inside an attacker-controlled browser, causing the victim to log into their accounts on the attacker's machine). At the same time, reports indicate that the Tycoon 2FA PhaaS service has resurfaced with new infrastructure and obfuscation layers following its law enforcement takedown back in March 2026. These developments also coincide with a surge in device code phishing attacks that exploit legitimate OAuth flows. Specifically, the attack tricks users into entering a device code that then issues active cookies and tokens directly to the attacker's device, bypassing multi-factor authentication (MFA). In tandem, Chinese-language phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) communities are expanding in an area historically dominated by Russian-speaking cybercriminal groups. One such PhaaS service is the Darcula platform, linked to threat actor UNC5814, which has abandoned static phishing templates in favor of AI-powered page generators and browser automation tools, Loke Puppeteer, that can clone legitimate websites by replicating their HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and visual elements. Because each generated phishing page is unique, traditional signature-based detection methods are rendered ineffective. While PhaaS is at the core of these operations, these developers also typically offer numerous ancillary services, including the sale of personal and financial information. According to a report from Group-IB, data brokers active in Chinese-speaking dark web forums and Telegram channels are advertising large volumes of purportedly stolen data from organizations worldwide. These include marketplaces like Exchange Market, Chang’An Sleepless Night, Aiqianjin, Yiqun Data, and Phoenix Overseas Resources. 🔧 Cybersecurity Tools T3MP3ST → It is an open-source offensive security framework that connects to an AI coding agent and uses it to run authorized security tests across web apps, CTF-style challenges, source code, and other targets. It provides a browser War Room and CLI for recon, exploit testing, and reporting, while its maintainers state it should only be used on systems the user owns or has written permission to test. NOX → It is an open-source Go-based tool for attack surface management, reconnaissance, and vulnerability scanning. It can run passive checks, quick probes, custom YAML workflows, or a full scan using 299 built-in modules across OSINT, subdomains, DNS, ports, web fingerprinting, and deeper vulnerability tests. Its maintainers warn that active scans make real network requests and should only be run against systems the user owns or has written permission to test. Disclaimer: This is strictly for research and learning. It hasn't been through a formal security audit, so don't just blindly drop it into production. Read the code, break it in a sandbox first, and make sure whatever you’re doing stays on the right side of the law. Conclusion Most of this week’s problems did not need a clever attacker so much as a useful opening. A trusted device, a trusted repo, a trusted reset path, a trusted browser feature. That word did a lot of damage. Patch what is yours. Question what looks too clean. And maybe stop assuming the boring parts are safe just because they look boring.
thehackernews.comJul 6, 2026extracted