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Mondiali 2026, i cyber criminali non aspettano il fischio d’inizio: ecco come proteggersi
Ferve l’attesa per il calcio d’inizio dei Mondiali di calcio 2026, già nel mirino delle frodi via e-mail. Secondo Proofpoint, più di un terzo dei partner ufficiali ha già esposto il pubblico al rischio cyber. Secondo Sandro Sana, Ethical Hacker e membro Comitato Scientifico Cyber 4.0, “la Coppa del Mondo 2026 conferma un principio ormai evidente: i grandi eventi non attirano solo pubblico, sponsor e media, ma anche ecosistemi criminali già strutturati mesi prima del calcio d’inizio”. “La puntualità dei criminali non dovrebbe più sorprenderci. Senza dubbio non aspettano il fischio d’inizio e hanno già preparato il campo”, commenta Alessandro Curioni, Presidente e fondatore di DI.GI Academy. Indice degli argomenti I Mondiali di calcio 2026 si svolgeranno dall’11 giugno al 19 luglio 2026, ma, da uno studio di Proofpoint emerge che ben il 36% fra sponsor ufficiali, fornitori, partner e sostenitori associati non si avvale delle misure di sicurezza email, utili a proteggersi dall’impersonificazione del dominio, esponendo così tifosi, clienti e partner a un’escalation del rischio cyber di frodi via email in grado di sfruttare la fama e la fiducia di questi marchi. “Il dato dei domini malevoli, degli account fake e delle credenziali esposte dimostra che non siamo davanti a truffe improvvisate, ma a campagne industrializzate che sfruttano emozione, urgenza e fiducia nel brand“, evidenzia Sandro Sana. Infatti, tra gennaio e maggio 2026, si conta la registrazione di oltre 13.000 nuovi domini a tema FIFA World Cup 2026. Circa l’8,8% di questi domini è risultato malevolo o sospetto. “Il tifoso cerca un biglietto, uno streaming o un’offerta di viaggio; l’attaccante cerca il momento in cui abbassa la guardia”, continua Sana. industrializzate FortiGuard Labs ha inoltre rilevato più di 1.700 account e canali sospetti legati alla FIFA su piattaforme social e di messaggistica e identificato oltre 4.600 URL collegati alla FIFA presenti nei log degli infostealer, connessi a famiglie malware come Vidar, LummaC2 e RedLine. Da sempre, i cyber criminali puntano a trarre beneficio dai grandi eventi sportivi globali, per sferrare truffe di social engineering per fingersi sponsor, compagnie aeree, brand legati all’hospitality, servizi di delivery o brand consumer, sfrttando domini dall’aspetto affine ed email di spoofing. “Biglietti, streaming, merchandising, offerte di lavoro: ogni desiderio diventa una porta socchiusa, un’opportunità per applicare tecniche di ingegneria sociale”, avverte Curioni. Ad attirare i criminal hacker è il picco significativo di viaggi, la fame di biglietti, l’interesse per promozioni e attività di merchandising. “La Coppa del Mondo sarà una festa, ma in rete le feste attirano anche i borseggiatori”, sottolinea Curioni. Le aziende dovrebbero potenziare la sicurezza dell’intero ecosistema contro le minacce diffuse via email, principale vettore di attacco per le frodi. Inoltre l’AI aumenta il rischio di cadere vittime, attraverso messaggi credibili. Per esempio, stanno anche crescendo le truffe su WhatsApp, alimentate dall’aumento dell’uso dell’AI per spedire messaggi più convincenti, accompagnati perfino da deepfake e voci clonate. In appena mezz’ora le frodi via messaggio telefonico possono costare salatissime: secondo Kaspersky, le perdite ammontano in media a 770 euro per truffa. Per effettuare una verifica dello stato attuale delle difese dal rischio di impersonificazione, Proofpoint ha messo sotto la lente il livello di adozione del protocollo DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance), la prima linea difensiva dalle frodi via email, su una lista di domini degli sponsor della Coppa del Mondo. Negli ultimi anni, infatti, Proofpoint ha osservato i criminal hacker sfruttare sempre più frequentemente una gamma di tattiche per fingersi organizzazioni legittime, allo scopo di centrare i propri obiettivi, invece di compromettere ed infiltrarsi in reti e infrastrutture tecniche delle loro vittime. Secondo l’indagine di Proofpoint, dei 25 domini esaminati, 24 (96%) hanno pubblicato un record DMARC a livello base: significa che la maggior parte delle aziende ha iniziato la fase di implementazione di protezioni dall’impersonificazione dei domini email. Però, soltanto 16 dei 25 domini (64%) hanno implementato la protezione attiva del proprio nome con la policy DMARC più solida “reject”, per impedire la consegna di email non autenticate e spoofed. Dunque, oltre un terzo (il 36%) non riesce ancora a bloccare in modo proattivo le email fraudolente dedicate all’impersonificazione del proprio marchio. DMARC rappresenta un protocollo di autenticazione delle email, nato per tutelare i nomi di dominio dall’abuso da parte di attaccanti, tramite la convalida dell’identità del mittente prima di consentire a un messaggio di raggiungere la propria destinazione. Infatti DMARC dispone ditre livelli di difesa: monitoraggio, quarantena e reject (che costituisce la modalità più sicura per impedire a messaggi sospetti di arrivare nella casella di posta). L’adozione di DMARC permette a un’azienda di delineare l’applicazione del trattamento giusto ai messaggi email che sfruttano il suo nome di dominio, nonché della policy in caso di fallimento durante la verifica: accettare il messaggio email (p=nessuna, dove “p” sta per policy), classificarlo come spam (p=quarantena), o eliminarlo (p=reject). “Per aziende, operatori turistici, media, hospitality e infrastrutture coinvolte, la sicurezza non può partire il giorno dell’evento: deve essere già attiva ora, con monitoraggio del brand, threat intelligence, protezione delle identità e awareness mirata. Chi aspetta la partita inaugurale è già in ritardo”, conclude Sandro Sana. Conviene comunque diffidare di richieste urgenti, non effettuare clic su link ricevuti in messaggi inattesi e verificare sempre l’autenticità delle comunicazioni mediante i canali ufficiali. Inoltre, l’uso dell’autenticazione a più fattori e di password uniche per i servizi online aiuta a ridurre il rischio di violazioni successive. I tifosi dovrebbero dunque dimostrare particolare cautela in occasione del torneo e adottare i seguenti suggerimenti: Il modo più sicuro per l’acquisto dei biglietti è sul sito ufficiale della FIFA, che ha già adottato una policy DMARC completa di tipo ‘reject’.” Occorre essere diffidenti verso e-mail, SMS o chiamate non sollecitate, specialmente quelle che imprimono un senso di urgenza o spingono ad eseguire pagamenti immediati. Non bisogna mai effettuare condivisioni di informazioni finanziarie o password via email o SMS; nel dubbio, occorre contattare l’azienda tramite i canali ufficiali. Impostare una password unica per ogni account ed attivare l’autenticazione multi-fattore (MFA). “Al di là dei controlli, di canali ufficiali, vale molto di più la diffidenza verso l’occasione troppo perfetta. Per restare in una metafora calcistica, nel digitale il gol più pericoloso è quello che subiamo prima ancora di essere scesi in campo”, conclude Curioni.
cybersecurity360.itJun 10, 2026extracted
Telnyx joins LiteLLM in latest PyPI package poisoning tied to Trivy breach
INFOSEC IN BRIEF The cybercrime crew linked to the Trivy supply-chain attack has struck again, this time pushing malicious Telnyx package versions to PyPI in an effort to plant credential-stealing malware on developers’ systems. Ox Security warned on Friday that TeamPCP - the group researchers link to the recent compromise of open-source vulnerability scanner Trivy, which led to malicious LiteLLM packages appearing on PyPI - is back, this time with another compromise of a legitimate software package. In this case, the crew hit Telnyx, which offers VoIP services and AI voice agents. TeamPCP appears to have compromised the PyPI distribution of Telnyx’s Python SDK, replacing current package versions with malicious releases loaded with a multi-stage infostealer and persistence mechanisms. According to Ox, the malware added to the package is similar to the malicious code added to LiteLLM. According to Ox, the Telnyx malware's main difference from the LiteLLM package is how it's installed: Instead of embedding malicious code directly in the file, the Telnyx package downloads its malware in the form of a .wav file that's decoded and executed on the target machine. Telnyx told Ox in a post on X that it had found and resolved the issue, while noting that the only affected component was its Python package. None of Telnyx's infrastructure, networking, or other services or APIs were affected, according to the company, though anyone who installed the Python package while the malicious versions were live should treat that environment as compromised. Those worried they might be affected should check their installed Telnyx version — if you're running 4.87.1 or 4.87.2, Telnyx recommends treating the host as compromised and rotating any exposed credentials. Telnyx sees more than 34,000 downloads a week on PyPI, Ox noted, so it's possible quite a few developers and services pulled one of the malicious releases before they were removed. Alleged RedLine operator extradited to US The mastermind may still be at large, but one of the men alleged to be behind the development and administration of prolific infostealer RedLine is behind bars in the US after being extradited to face charges. Hambardzum Minasyan, an Armenian national, last week made his initial appearance in federal court in Austin, Texas, on charges of conspiracy to commit access device fraud, conspiracy to violate the CFAA, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. According to the indictment, Minasyan's part of RedLine's operations involved registering virtual private servers and domains to host RedLine infrastructure, as well as the creation of repositories used to host RedLine for distribution to affiliates. Minasyan also allegedly registered a cryptocurrency account used to receive RedLine affiliate payments. If convicted on all three charges, Minasyan faces up to 30 years in prison. Law enforcement first publicly identified alleged RedLine developer and administrator Maxim Rudometov in 2024, accusing the Russian national of helping build and run the infostealer operation. Last year, the US government offered a $10 million bounty for information on Rudometov and his co-conspirators. It's not clear whether any money was paid out in relation to the arrest of Minasyan. Snapchat, porn platforms, put on notice for DSA violations What does Snapchat have in common with Pornhub, Stripchat, and other porn platforms? All came under EU scrutiny last week under the Digital Services Act over alleged failures to protect minors online. In Snapchat's case, the matter is a bit earlier in proceedings, as Pornhub, Stripchat, XNXX, and XVideos were all preliminarily found last week to be in breach of the DSA for failing to implement effective age-verification measures that would keep minors off their services. According to the European Commission, all four platforms have a simple self-verification system in place requiring visitors to confirm they're over 18 without any formal checks in place. As this is a preliminary finding, the Commission is now giving the porno-pushers an opportunity to respond. The Commission suspects that Snapchat has a similar weakness in relying on self-declaration, noting the platform's age-assurance measures may be insufficient. "The Commission suspects that Snapchat is not adequately protecting minors from being contacted by users with harmful intent, such as sexual exploitation or recruitment for criminal activities," the EC explained. The Commission will now carry out an in-depth investigation into Snapchat before deciding whether to take further enforcement steps. LAPSUS$ spills alleged AstraZeneca data The cybercriminals behind the LAPSUS$ threat group have released 2.66 GB of data allegedly stolen from drug maker AstraZeneca, and threat watchers say it could become one of the more serious healthcare cyber incidents of 2026 so far if the claims hold up. According to SOCRadar, LAPSUS$ claimed to have hit AstraZeneca recently, making off with what they claim are internal code repositories, access-related data, cloud and infrastructure references, and employee records - data which could be devastating to the company in the hands of the right - or wrong - person. Per SOCRadar, the data they reviewed "points to a potentially meaningful internal code and operations exposure rather than a small credential-only leak." They warn that the purportedly stolen data could be used for follow-on intrusions, to target phishing attacks, and to compromise AstraZeneca partners in supply chain attacks. LAPSUS$ released the full dataset over the weekend, SOCRadar reported. US National Lab creates exascale AI model vulnerability detector Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have created what they say is an efficient, effective AI vulnerability detection machine that can operate at the exascale level, and all it took was turning a friendly neural network optimization bot into an exploitative one. "It might sound devious, but it's worked very well," said ORNL Center for Artificial Intelligence Security Research director Edmon Begoli. Photon, as the ORNL team dubbed it, is designed to explore, discover, and exploit AI vulnerabilities at scale. According to the team, it starts by applying publicly known attacks against a target model and refining them based on the results. Simultaneously, the team said, it continues exploring the model for new weaknesses, which it can then exploit as part of an ongoing cycle to refine the most effective attacks it finds. Photon is also able to significantly reduce bottlenecks and auxiliary tasks associated with red team AI campaigns - per the team, it scaled without loss of computational efficiency, and maintained 95 percent resource utilization across 1,920 GPUs on the lab's Frontier supercomputer. And there's the rub: This thing can find and exploit anything it can find in an AI model, but such capabilities are limited to supercomputing labs for now. "Photon represents a paradigm shift in how we approach AI security," Begoli said. Thankfully it won't be something bad actors will have the resources to utilize for some time. ®
go.theregister.comMar 30, 2026extracted
⚡ Weekly Recap: Telecom Sleeper Cells, LLM Jailbreaks, Apple Forces U.K. Age Checks and More
Some weeks are loud. This one was quieter but not in a good way. Long-running operations are finally hitting courtrooms, old attack methods are showing up in new places, and research that stopped being theoretical right around the time defenders stopped paying attention. There's a bit of everything this week. Persistence plays, legal wins, influence ops, and at least one thing that looks boring until you see what it connects to. All of it below. Let's go. ⚡ Threat of the Week Citrix Flaw Comes Under Active Exploitation — A critical security flaw in Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway (CVE-2026-3055, CVSS score: 9.3) has come under active exploitation as of March 27, 2026. The vulnerability refers to a case of insufficient input validation leading to memory overread, which an attacker could exploit to leak potentially sensitive information. Per Citrix, successful exploitation of the flaw hinges on the appliance being configured as a SAML Identity Provider (SAML IDP). Your Engineers Are Drowning in Tools — Here's the Data Chainguard surveyed 1,200 engineers and tech leaders for their 2026 Engineering Reality Report. AI is buying back time but also introducing new security concerns, while technical debt, tool sprawl, and burnout keep dragging teams down. 72% say time pressure blocks new feature work; 88% report productivity loss from too many tools. Get the Full Report ➝ 🔔 Top News FBI Confirms Hack of Director Kash Patel's Personal Email Account — The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) confirmed that threat actors gained access to an email account belonging to FBI Director Kash Patel, but said no government information has been compromised. The Iran-linked hacker group Handala claimed responsibility for the hack, releasing files allegedly representing photos, emails, and classified documents taken from the FBI director's inbox. "The so-called 'impenetrable' systems of the FBI were brought to their knees within hours by our team," the hackers wrote. It's unclear when the account was hacked. The U.S. government, which recently took down multiple sites operated by Iranian state actors, said it's offering up to $10 million for information on threat groups like Parsian Afzar Rayan Borna and Handala. Parsian Afzar Rayan Borna is an IT company that's been implicated in Iran's disinformation and surveillance campaigns. The company is assessed to be linked to Banished Kitten, an Iran-nexus adversary active since at least 2008 and operates the Homeland Justice and Handala Hack personas. Red Menshen Uses Stealthy BPFDoor to Spy on Telecom Networks — A China-linked state-sponsored threat actor known as Red Menshen has deployed kernel implants and passive backdoors deep within telecommunication backbone infrastructure worldwide for long-term persistence. The implants have been fittingly described as sleeper cells that lie dormant and blend into target environments, but spring into action upon receiving a magic packet by quietly monitoring network traffic instead of opening a visible connection. Initial access is usually gained by exploiting known vulnerabilities in edge networking devices and VPN products or by leveraging compromised accounts. Once inside, the threat actor maintains long-term access by deploying tools like BPFdoor. Some BPFdoor samples mimic bare-metal infrastructure, posing as legitimate enterprise platforms to blend into operational noise. Others spoof core containerization components. By embedding the implant deep below traditional visibility layers, the goal is to significantly complicate detection efforts. Rapid7 has released a scanning script designed to detect known BPFDoor variants across Linux environments. GlassWorm Evolves to Drop Extension-Based Stealer — A new evolution of the GlassWorm campaign is delivering a multi-stage framework capable of comprehensive data theft and installing a remote access trojan (RAT), which deploys an information-stealing Google Chrome extension masquerading as an offline version of Google Docs. "It logs keystrokes, dumps cookies and session tokens, captures screenshots, and takes commands from a C2 server hidden in a Solana blockchain memo," Aikido said. GlassWorm is the moniker assigned to a persistent campaign that obtains an initial foothold through rogue packages published across npm, PyPI, GitHub, and the Open VSX marketplace. In addition, the operators are known to compromise the accounts of project maintainers to push poisoned updates. Russian Hacker Sentenced to 2 Years for TA551-Linked Ransomware Attacks — Ilya Angelov, a 40-year-old Russian national, was sentenced to two years in prison for managing a botnet that was used to launch ransomware attacks against U.S. companies. Angelov, who went by the online aliases "milan" and "okart," is said to have co-managed a Russia-based cybercriminal group known as TA551 (aka ATK236, G0127, Gold Cabin, Hive0106, Mario Kart, Monster Libra, Shathak, and UNC2420) between 2017 and 2021. The attacks leveraged spam emails to compromise systems and rope them into a botnet that other cybercriminals used to break into corporate systems and deploy ransomware. This included threat actors affiliated with BitPaymer and IcedID. FCC Bans New Foreign-Made Routers Over Security Risks — The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) said it was banning the import of new, foreign-made consumer routers, citing "unacceptable" risks to cyber and national security. To that end, all consumer-grade routers manufactured in foreign countries have been added to the Covered List, unless they have been granted a Conditional Approval by the Department of War (DoW) or the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) after determining that they do not pose any risks. The development comes as the Indian government appears to be preparing to bar Chinese CCTV product makers, such as Hikvision, Dahua, and TP-Link, from selling their cameras from April 1, 2026, to tighten oversight under the Standardisation Testing and Quality Certification (STQC) rules, the Economic Times reported. ️🔥 Trending CVEs New vulnerabilities show up every week, and the window between disclosure and exploitation keeps getting shorter. The flaws below are this week's most critical — high-severity, widely used software, or already drawing attention from the security community. Check these first, patch what applies, and don't wait on the ones marked urgent — CVE-2026-3055 (Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway), CVE-2025-62843, CVE-2025-62844, CVE-2025-62845, CVE-2025-62846 (QNAP), CVE-2026-22898 (QNAP QVR Pro), CVE-2026-4673, CVE-2026-4677, CVE-2026-4674 (Google Chrome), CVE-2026-4404 (GoHarbor Harbor), CVE-2026-1995 (IDrive for Windows), CVE-2026-4681 (Windchill and FlexPLM), CVE-2025-15517, CVE-2025-15518, CVE-2025-15519, CVE-2025-15605, CVE-2025-62673 (TP-Link),CVE-2025-66176 (HikVision), CVE-2026-32647 (NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus), CVE-2026-22765, CVE-2026-22766 (Dell Wyse Management Suite), CVE-2026-21637, CVE-2026-21710 (Node.js), CVE-2026-25185 aka LnkMeMaybe (Microsoft), CVE-2026-1519, CVE-2026-3104, CVE-2026-3119, CVE-2026-3591 (BIND 9), CVE-2026-2931 (Amelia Booking plugin), CVE-2026-33656 (EspoCRM), CVE-2026-3608 (Kea), CVE-2026-20817 (Microsoft Windows Error Reporting), CVE-2025-33244 (NVIDIA Apex), CVE-2026-32746 (Synology DiskStation Manager), and CVE-2026-3098 (Smart Slider 3 plugin). 🎥 Cybersecurity Webinars Your Identity Program Is Mature. So Why Are You Still Getting Breached? → Your identity program is mature. Yet hundreds of apps still operate outside it. New 2026 Ponemon research from 600+ security leaders shows exactly how big that gap is and what it costs. Now, AI agents are making it worse. This webinar breaks down the findings and shows you what to fix first. Everyone Agrees AI Agents Need Identity. Almost Nobody Knows How to Do It → Everyone agrees AI agents need identity. Few know how to actually do it. This session skips the theory and shows you what a real production deployment looks like, including how to give agents strong identities, see exactly what they're doing, and control how they behave. 📰 Around the Cyber World Fortinet FortiClient EMS Flaw Comes Under Attack — A recently patched security flaw affecting Fortinet FortiClient EMS has come under active exploitation in the wild as of March 24, 2026. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-21643 (CVSS score: 9.1), a critical SQL injection that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute unauthorized code or commands via specifically crafted HTTP requests. The issue was addressed by Fortinet last month in FortiClient EMS version 7.4.5. "Attackers can smuggle SQL statements through the 'Site'-header inside an HTTP request," Defused Cyber said. Nearly 1,000 FortiClient EMS are publicly exposed. Meta Disrupts Influence Operation Linked to Iran — Meta said it disrupted an influence operation linked to Iran that employed "sophisticated fake personas" on Instagram to build relationships with U.S. users before sending political messaging. The network used accounts posing as journalists, commentators, and ordinary people to engage users and gradually introduce political narratives. A second layer of accounts amplified posts to help spread the messaging. Armenian National Extradited to U.S. in Connection with RedLine Stealer Operations — An Armenian national has been extradited to the United States over his alleged role in the administration of the RedLine infostealer malware. Hambardzum Minasyan, per court documents, allegedly developed and managed the stealer, while unnamed conspirators maintained digital infrastructure, including the command-and-control (C2) servers and administrative panels to enable the deployment of the malware by affiliates, and collected payments from the affiliates. "They allegedly responded to questions and requests from actual and potential RedLine affiliates, conspired with each other and affiliates to steal and possess the financial information, including access devices, of victims, and laundered the proceeds of cybercrime through cryptocurrency exchanges and other means," the U.S. Justice Department said. Minasyan has also been accused of registering two virtual private servers to host portions of RedLine's infrastructure, as well as two internet domains in support of the scheme, repositories on an online file sharing site to distribute the stealer to affiliates, and registering a cryptocurrency account in November 2021 to receive payments. RedLine Stealer was disrupted in an international law enforcement operation in October 2024. Minasyan has been charged with conspiracy to commit access device fraud, conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison for access device fraud and up to 20 years in prison for the other two counts. In June 2025, the U.S. Department of State announced a $10 million reward for information on Maxim Alexandrovich Rudometov, who is believed to be the main developer and administrator of RedLine. New Android Malware "Android God Mode" Abuses Accessibility Permissions — The Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C) has issued an advisory, alerting users of a new Android malware called Android God Mode that abuses its permissions to accessibility services to seize control of infected devices. The malware is propagated via dropper apps that masquerade as banking, public, and utility services such as SBI YONO, Jivan Parman Patra, and RTO Challan, indicating that the campaign's focus is on targeting Indian users. "By coercing users into granting elevated Android permissions, these threats achieve near-total control over the device, enabling stealthy overlay attacks and the real-time theft of sensitive financial and personal information," the I4C said. The malware is distributed in the form of links or APK files shared through WhatsApp. Once installed, it abuses Android's accessibility services to grant itself additional permissions to harvest incoming SMS messages, send messages on the victim's behalf, access contact lists, initiate fraudulent call forwarding, and take pictures using the device's camera. Android 17 Beta Gains New Security Features — To improve security against code injection attacks, Android now enforces that dynamically loaded native libraries must be read-only. If your app targets Android 17 or higher, all native files loaded using System.load() must be marked as read-only beforehand. Another new addition is the support for Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) through the new v3.2 APK Signature Scheme. This scheme utilizes a hybrid approach, combining a classical signature with an ML-DSA signature. China-Linked Actors Deliver Mofu Loader and KIVARS — In recent months, Chinese-affiliated espionage clusters like DRBControl have employed DLL side-loading techniques to deliver Mofu Loader – a malware previously attributed to GroundPeony – which then drops a C++ backdoor capable of executing commands issued by an attacker-controlled server. Last year, companies and organizations in Japan and Taiwan have also been targeted by variants of a backdoor called KIVARS, which is tied to a Chinese hacking group called BlackTech. Automated Traffic Outpaces Human Traffic — HUMAN Security found that automated traffic grew eight times faster than human traffic year-over-year. "In 2025, automated traffic across the internet grew 23.51% year over year, while human traffic increased 3.10% over the same period," the company said. The cybersecurity company noted that its customers experienced more than 400,000 attempted post-login account compromise attacks, more than quadruple that of 2024. U.S. Accuses China of Backing Scam Compounds — A senior U.S. official accused Beijing of implicitly backing Chinese criminal syndicates running cyber scam compounds across Southeast Asia. Speaking during a Joint Economic Committee congressional hearing about U.S. efforts to combat digital scams, Reva Price, commissioner with the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, said links have been unearthed between scam centers and the Chinese government's Belt and Road Initiative. Chinese criminal syndicates have "invested in projects linked to China's Belt and Road Initiative alongside China's state-owned enterprises," she said, adding that they "have also seen criminal leaders who appear to have gotten a pass by promoting messaging and other activities aligned with Chinese Communist Party priorities." Scam centers in Southeast Asia are often operated by Chinese crime syndicates that lure people into the region with enticing job opportunities and coerce them into participating in pig butchering or romance baiting scams by confiscating their passports and subjecting them to torture. Exploitation Against Oracle WebLogic Servers — A recently disclosed security flaw in Oracle WebLogic (CVE-2026-21962, CVSS score: 10.0) witnessed automated exploitation attempts almost immediately after public exploit code was released, demonstrating how software flaws are being rapidly weaponized by bad actors. The activity, detected by CloudSEK against its honeypots, also leveraged other WebLogic flaws (CVE-2020-14882, CVE-2020-14883, CVE-2020-2551, and CVE-2017-10271), as well as flaws impacting Hikvision and PHPUnit, indicating a spray and pray approach. "Attackers predominantly utilized rented Virtual Private Servers (VPS) from common hosting providers like DigitalOcean and HOSTGLOBAL.PLUS," the company said. "The overall activity was characterized by high-volume, automated scanning, with tools like libredtail-http and the Nmap Scripting Engine dominating the malicious traffic." Security Flaws in Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches — Details have emerged about now-patched vulnerabilities in Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series switches (CVE-2026-20110, CVE-2026-20112, CVE-2026-20113, and CVE-2026-20114) that could result in privilege escalation, operational denial-of-service, stored cross-site scripting (XSS), and CRLF injection. "Collectively, these vulnerabilities introduce risks to administrative trust boundaries, service availability, session integrity, and system log reliability – affecting both operational continuity and security monitoring capabilities," OPSWAT said. "CVE-2026-20114 and CVE-2026-20110 are the most operationally impactful when chained. A low-privilege Web UI user can escalate access and invoke a maintenance-mode operation, resulting in full denial of service that may require physical intervention to restore." The issues were patched by Cisco last week. Financial Institution Targeted by BRUSHWORM and BRUSHLOGGER — A modular backdoor with USB-based spreading capabilities was used in an attack targeting an unnamed South Asian financial institution, according to findings from Elastic Security Labs. The malware, dubbed BRUSHWORM, is one of the two malware components identified in the victim's infrastructure, the other being a DLL keylogger referred to as BRUSHLOGGER. "BRUSHWORM features anti-analysis checks, AES-CBC encrypted configuration, scheduled task persistence, modular DLL payload downloading, USB worm propagation, and broad file theft targeting documents, spreadsheets, email archives, and source code," security researcher Salim Bitam said. BRUSHWORM is also responsible for running basic anti-analysis checks, maintaining persistence, command-and-control (C2) communication, and downloading additional modular payloads. BRUSHLOGGER augments the backdoor by capturing system-wide keystrokes via a simple Windows keyboard hook and logging the active window context for each keystroke session. "Neither binary employs meaningful code obfuscation, packing, or advanced anti-analysis techniques," Elastic said. "Given the absence of a kill switch, the use of free dynamic DNS servers in testing versions, and some coding mistakes, we assess with moderate confidence that the author is relatively inexperienced and may have leveraged AI code-generation tools during development without fully reviewing the output." U.K. Sanctions Xinbi — The U.K.'s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has sanctioned Xinbi, a Chinese-language guarantee marketplace accused of enabling large-scale online fraud and human exploitation by supporting #8 Park (aka Legend Park), an industrial-scale scam compound in Cambodia notorious for large-scale pig butchering scams and forced labor of trafficked workers. The U.K. is the first country to sanction Xinbi. The move is designed to isolate Xinbi from the legitimate crypto ecosystem and disrupt its operations. Xinbi is estimated to have processed over $19.9 billion between 2021 and 2025. "The platform facilitates everything from 'Black U' money laundering and unlicensed OTC trades to the sale of compromised personal databases and scam infrastructure," Chainalysis said. "In the face of previous takedowns, Xinbi demonstrated significant resilience by rapidly migrating to the SafeW messaging app and launching its own proprietary payment app, XinbiPay. This evolution highlights the challenges around pursuing illicit services as they build custom financial rails to insulate themselves from platform-level disruptions." According to a report published by Elliptic last month, #8 Park is linked to a company named Legend Innovation, which, in turn, has ties to Prince Group, whose chairman, Chen Zhi, was arrested and extradited to China in connection with a crackdown on a large-scale fraud operation. #8 Park is also tied to HuiOne Group, with its payment business, HuiOne Pay (later rebranded as H-PAY), which operates a physical store within the compound. There has since been a sharp decline in incoming payments to merchants operating inside the compound beginning around February 9, 2026, with transactions almost entirely ceasing by February 13. What is Tsundere? — Tsundere is a botnet that enables system fingerprinting and arbitrary command execution on victim machines. It's notable for the use of a technique called EtherHiding to retrieve command-and-control (C2) servers stored in smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. The malware is suspected to be a Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) offering of Russian origin, owing to logic that checks whether the infected host is located in a CIS country, including Ukraine, and terminates execution if so. Most recently, the use of the botnet has been linked to the Iranian state-sponsored actor MuddyWater. Jailbreaking, a Continued Risk to LLMs — New research from Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 has uncovered that prompt jailbreaking remains a practical risk to large language models (LLMs) and that a genetic algorithm-based fuzzing approach can be used to generate meaning-preserving prompt variants to trigger policy-violating outcomes against both closed-source and open-weight pre-trained models. "The broader implication is that guardrails should be treated as probabilistic controls that require continuous adversarial evaluation, not as definitive security boundaries," Unit 42 said. The findings reinforce that security for LLM applications cannot rely on a single layer, necessitating that organizations define and enforce application scope, use robust, multi-signal content controls, treat user input as untrusted and isolate it from privileged instructions, validate outputs against scope and policy, and monitor for misuse, and apply standard security controls, such as authentication, rate limiting, and and least privilege tool permissions. SEO Campaign Delivers AsyncRAT — Since October 2025, an unknown threat actor has been running an active SEO poisoning campaign, using impersonation sites of over 25 popular applications to direct victims to malicious installers, including VLC Media Player, OBS Studio, KMS Tools, and CrosshairX. The campaign uses ScreenConnect, a legitimate remote management tool, to establish initial access and to deliver AsyncRAT. "Most notable in this campaign is the RAT’s added cryptocurrency clipper, dynamic plugin system capable of loading arbitrary capabilities at runtime, and a geo-fencing mechanism that deliberately excludes targets across the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia," NCC Group said. AsyncRAT has also been delivered as part of a series of attacks on Libyan organizations between November 2025 and February 2026. The attacks targeted an oil refinery, a telecoms organization, and a state institution. "AsyncRAT is a remote access Trojan with a variety of capabilities, including keylogging, screen capture, and remote command execution capabilities, making it ideal for use in intelligence gathering and espionage attacks," Symantec and Carbon Black said. "It is also modular, meaning it can be updated and customized, which is attractive for attackers." Nigerian National Sentenced to 7 Years in Prison — A Nigerian man has been sentenced to more than seven years in a U.S. prison for his role in a scheme that broke into business email accounts and tricked victims into sending millions of dollars to fraudulent bank accounts. James Junior Aliyu, 31, received a 90-month prison sentence for conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering. The court also ordered Aliyu to forfeit $1.2 million and repay nearly $2.39 million to the victims. Aliyu, who pleaded guilty in August 2025, acknowledged that he conspired with others, including Kosi Goodness Simon-Ebo, 31, and Henry Onyedikachi Echefu, 34, to deceive and defraud multiple American victims from February 2017 until at least July 2017. The business email compromise scheme targeted American businesses and individuals by compromising email accounts and sending false wiring instructions to deceive victims into sending money to bank accounts under their control. "Aliyu and his accomplices conspired to commit money laundering by disbursing the fraudulently obtained funds in the drop accounts to other accounts," the U.S. Justice Department said. "Co-conspirators moved the stolen money by initiating account transfers, withdrawing cash, and obtaining cashier’s checks. They also wrote checks to other individuals and entities to hide the true ownership and source of these assets. In total, Aliyu and his co-conspirators attempted to defraud victims of at least $10.4 million, and the victims suffered an actual loss of at least $2,389,130." Sensor Technology to Combat Deepfakes — Researchers at ETH Zürich have developed a sensor system that stamps a cryptographic signature onto images, video, and audio within a sensor chip at the exact moment they are captured, making it impossible to tamper with the data without being detected. "If the signatures are uploaded to a public ledger (e.g., a blockchain), anyone can verify the authenticity of videos and other data," ETH Zürich said. "The technology can, in principle, be integrated into any type of sensor or camera. It would then be possible to identify manipulated content on online platforms with minimal effort." Middle East Conflict Fuels Cyber Attacks — Threat actors have been capitalizing on geopolitical tensions in the Middle East region to spread Android spyware by distributing trojanized versions of Israel's Red Alert apps via SMS phishing messages. The espionage campaign has been codenamed Operation False Siren by CYFIRMA. ZIP archives containing lures related to the conflict are also being used to launch malicious payloads that lead to the deployment of PlugX and LOTUSLITE backdoors. These ZIP-based phishing campaigns have been attributed to a Chinese nation-state actor known as Mustang Panda. Elsewhere, an Iran-themed fake news blog site hosting malicious JavaScript has been found, leading to the deployment of StealC malware. Apple Tests Ways to Block Malicious Copy-Pastes in macOS — With the release of macOS 26.4 last week, Apple has introduced a new feature that warns Mac users if they paste harmful commands in the Terminal app to curb ClickFix-style attacks that have increasingly targeted macOS in recent months. "Scammers often encourage pasting text into Terminal to try and harm your Mac or compromise your privacy," the message reads. "These instructions are commonly offered via websites, chat agents, apps, files, or a phone call." The alert comes with a "Paste Anyway" for those who wish to proceed. The disclosure comes as multiple ClickFix campaigns have come to light, including using a Cloudflare-themed verification page to deliver a Python-based macOS stealer dubbed Infiniti Stealer. A similar Cloudflare verification, but for Windows, has been used to launch PowerShell commands that ultimately drop StealC, Lumma, Rhadamanthys, Vidar Stealer, and Aura Stealer malware. The ClickFix strategy has also been adopted by a traffic distribution system known as KongTuke to redirect visitors of compromised WordPress websites to phishing pages and malware payloads. According to eSentire, ClickFix lures have been used to deliver EtherRAT, a Node.js-based backdoor linked to North Korean threat actors. "EtherRAT allows threat actors to run arbitrary commands on compromised hosts, gather extensive system information, and steal assets such as cryptocurrency wallets and cloud credentials," the Canadian security company said. "Command-and-Control (C2) addresses are retrieved using 'EtherHiding,' a technique to make C2 addresses more resilient by storing and updating them in Ethereum smart contracts, allowing threat actors to rotate infrastructure at a small cost and avoid takedowns by law enforcement." Recorded Future said it has identified five distinct clusters leveraging ClickFix to facilitate initial access to Windows and macOS systems since May 2024. "This indicates that the ClickFix methodology has transitioned into a standardized, high-ROI template adopted across a fragmented ecosystem of threat actors," Insikt Group said. "While visually diverse, all analyzed clusters use a consistent execution framework that bypasses traditional browser security controls by shifting the point of exploitation to user-assisted manual commands. These campaigns target a wide variety of sectors, including accounting (QuickBooks), travel (Booking.com), and system optimization (macOS)." Apple Rolls Out Mandatory Age Verification in U.K. — In more Apple news, the tech giant has rolled out mandatory U.K. age verification with iOS 26.4, requiring users to provide a credit card or ID to confirm if they are an adult before "downloading apps, changing certain settings, or taking other actions with your Apple Account." The move comes at a time when online child safety is increasingly drawing attention from regulators, causing many digital services, including social media apps and porn sites, to roll out similar checks. Discord, which announced plans to verify the ages of all its users last month, has since paused the effort until H2 2026 after concerns were raised about how IDs and personal information would be handled. Discord has reiterated that it does not receive any identifying personal information from users who need to manually verify their age. Instead, it is partnering with third-party age verification companies, who will "handle verification and only pass back your age group." The company also said it's no longer working with age verification vendor Persona, which has attracted criticism over allegations that it shared users' data with other companies and left its frontend source code exposed to the internet. 🔧 Cybersecurity Tools OpenClaw Security Handbook → It is a detailed security guide published by ZAST AI for users of OpenClaw, a multi-channel AI gateway that connects messaging platforms, LLMs, and local system capabilities. Because that combination creates a serious attack surface, the handbook covers the real risks — prompt injection, malicious skills, exposed ports, credential theft — backed by documented incidents and CVEs, with practical configuration guidance for locking it down. VulHunt → It is an open-source framework from Binarly's research team for hunting vulnerabilities in software binaries and UEFI firmware. It uses customizable rulepacks for scanning and can connect to Binarly's Transparency Platform for large-scale triage. It also supports running as an MCP server, letting AI assistants interact with it directly. Disclaimer: For research and educational use only. Not security-audited. Review all code before use, test in isolated environments, and ensure compliance with applicable laws. Conclusion That's the week. Some of it will age well, some of it is already being quietly exploited while you're reading this sentence. The through-line, if there is one: patience. Attackers are playing long games. The detections, the arrests, the patches — they matter, but they're almost always trailing. Stay sharp, check the CVE list, and see you next Monday.
thehackernews.comMar 30, 2026extracted
Week in review: NIST updates DNS security guidance, compromised LiteLLM PyPI packages
Week in review: NIST updates DNS security guidance, compromised LiteLLM PyPI packages Here’s an overview of some of last week’s most interesting news, articles, interviews and videos: NIST updates its DNS security guidance for the first time in over a decade DNS infrastructure underpins nearly every network connection an organization makes, yet security configurations for it have gone largely unrevised at the federal guidance level for more than twelve years. NIST published SP 800-81r3, the Secure Domain Name System Deployment Guide, superseding a version that dates to 2013. The document covers three main areas: using DNS as an active security control, securing the DNS protocol itself, and protecting the servers and infrastructure that run DNS services. Attackers are exploiting RCE vulnerability in BIG-IP APM systems (CVE-2025-53521) A critical unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2025-53521) in F5’s BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) solution is under active exploitation, the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned on Friday. Your AI agents are moving sensitive data. Do you know where? In this Help Net Security interview, Gidi Cohen, CEO at Bonfy.AI, addresses what he sees as the most pressing gap in AI agent security: data-layer risk. While the industry focuses on prompt injection and model behavior, Cohen argues the deeper threat is autonomous AI agents operating across systems with no visibility into what data they access, combine, or expose. Quantum threats are already active and the defense response remains fragmented Enterprises are moving toward post-quantum security at uneven speeds, and the gap between organizations that have built crypto-agility into their infrastructure and those that have adopted the label without the underlying capability is widening. Dr. Tan Teik Guan, CEO of Singapore-based cybersecurity company pQCee, draws a sharp line between the two. Crypto-agility, in his view, requires more than support for multiple algorithms or protocol-level negotiation. Measuring security performance in real-time, not once a quarter Most organizations have invested heavily in security products over the past decade. The assumption embedded in that spending is that more tools equal better protection. Tim Nan, CEO of digiDations, says that assumption is the most persistent misconception he encounters when working with security leaders across industries. NVIDIA puts GPU orchestration in community hands GPU-accelerated AI workloads now run on Kubernetes in the large majority of enterprise environments. Managing those workloads at scale has required specialized tooling that, until now, remained under vendor control. NVIDIA moved to change that at KubeCon Europe in Amsterdam this week, donating its Dynamic Resource Allocation (DRA) Driver for GPUs to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). TeamPCP strikes again: Backdoored Telnyx PyPI package delivers malware TeamPCP continues is supply chain compromise rampage, with telnyx on PyPI being the latest maliciously modified package. The AI safety conversation is focused on the wrong layer Organizations have spent years accumulating fragmented identity systems: too many roles, too many credentials, too many disconnected tools. For a workforce of humans, that fragmentation was manageable. Humans log in, log out, and make decisions slowly enough that gaps in control rarely turned into immediate incidents. AI agents operate differently. Training an AI agent to attack LLM applications like a real adversary Most enterprise software development teams now ship AI-powered applications faster than traditional penetration testing can keep up with. A security team with 500 applications may test each one once a year, or less. In the time between tests, the underlying models, integrations, and behaviors can change, with no corresponding security review. Novee launched a product it calls AI Red Teaming for LLM Applications, an AI pentesting agent built specifically to probe LLM-powered software. Your facilities run on fragile supply chains and nobody wants to admit it In this Help Net Security interview, Christa Dodoo, Global Chair at IFMA, discusses how facility managers are managing supply chain risk in critical building systems. She explains how sourcing, localized redundancy, and flexible infrastructure design are being integrated into resilience planning. A nearly undetectable LLM attack needs only a handful of poisoned samples Prompt engineering has become a standard part of how large language models are deployed in production, and it introduces an attack surface most organizations have not yet addressed. Researchers have developed and tested a prompt-based backdoor attack method, called ProAttack, that achieves attack success rates approaching 100% on multiple text classification benchmarks without altering sample labels or injecting external trigger words. AI SOC vendors are selling a future that production deployments haven’t reached yet Vendors selling AI-powered security operations platforms have built their pitches around a consistent set of promises: autonomous threat investigation, dramatic reductions in analyst workload, and an accelerating path toward humanless operations. Practitioners buying and deploying those platforms describe something different. Top product launches at RSAC 2026 RSAC 2026 showcased a wave of innovation, with vendors unveiling technologies poised to redefine cybersecurity. From AI-powered defense to breakthroughs in identity protection, this year’s conference delivered a glimpse into the future. Here are the most interesting products that caught our attention, and could shape what’s next. Oracle issues emergency fix for pre-auth RCE in Identity Manager (CVE-2026-21992) Oracle has released an out-of-band patch for a critical and easily exploitable vulnerability (CVE-2026-21992) in Oracle Identity Manager and Oracle Web Services Manager. The company did not say whether the vulnerability has been exploited as a zero-day, but has urged customers to apply the updates or provided mitigations as soon as possible. GitHub-hosted malware campaign uses split payload to evade detection A large-scale malware delivery campaign has been targeting developers, gamers, and general users through fake tools hosted on GitHub, Netskope researchers have warned. These “lures” are highly polished and appear legitimate, occasionally mimicking real projects, thus making them difficult to distinguish from safe software. Critical NetScaler ADC, Gateway flaw may soon be exploited (CVE-2026-3055) Citrix has fixed two vulnerabilities in NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway, with the more serious flaw (CVE-2026-3055) potentially allowing attackers to extract active session tokens from the memory of affected devices. LiteLLM PyPI packages compromised in expanding TeamPCP supply chain attacks A slew of supply chain attacks against popular open source tools and packages appears to have been orchestrated by TeamPCP, a cybercriminal group that rose to prominence in late 2025. The latest victim of the group is BerryAI’s popular LiteLLM library, a unified interface that makes it easier for apps to switch between various LLMs: on March 24, TeamPCP uploaded two compromised versions (1.82.7 and 1.82.8) on PyPI that included a credential stealer and a malware dropper. Researchers release tool to detect stealthy BPFDoor implants in critical infrastructure networks Telecommunications providers around the world have been dealing with the burrowing efforts of the China-linked APTs for many years now. To help them identify hard-to-detect implants used by the China-based group dubbed Red Menshen, Rapid7 researchers have released a scanning script. CISA sounds alarm on Langflow RCE, Trivy supply chain compromise after rapid exploitation The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added two new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog: CVE-2026-33017, a recently disclosed code injection vulnerability in Langflow, an open-source framework for building AI agents and workflows, and CVE-2026-33634, an embedded malicious code vulnerability in Aqua Security’s Trivy security scanner. Product showcase: Cross-platform and third-party endpoint patching with Action1 Keeping endpoints patched is one of the more annoying chores in IT operations. Action1 is a cloud-based autonomous endpoint management platform that addresses this challenge head-on, covering third-party apps and OS updates (Windows, macOS, and now Linux) from a single, centralized console. You don’t have to choose between BAS or automated pentesting, you shouldn’t There’s a debate making the rounds in security circles that sounds reasonable on the surface but falls apart under operational scrutiny: Which is better, breach and attack simulation (BAS) or automated penetration testing (APT)? Security vendors have stoked this debate for obvious reasons, with some even explicitly arguing that automated pentesting should replace BAS entirely. But for practitioners responsible for defending an organization, this framing is the problem. It represents a coverage regression disguised as simplification. Why your phishing simulations aren’t building a security culture Security culture isn’t built by phishing simulations. In this Help Net Security video, Dan Potter, VP of Cyber Resilience at Immersive, argues that annual training videos and quarterly phishing tests happen in calm, controlled settings that tell us nothing about how people perform when a real incident hits. Russian hackers go after high-value targets through Signal Russian intelligence-linked hackers are targeting commercial messaging platforms, with Signal a primary focus, the FBI and CISA warn. The campaign is aimed at individuals of intelligence interest, including government personnel, journalists, and others with access to sensitive communications. The devices winning the race to get hacked in 2026 Enterprise networks keep adding connected devices, expanding the attack surface as threat actors target a wider range of systems, many of which are difficult to inventory, secure, and patch consistently. Forescout’s 2026 Riskiest Devices research maps that shift in IT, IoT, OT, and IoMT environments, with 11 new riskiest asset types entering the list this year. GitHub just made it much harder to ship a vulnerable pull request GitHub is expanding its application security capabilities with AI-powered security detections designed to identify risks earlier in the development process, with public preview planned for early Q2. The update is intended to improve code scanning, secret detection, and dependency analysis within repositories hosted on the platform. 32% of top-exploited vulnerabilities are over a decade old Exploitation timelines continued to compress in enterprise environments, with newly disclosed flaws reaching active use almost immediately and older weaknesses remaining active years after disclosure. Findings from Cisco Talos’ 2025 Year in Review show how attackers combined rapid weaponization with long-term exposure spanning infrastructure, identity systems, and user workflows. Russian initial access broker helped ransomware gangs extort millions, sentenced to 81 months A Russian citizen, Aleksei Volkov, was sentenced to 81 months in prison for helping ransomware groups carry out attacks causing over $9 million in actual losses and over $24 million in intended losses, after being arrested in Italy and extradited to the United States where he pleaded guilty. Uncle Sam closes the door on all new foreign-made routers The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has imposed a ban on all new routers manufactured overseas being imported into and sold within the United States. The move follows a determination by a White House-led interagency group that consumer-grade routers produced outside the United States pose what officials described as an “unacceptable risk” to national security and public safety. Anthropic trims action approval loop, lets Claude Code make the call Auto mode is a new permissions feature in the Claude Code system that allows the AI to make approval decisions on a user’s behalf while safeguards review actions before execution. The feature is available on Team plans and requires administrator approval before use, with support for Enterprise and API users expected soon. Gemini picks up criminal activity buried in dark web noise To help teams make faster and more accurate decisions on emerging threats, Google has introduced a dark web intelligence capability in Google Threat Intelligence. Powered by Gemini, the feature analyzes millions of dark web events each day and surfaces threats relevant to an organization’s operations. Botnet operator behind $14 million in ransomware extortion payments gets 24 months behind bars A Russian national has been sentenced to 24 months in prison after admitting he managed a botnet used to launch ransomware attacks against dozens of U.S. companies. The judge also imposed a $100,000 fine and ordered him to forfeit $1.6 million linked to the scheme. Google races to secure encryption before quantum threats arrive Google is preparing for the quantum era, a turning point in digital security, with a 2029 timeline for post-quantum cryptography (PQC) migration. Security professionals warn that current encryption could be broken by large-scale quantum computers in the coming years. This risk is already relevant due to store-now-decrypt-later attacks. Mission to smuggle $170 million worth of AI tech to China collapsed for three men Three individuals, Stanley Yi Zheng, Matthew Kelly, and Tommy Shad English, have been charged with conspiracy to commit smuggling and export control violations after allegedly attempting to procure millions of dollars’ worth of restricted computer chips from a California-based hardware company. Second RedLine infostealer operator ends up in US custody Hambardzum Minasyan, an Armenian man extradited to the United States, is accused of conspiring with others to develop and operate the RedLine infostealer malware used to steal sensitive data, including login credentials, from victims’ computers. Ajax data breach exposed season tickets, supporter bans open to tampering AFC Ajax, the Dutch football club from Amsterdam, disclosed that an unknown hacker gained access to parts of its IT systems and obtained the email addresses of a few hundred people. The hack exploited vulnerabilities in Ajax’s app and website, including exposed APIs and shared access keys. Plumber: Open-source scanner of GitLab CI/CD pipelines for compliance gaps GitLab CI/CD pipelines often accumulate configuration decisions that drift from security baselines over time. Container images get pinned to mutable tags, branches lose protection settings, and required templates go missing. An open-source tool called Plumber automates the detection of those conditions by scanning pipeline configuration and repository settings directly. Attackers are handing off access in 22 seconds, Mandiant finds Exploits remain the leading entry point for attackers for the sixth consecutive year, according to Mandiant’s M-Trends 2026 report, which draws on more than 500,000 hours of incident response work conducted in 2025. The data shows attackers speeding up their internal hand-offs, shifting away from email phishing, and targeting backup and virtualization infrastructure with greater precision. Microsoft details AI prompt abuse techniques targeting AI assistants Prompt abuse occurs when crafted inputs manipulate an AI system into producing unintended behavior, such as attempting to access sensitive information or overriding built-in safety instructions. Prompt injection is also recognized as one of the top risks in the 2025 OWASP guidance for LLM applications. Kali Linux 2026.1 ships BackTrack mode, eight new tools, and a kernel upgrade to 6.18 Penetration testers running Kali Linux have a new release to work with. Version 2026.1 delivers the annual theme refresh, a new BackTrack-inspired mode in kali-undercover, eight tools added to the network repositories, a kernel bump to 6.18, and several Kali NetHunter changes. Your security stack looks fine from the dashboard and that’s the problem One in five enterprise endpoints is operating outside a protected and enforceable state on any given day, according to device telemetry collected across tens of millions of corporate PCs. That figure, drawn from Absolute Security’s 2026 Resilience Risk Index, has barely moved in a year, even as organizations continue to add security tools and increase spending. Google’s TurboQuant cuts AI memory use without losing accuracy Large language models carry a persistent scaling problem. As context windows grow, the memory required to store key-value (KV) caches expands proportionally, consuming GPU memory and slowing inference. A team at Google Research has developed three compression algorithms: TurboQuant, PolarQuant, and Quantized Johnson-Lindenstrauss (QJL). All three are designed to compress those caches aggressively without degrading model output quality. Microsoft hands Entra ID users new option for MFA Organizations rely on MFA to enforce identity checks before granting access to systems and services. Microsoft has made external MFA generally available in Microsoft Entra ID, expanding support for third-party identity providers. External MFA supports organizations that use third-party MFA solutions to meet regulatory or business requirements, handle scenarios such as mergers and acquisitions, or maintain a consistent MFA approach within Microsoft Entra ID. Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8.2 ships with confidential computing support, XFS live repair Many enterprise Linux deployments rely on hardware-level memory isolation to protect sensitive workloads from co-tenants and compromised hypervisors. Oracle’s Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel 8.2 (UEK 8.2) extends that capability on Oracle Linux with support for Intel Trust Domain Extensions, along with a set of file system and memory management changes intended to reduce downtime and improve diagnostic visibility. Who owns AI agent access? At most companies, nobody knows AI agents are operating across production enterprise environments at scale, and the identity infrastructure managing their access has not kept up with their deployment. A January 2026 survey of 228 IT and security professionals, conducted by the Cloud Security Alliance, finds that the majority of organizations have AI agents active in core systems, with fragmented ownership of how those agents authenticate and what they can access. Reddit declares war on bad bot activity Reddit is introducing changes to support interactions between people. The company is taking a bottom-up approach to help users understand when they are engaging with another person unless an account is labeled otherwise. Reddit plans to verify that users are human without requiring disclosure of real-world identity. GitHub jumps on the bandwagon and will use your data to train AI GitHub updated how it uses data to improve AI-powered coding assistance. Starting April 24, interaction data from Copilot Free, Pro, and Pro+ users may be used to train and improve GitHub’s models unless users opt out. Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise users are not included in this change. Tails 7.6 ships automatic Tor bridge retrieval and a new password manager Tails 7.6 is out, and for users operating on networks that block Tor, the most consequential addition is built-in bridge retrieval. The Tor Connection assistant can now detect when a direct connection to Tor is restricted and automatically request bridges suited to the user’s region. The request goes through the Tor Project’s Moat API, and the connection to that API is disguised via domain fronting, making it appear as traffic to an ordinary website. Make OpenAI’s models misbehave and earn a reward OpenAI’s public Safety Bug Bounty program focuses on AI abuse and safety risks across its products. The goal is to support safe and secure systems and reduce the risk of misuse that could lead to harm. This program complements the Security Bug Bounty. It accepts reports of abuse and safety risks that do not meet the criteria for a security vulnerability. AI frenzy feeds credential chaos, secrets leak through code, tools, and infrastructure Code keeps moving through pipelines, and credentials continue to surface alongside it. GitGuardian’s State of Secrets Sprawl 2026 puts the count at 28.65 million new hardcoded secrets in public GitHub commits in 2025, extending a multi-year rise in exposed access keys, tokens, and passwords. Cybersecurity jobs available right now: March 24, 2026 We’ve scoured the market to bring you a selection of roles that span various skill levels within the cybersecurity field. Check out this weekly selection of cybersecurity jobs available right now.
helpnetsecurity.comMar 29, 2026extracted
RSAC 2026 Conference Announcements Summary (Days 3-4)
As hundreds of vendors descend on San Francisco for the RSAC 2026 Conference, the sheer volume of news can be overwhelming. To help you navigate the noise, SecurityWeek is providing a daily digest of the most significant announcements. Below is our curated roundup of essential news from the third and fourth days of the event (as well as some announcements we may have missed in the previous days). Roundups of announcements from day 1, day 2, and the days leading up to the conference are also available. Accenture has introduced Cyber.AI, a new cybersecurity solution that uses Anthropic’s Claude model as a central reasoning engine to automate security workflows. The platform integrates a library of autonomous agents to synthesize security data and provide contextual insights throughout the security lifecycle. It features a specialized component called Agent Shield to monitor and govern these autonomous agents in real-time to ensure they adhere to defined organizational policies. Akamai and Bolster AI detect brand impersonation and phishing Bolster AI and Akamai have teamed up to help organizations detect and disrupt brand impersonation and phishing campaigns targeting their customers. The new Brand Guardian solution combines Akamai’s global internet infrastructure with Bolster’s AI-driven fraud detection and automated takedown technology to detect impersonation campaigns earlier, observe attacks from the victim’s perspective, disrupt campaigns using automated investigation and takedown workflows, and understand campaign impact. Arctic Wolf Labs has analyzed over 22,000 AI‑assisted malware samples and found that a significant share of this malware is novel and harder to catch with traditional tools—39% initially evaded signature-based detection. While AI increases the scale of threats, most activity is not tied to sophisticated or known actors, and the resulting malware can still be detected with the right layered defenses. Barracuda Networks has announced enhancements to its BarracudaONE cybersecurity platform, along with a revamped global Partner Success Program, aimed at strengthening cyber resilience and supporting partner growth. The platform updates boost protection across email, network access, and generative AI usage. Barracuda has overhauled its Partner Success Program, creating a unified model for MSPs, resellers, and hybrid partners with expanded benefits and incentives. CrowdStrike announced the Charlotte AI AgentWorks ecosystem for building secure agents, with launch partners including Accenture, AWS, Anthropic, Deloitte, Kroll, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Salesforce, and Telefónica Tech. The ecosystem enables customers to leverage CrowdStrike’s no-code development platform and frontier AI models to securely build, orchestrate, and scale custom security agents, while opening new opportunities for partners to create agentic security businesses on the Falcon platform. CyberProof MDR analysts and threat researchers have identified a significant surge in PXA Stealer activity targeting global financial institutions during Q1 2026. These campaigns primarily leverage phishing emails containing malicious URLs that trigger the download of compromised ZIP attachments. Threat actors have demonstrated high levels of adaptability, utilizing diverse lures ranging from curriculum vitae and Adobe Photoshop installers to tax forms and legal documentation. Following the 2025 takedowns of major infostealers such as Lumma, Rhadamanthys, and RedLine, CyberProof observed that PXA Stealer activity has filled the resulting vacuum, seeing an estimated growth of 8-10%. Cyber Sierra announced a new collaboration with ST Engineering’s Cyber business to help organisations bring together AI‑driven governance and frontline cybersecurity operations for continuous, outcome-focused cyber resilience. DigiCert has introduced several updates to its Document Trust Manager platform to streamline digital signing workflows and enhance key security. The system now features centralized key management (eliminating the need for physical tokens by providing secure cloud-based storage for signing certificates). New unified workflows provide enterprise-wide visibility into signing activities (allowing administrators to monitor document integrity and track usage across the organization). The platform also supports various global PKI standards to ensure compliance with regional regulatory requirements for cross-border digital transactions. Ironscales announced ‘Email Attack of the Day,’ an ongoing email threat intelligence blog series spotlighting recent, real phishing attacks caught by the organization’s adaptive AI and its community of 30,000+ security professionals. Each post breaks down one attack — what it looked like, why it worked, and what users can do about it. The company also introduced new email security agents that anticipate, investigate, and prepare for advanced phishing attacks. Menlo Security has released a platform designed to monitor and control the activities of autonomous AI agents operating within web browsers. The platform provides visibility into agent-driven web sessions to prevent unauthorized data exfiltration and ensure compliance with corporate governance standards. The solution allows organizations to define granular permissions for AI agents. Minimus announced a new open source program that provides maintainers with free access to hardened container images, SBOM generation and analysis, and real-time threat intelligence. The initiative aims to close the security gap for open source projects that underpin critical infrastructure but lack enterprise-grade supply-chain security tooling. Accepted projects can integrate Minimus images into their pipelines to reduce attack surface, gain visibility into dependencies, and accelerate vulnerability remediation. Nile has updated its networking platform to incorporate “datacenter-class” security features designed to limit lateral movement within campus and branch environments. The architecture utilizes AI-driven automation to enforce granular micro-segmentation. By integrating these controls directly into the network fabric, the system aims to contain potential breaches by reducing the available attack surface. Singapore-based pQCee has introduced a crypto-agile Cryptography Next Generation (CNG) provider for Microsoft Windows. It allows enterprises, governments, and regulated industries to rapidly adopt post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, comply with national security requirements, and prepare for integration with emerging quantum hardware. The solution provides seamless support for custom post-quantum algorithms and implementations directly within Windows. Protos Labs has introduced a free tier of Protos AI, its agentic AI platform designed to automate the collection and analysis of cyber threat intelligence (CTI). The system utilizes specialized AI agents to execute tasks across the CTI lifecycle (including planning, evidence collection, and citation-backed reporting). The platform is model-agnostic and functions independently of existing security stacks to build ‘organizational intelligence memory’ by linking threat entities across historical investigations. Human analysts maintain control by approving investigation plans and validating the agents’ outputs before dissemination. Quokka Q-scout now integrates with Microsoft Sentinel to centralize mobile application risk intelligence across Microsoft Intune-managed devices. The connector automatically ingests app inventories from Intune, analyzes them using Quokka’s mobile app vetting engines, and streams security, privacy, and compliance risk findings into Sentinel. The Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU) released what it described as the largest remediation study ever conducted, examining more than 1 billion CISA KEV records across over 10,000 organizations spanning four years. The study found that vulnerability volume has increased 6.5x in the last three years, while exploitation timelines have collapsed to -1 days. Despite processing more tickets, security teams left 63% of critical vulnerabilities open on day 7 in 2025, a deterioration from 56% in 2022. Out of 52 actively weaponized vulnerabilities that were analyzed, half were exploited before public disclosure. Singapore-based Scantist has announced the US launch of PAIStrike, an autonomous penetration testing platform designed to validate real-world security risks. PAIStrike functions as a coordinated multi-agent system that autonomously analyzes targets, devises multi-step attack strategies, executes exploits, evaluates results, and dynamically adjusts its tactics in real time. Skyhigh Security announced new capabilities for its Security Service Edge (SSE) platform. The company introduced new offerings and updates to strengthen its platform, including Next-Generation SSE Hybrid and Secure Browser Controls solutions, along with updates to Skyhigh DSPM to create a unified view of data risk across multi-vendor environments. Vorlon has launched two new products, AI Agent Flight Recorder and AI Agent Action Center, to provide forensics and coordinated response for enterprise AI and SaaS environments. The Flight Recorder uses intelligent simulation technology to capture a continuous audit trail of agent actions across various identities, APIs, and data classifications. To address identified risks, the Action Center prioritizes security findings and routes remediation guidance to relevant stakeholders. These tools integrate with existing security workflows, including SIEM and SOAR platforms.
securityweek.comMar 27, 2026extracted
Alleged RedLine malware developer extradited to US, faces up to 30 years
Alleged RedLine malware developer extradited to US, faces up to 30 years An Armenian national appeared in U.S. federal court on Tuesday after prosecutors accused him of being a leading developer of RedLine, one of the most widely used infostealer malware variants in the world. Hambardzum Minasyan is facing up to 30 years in prison after the Justice Department secured his arrest and extradition on Monday. Minasyan appeared in an Austin federal court on Tuesday and was indicted on charges of conspiracy to commit access device fraud, conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and conspiracy to commit money laundering. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison for access device fraud and up to 20 years in prison for the other two counts. In court documents, prosecutors said Minasyan worked with other men to maintain the digital infrastructure that backed the RedLine malware, including administrative panels and servers that enabled affiliates to deploy the malware on victim devices. Minasyan and others collected payments from affiliates who used the malware, offering customer service to hackers and coordinating with them on the theft of financial information. Prosecutors said he also laundered his earnings from the scheme through cryptocurrency exchanges. Minasyan registered servers hosting part of RedLine’s infrastructure and ran internet domains in support of the malware. He additionally created repositories that enabled him and others to give RedLine to other hackers. The extradition of Minasyan follows an October 2024 takedown of RedLine infrastructure launched by the Justice Department and law enforcement agencies in the Netherlands, Belgium and other countries. That action coincided with charges issued against Maxim Rudometov, another developer and administrator of RedLine. U.S. prosecutors said Rudometov is a Russian national believed to reside in the city of Krasnodar. The malware has been sold on several underground hacking forums since March 2020. With RedLine, hackers had the ability to extract login credentials from web browsers, FTP clients, email apps, instant messaging clients and VPNs before selling them on underground markets. Cybersecurity experts previously said hackers deployed the malware in thousands of attacks against systems in more than 150 countries and territories. RedLine allowed attackers to gain access to system information like usernames, hardware, browsers installed, and anti-virus software before exfiltrating passwords, credit card numbers, crypto wallets and VPN logins to a remote command and control server. In November, U.S. authorities sanctioned a prominent Russian bulletproof hosting company that provided hosting services to RedLine’s developers. Researchers previously found that the vast majority of stolen credentials currently sold on two dark web underground markets were collected using the RedLine malware. Jonathan Greig is a Breaking News Reporter at Recorded Future News. Jonathan has worked across the globe as a journalist since 2014. Before moving back to New York City, he worked for news outlets in South Africa, Jordan and Cambodia. He previously covered cybersecurity at ZDNet and TechRepublic.
therecord.mediaMar 26, 2026extracted
Second RedLine infostealer operator ends up in US custody
Second RedLine infostealer operator ends up in US custody Hambardzum Minasyan, an Armenian man extradited to the United States, is accused of conspiring with others to develop and operate the RedLine infostealer malware used to steal sensitive data, including login credentials, from victims’ computers. Minasyan is charged with conspiracy to commit access device fraud, conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison on the access device fraud count and up to 20 years on each of the other charges. According to the indictment, the suspect allegedly registered two virtual private servers to host parts of RedLine’s infrastructure and two internet domains to support the scheme. Authorities believe he created repositories on a file-sharing site to distribute the malware to affiliates and registered a cryptocurrency account in November 2021 to receive payments. “The conspirators maintained digital infrastructure, including C2 servers and administrative panels to enable the deployment of the malware by affiliates, and collected payments from RedLine affiliates, allowing the affiliates to use the infostealer against victims,” prosecutors said. In October 2024, the Justice Department joined authorities in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Eurojust in an international operation targeting the RedLine infostealer. Officials also launched a public website with resources for victims and unsealed charges against co-conspirator Maxim Rudometov, identified as a developer and administrator of the malware.
helpnetsecurity.comMar 26, 2026extracted
Suspected RedLine infostealer malware admin extradited to US
An Armenian suspect was extradited to the United States to face criminal charges for allegedly helping manage RedLine, one of the most prolific infostealer malware operations in recent years. Hambardzum Minasyan was arrested on Monday, March 23, and appeared in federal court in Austin on Tuesday, when U.S. prosecutors accused him of registering virtual private servers that were part of RedLine's infrastructure and two web domains used during RedLine attacks. He also allegedly registered a cryptocurrency account in November 2021 that the RedLine cybercrime gang used to receive affiliate payments and created online file-sharing repositories used to distribute the malware to affiliates. "Hambardzum Minasyan allegedly conspired with others to enrich himself by developing and administering RedLine, one of the most prevalent infostealing malware variants in the world, which has previously been used to conduct intrusions against major corporations," the Justice Department said on Wednesday. "When executed, RedLine would steal data, including access devices, from victims' computers." With the help of other accomplices, Minasyan managed the operation's digital infrastructure, including administrative panels and command-and-control (C2) servers that affiliates used to deploy the info stealer to victims' compromised devices. The conspirators also allegedly provided support to actual and potential RedLine affiliates, answering their questions and requests, and conspired to steal financial information from infected systems, laundering the illegally obtained funds through cryptocurrency exchanges and other methods. Minasyan is now facing access device fraud, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act violation, money laundering conspiracy charges, and a maximum of 30 years in prison if convicted. In October 2024, the Dutch National Police seized the network infrastructure for the Redline malware-as-a-service (MaaS) platform, working with international partners in a joint action named "Operation Magnus." The United States also charged Russian national Maxim Alexandrovich Rudometov, the suspected developer and administrator of the RedLine operation, who could face up to 35 years in prison if convicted on counts of access device fraud, conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, and money laundering. More recently, in June 2025, the U.S. Department of State announced a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the arrest of government-sponsored hackers linked to the RedLine operation and its suspected creator. Overall prevention scores can hide what happens after initial access. Once attackers are using valid credentials, prevention drops sharply. The Blue Report 2026 measures defenses technique by technique across 338 million simulations run in customer production environments. Get the report
bleepingcomputer.comMar 26, 2026extracted
Alleged RedLine Malware Administrator Extradited to US
Armenian national Hambardzum Minasyan has been extradited to the United States over his alleged role in the administration of the RedLine infostealer malware. The US Justice Department announced Minasyan’s first appearance in a Texas court on Wednesday. According to authorities, the man was involved in maintaining the malware’s infrastructure, including command-and-control servers and administration panels used by affiliates. He also allegedly collected payments from affiliates and handled support requests. “The indictment alleges that Minasyan registered two virtual private servers to host portions of RedLine’s infrastructure as well as two internet domains in support of the RedLine scheme,” the DOJ said. “He also allegedly created repositories on an online file sharing site that were used to distribute RedLine to affiliates. In November 2021, he allegedly registered a cryptocurrency account that was used to receive payments from RedLine affiliates,” the DOJ added. Minasyan has been charged with conspiracy to commit access device fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to violate the CFAA. He faces up to 10 years in prison for access device fraud and up to 20 years in prison for the remaining counts. RedLine is a widely used information stealer offered via a malware-as-a-service model, enabling cybercriminals to steal browser credentials, cryptocurrency wallet data, VPN credentials, and other information. The malware emerged in 2020 and was targeted in an international law enforcement operation in October 2024. However, the takedown effort had limited impact, and RedLine remains one of the most popular infostealers among cybercriminals, frequently cited by security firms as a leading threat in the category. In mid-2025, the US Department of State announced a $10 million reward for information on Maxim Alexandrovich Rudometov, who is believed to be the main developer and administrator of RedLine. Rudometov was born in Ukraine, but fled to Russia in early 2022. Related: US Prisons Russian Access Broker for Aiding Ransomware Attacks Related: Russian Cybercriminal Gets 2-Year Prison Sentence in US Related: Aisuru and Kimwolf DDoS Botnets Disrupted in International Operation
securityweek.comMar 26, 2026extracted
ThreatsDay Bulletin: DDR5 Bot Scalping, Samsung TV Tracking, Reddit Privacy Fine & More
Some weeks in cybersecurity feel routine. This one doesn’t. Several new developments surfaced over the past few days, showing how quickly the threat landscape keeps shifting. Researchers uncovered fresh activity, security teams shared new findings, and a few unexpected moves from major tech companies also drew attention. Together, these updates offer a useful snapshot of what is happening behind the scenes in the cyber world right now. From new tactics and campaigns to security and policy changes that could affect millions of users, there is a lot unfolding at once. Below is a quick roundup of the most notable stories making headlines this week. Phishing Campaign Deploys Multiple Malware StrainsThe Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of a hacking campaign targeting Ukrainian government institutions using phishing emails containing a ZIP archive (or a link to a website vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks) to distribute SHADOWSNIFF and SALATSTEALER information-stealing malware and a Go backdoor called DEAFTICKK. The agency attributed the activity to a threat actor tracked as UAC-0252. The development comes as a suspected Russian espionage campaign is targeting Ukraine with two previously undocumented malware strains, BadPaw and MeowMeow, according to ClearSky. While the campaign is likely said to be the work of APT28, the cybersecurity company did not identify the targets of the campaign or say whether the attacks were successful. Fake RMM Service Spreads RAT via PhishingA new malware-as-a-service (MaaS) dubbed TrustConnect ("trustconnectsoftware[.]com") masqueraded as a legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool for $300 per month. It's assessed that the threat actor behind TrustConnect was also a prominent user of RedLine Stealer. According to email security firm Proofpoint, multiple threat actors have been observed distributing the malware via phishing emails as of January 27, 2026. The emails claim to be event invites or bid proposals, tricking recipients into clicking on links that lead to the download of bogus executables that install TrustConnect RAT. The RAT backdoors users' machines and gives attackers full mouse and keyboard control, allowing them to record and stream the victim's screen. Some campaigns have also been observed delivering legitimate remote access software like ScreenConnect and LogMeIn Resolve alongside TrustConnect between January 31 and February 3, 2026. Customers who purchase the toolkit are granted access to a dashboard to remotely commandeer infected devices and generate branded installers containing the malware. After Proofpoint took steps to disrupt some of the malware's infrastructure on February 17, 2026, the threat actor resurfaced with a rebranded version of the malware platform called DocConnect. "Disruptions to MaaS operations like RedLine, Lumma Stealer, and Rhadamanthys have created new opportunities for malware creators to fill gaps in the cybercrime market," Proofpoint said. "Although TrustConnect only masqueraded as a legitimate RMM, the lures, attack chains, and follow-on payloads (which include RMMs) show overlap with techniques and delivery methods that are frequently observed in RMM campaigns and used by multiple threat actors." The development comes amid skyrocketing abuse of legitimate RMM software in cyber attacks. Chrome Moves to Two-Week Release CycleGoogle has announced that new Chrome iterations will be released every two weeks, moving away from the current four-week release cycle. Since 2021, Google has been shipping major Chrome versions every four weeks, and since 2023, it has been delivering security updates every week for a reduced patch gap and improved quality. "The web platform is constantly advancing, and our goal is to ensure developers and users have immediate access to the latest performance improvements, fixes, and new capabilities," Google said. The new release cycle will also apply to beta releases, starting with Chrome 153, which will arrive on September 8, 2026. TPMS Signals Allow Covert Vehicle TrackingResearchers at IMDEA Networks Institute have found that Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) sensors inside each car wheel broadcast unencrypted wireless signals containing persistent identifiers. While the feature is designed for vehicle safety, each sensor transmits a unique ID that does not change, allowing the same car to be recognized again and tracked over time. This, in turn, opens the door to a low-cost monitoring network that uses software-defined radio receivers near roads (at a distance of up to 40m from the car) and parking areas to collect TPMS messages from thousands of vehicles and build profiles of their movements over time. "Malicious users could deploy passive receivers on large scales and track citizens without their knowledge. The advantage of such a system, over more traditional camera-based ones, is that no direct line-of-sight is needed with the TPMS sensors, and spectrum receivers could be placed in covert or hidden locations, making them harder to spot by victims," the researchers warned. "Our results show that TPMS transmissions can be used to systematically infer potentially sensitive information such as the presence, type, weight, or driving pattern of the driver." The disclosure adds to a growing body of research demonstrating how various components fitted into modern vehicles can become unintended conduits for surveillance and exploits. Telegram Emerges as Cybercrime Command HubA new analysis from CYFIRMA has pointed out how Telegram's structure offers threat actors a way to extend their reach globally without the need for specialized tooling, enable frictionless onboarding of buyers and affiliates, support payment options, and facilitate audience growth. The emergence of the platform has fundamentally changed the way cyber operations are coordinated, monetized, and publicized. "For financially motivated actors, Telegram functions as a scalable storefront and customer support hub," the company said. "For hacktivists, it serves as a mobilization and propaganda amplifier. For state-aligned operations, it offers a rapid distribution channel for narratives and leaks. In many cases, telegram complements and increasingly replaces traditional Tor-based ecosystems by removing technical friction while maintaining operational flexibility." AuraStealer Infrastructure RevealedA new analysis of AuraStealer from Intrinsec has uncovered 48 command-and-control (C2) domain names linked to the stealer's operations. The threat actor behind the malware has been found to use .shop and .cfd top-level domains, in addition to routing all traffic through Cloudflare as a reverse proxy to conceal the real server. AuraStealer first appeared on underground hacker forums in July 2025, shortly after the disruption of the Lumma Stealer as part of a law enforcement operation. It was advertised by a user named AuraCorp on the XSS forum. It comes in two subscription packages: $295/month for Basic and $585/month for Advanced. One of the primary mechanisms through which the stealer is distributed is ClickFix. Malvertising Pushes New Atomic Stealer VariantA malvertising campaign is using bogus ads on Google Search results pages to redirect users looking for ways to free up macOS storage to fraudulent web pages hosted on Medium, Evernote, and Kimi AI to serve ClickFix-style instructions that drop a new variant of the Atomic Stealer called malext to steal a wide range of data from compromised macOS systems. The campaign uses more than 50 compromised Google Ads accounts that push "over 485 malicious landing pages, ultimately leading to a ClickFix attack that deployed a potentially new version of AMOS Stealer onto infected systems," security researcher Gi7w0rm said. Bots Hammer DRAM Pages for DDR5 InventoryA large-scale data gathering operation has submitted more than 10 million web scraping requests to hit DRAM product pages on e-commerce sites in an effort to find sellers carrying desirable DRAM stock. The bots have been found to check the stock of specific RAM kits every 6.5 seconds by using a technique called cache busting to ensure they get the most up-to-date information, DataDome said. "These bots aggressively target the entire supply chain, from consumer RAM to B2B industrial memory providers and raw hardware components like DIMM sockets," the company said. "Scrapers attempt to avoid detection by adding cache-busting parameters to every request and calibrating their speed to stay just below volumetric alarm thresholds. By rapidly snapping up the limited DDR5 memory inventory for profitable resale, these bots further deplete the consumer supply, effectively boxing out legitimate customers and driving market prices even higher." Reddit Fined Over Children's Data HandlingThe U.K. Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has fined Reddit £14.47 million for unlawfully processing the personal information of children under the age of 13 and for failing to properly check the age of its users, thereby putting them at risk of being exposed to inappropriate and harmful content online. In July 2025, Reddit introduced age assurance measures that include age verification to access mature content and asking users to declare their age when opening an account. Reddit said it would appeal the decision, stating it doesn't require users to share information about their identities, regardless of age, to ensure users' online privacy and safety. Samsung Restricts TV Data Collection in TexasTexas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that Samsung will no longer collect Automated Content Recognition (ACR) data without consumers' express consent. The development comes in the wake of a lawsuit filed against the South Korean electronics giant for its data collection practices and over allegations that the collected ACR information could be used to serve targeted ads. "Additionally, it compels Samsung to promptly update its smart TVs and implement disclosures and consent screens that are clear and conspicuous to ensure that Texans can make an informed decision regarding whether their data is collected and how it's used," the Office of the Attorney General said. Samsung has denied it spies on users. NATO Clears Consumer iPhones and iPadsApple iPhones and iPads have been approved to handle classified information in NATO networks. They are the first consumer-grade devices to be approved for NATO use without additional special software or settings. iPhone and iPad previously received approval to handle classified German government data on devices using native iOS and iPadOS security measures following a security evaluation conducted by Germany's Federal Office for Information Security. TikTok Rejects End-to-End Encryption for DMsByteDance's TikTok said it has no plans to add end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to direct messages because it would prevent law enforcement and safety teams from reading messages if necessary. In a statement shared with the BBC, the company said it wanted to protect users, especially young people, from harm. Multi-Stage Phishing Attack Spreads Agent TeslaA new phishing campaign using purchase order lures has leveraged a multi-stage attack chain to deliver Agent Tesla, allowing threat actors to harvest sensitive data, while taking steps to evade detection using techniques like obfuscation and in-memory execution. "From the initial obfuscated JSE loader to the reflective loading of .NET assemblies and process hollowing of legitimate Windows utilities, Agent Tesla is designed to stay invisible," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs said. "Its extensive anti-analysis checks further ensure that it only reveals its true nature when it’s certain it isn't being watched." Attackers Abuse Infrastructure-Only .arpa DomainWith organizations taking steps to tighten their traditional email and web filters, new research from Infoblox has found a novel campaign where actors are abusing the .arpa top-level domain, a space strictly reserved for network infrastructure, to host malicious content and bypass standard blocklists. The development shows cybercriminals are finding "impossible" hiding spots within the internet’s core infrastructure to bypass security, the DNS threat intelligence firm said. Elsewhere, threat actors are also abusing LNK shortcut files and WebDAV to download malicious files on targets' systems. "Because being able to remotely access things on the internet via File Explorer is a relatively unknown functionality to most people, WebDAV is an exploitable way to make people download files without going through a traditional web browser file download," Cofense said. Spoofed Email Chains Target LastPass UsersA new phishing campaign that commenced on March 1, 2026, is using lures related to unauthorized access to individuals' accounts to trick recipients into visiting fake LastPass login pages to take control of their accounts. The attack takes advantage of the fact that many email clients, especially mobile, show only the display name, hiding the real sender address unless users expand it. "Attackers are forwarding fake email chains to make it appear as though another individual is trying to take unauthorized action on their LastPass account (i.e., export vault, full account recovery, new trusted device registered, etc.)," LastPass said. "Attackers use display name spoofing so that the name portion of the sender field is manipulated to impersonate LastPass, while the actual sending email address is unrelated." Experts Warn Against Blind Trust in AI Coding AgentsWith the emergence of tools like Claude Code Security, OX Security is urging users to resist the temptation to outsource judgment, architecture, and validation to a single artificial intelligence (AI) model. "AI doesn't invent fundamentally new code patterns," it said. "It reproduces the most common ones it has seen before. That means it scales not only productivity, but also existing weaknesses in software engineering practice." The cybersecurity company also warned that AI systems may be prone to false positives and may not reliably inform a user if an issue flagged in a single repository is actually exploitable in a complex and unique environment. A pipeline that relies on the same AI system for both writing and reviewing code is not ideal, it added. LLMs Enable Automated Internet DeanonymizationA team of academics from Anthropic, ETH Zurich, and MATS Research has developed large language models (LLMs) that can deanonymize internet users based on past comments or other digital clues they leave behind. "Given two databases of pseudonymous individuals, each containing unstructured text written by or about that individual, we implement a scalable attack pipeline that uses LLMs to: (1) extract identity-relevant features, (2) search for candidate matches via semantic embeddings, and (3) reason over top candidates to verify matches and reduce false positives," the researchers said. The method works even if targets use different pseudonyms across multiple platforms. The researchers said using their LLMs outperforms classical research methods, where digital footprints are examined manually by a human operator. This, in turn, enables fully automated deanonymization attacks that can work on unstructured data at scale, while also reducing the cost and effort that goes into intelligence gathering. "Our results show that the practical obscurity protecting pseudonymous users online no longer holds and that threat models for online privacy need to be reconsidered," the researchers said. "The average online user has long operated under an implicit threat model where they have assumed pseudonymity provides adequate protection because targeted deanonymization would require extensive effort. LLMs invalidate this assumption." That wraps up this week’s quick look at what has been happening across the cybersecurity landscape. Each update on its own may seem small, but together they show how quickly things continue to change. New techniques appear, old tactics evolve, and security decisions from major companies can shift the wider ecosystem. For security teams, researchers, and anyone who follows the threat landscape, keeping track of these signals helps make sense of the bigger picture. Stay tuned for the next edition of the ThreatsDay Bulletin with more developments from the cyber world.
thehackernews.comMar 5, 2026extracted
Criminals create business website to sell RAT disguised as RMM tool
Criminals create business website to sell RAT disguised as RMM tool A RAT masquerading as legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) software is being sold to cybercriminals as a service, Proofpoint researchers recently discovered. The fake RMM tool, called TrustConnect, was being marketed via an LLM-created website parked on trustconnectsoftware[.]com, supposedly belonging to “TrustConnect Software PTY LTD”. “The malware creator uses the domain as the ‘business website’ designed to convince the public (including certificate providers) that the software is a legitimate RMM app, providing fake details like customer statistics and software documentation,” the researchers explained. “This website is also the portal for criminals to sign up for the service and acts as the command and control (C2) for the malware. Cybercriminals are instructed to sign up for a ‘free trial’, instructed on how to pay in cryptocurrency, and then verify payment in the TrustConnect portal.” Owning the domain also allowed the threat actor to purchase a legitimate Extended Validation (EV) certificate, which they then used to sign the RAT/fake RMM tool, thus helping it evade signature-based detections. The operation and delivery campaigns The threat actor sold access to the tool and C2 portal for $300 per month. The TrustConnect command and control panel (Source: Proofpoint) The buyers distributed TrustConnect Agent (and also legitimate RMMs) via email campaigns using various lures: tax-related emails, DocuSign notifications, meeting invitations, events, and more. TrustConnect creates fake installers that look like real software by using familiar icons, names, and branding while secretly delivering malware. The attackers use common lures seen in cybercrime campaigns, including well-known corporate apps like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Adobe Reader, and Google Meet, as well as document-style files labeled things like “Proposal,” “Special Events,” or “Social Security Administrative.” It also offers a generic installer branded simply as “TrustConnect,” likely meant to appear as a legitimate IT management tool. Admin dashboard, with mock data (Source: Proofpoint) “Proofpoint has observed TrustConnect campaigns leading to the follow-on deployment of a legitimate remote access tool, typically ScreenConnect (…) from at least nine distinct on‑premises (self‑hosted) ScreenConnect servers over a 10‑day period,” the researchers shared. “All were older versions signed with expired or revoked certificates, suggesting the instances were illegitimately purchased previously or possibly pirated. Proofpoint also observed deployment of Level RMM via an abused account as well as hands‑on-keyboard activity. This activity occurred within minutes of TrustConnect installation, reinforcing the assessment that it is used by multiple threat actors. (We reported it to Level, and the account was disabled by the vendor.)” Attempted disruption Proofpoint worked with industry partners to disrupt the TrustConnect operation. They collaborated with certificate-intelligence specialists to revoke the malware’s Extended Validation code-signing certificate on Feb. 6, 2026, stripping the operators of the ability to make malicious files appear trusted and evade detection.  However, the certificate revocation was not applied retroactively, which means files signed before the revocation remained valid and could still be distributed by existing criminal customers.  The company also coordinated action against the malware’s command-and-control environment, which was hosted on a specific server and was taken offline around Feb. 17, an operation that impacted the actor’s infrastructure and disrupted ongoing campaigns. Unfortunately, the disruption proved temporary: shortly before the report’s publication, the operators had already shifted to parallel infrastructure and begun testing a rebranded, updated version of the malware platform called DocConnect. “Based on details of the malware creator, capabilities of the malware, and knowledge of the ecosystem, we assess with moderate confidence the threat actor behind TrustConnect was also a prominent user of Redline stealer,” the researchers stated. They also believe that the TrustConnect and DocConnect websites and agents were likely coded with the assistance of AI agents. UPDATE (March 4, 2026, 07:30 a.m. ET): Microsoft researchers have shared additional information about the campaigns mounted by the attackers using this service. They also shared mitigation and protection guidance. Subscribe to our breaking news e-mail alert to never miss out on the latest breaches, vulnerabilities and cybersecurity threats. Subscribe here!
helpnetsecurity.comFeb 20, 2026extracted
Key OpenClaw risks, Clawdbot, Moltbot | Kaspersky official blog
Everyone has likely heard of OpenClaw, previously known as “Clawdbot” or “Moltbot”, the open-source AI assistant that can be deployed on a machine locally. It plugs into popular chat platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Discord, and Slack, which allows it to accept commands from its owner and go to town on the local file system. It has access to the owner’s calendar, email, and browser, and can even execute OS commands via the shell. From a security perspective, that description alone should be enough to give anyone a nervous twitch. But when people start trying to use it for work within a corporate environment, anxiety quickly hardens into the conviction of imminent chaos. Some experts have already dubbed OpenClaw the biggest insider threat of 2026. The issues with OpenClaw cover the full spectrum of risks highlighted in the recent OWASP Top 10 for Agentic Applications. OpenClaw permits plugging in any local or cloud-based LLM, and the use of a wide range of integrations with additional services. At its core is a gateway that accepts commands via chat apps or a web UI, and routes them to the appropriate AI agents. The first iteration, dubbed Clawdbot, dropped in November 2025; by January 2026, it had gone viral — and brought a heap of security headaches with it. In a single week, several critical vulnerabilities were disclosed, malicious skills cropped up in the skill directory, and secrets were leaked from Moltbook (essentially “Reddit for bots”). To top it off, Anthropic issued a trademark demand to rename the project to avoid infringing on “Claude”, and the project’s X account name was hijacked to shill crypto scams. Known OpenClaw issues Though the project’s developer appears to acknowledge that security is important, since this is a hobbyist project there are zero dedicated resources for vulnerability management or other product security essentials. OpenClaw vulnerabilities Among the known vulnerabilities in OpenClaw, the most dangerous is CVE-2026-25253 (CVSS 8.8). Exploiting it leads to a total compromise of the gateway, allowing an attacker to run arbitrary commands. To make matters worse, it’s alarmingly easy to pull off: if the agent visits an attacker’s site or the user clicks a malicious link, the primary authentication token is leaked. With that token in hand, the attacker has full administrative control over the gateway. This vulnerability was patched in version 2026.1.29. Also, two dangerous command injection vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-24763 and CVE-2026-25157) were discovered. Insecure defaults and features A variety of default settings and implementation quirks make attacking the gateway a walk in the park: Authentication is disabled by default, so the gateway is accessible from the internet. The server accepts WebSocket connections without verifying their origin. Localhost connections are implicitly trusted, which is a disaster waiting to happen if the host is running a reverse proxy. Several tools — including some dangerous ones — are accessible in Guest Mode. Critical configuration parameters leak across the local network via mDNS broadcast messages. Secrets in plaintext OpenClaw’s configuration, “memory”, and chat logs store API keys, passwords, and other credentials for LLMs and integration services in plain text. This is a critical threat — to the extent that versions of the RedLine and Lumma infostealers have already been spotted with OpenClaw file paths added to their must-steal lists. Also, the Vidar infostealer was caught stealing secrets from OpenClaw. Malicious skills OpenClaw’s functionality can be extended with “skills” available in the ClawHub repository. Since anyone can upload a skill, it didn’t take long for threat actors to start “bundling” the AMOS macOS infostealer into their uploads. Within a short time, the number of malicious skills reached the hundreds. This prompted developers to quickly ink a deal with VirusTotal to ensure all uploaded skills aren’t only checked against malware databases, but also undergo code and content analysis via LLMs. That said, the authors are very clear: it’s no silver bullet. Structural flaws in the OpenClaw AI agent Vulnerabilities can be patched and settings can be hardened, but some of OpenClaw’s issues are fundamental to its design. The product combines several critical features that, when bundled together, are downright dangerous: OpenClaw has privileged access to sensitive data on the host machine and the owner’s personal accounts. The assistant is wide open to untrusted data: the agent receives messages via chat apps and email, autonomously browses web pages, etc. It suffers from the inherent inability of LLMs to reliably separate commands from data, making prompt injection a possibility. The agent saves key takeaways and artifacts from its tasks to inform future actions. This means a single successful injection can poison the agent’s memory, influencing its behavior long-term. OpenClaw has the power to talk to the outside world — sending emails, making API calls, and utilizing other methods to exfiltrate internal data. It’s worth noting that while OpenClaw is a particularly extreme example, this “Terrifying Five” list is actually characteristic of almost all multi-purpose AI agents. OpenClaw risks for organizations If an employee installs an agent like this on a corporate device and hooks it into even a basic suite of services (think Slack and SharePoint), the combination of autonomous command execution, broad file system access, and excessive OAuth permissions creates fertile ground for a deep network compromise. In fact, the bot’s habit of hoarding unencrypted secrets and tokens in one place is a disaster waiting to happen — even if the AI agent itself is never compromised. On top of that, these configurations violate regulatory requirements across multiple countries and industries, leading to potential fines and audit failures. Current regulatory requirements, like those in the EU AI Act or the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, explicitly mandate strict access control for AI agents. OpenClaw’s configuration approach clearly falls short of those standards. But the real kicker is that even if employees are banned from installing this software on work machines, OpenClaw can still end up on their personal devices. This also creates specific risks for given the organization as a whole: Personal devices frequently store access to work systems like corporate VPN configs or browser tokens for email and internal tools. These can be hijacked to gain a foothold in the company’s infrastructure. Controlling the agent via chat apps means that it’s not just the employee that becomes a target for social engineering, but also their AI agent, seeing AI account takeovers or impersonation of the user in chats with colleagues (among other scams) become a reality. Even if work is only occasionally discussed in personal chats, the info in them is ripe for the picking. If an AI agent on a personal device is hooked into any corporate services (email, messaging, file storage), attackers can manipulate the agent to siphon off data, and this activity would be extremely difficult for corporate monitoring systems to spot. How to detect OpenClaw Depending on the SOC team’s monitoring and response capabilities, they can track OpenClaw gateway connection attempts on personal devices or in the cloud. Additionally, a specific combination of red flags can indicate OpenClaw’s presence on a corporate device: Look for ~/.openclaw/, ~/clawd/, or ~/.clawdbot directories on host machines. Scan the network with internal tools, or public ones like Shodan, to identify the HTML fingerprints of Clawdbot control panels. Monitor for WebSocket traffic on ports 3000 and 18789. Keep an eye out for mDNS broadcast messages on port 5353 (specifically openclaw-gw.tcp). Watch for unusual authentication attempts in corporate services, such as new App ID registrations, OAuth Consent events, or User-Agent strings typical of Node.js and other non-standard user agents. Look for access patterns typical of automated data harvesting: reading massive chunks of data (scraping all files or all emails) or scanning directories at fixed intervals during off-hours. Controlling shadow AI A set of security hygiene practices can effectively shrink the footprint of both shadow IT and shadow AI, making it much harder to deploy OpenClaw in an organization: Use host-level allowlisting to ensure only approved applications and cloud integrations are installed. For products that support extensibility (like Chrome extensions, VS Code plugins, or OpenClaw skills), implement a closed list of vetted add-ons. Conduct a full security assessment of any product or service, AI agents included, before allowing them to hook into corporate resources. Treat AI agents with the same rigorous security requirements applied to public-facing servers that process sensitive corporate data. Implement the principle of least privilege for all users and other identities. Don’t grant administrative privileges without a critical business need. Require all users with elevated permissions to use them only when performing specific tasks rather than working from privileged accounts all the time. Configure corporate services so that technical integrations (like apps requesting OAuth access) are granted only the bare minimum permissions. Periodically audit integrations, OAuth tokens, and permissions granted to third-party apps. Review the need for these with business owners, proactively revoke excessive permissions, and kill off stale integrations. Secure deployment of agentic AI If an organization allows AI agents in an experimental capacity — say, for development testing or efficiency pilots — or if specific AI use cases have been greenlit for general staff, robust monitoring, logging, and access control measures should be implemented: Deploy agents in an isolated subnet with strict ingress and egress rules, limiting communication only to trusted hosts required for the task. Use short-lived access tokens with a strictly limited scope of privileges. Never hand an agent tokens that grant access to core company servers or services. Ideally, create dedicated service accounts for every individual test. Wall off the agent from dangerous tools and data sets that aren’t relevant to its specific job. For experimental rollouts, it’s best practice to test the agent using purely synthetic data that mimics the structure of real production data. Configure detailed logging of the agent’s actions. This should include event logs, command-line parameters, and chain-of-thought artifacts associated with every command it executes. Set up SIEM to flag abnormal agent activity. The same techniques and rules used to detect LotL attacks are applicable here, though additional efforts to define what normal activity looks like for a specific agent are required. If MCP servers and additional agent skills are used, scan them with the security tools emerging for these tasks, such as skill-scanner, mcp-scanner, or mcp-scan. Specifically for OpenClaw testing, several companies have already released open-source tools to audit the security of its configurations. Corporate policies and employee training A flat-out ban on all AI tools is a simple but rarely productive path. Employees usually find workarounds — driving the problem into the shadows where it’s even harder to control. Instead, it’s better to find a sensible balance between productivity and security. Implement transparent policies on using agentic AI. Define which data categories are okay for external AI services to process, and which are strictly off-limits. Employees need to understand why something is forbidden. A policy of “yes, but with guardrails” is always received better than a blanket “no”. Train with real-world examples. Abstract warnings about “leakage risks” tend to be futile. It’s better to demonstrate how an agent with email access can forward confidential messages just because a random incoming email asked it to. When the threat feels real, motivation to follow the rules grows too. Ideally, employees should complete a brief crash course on AI security. Offer secure alternatives. If employees need an AI assistant, provide an approved tool that features centralized management, logging, and OAuth access control.
kaspersky.comFeb 16, 2026extracted
Report Acn sugli infostealer: ecco le raccomandazioni contro il vettore fantasma dei cyber attacchi
LummaC2, RedLine Stealer e DcRat sono tra le famiglie di infostealer più attive nell’esfiltrare dati attribuiti a vittime italiane, oltre a costituire il vettore di compromissione iniziale di cyber attacchi più complessi. “Gli infostealer non sono più ‘semplice’ malware da commodity: dal rapporto emerge la centralità di tali strumenti nell’economia del cybercrime”, commenta Pierluigi Paganini, analista di cyber security e Ceo Cybhorus. Secondo Francesco Iezzi, Cybersecurity Specialist NHOA, “l’incremento degli infostealer corrisponde direttamente all’aumento del mercato e della vendita di credenziali di accesso compromesse”. “A colpirmi è in particolare la normalizzazione del mercato dei log”, avverte Dario Fadda, esperto di cyber sicurezza e collaboratore di CyberSecurity360.it. Ecco cosa fotografa il report Acn, il primo sugli infostealer. Indice degli argomenti La cyber criminalità li utilizza per rubare credenziali di accesso a servizi digitali ed altri dati personali e sensibili. L’ecosistema criminale “strutturato e altamente specializzato” vede gli attori sfruttare gli infostealer per effettuare operazioni su fasi mirate della catena di attacco, spaziando dalla distribuzione del malware alla possibilità di monetizzare i dati sottratti, al fine di rendere più efficienti e scalabili le operazioni malevole. Il furto di una solo credenziale è potenzialmente la prima fase di una catena di eventi che sfocia in compromissioni su larga scala. “Il report Acn mostra come famiglie come LummaC2, RedLine e DcRat alimentino un mercato di log e credenziali rubate che sono abilitanti a diverse pratiche criminali, come attacchi ransomware, BEC e compromissioni cloud“, spiega Paganini: “la singola password sottratta oggi potrebbe divenire l’entry point di domani”. Ma a stupire è “la normalizzazione del mercato dei log: abbonamenti low cost, stealer pronti all’uso, Telegram come C2 e marketplace, log ‘premium’ per certi Paesi o settori, quasi fosse un SaaS legittimo con segmentazione e pricing”, evidenzia Dario Fadda. Gli infostealer sono minacce create per la raccolta e l’esfiltrazione di informazioni sensibili dai dispositivi, una volta compromessi. “Oggi, per un attaccante, è molto più facile entrare in un sistema avendo già le chiavi piuttosto che andare a cercare e sfruttare una vulnerabilità tecnica. Questo cambia il modello di attacco”, spiega Francesco Iezzi: “Qui entra in gioco la dinamica di mercato: maggiore richiesta, mercato più ricco e abbassamento delle barriere di ingresso tecniche, soprattutto grazie all’AI. Il trend degli infostealer cresce in modo quasi esponenziale proprio perché va letto come un mercato vero e proprio, da analizzare in termini di domanda, offerta e barriere di ingresso“. L’evoluzione di questi software malevoli vede le strategie di attacco spaziare dal modello della Cyber Kill Chain all’ecosistema cyber crime che ruota attorno a questa categoria di malware. Ecco un caso studio reale gestito dal CSIRT Italia che esemplifica come gli infostealer rappresentano frequentemente il punto di partenza per attacchi più più articolati, compresi attacchi di tipo ransomware. I rischi derivanti dall’esfiltrazione delle informazioni: furto d’identità; danni economici, in caso di accesso a banking online o di furto di criptovalute; accessi non autorizzati ad account personali o professionali, in particolare nel caso di politiche di BYOD o nel caso in cui si condividono le credenziali per servizi differenti; violazione della privacy; danni reputazionali ed esposizione a ricatti; sofisticati attacchi di social engineering; eventuale perdita di proprietà intellettuale. Nelle attività di risposta e gestione degli incidenti avvenute nel 2024, il CSIRT Italia è stato coinvolto nella gestione di un incidente riconducibile a un attacco ransomware che ha riguardato un ente operante nell’ambito della ricerca. In fase di triage, il CSIRT ha analizzato il parco macchine, scoprendo che l’accesso iniziale era riconducibile a un account VPN intestato a un dipendente dell’ente, privo di privilegi elevati. Una volta eseguito l’accesso tramite credenziali valide, l’aggressore ha effettuato attività di movimento laterale nella rete e, quindi, un’escalation dei privilegi (Privilege Escalation) che, avvalendosi di una configurazione di sicurezza debole, gli ha permesso di acquisire il controllo completo del dominio (Domain Dominance). A quel punto è stato in grado di diffondere il ransomware mediante l’uso di una semplice Group Policy. Per impossessarsi delle credenziali VPN del dipendente, che usava infatti una password robusta e non erano caduto vittima di campagne di phishing, l’aggressore si era limitato a sfruttare le credenziali dell’account VPN comprese in un pacchetto di dati frutto dell’attività di raccolta di un noto infostealer, già commercializzato e poi divulgato pubblicamente gratuitamente. Il notebook personale del dipendente, usato solo raramente per l’accesso da remoto all’infrastruttura dell’ente tramite VPN, risultava infettato dall’infostealer circa sei mesi prima rispetto all’accesso iniziale dell’attaccante. Secondo CSIRT Italia, l’autore dell’attacco ransomnware avrebbe comprato il pacchetto di credenziali compromesse, per esempio attraverso un marketplace criminale o uno scambio privato. Questo caso sottolinea, secondo il report, “la natura modulare e stratificata delle minacce infostealer”, vettori primari anche per ottenere l’accesso iniziale a infrastrutture potenzialmente difficili da compromettere. “Secondo il rapporto Mandiant M Trends 2025, le credenziali rubate rappresentano la seconda causa di violazioni di sicurezza (16% casi), con un boom legato proprio agli infostealer, che colmano il gap tra exploit e accessi reali”, mette in guardia Paganini. “La domanda è l’accesso ai sistemi tramite credenziali valide: entrare come utente autenticato è più diretto e più efficace rispetto a un attacco tradizionale”, avverte Francesco Iezzi: “L’offerta è il numero di infostealer disponibili, che aumenta perché l’AI e l’automazione facilitano la creazione di nuovo codice malevolo e di nuove varianti operative. Le barriere di ingresso tecnico si abbassano, perché serve meno competenza specialistica per sviluppare o adattare questi strumenti”. Questo schema, “domanda, offerta e abbassamento delle barriere tecniche“, secondo Francesco Iezzi, “è la chiave di lettura del fenomeno descritto nel report ACN. A questo si aggiunge la crescita di strumenti basati su AI e automazione che facilitano la produzione e l’evoluzione di malware. Di conseguenza aumenta la capacità di generare e distribuire infostealer e cresce la loro disponibilità nel mercato criminale”. Nel frattempo il contesto è sempre più digitalizzato. Infatti “aumentano applicazioni, servizi e sistemi presenti su computer e dispositivi mobili. Più identità digitali e più account significano più credenziali potenzialmente sottraibili. Maggiore superficie digitale e maggiore disponibilità di strumenti portano in modo naturale a un aumento del fenomeno infostealer”, evidenzia Francesco Iezzi. Per tutelare i propri asset dalla minaccia infostealer, occorre adottare misure preventive. Per alzare il livello di resilienza alla minaccia, occorre implementare MFA, effettuare download solo da siti e marketplace ufficiali, mantenere aggiornati i propri sistemi operativi e software, non cliccare su allegati e link inviati via Sms. “Dal punto di vista difensivo, il caso studio sulla compromissione via laptop personale infetto conferma un punto scomodo: finché continuiamo a sottovalutare il rischio BYOD e gli endpoint domestici, stiamo lasciando aperta la porta laterale alle nostre infrastrutture più critiche“, avverte Dario Fadda: “Trovo molto centrata anche l’idea che il problema non sia solo l’esfiltrazione immediata, ma la persistenza nel tempo del rischio: un log infostealer può riemergere mesi dopo, in mano a un attore diverso, con un impatto completamente nuovo”. Occorre inoltre disabilitare il salvataggio automatico delle password, preferendo password manager custodire credenziali robuste. Bisogna monitorare gli accessi e controllare i dati salvati dall’opzione autofill. Per i cookie di sessione è infine necessario accorciare i timeout ed effettuare i logout da tutti gli account, oltre a cancellare i cookies. “ENISA Threat Landscape 2025 evidenzia come questi malware alimentino piu’ del 50% degli attacchi ransomware, trasformando una password rubata in compromissioni cloud e attacchi alla supply chain. Le raccomandazioni ACN – MFA phishing resistant, browser hardening, monitoraggio esposizione su leak site – sono essenziali, ma serve una strategia nazionale per tracciare e smantellare i marketplace di log. A tal fine trovo estremamente interessante e utile il rapporto pubblicato dall’agenzia nazionale”, conclude Paganini.
cybersecurity360.itFeb 11, 2026extracted
⚡ Weekly Recap: Fortinet Exploits, RedLine Clipjack, NTLM Crack, Copilot Attack & More
In cybersecurity, the line between a normal update and a serious incident keeps getting thinner. Systems that once felt reliable are now under pressure from constant change. New AI tools, connected devices, and automated systems quietly create more ways in, often faster than security teams can react. This week’s stories show how easily a small mistake or hidden service can turn into a real break-in. Behind the headlines, the pattern is clear. Automation is being used against the people who built it. Attackers reuse existing systems instead of building new ones. They move faster than most organizations can patch or respond. From quiet code flaws to malware that changes while it runs, attacks are focusing less on speed and more on staying hidden and in control. If you’re protecting anything connected—developer tools, cloud systems, or internal networks—this edition shows where attacks are going next, not where they used to be. ⚡ Threat of the Week Critical Fortinet Flaw Comes Under Attack — A critical security flaw in Fortinet FortiSIEM has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-64155 (CVSS score: 9.4), allows an unauthenticated attacker to execute unauthorized code or commands via crafted TCP requests. In a technical analysis, Horizon3.ai described the issue as comprising two issues: an unauthenticated argument injection vulnerability that leads to arbitrary file write, allowing for remote code execution as the admin user, and a file overwrite privilege escalation vulnerability that leads to root access and complete compromise of the appliance. The vulnerability affects the phMonitor service, an internal FortiSIEM component that runs with elevated privileges and plays an integral role in system health and monitoring. Because the service is deeply embedded in FortiSIEM's operational workflow, successful exploitation grants attackers full control of the appliance. When Your CEO Calls, Will You Know It's Real? Today's phishing attacks involve AI voices, videos, and exec deepfakes. Adaptive Security is the first security awareness platform built to stop AI-powered social engineering. Adaptive protects your team with custom training and deepfake simulations featuring your own executives. Book a Demo ➝ 🔔 Top News VoidLink Linux Malware Enables Long-Term Access — A new cloud-native Linux malware framework named VoidLink focuses on cloud environments, providing attackers with a wide assortment of custom loaders, implants, rootkits, and plugins that are designed for additional stealth and for reconnaissance, privilege escalation, and lateral movement inside a compromised network. The feature-rich framework is engineered for long-term access, surveillance, and data collection rather than short-term disruption, allowing an operator to control agents, implants, and plugins via a web-based dashboard localized for Chinese users. Key to the malware's architecture is to "automate evasion as much as possible" by profiling a Linux environment and intelligently choosing the best strategy for operating without detection. Indeed, when signs of tampering or malware analysis are detected on an infected machine, it can delete itself and invoke anti-forensics modules designed to remove traces of its activity. It's fitted with an "unusually broad" feature set, including rootkit-style capabilities, an in-memory plug-in system for extending functionality, and the ability to adjust runtime evasion based on the security products it detects. VoidLink draws inspiration from Cobalt Strike, an adversary simulation framework that has been widely adopted and misused by attackers over the years. It's believed to be the work of Chinese developers. "Together, these plugins sit atop an already sophisticated core implementation, enriching VoidLink's capabilities beyond cloud environments to developer and administrator workstations that interface directly with those cloud environments, turning any compromised machine into a flexible launchpad for deeper access or supply-chain compromise," Check Point said. "Its design reflects a level of planning and investment typically associated with professional threat actors rather than opportunistic attackers." However, its intended use remains unclear, and no evidence of real-world infections has been observed, which supports the assumption that the modular malware was created "either as a product offering or as a framework developed for a customer." Microsoft Disrupts RedVDS Criminal Service — A cybercriminal subscription service responsible for fraud campaigns causing millions of dollars in losses has been disrupted in a coordinated action by Microsoft alongside legal partners in the U.S. and, for the first time, the U.K. The Windows makers said it seized the website and infrastructure of RedVDS, a platform that hosted cybercrime-as-a-service tools for phishing and fraud campaigns, which cost users as little as $24 a month. The subscription service is known to have cost victims in the U.S. alone over $40 million since March 2025. In total, Microsoft has identified nearly 190,000 organizations worldwide that fell victim to RedVDS-supported campaigns. In one month, the company noted approximately 2,600 RedVDS virtual machines sent an average of 1 million phishing messages to Microsoft customers daily. RedVDS provided cybercriminals with access to cheap, effective, and disposable virtual computers running unlicensed software, including Windows, allowing criminals to conduct phishing attacks and business email compromise (BEC) schemes. The service is also said to have been a player in the spread of real estate payment diversion scams, affecting more than 9,000 customers primarily in Canada and Australia. RedVDS did not own physical data centers and instead rented servers from third-party hosting providers in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, and the Netherlands. "Once provisioned, these cloned Windows hosts gave actors a ready‑made platform to research targets, stage phishing infrastructure, steal credentials, hijack mailboxes, and execute impersonation‑based financial fraud with minimal friction," Microsoft said. "Threat actors benefited from RedVDS’s unrestricted administrative access and negligible logging, allowing them to operate without meaningful oversight. The uniform, disposable nature of RedVDS servers allowed cybercriminals to rapidly iterate campaigns, automate delivery at scale, and move quickly from initial targeting to financial theft." Over 550 Kimwolf Botnet C2 Nodes Null-Routed — Lumen Technologies' Black Lotus Labs has blocked more than 550 command-and-control (C2) nodes linked to Aisuru and Kimwolf's servers since October 2025, as the botnets gained attention for their role in orchestrating hypervolumetric distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Kimwolf, which is said to mainly target unsanctioned Android TV boxes, has caught on like wildfire, corralling over 2 million devices into its botnet. The disruption of RapperBot and the arrest of its alleged leader in August 2025 played a key factor in the rise of Aisuru and Kimwolf. Recent research by QiAnXin XLab and Synthient revealed how the botnet's operators have leveraged proxy services to expand its reach. In a separate report, Infoblox said nearly 25% of its cloud customers made a query to a Kimwolf domain since October 1, 2025. "The main takeaway is these residential proxies are literally everywhere," Chris Formosa, senior lead information security engineer at Lumen Technologies' Black Lotus Labs, told The Hacker News. "Like everywhere and in most organizations you can think of. Given we know the actors were exploiting it, the story is mainly a story of a lot of networks you may think are secured, but have devices running residential proxies which can provide attackers with an opportunity to get an initial foothold, bypassing a large majority of your devices you likely have in place." Reprompt Attack Targets Microsoft Copilot — Security researchers discovered a new attack named Reprompt that allowed them to exfiltrate user data from Microsoft Copilot once a victim clicks on a specifically crafted link pointing to the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot. The attack bypasses data leak protections and allows for persistent session exfiltration even after the Copilot session was closed. The attack leverages a combination of Parameter 2 Prompt (P2P) injection (i.e., the exploitation of the "q" parameter), a double-request technique, and a chain-request technique to obtain a data exfiltration primitive. "Client-side monitoring tools won't catch these malicious prompts, because the real data leaks happen dynamically during back-and-forth communication — not from anything obvious in the prompt the user submits," Varonis said. The attack does not affect enterprise customers using Microsoft 365 Copilot. Microsoft has since addressed the issue. AWS CodeBuild Misconfiguration Creates Supply Chain Risks — A critical misconfiguration in Amazon Web Services (AWS) CodeBuild could have allowed complete takeover of the cloud service provider's own GitHub repositories, including its AWS JavaScript SDK, putting every AWS environment at risk. The vulnerability, codenamed CodeBreach, was fixed by AWS in September 2025. "By exploiting CodeBreach, attackers could have injected malicious code to launch a platform-wide compromise, potentially affecting not just the countless applications depending on the SDK, but the Console itself, threatening every AWS account," Wiz said. ️🔥 Trending CVEs Hackers act fast. They can use new bugs within hours. One missed update can cause a big breach. Here are this week’s most serious security flaws. Check them, fix what matters first, and stay protected. This week’s list includes — CVE-2025-20393 (Cisco AsyncOS Software), CVE-2026-23550 (Modular DS plugin), CVE-2026-0227 (Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS), CVE-2025-64155 (Fortinet FortiSIEM), CVE-2026-20805 (Microsoft Windows Desktop Window Manager), CVE-2025-12420 (ServiceNow), CVE-2025-55131, CVE-2025-55131, CVE-2025-59466, CVE-2025-59465 (Node.js), CVE-2025-68493 (Apache Struts 2), CVE-2026-22610 (Angular Template Compiler), CVE-2025-66176, CVE-2025-66177 (Hikvision), CVE-2026-0501, CVE-2026-0500, CVE-2026-0498, CVE-2026-0491 (SAP), CVE-2026-21859, CVE-2026-22689 (Mailpit), CVE-2026-22601, CVE-2026-22602, CVE-2026-22603, CVE-2026-22604 (OpenProject), CVE-2026-23478 (Cal.com), CVE-2025-14364 (Demo Importer Plus plugin), CVE-2025-14502 (News and Blog Designer Bundle), CVE-2025-14301 (Integration Opvius AI for WooCommerce plugin), CVE-2025-52493 (PagerDuty Runbook), CVE-2025-55315 (ASP.NET Core Kestrel server), CVE-2026-20965 (Microsoft Windows Admin Center), and CVE-2025-14894 (Livewire Filemanager). 📰 Around the Cyber World Unpatched Flaw in Livewire Filemanager — An unpatched security flaw was disclosed in Livewire Filemanager, a file manager component for Laravel-based websites that allows file uploads. The vulnerability (CVE-2025-14894, CVSS score: 7.5) can permit threat actors to upload malicious PHP files to a remote server and trigger its execution. "When a user uploads a PHP file to the application, it can be accessed and executed by visiting the web-accessible file hosting directory," the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) said. "This enables an attacker to create a malicious PHP file, upload it to the application, then force the application to execute it, enabling unauthenticated arbitrary code execution on the host device." More GhostPoster Extensions Spotted — LayerX said it found a new cluster of 17 extensions related to GhostPoster impacting Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. The new extensions, which are designed to hijack affiliate links, inject tracking code, and commit click and ad fraud, have a collective install base of over 840,000 users, and some of them date back to 2020. GhostPoster, first disclosed last month, is part of a broader campaign undertaken by a Chinese threat actor dubbed DarkSpectre. The new findings show that GhostPoster first originated on Microsoft Edge in February 2020 and then expanded to Firefox and Chrome. RedLineCyber Distributes Clipboard Hijacking Malware — A threat actor named RedLineCyber has been observed leveraging the notoriety of the well-known RedLine information stealer to distribute an executable called "Pro.exe" (or "peeek.exe"). It's a Python-based clipboard hijacking trojan that is designed for cryptocurrency theft by continuously monitoring the Windows clipboard for cryptocurrency wallet addresses and substituting them with a wallet address under their control to facilitate cryptocurrency theft. "The threat actor exploits trust relationships within Discord communities focused on gaming, gambling, and cryptocurrency streaming," CloudSEK said. "Distribution occurs through direct social engineering, where the actor cultivates relationships with potential victims, particularly cryptocurrency streamers and influencers, over extended periods before introducing the malicious payload as a 'security tool' or 'streaming utility.'" Fake Shipping Documents Deliver Remcos RAT — A new phishing campaign is using shipping-themed lures to trick recipients into opening a malicious Microsoft Word document that, in turn, triggers an exploit for a years-old security flaw in Microsoft Office (CVE-2017-11882) to distribute a new variant of Remcos RAT that's executed directly in memory, Fortinet said. Successful exploitation of the vulnerability triggers the download of a Visual Basic Script, which executes Base64-code PowerShell code to download and launch a .NET DLL loader module responsible for launching the RAT in addition to setting up persistence using scheduled tasks. An off-the-shelf malware, Remcos RAT (version 7.0.4 Pro) enables comprehensive data gathering capabilities, including system management, surveillance, networking, communication, and agent control. In another campaign detected by AhnLab, users in South Korea have been targeted by Remcos RAT malware masquerading as VeraCrypt installers or software associated with illegal gambling websites. Google Releases Rainbow Tables to Speed Up Demise of Net-NTLMv1 — Google's Mandiant threat intelligence division released a comprehensive dataset of Net-NTLMv1 rainbow tables to emphasize the need for urgently moving away from the outdated protocol. While Microsoft previously announced its plans to deprecate NTLM in favor of Kerberos, Google said it continues to identify the use of Net-NTLMv1 in active environments, leaving organizations vulnerable to trivial credential theft. "While tools to exploit this protocol have existed for years, they often required uploading sensitive data to third-party services or expensive hardware to brute-force keys," Google said. "The release of this dataset allows defenders and researchers to recover keys in under 12 hours using consumer hardware costing less than $600 USD." Former U.S. Navy Sailor Sentenced to 200 Months for Spying for China — Jinchao Wei (aka Patrick Wei), 25, a former U.S. Navy sailor, was sentenced in the U.S. to 200 months in prison for selling secrets to China by abusing his security clearance and access to sensitive national defense information about the amphibious assault ship U.S.S. Essex. Wei was convicted of espionage charges in August 2025 following his arrest in August 2023. "By sharing thousands of documents, operating manuals, and export-controlled and sensitive information with a Chinese intelligence officer, Petty Officer Wei knowingly betrayed his fellow service members and the American people," said NCIS Director Omar Lopez. Wei was recruited by a Chinese intelligence officer in February 2022 and sent photographs and videos of the Essex via an encrypted messaging application, and advised the officer of the location of various Navy ships. He also described the defensive weapons of the Essex, sent thousands of pages of technical and operational information about U.S. Navy surface warfare ships, and sold approximately 60 technical and operational manuals about U.S. Navy ships. In exchange, Wei received more than $12,000 over 18 months. Post his arrest, Wei admitted to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that what he did amounted to espionage and that "I'm screwed." Australia Warns Domestic Firms About AI Security Risks — The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) has warned local businesses against uploading customer data and files to AI chatbots or genAI platforms without proper anonymization. "Some artificial intelligence providers may use customer‑submitted data to train or refine their models. This can depend on the configuration settings or the type of subscription," ASD said. "As a result, information entered into these platforms could potentially be reused or disclosed in unexpected contexts later." It also warned that AI systems are susceptible to hallucinations and can be tricked by malicious cyber actors through prompt injections, which refer to malicious inputs disguised as legitimate requests designed to confuse or mislead the AI into giving sensitive, wrong, or unsafe answers. Furthermore, ASD warned of potential supply chain risks resulting from AI integration, emphasizing the need for secure deployment of AI chatbots. Jordan National Pleads Guilty to Selling Access — A Jordanian national pleaded guilty in the U.S. to charges of selling access to the networks of at least 50 companies through a cybercriminal forum. Feras Khalil Ahmad Albashiti (aka r1z, Feras Bashiti, and Firas Bashiti), 40, is facing a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison after being charged with fraud and related activity in connection with access credentials. Albashiti was arrested in July 2024. His sentencing will take place in May 2026. The FBI, which contacted the defendant in September 2026 under cover, said it was able to trace the "r1z” cybercrime forum account to Albashiti because it was registered in 2018 with the same Gmail address that was used to apply for a U.S. visa in October 2016. According to a report from SentinelOne, the "r1z" account marketed a malware dropper and bypass service called EDR Killer on underground forums. The account was previously identified as advertising access to 50 vulnerable Confluence servers acquired by exploiting the critical Confluence unauthenticated RCE vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-26134, and claimed to be in possession of a list of over 10,000 vulnerable Confluence servers. Other tools included illicit versions of Cobalt Strike, private exploits for local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerabilities in different services, access to 30 SonicWall VPN and 50 Microsoft Exchange servers with a working exploit, as well as a service that acquired compromised VPN and RDP login credentials from other criminals on the XSS forum. R1z is said to have been active on XSS since 2019. Google Agrees to Pay $8.25M to Settle Children Privacy Violations — Google has agreed to pay $8.25 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that claimed the company illegally collected data from devices belonging to children under age 13, The Record reported. The case was brought more than two years ago by the parents of six minors who allegedly downloaded apps and games from the Play Store that were targeted at children, such as Fun Kid Racing, GummyBear, and Friends Speed Racing. The apps, according to the lawsuit, came with Google's AdMob software development kit that collected data from children at scale, violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). U.S. Bank Targeted by Keylogger — Sansec identified a keylogger on the employee merchandise store of a major U.S. bank. The store is used by the bank's 200,000 employees to order company-branded items. "The malware intercepts everything typed into the site's forms: login credentials, payment card numbers, personal information," the Dutch company said. "The stolen data is exfiltrated via image beacon, a common technique that bypasses many security controls." The malware has since been removed from the site. The activity is assessed to share overlaps with an October 2024 breach of the Green Bay Packers Pro Shop, citing infrastructure pattern similarities. Payroll Pirates Redirect Paychecks to Accounts Under Their Control — In a new social engineering attack targeting an unnamed organization, the threat actors behind Payroll Pirates reached out via a phone call, impersonating employees to manipulate multiple help desks and successfully perform password resets and re-enroll multi-factor authentication (MFA) devices. The threat actor has also been observed attempting to establish persistence by registering an external email address as an authentication method for a service account within the client's Azure AD environment. "Once authenticated into the payroll system, the attacker moved quickly," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said. "In total, they compromised multiple employee accounts, each one granting access to sensitive payroll information. The attacker then proceeded to modify direct-deposit details for multiple individuals, redirecting their paychecks into bank accounts under the attacker’s control. Because the credentials were valid and MFA appeared legitimate, the activity blended in with normal operations. The incident was discovered only when employees reported missing paychecks." New Attack Uses DLL Side-Loading to Distribute PDFSIDER Malware — An unknown threat actor is leveraging DLL side-loading to deploy PDFSIDER, a backdoor with encrypted C2 capabilities, using a legitimate executable associated with PDF24 Creator ("pdf24.exe"). The malware operates primarily in memory, minimizing disk artifacts. "PDFSIDER blends traditional cyber-espionage behaviors with modern remote-command functionality, enabling operators to gather system intelligence and remotely execute shell commands covertly," Resecurity said. "The malware uses a fake cryptbase.dll to bypass endpoint detection mechanisms. Once loaded, the malware provides attackers with an interactive, hidden command shell and can exfiltrate command output through its encrypted channel." The malware is delivered via spear-phishing emails that guide victims to a ZIP archive attached to the message. Resecurity told The Hacker News that PDFSIDER has been used in targeted attacks either via spear-phishing or a social engineering attack in which the threat actors impersonate tech support personnel to contact employees in large enterprises and government agencies and deliver the package over Microsoft Teams or Quick Assist. The cybersecurity company also said it observed an affiliate of Qilin ransomware using the malware, although it expects more groups to join the bandwagon. There is no evidence it's being advertised under a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model. 🎥 Cybersecurity Webinars How Top MSSPs Are Using AI to Grow in 2026: Learn Their Formula — By 2026, MSSPs are under pressure to do more with less, and AI is becoming the edge that separates those who scale from those who stall. This session explores how automation reduces manual work, improves margins, and enables growth without adding headcount, with real-world insights from Cynomi founder David Primor and Secure Cyber Defense CISO Chad Robinson on turning expertise into repeatable, high-value services. Stop Guessing Your SOC Strategy: Learn What to Build, Buy, or Automate — Modern SOC teams are overloaded with tools, noise, and promises that don’t translate into results, making it hard to know what to build, buy, or automate. In this session, AirMDR CEO Kumar Saurabh and SACR CEO Francis Odum cut through the clutter with a practical, vendor-neutral look at SOC operating models, maturity, and real-world decision frameworks—leaving teams with a clear, actionable path to simplify their stack and make their SOC work more effectively. 🔧 Cybersecurity Tools AuraInspector — It is an open-source tool for auditing Salesforce Experience Cloud security. It helps find misconfigurations that could expose data or admin functions by checking accessible records, self-registration options, and hidden “home URLs.” The tool automates much of the testing, including object discovery through GraphQL methods, and works in both guest and authenticated contexts. It’s a research utility, not an official Google product, designed to make Salesforce Aura security testing faster and more reliable. Maltrail — It is an open-source tool for detecting malicious network traffic. It compares network activity against known blacklists of suspicious domains, IPs, URLs, and user agents linked to malware or attacks, and can also flag new threats using heuristics. The system uses sensors to monitor traffic and a central server to log and display events through a web interface, helping identify infected hosts or abnormal activity in real time. Disclaimer: These tools are for learning and research only. They haven’t been fully tested for security. If used the wrong way, they could cause harm. Check the code first, test only in safe places, and follow all rules and laws. Conclusion The message is clear. Today’s threats aren’t just single break-ins. They come from connected weak spots, where one exposed service or misused tool can affect an entire system. Attackers don’t see cloud platforms, AI tools, and enterprise software as separate. They see one shared space. Defenders need to think the same way, treating every part of their environment as connected and worth watching all the time, not just after something goes wrong. What happened this week isn’t unusual. It’s a warning. Every update, setting, and access rule matters, because the next attack will likely begin from something already inside. This recap shows how small gaps turned into big openings—and what’s being done to close them before the next round begins.
thehackernews.comJan 19, 2026extracted
Operation Endgame Dismantles Rhadamanthys, Venom RAT, and Elysium Botnet in Global Crackdown
Malware families like Rhadamanthys Stealer, Venom RAT, and the Elysium botnet have been disrupted as part of a coordinated law enforcement operation led by Europol and Eurojust. The activity, which took place between November 10 and 13, 2025, marks Please remove image compression the latest phase of Operation Endgame, an ongoing operation designed to take down criminal infrastructures and combat ransomware enablers worldwide. Besides dismantling the "three large cybercrime enablers," authorities have also arrested the main suspect behind Venom RAT in Greece on November 3, more than 1,025 servers have been taken down, and 20 domains have been seized. "The dismantled malware infrastructure consisted of hundreds of thousands of infected computers containing several million stolen credentials," Europol said in a statement. "Many of the victims were not aware of the infection of their systems." It's worth noting that the Elysium botnet neutralized by authorities is the same proxy botnet service RHAD security (aka Mythical Origin Labs), the threat actor associated with Rhadamanthys, was observed advertising as recently as last month. Europol also noted that the main suspect behind the infostealer had access to no less than 100,000 cryptocurrency wallets belonging to victims, potentially amounting to millions of euros. A recent analysis published by Check Point revealed that the latest version of Rhadamanthys added support for collecting device and web browser fingerprints, along with incorporating several mechanisms to fly under the radar. Rhadamanthys, according to the cybersecurity company, was offered under two paid models, a self-hosted subscription and a subscription with a rented server and additional benefits. It's assessed that the impact of the crackdown will be felt differently for each of them, Sergey Shykevich, group manager at Check Point Research, told The Hacker News. "The takedowns of RedLine and Lumma changed the ecosystem last year, and Rhadamanthys became one of the most dominant and widely used infostealers," Shykevich added. "The current takedown operation is another important step in fighting the big brands in the underground ecosystem." "Rhadamanthys developer had many ups and downs during the last years, and nevertheless, was able to continue and even accelerate its activity. We assume that now the developer behind Rhadamanthys will try to revive its operations in a few days, likely using only the new version 0.9.3, which was launched just recently." "It is important to note that Rhadamanthys may have been used to drop additional malware on infected systems, so other malware infections may also be active on these systems and require further local remediation efforts," the Shadowserver Foundation said. "These victim systems may also have been used in historic or recent intrusions and ransomware incidents." The non-profit, which assisted in the enforcement action, said 525,303 unique Rhadamanthys Stealer infections were identified between March and November 2025 across 226 countries and territories, representing over 86.2 million "information stealing events." Of these, about 63,000 IP addresses are located in India. "Operation Endgame 3.0 shows what's possible when law enforcement and the private sector work together," Adam Meyers, head of Counter Adversary Operations at CrowdStrike, said in a statement. "Disrupting the front end of the ransomware kill chain – the initial-access brokers, loaders, and infostealers – instead of just the operators themselves has a ripple effect through the eCrime ecosystem." "By targeting the infrastructure that fuels ransomware, this operation struck the ransomware economy at its source. But disruption isn't eradication. Defenders should use this window to harden their environments, close visibility gaps, and hunt for the next wave of tools these adversaries will deploy." Authorities that participated in the effort included law enforcement agencies from Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Lithuania, the Netherlands, and the U.S. (The story was updated after publication to include additional insights from Check Point Research.)
thehackernews.comNov 13, 2025extracted
3,000 YouTube Videos Exposed as Malware Traps in Massive Ghost Network Operation
A malicious network of YouTube accounts has been observed publishing and promoting videos that lead to malware downloads, essentially abusing the popularity and trust associated with the video hosting platform for propagating malicious payloads. Active since 2021, the network has published more than 3,000 malicious videos to date, with the volume of such videos tripling since the start of the year. It has been codenamed the YouTube Ghost Network by Check Point. Google has since stepped in to remove a majority of these videos. The campaign leverages hacked accounts and replaces their content with "malicious" videos that are centred around pirated software and Roblox game cheats to infect unsuspecting users searching for them with stealer malware. Some of these videos have racked up hundreds of thousands of views, ranging from 147,000 to 293,000. "This operation took advantage of trust signals, including views, likes, and comments, to make malicious content seem safe," Eli Smadja, security research group manager at Check Point, said. "What looks like a helpful tutorial can actually be a polished cyber trap. The scale, modularity, and sophistication of this network make it a blueprint for how threat actors now weaponize engagement tools to spread malware." The use of YouTube for malware distribution is not a new phenomenon. For years, threat actors have been observed hijacking legitimate channels or using newly created accounts to publish tutorial-style videos with descriptions pointing to malicious links that, when clicked, lead to malware. These attacks are part of a broader trend where attackers repurpose legitimate platforms for nefarious purposes, turning them into an effective avenue for malware distribution. While some of the campaigns have abused legitimate ad networks, such as those associated with search engines like Google or Bing, others have capitalized on GitHub as a delivery vehicle, as in the case of the Stargazers Ghost Network. One of the main reasons why Ghost Networks has taken off in a big way is that they can not only be used to amplify the perceived legitimacy of the links shared, but also maintain operational continuity even when the accounts are banned or taken down by the platform owners, thanks to their role-based structure. "These accounts take advantage of various platform features, such as videos, descriptions, posts (a lesser-known YouTube feature similar to Facebook post), and comments to promote malicious content and distribute malware, while creating a false sense of trust," security researcher Antonis Terefos said. "The majority of the network consists of compromised YouTube accounts, which, once added, are assigned specific operational roles. This role-based structure enables stealthier distribution, as banned accounts can be rapidly replaced without disrupting the overall operation." There are three specific types of accounts - Video-accounts, which upload phishing videos and provide descriptions containing links to download the advertised software (alternatively, the links are shared as a pinned comment or provided directly in the video as part of the installation process) Post-accounts, which are responsible for publishing community messages and posts containing links to external sites Interact-accounts, which like and post encouraging comments to give the videos a veneer of trust and credibility The links direct users to a wide range of services like MediaFire, Dropbox, or Google Drive, or phishing pages hosted on Google Sites, Blogger, and Telegraph that, in turn, incorporate links to download the supposed software. In many of these cases, the links are concealed using URL shorteners to mask the true destination. It's currently not known if all these videos and hijacked accounts are the work of a single threat actor, or it's some sort of a distribution-as-a-service (DaaS) that other cybercriminals can lease access to distribute their warez. "The network appears to be operating as a collective, with different threat actors distributing their malware through those accounts," Check Point told The Hacker News. "We have no clear evidence that there is a single threat actor — there could be multiple actors who have adopted this method of operation." "Although all of the videos share similar descriptions and formats, if there are additional threat actors involved, they may have 'copied' or been inspired by the original operator's modus operandi." Some of the malware families distributed via the YouTube Ghost Network include Lumma Stealer, Rhadamanthys Stealer, StealC Stealer, RedLine Stealer, Phemedrone Stealer, and other Node.js-based loaders and downloaders - A channel named @Sound_Writer (9,690 subscribers), which has been compromised for over a year to upload cryptocurrency software videos to deploy Rhadamanthys A channel named @Afonesio1 (129,000 subscribers), which was compromised on December 3, 2024, and January 5, 2025, to upload a video advertising a cracked version of Adobe Photoshop to distribute an MSI installer that deploys Hijack Loader, which then delivers Rhadamanthys "The ongoing evolution of malware distribution methods demonstrates the remarkable adaptability and resourcefulness of threat actors in bypassing conventional security defenses," Check Point said. "Adversaries are increasingly shifting toward more sophisticated, platform-based strategies, most notably, the deployment of Ghost Networks." "These networks leverage the trust inherent in legitimate accounts and the engagement mechanisms of popular platforms to orchestrate large-scale, persistent, and highly effective malware campaigns." (The story was updated after publication on October 28, 2025, to include a response from Check Point.)
thehackernews.comOct 24, 2025extracted
Security Teams Must Deploy Anti-Infostealer Defenses Now
Infostealers are driving today’s ransomware wave and stealer logs can be bought for as little as $10 on the dark web. At ISACA Europe 2025, Tony Gee, a principal cybersecurity consultant at 3B Data Security, urged security teams to deploy tactical defenses to protect against infostealers. Evolution of Infostealers Since the early 2000s infostealers have become a common weapon in the arsenal of cybercriminals to gain initial access to targeted systems, with the emergence of keyloggers such as Zeus and SpyEye. Around the early 2010s, new infostealer families like Vidar, Trickbot and Emotet, began integrating the capability to extract cryptocurrency. Now, a wide variety of new infostealers frequently appear with different features and capabilities, expanding a market that has largely been dominated by LummaC2 and Redline. Today, stealer logs (the output that infostealers produce) can be found for sale for as little as $10 on some Russian-language dark web marketplaces, according to Gee’s research. The security consultant argued that the best way to defend against infostealer infection is through specific technical security controls. “There are basic controls that you can implement, of course, such as adopting a zero trust architecture, ensuring a good password policy and robust network segmentation that includes separating privileges and provide security awareness training,” he said. However, these alone are not sufficient to prevent infostealers. Gee provided six additional technical controls organizations should implement. Top Six Technical Measures to Mitigate the Infostealer Threat Regular Password Changes Although frequent password changes can be burdensome, they are an efficient measure to mitigate the impact of credential theft and infostealer infections. “The passwords that gets exposed in the stealer logs will then be changed by the time that someone comes to use it,” Gee explained. FIDO2-Enabled Multifactor Authentication Multifactor authentication (MFA) with a FIDO2-enabled technology is also “strongly recommended” against infostealers, especially for users with administrator privileges. Gee argued that such a security measure will make it harder for a threat actor to sign in to systems and services, even with comprehensive logs on the user which have been stolen through infostealer malware. Forced Authentication The “force authentication” process refers to a policy where security teams require staff members to re-authenticate every time they try to gain access to somewhere sensitive within company systems or on the internet. “It means that, instead of just using cookies to just rinse your entire domain, you have to step through multiple authentication steps,” Gee explained. Session Token Expiration Security teams ought to shorten the lifespan of authentication tokens, Gee also recommended. “This method should be especially implemented for bring-your-own-device (BYOD) situations. One of the companies I work with has all cookies expire every day. It makes it really annoying to log in every day, but it's very secure.” Cookie Replay Detection Another of Gee’s recommendations is for security teams to implement cookie replay detection processes on the browsers used by their workforce. This security mechanism identifies and blocks fraudulent attempts to reuse stolen or intercepted session cookies (e.g. in replay attacks) by tracking cookie usage patterns, timestamps or unique identifiers. It helps prevent unauthorized access by ensuring cookies are used only once or within valid contexts. Suspicious and Impossible Travel Monitoring Finally, Gee recommend security teams to deploy an automated security system that monitors connection locations and provide alerts for “suspicious or impossible travel.” “This is when people are logging in twice from two different geographically located places in a short period of time, for instance. That’s an indicator of suspicious activity,” he concluded.
infosecurity-magazine.comOct 17, 2025extracted
Microsoft contro RaccoonO365: sanità nel mirino del phishing-as-a-service e attacchi AI
Microsoft, attraverso la Digital Crimes Unit (DCU), sequestra centinaia di siti web per smantellare il servizio di phishing RaccoonO365. I criminali informatici sfruttano questo strumento di phishing in rapida crescita, per rubare nomi utente e password (le credenziali) di Microsoft 365. “Con la recente interruzione di RaccoonO365 da parte della Dcu di Microsoft, si è avuto un’ulteriore dimostrazione di quanto rapidamente stia cambiando lo scenario della criminalità informatica”, commenta Irina Artioli, Cyber Protection Evangelist TRU di Acronis. Secondo Massimo Biagiotti, Cyber Competence Center Manager per Maticmind, “l’azione di Microsoft contro RaccoonO365 evidenzia quanto la sicurezza non possa più essere affrontata solo come un tema tecnico, ma debba rientrare pienamente nella governance aziendale e nei requisiti di compliance”. Ecco come mitigare il rischio. Indice degli argomenti Grazie a un’ordinanza del tribunale del distretto meridionale di New York, la DCU ha sequestrato 338 siti web associati al popolare servizio, bloccando l’infrastruttura tecnica dell’operazione e impedendo ai criminali di accedere alle vittime. Ancora una volta, il caso dimostra che i criminali informatici non devono essere sofisticati hacker per provocare danni su larga scala. Infatti, bastano strumenti semplici come RaccoonO365 per democratizzare il crimine informatico, mettendo a rischio milioni di utenti. “Nel nostro Acronis Cyberthreats Report H1 2023 avevamo analizzato Raccoon Stealer, uno degli infostealer più diffusi e pericolosi dal 2019, in grado di sottrarre dati dai browser, portafogli di criptovalute e persino password manager attraverso tecniche avanzate di evasion e injection”, spiega Irina Artioli: “Queste campagne hanno evidenziato come gli infostealer rappresentino spesso il primo tassello di un effetto domino che porta a violazioni di rete, furti di identità e, in ultima istanza, ad attacchi ransomware“. Tuttavia, RaccoonO365, tracciato da Microsoft come Storm-2246, è evoluto ed ora offre kit di phishing in abbonamento. “Oggi, infatti, si osserva una chiara evoluzione strategica: dal malware sviluppato su misura come Raccoon Stealer o RedLine si è passati a piattaforme di Phishing-as-a-Service come RaccoonO365 o EvilProxy”, mette in guardia Irina Artioli: “Invece di puntare sulla distribuzione del malware, i criminali informatici scelgono ora kit in abbonamento che permettono anche ad attori con scarse competenze di lanciare campagne di phishing su vasta scala”. Il phishing-as-a-service, accessibile a chiunque paghi, consente a tutti, anche a chi ha scarse competenze tecniche, di rubare le credenziali Microsoft imitando le comunicazioni ufficiali dell’azienda. Per ingannare gli utenti, i kit di RaccoonO365 sfruttano il marchio Microsoft per far sembrare legittimi email, allegati e siti web fraudolenti, invitando i destinatari ad aprirli, effettuare click ed inserire i propri dati sensibili, credenziali incluse. “Il modello del phishing as-a-service aumenta in modo esponenziale il rischio operativo: non solo sottrazione di credenziali, ma anche esposizione a sanzioni e obblighi di notifica previsti da normative come il Gdpr in Europa o la Direttiva NIS 2 per i settori essenziali”, avverte Biagiotti. Dal luglio 2024, i kit di RaccoonO365 sono sserviti a cyber criminali per rubare almeno 5.000 credenziali Microsoft da 94 paesi. Non tutte le informazioni rubate comportano la compromissione delle reti o frodi grazie alla varietà di funzioni di sicurezza impiegate per porre rimedio alle minacce. Tuttavia queste cifre sottolineano la portata della minaccia e come l’ingegneria sociale rimanga una tattica preferita dai criminali informatici. Più in generale, il rapido sviluppo, la commercializzazione e l’accessibilità di servizi come RaccoonO365 indicano che stiamo entrando in una nuova fase preoccupante del crimine informatico, in cui le truffe e le minacce sono destinate a moltiplicarsi in modo esponenziale. “RaccoonO365 va oltre, infatti”, mette in evidenza Irina Artioli, “introducendo moduli basati su AI in grado di aggirare l’autenticazione a più fattori e di incrementare l’automazione, a conferma di come le stesse tecnologie adottate dai difensori vengano ormai utilizzate anche dagli aggressori”. Sebbene i servizi RaccoonO365 colpiscano tutti i settori, come testimonia un’ampia campagna di phishing a tema fiscale che ha preso di mira oltre 2.300 organizzazioni negli Stati Uniti, ad allarmare Microsoft è il fatto che i suoi kit siano stati utilizzati contro almeno 20 organizzazioni sanitarie statunitensi. Ciò mette a rischio la sicurezza pubblica, poiché le e-mail di phishing di RaccoonO365 sono spesso un precursore di malware e ransomware, che hanno gravi conseguenze per gli ospedali. In questi attacchi, i servizi ai pazienti subiscono ritardi, le cure critiche si posticipano o cancellano, si compromettono i risultati di laboratorio e si violano dati sensibili, causando gravi perdite finanziarie e ripercussioni dirette sui pazienti. Queste gravi conseguenze sono uno dei motivi principali per cui la DCU ha intentato questa causa in collaborazione con Health-ISAC, un’organizzazione globale senza scopo di lucro che si occupa di sicurezza informatica e intelligence sulle minacce per il settore sanitario. “La preoccupazione” sale “per settori critici come quello sanitario, dove il phishing apre spesso la strada al ransomware e mette a rischio vite umane. Si sono già osservati schemi simili in campagne in cui le credenziali sottratte vengono successivamente vendute nei mercati underground, alimentando attacchi secondari come compromissioni della posta elettronica aziendale o intrusioni nella supply chain, amplificati da funzionalità basate su AI come ‘AI-MailCheck’”, avverte Irina Artioli. “In quest’ottica, la resilienza non è soltanto una best practice, ma un dovere normativo che richiede controlli documentabili, procedure di incident response verificate e misure di autenticazione realmente robuste”, sottolinea Biagiotti. Per mitigare i rischi connessi al phishing e al social engineering, servono formazione continua ed uso di simulazioni per rafforzare la consapevolezza e restare sempre vigili. Oltre a mantenere aggiornati sistemi operativi, softyware e app, occorre adottare autenticazione a due fattori e un approccio Zero Trust. Ma non basta. “Questo caso ricorda infatti quanto sia necessario un impegno congiunto contro gli ecosistemi della criminalità informatica: aziende tecnologiche, istituzioni giudiziarie e organizzazioni no-profit devono collaborare per il bene comune. Allo stesso tempo, non è possibile delegare la responsabilità esclusivamente alle forze dell’ordine: è fondamentale implementare MFA robuste, filtri avanzati per la posta elettronica, un monitoraggio proattivo dei sistemi e, naturalmente, programmi di Security awareness training per accrescere il livello di consapevolezza degli utenti e dei difensori”. “Dal lato offensive, guardo a kit come RaccoonO365 come a una cartina di tornasole delle nostre difese. Simulare scenari di attacco che riproducano le stesse tecniche, inclusi i tentativi di bypass MFA, permette di validare non solo la solidità dei controlli tecnici, ma anche l’effettiva capacità dell’organizzazione di rispettare i requisiti di legge in termini di prevenzione, rilevazione e notifica“, ricorda Biagiotti. “In un contesto in cui le minacce si rigenerano rapidamente, la capacità di anticiparle attraverso attività di red teaming e threat hunting diventa parte integrante non solo della strategia di sicurezza, ma anche della conformità normativa”, conclude Massimo Biagiotti.
cybersecurity360.itSep 18, 2025extracted
RaccoonO365 Phishing Service Disrupted, Leader Identified
Microsoft and Cloudflare announced on Tuesday that they have teamed up to disrupt the RaccoonO365 phishing service, which has been used by cybercriminals to steal thousands of users’ credentials. RaccoonO365, which has been around for more than a year, has been rented to cybercriminals for between $355 (30-day plan) and $999 (90-day plan) under a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) model. Microsoft estimates that the operation earned the criminal enterprise at least $100,000 in cryptocurrency. The phishing service has been advertised on a Telegram channel with over 850 members, and Microsoft believes RaccoonO365 had at least 100-200 subscribers. RaccoonO365 enables users to create fake emails, attachments with a link or QR code, and phishing websites designed to trick victims into handing over their Microsoft 365 usernames and passwords. The fake emails and websites look realistic and creating them does not require any advanced skills. According to Microsoft, at least 5,000 credentials from users across 94 countries have been stolen through RaccoonO365 since July 2024, although the tech giant pointed out that the attackers were likely not able to use all of the compromised credentials to access networks or conduct fraud. Microsoft and Cloudflare have taken action against RaccoonO365 on several fronts. Microsoft teamed up with healthcare cybersecurity non-profit Health-ISAC to file a lawsuit against RaccoonO365 operators. The partnership with Health-ISAC is explained by the fact that RaccoonO365 has been used to target at least 20 healthcare organizations in the US, which Microsoft says “puts public safety at risk” due to RaccoonO365 phishing emails often leading to malware and ransomware, which can have a severe impact on hospitals. In addition to the lawsuit, Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit (DCU) has seized over 330 domains associated with the phishing service, which has disrupted the cybercriminals’ technical infrastructure and cut off their access to victims. Cloudflare was involved in the operation against RaccoonO365 because its own services were abused, including for anti-analysis and evasion. “Before a request was passed to the actual phishing server, a Cloudflare Workers script inspected the request to determine if it originated from a security researcher, automated scanner, or sandbox. If any red flags were raised, the connection would be dropped or the client would receive an error message, effectively hiding the phishing kit,” the web security firm explained. Cloudflare’s actions were conducted over a period of several days in early September and the cybercriminals attempted to implement some changes in response. The company has banned domains used by RaccoonO365 and placed phishing warnings in front of them, removed the Workers scripts used by the hackers, and suspended the user accounts associated with the operation. In addition to disrupting RaccoonO365 infrastructure, Microsoft announced that it has identified the alleged leader of the operation. The suspect is Joshua Ogundipe, a programmer from Nigeria. Microsoft believes he wrote most of the code, but the company’s blog post indicates that he had several associates who aided with development, customer support, and sales. Microsoft has notified international law enforcement about Ogundipe. Related: RapperBot Botnet Disrupted, American Administrator Indicted Related: Recently Disrupted DanaBot Leaked Valuable Data for 3 Years Related: RedLine and Meta Infostealers Disrupted by Law Enforcement
securityweek.comSep 17, 2025extracted
Steam games abused to deliver malware once again
A cybercriminal known as EncryptHub (aka Larva-208) has reportedly abused the online game platform Steam to distribute information stealers. EncryptHub managed to sneak malicious files into the Chemia game files hosted on Steam. Chemia is an adventurous survival type of game that puts the player in a world ravaged by a catastrophic natural disaster… which is nothing compared to the real-world disasters that can be caused by information stealers. Chemia has not been publicly released yet, but was available as an early access on Steam. Steam offers Early Access to certain games primarily as a development model that allows players to purchase and play games while they are still in progress, rather than waiting for a full official release. It helps developers to receive direct, ongoing feedback from the community which they can use to find bugs, balance gameplay, and improve features. According to security researchers at the Proactive Defense Against Future Threats (PRODAFT), the initial compromise took place on July 22, 2025. EncryptHub added a Trojan downloader to the game files that runs alongside the actual application. The downloader establishes persistence on the affected machine and distributes Fickle Stealer, HijackLoader, and Vidar. Vidar is a Malware-as-a-Service information stealer which uses public networks such as social media, communication platforms—and Steam—as parts of its Command & Control infrastructure. HijackLoader is a malware loader used by attackers to load additional malware (such as Trojans like Danabot or the RedLine stealer) onto infected computers. The Fickle stealer is a relatively new information stealer which uses PowerShell scripts to bypass User Account Control (UAC) and can steal sensitive files, system information, browser-stored data, cryptocurrency wallet details, and more. As we explained many times before, information stealers can turn your life upside down. Depending on what is stored on the infected device the consequences can range from financial damage to identity theft. In another case of abuse of the Steam platform, we saw a cybercriminal use a sniper video game to distribute malware to unsuspecting gamers. But that criminal didn’t circulate the malicious demo on Steam directly. Instead, the game’s Steam page featured a link to the developer’s external website promoting a demo that turned out to be malware. A month before that, a game called PirateFi was released on Steam, but turned out to be circulating malware amongst gamers. With Steam’s huge userbase (over 100 million monthly active users), a compromised game can serve as a direct path for cybercriminals to get hold of valuable digital assets, direct financial information, and personal information. How to stay safe Some tips to help gamers stay clear of downloading malicious software: Do not act on direct messages and other unsolicited ways to try out some game. Random people asking you to download something should be treated as suspicious. Verify invitations from “friends” through a different channel, such as texting them directly or contacting them on another social media platform. This is because their current account may have been compromised. Make sure to run an up-to-date and active anti-malware solution on your computer. If you have tried the Chemia game, run a full system anti-malware scan. Indicators of compromise Domains: soft-gets[.]com reaitek[.]com safesurf.fastdomain-uoemathhvq.workers[.]dev Fickle downloader hash: ed076c27b420bfa66c251488b4121913fa461367a60c5fa32cee3953efcae32b Fickle Stealer hash: 6fb7fd9763d6b269793c80bbc03a1be358390781af4b698fba1591cb8dbb8825 Vidar Stealer has: 2cd8c0e75cf76381f06dfe465a542e52eefa713b0bea2557763e0c0c45b21481 HijackLoader hashes: 9a733b2de84e2bf466287abd034b04b18c8c269535606e8f6403eee2a3b288c4 12935315254175719cbbaad0b213204ddebd4100ffc551d54f8cf39ced1be227 From reporting threats to removing them. Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.
malwarebytes.comJul 25, 2025extracted
CastleLoader Malware Infects 469 Devices Using Fake GitHub Repos and ClickFix Phishing
Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new versatile malware loader called CastleLoader that has been put to use in campaigns distributing various information stealers and remote access trojans (RATs). The activity employs Cloudflare-themed ClickFix phishing attacks and fake GitHub repositories opened under the names of legitimate applications, Swiss cybersecurity company PRODAFT said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The malware loader, first observed in the wild earlier this year, has been used to distribute DeerStealer, RedLine, StealC, NetSupport RAT, SectopRAT, and even other loaders like Hijack Loader. "It employs dead code injection and packing techniques to hinder analysis," the company said. "After unpacking itself at runtime, it connects to a C2 (command-and-control) server, downloads target modules, and executes them." CastleLoader’s modular structure allows it to act as both a delivery mechanism and a staging utility, enabling threat actors to separate initial infection from payload deployment. This separation complicates attribution and response because it decouples the infection vector from the eventual malware behavior, giving attackers more flexibility in adapting campaigns over time. CastleLoader payloads are distributed as portable executables containing an embedded shellcode, which then invokes the main module of the loader that, in turn, connects to the C2 server in order to fetch and execute the next-stage malware. Attacks distributing the malware have relied on the prevalent ClickFix technique on domains posing as software development libraries, videoconferencing platforms, browser update notifications, or document verification systems, ultimately tricking users into copying and executing PowerShell commands that activate the infection chain. Victims are directed to the bogus domains through Google searches, at which point they are served pages containing fake error messages and CAPTCHA verification boxes developed by the threat actors, asking them to carry out a series of instructions to supposedly address the issue. Alternatively, CastleLoader leverages fake GitHub repositories mimicking legitimate tools as a distribution vector, causing users who unknowingly download them to compromise their machines with malware instead. "This technique exploits developers' trust in GitHub and their tendency to run installation commands from repositories that appear reputable," PRODAFT said. This strategic abuse of social engineering mirrors techniques used in initial access brokers (IABs), underscoring its role within a broader cybercrime supply chain. PRODAFT said it has observed Hijack Loader being delivered via DeerStealer as well as CastleLoader, with the latter also propagating DeerStealer variants. This suggests the overlapping nature of these campaigns, despite them being orchestrated by different threat actors. Since May 2025, CastleLoader campaigns have leveraged seven distinct C2 servers, with over 1,634 infection attempts recorded during the time period. Analysis of its C2 infrastructure and its web-based panel—which is used to oversee and manage the infections – shows that as many as 469 devices were compromised, resulting in an infection rate of 28.7%. Researchers also observed elements of anti-sandboxing and obfuscation—features typical in advanced loaders like SmokeLoader or IceID. Combined with PowerShell abuse, GitHub impersonation, and dynamic unpacking, CastleLoader reflects a growing trend in stealth-first malware loaders that operate as stagers in malware-as-a-service (MaaS) ecosystems. "CastleLoader is a new and active threat, rapidly adopted by various malicious campaigns to deploy an array of other loaders and stealers," PRODAFT said. "Its sophisticated anti-analysis techniques and multi-stage infection process highlight its effectiveness as a primary distribution mechanism in the current threat landscape." "The C2 panel demonstrates operational capabilities typically associated with malware-as-a-service (MaaS) offerings, suggesting the operators have experience in cybercriminal infrastructure development." Update In a new analysis, IBM X-Force said it observed campaigns leveraging CastleLoader (aka CastleBot) to also deliver MonsterV2 (aka Aurotun Stealer) and WARMCOOKIE (aka BadSpace) via (Fixed spelling) SEO poisoning and GitHub repositories impersonating legitimate software. This underscores the versatility of the MaaS framework to enable the deployment of a diverse array of high-impact payloads. "What makes CastleBot particularly concerning is how it's being distributed: Most often through trojanized software installers downloaded from fake websites, luring unsuspecting users into launching the infection themselves," security researcher Golo Mühr said. "Once inside, CastleBot runs through a three-stage process: a stager/downloader, a loader and a core backdoor, which requests a set of tasks from its command and control (C2) server. Information gathered from the infected machine allows operators to easily filter victims, manage ongoing infections and deploy malware to high-value targets with precision." (The story was updated after publication on August 9, 2025, to include insights from IBM X-Force)
thehackernews.comJul 24, 2025extracted
Credential Theft and Remote Access Surge as AllaKore, PureRAT, and Hijack Loader Proliferate
Mexican organizations are still being targeted by threat actors to deliver a modified version of AllaKore RAT and SystemBC as part of a long-running campaign. The activity has been attributed by Arctic Wolf Labs to a financially motivated hacking group called Greedy Sponge. It's believed to be active since early 2021, indiscriminately targeting a wide range of sectors, such as retail, agriculture, public sector, entertainment, manufacturing, transportation, commercial services, capital goods, and banking. "The AllaKore RAT payload has been heavily modified to enable the threat actors to send select banking credentials and unique authentication information back to their command-and-control (C2) server, for the purpose of conducting financial fraud," the cybersecurity company said in an analysis published last week. Details of the campaign were first documented by the BlackBerry Research and Intelligence Team (which is now part of Arctic Wolf) in January 2024, with the attacks employing phishing or drive-by compromises to distribute booby-trapped ZIP archives that ultimately facilitate the deployment of AllaKore RAT. Attack chains analyzed by Arctic Wolf show that the remote access trojan is designed to optionally deliver secondary payloads like SystemBC, a C-based malware that turns compromised Windows hosts into SOCKS5 proxies to allow attackers to communicate with their C2 servers. Besides dropping potent proxy tools, Greedy Sponge has also refined and updated its tradecraft to incorporate improved geofencing measures as of mid-2024 in an attempt to thwart analysis. "Historically, geofencing to the Mexican region took place in the first stage, via a .NET downloader included in the trojanized Microsoft software installer (MSI) file," the company said. "This has now been moved server-side to restrict access to the final payload." The latest iteration sticks to the same approach as before, distributing ZIP files ("Actualiza_Policy_v01.zip") containing a legitimate Chrome proxy executable and a trojanized MSI file that's engineered to drop AllaKore RAT, a malware with capabilities for keylogging, screenshot capture, file download/upload, and remote control. The MSI file is configured to deploy a .NET downloader, which is responsible for retrieving and launching the remote access trojan from an external server ("manzisuape[.]com/amw"), and a PowerShell script for cleanup actions. This is not the first time AllaKore RAT has been used in attacks targeting Latin America. In May 2024, HarfangLab and Cisco Talos revealed that an AllaKore variant known as AllaSenha (aka CarnavalHeist) has been used to single out Brazilian banking institutions by threat actors from the country. "Having spent those four years-plus actively targeting Mexican entities, we would deem this threat actor persistent, but not particularly advanced," Arctic Wolf said. "The strictly financial motivation of this actor coupled with their limited geographic targeting is highly distinctive." "Additionally, their operational longevity points to probable operational success – meaning they’ve found something that works for them, and they are sticking with it. Greedy Sponge has held the same infrastructure models for the duration of their campaigns." The development comes as eSentire detailed a May 2025 phishing campaign that employed a new crypter-as-a-service offering known as Ghost Crypt to deliver and run PureRAT. "Initial access was gained through social engineering, where the threat actor impersonated a new client and sent a PDF containing a link to a Zoho WorkDrive folder containing malicious zip files," the Canadian company noted. "The attacker also created a sense of urgency by calling the victim and requesting that they extract and execute the file immediately." Further examination of the attack chain has revealed that the malicious file contains a DLL payload that's encrypted with Ghost Crypt, which then extracts and injects the trojan (i.e., the DLL) into a legitimate Windows csc.exe process using a technique called process hypnosis injection. Ghost Crypt, which was first advertised by an eponymous threat actor on cybercrime forums on April 15, 2025, offers the ability to bypass Microsoft Defender Antivirus, and serve several stealers, loaders, and trojans like Lumma, Rhadmanthys, StealC, BlueLoader, PureLoader, DCRat, and XWorm, among others. The discovery also follows the emergence of a new version of Neptune RAT (aka MasonRAT) that's distributed via JavaScript file lures, allowing the threat actors to extract sensitive data, take screenshots, log keystrokes, drop clipper malware, and download additional DLL payloads. Neptune RAT, according to Gen Digital, shares striking overlaps with another remote access trojan referred to as XWorm, suggesting that the first iteration of the malware is a derivative of the latter. Neptune RAT V2, in contrast, incorporates significant changes from its predecessor, alluding to a rewrite or an extensive refactoring. "Both XWorm and Neptune RAT V1 use the exact same encryption routine: The mutex is hashed using MD5, and the hash is duplicated to form a 32-byte key used for AES encryption running in the insecure ECB mode," security researcher Ajin Deepak said. "Both XWorm and Neptune RAT share a similar approach to initialization: they load all configuration settings at the start of their respective main functions and then launch executor threads to carry out their tasks." In recent months, cyber attacks have employed malicious Inno Setup installers that serve as a conduit for Hijack Loader (aka IDAT Loader), which then delivers the RedLine information stealer. The attack "leverages Inno Setup's Pascal scripting capabilities to retrieve and execute the next-stage payload in a compromised or targeted host," the Splunk Threat Research Team said. "This technique closely resembles the approach used by a well-known malicious Inno Setup loader called D3F@ck Loader, which follows a similar infection pattern."
thehackernews.comJul 22, 2025extracted