The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Cybersecurity News Site

Law enforcement authorities in seven African countries have arrested 306 suspects and confiscated 1,842 devices as part of an international operation codenamed Red Card that took place between November 2024 and February 2025. The coordinated effort "aims to disrupt and dismantle cross-border criminal networks which cause significant harm to individuals and businesses," INTERPOL said , adding it focused on targeted mobile banking, investment, and messaging app scams. The cyber-enabled scams involved more than 5,000 victims. The countries that participated in the operation include Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Togo, and Zambia. "The success of Operation Red Card demonstrates the power of international cooperation in combating cybercrime, which knows no borders and can have devastating effects on individuals and communities," Neal Jetton, INTERPOL's Director of the Cybercrime Directorate, said. "The recovery of significant asse...

A set of five critical security shortcomings have been disclosed in the Ingress NGINX Controller for Kubernetes that could result in unauthenticated remote code execution, putting over 6,500 clusters at immediate risk by exposing the component to the public internet. The vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-24513, CVE-2025-24514, CVE-2025-1097, CVE-2025-1098, and CVE-2025-1974 ), assigned a CVSS score of 9.8, have been collectively codenamed IngressNightmare by cloud security firm Wiz. It's worth noting that the shortcomings do not impact NGINX Ingress Controller , which is another ingress controller implementation for NGINX and NGINX Plus. "Exploitation of these vulnerabilities leads to unauthorized access to all secrets stored across all namespaces in the Kubernetes cluster by attackers, which can result in cluster takeover," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. IngressNightmare, at its core, affects the admission controller component of the Ingress N...

Microsoft on Monday announced a new feature called inline data protection for its enterprise-focused Edge for Business web browser. The native data security control is designed to prevent employees from sharing sensitive company-related data into consumer generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) apps like OpenAI ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and DeepSeek. The list will be expanded over time to include other genAI, email, collaboration, and social media apps. "With the new inline protection capability for Edge for Business, you can prevent data leakage across the various ways that users interact with sensitive data in the browser, including typing of text directly into a web application or generative AI prompt," the tech giant said. The Microsoft Purview browser data loss prevention ( DLP ) controls come as the company announced the General Availability of collaboration security for Microsoft Teams in an effort to tackle phishing attacks against users of the enterprise com...

A ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation called VanHelsing has already claimed three victims since it launched on March 7, 2025, demanding ransoms as high as $500,000. "The RaaS model allows a wide range of participants, from experienced hackers to newcomers, to get involved with a $5,000 deposit. Affiliates keep 80% of the ransom payments, while the core operators earn 20%," Check Point said in a report published over the weekend. "The only rule is not to target the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)." As with any affiliate-backed ransomware program, VanHelsing claims to offer the ability to target a wide range of operating systems, including Windows, Linux, BSD, Arm, and ESXi. It also employs what's called the double extortion model of stealing data prior to encryption and threatening to leak the information unless the victim pays up. The RaaS operators have also revealed that the scheme offers a control panel that works "seamlessly" o...

A quiet tweak in a popular open-source tool opened the door to a supply chain breach—what started as a targeted attack quickly spiraled, exposing secrets across countless projects. That wasn't the only stealth move. A new all-in-one malware is silently stealing passwords, crypto, and control—while hiding in plain sight. And over 300 Android apps joined the chaos, running ad fraud at scale behind innocent-looking icons. Meanwhile, ransomware gangs are getting smarter—using stolen drivers to shut down defenses—and threat groups are quietly shifting from activism to profit. Even browser extensions are changing hands, turning trusted tools into silent threats. AI is adding fuel to the fire—used by both attackers and defenders—while critical bugs, cloud loopholes, and privacy shakeups are keeping teams on edge. Let's dive into the threats making noise behind the scenes. ⚡ Threat of the Week Coinbase the Initial Target of GitHub Action Supply Chain Breach — The supply chain compromise...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered two malicious extensions in the Visual Studio Code (VSCode) Marketplace that are designed to deploy ransomware that's under development to its users. The extensions, named "ahban.shiba" and "ahban.cychelloworld," have since been taken down by the marketplace maintainers. Both the extensions, per ReversingLabs , incorporate code that's designed to invoke a PowerShell command, which then grabs a PowerShell-script payload from a command-and-control (C2) server and executes it. The payload is suspected to be ransomware in early-stage development, only encrypting files in a folder called "testShiba" on the victim's Windows desktop. Once the files are encrypted, the PowerShell payload displays a message, stating "Your files have been encrypted. Pay 1 ShibaCoin to ShibaWallet to recover them." However, no other instructions or cryptocurrency wallet addresses are provided to the victims, anothe...

The latest Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 Cloud Threat Report found that sensitive data is found in 66% of cloud storage buckets. This data is vulnerable to ransomware attacks. The SANS Institute recently reported that these attacks can be performed by abusing the cloud provider's storage security controls and default settings. "In just the past few months, I have witnessed two different methods for executing a ransomware attack using nothing but legitimate cloud security features," warns Brandon Evans, security consultant and SANS Certified Instructor. Halcyon disclosed an attack campaign that leveraged one of Amazon S3's native encryption mechanisms, SSE-C, to encrypt each of the target buckets. A few months prior, security consultant Chris Farris demonstrated how attackers could perform a similar attack using a different AWS security feature, KMS keys with external key material, using simple scripts generated by ChatGPT. "Clearly, this topic is top-of-mind for both threat actors and ...

If given the choice, most users are likely to favor a seamless experience over complex security measures, as they don't prioritize strong password security. However, balancing security and usability doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. By implementing the right best practices and tools, you can strike a balance between robust password security and a frictionless user experience (UX). This article explores how to achieve the perfect balance between strong password security and a seamless user experience, even as the standards for strong passwords continue to evolve. Why user friction is bad for cybersecurity End users that find security measures cumbersome or frustrating might disregard them, resulting in unintentional cyber risk exposures. These scenarios are especially pronounced in the workplace; if cybersecurity protocols (e.g., strong password security policies) are perceived as obstacles to productivity, employees will frequently ignore or circumvent them due to how difficult, ...

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in the Next.js React framework that could be potentially exploited to bypass authorization checks under certain conditions. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-29927 , carries a CVSS score of 9.1 out of 10.0. "Next.js uses an internal header x-middleware-subrequest to prevent recursive requests from triggering infinite loops," Next.js said in an advisory.  "It was possible to skip running middleware , which could allow requests to skip critical checks—such as authorization cookie validation—before reaching routes." It's worth noting that CVE-2025-29927 impacts only self-hosted versions that use "next start" with "output: standalone." Next.js apps hosted on Vercel and Netlify, or deployed as static exports, are not affected. The shortcoming has been addressed in versions 12.3.5, 13.5.9, 14.2.25, and 15.2.3. If patching is not an option, it's recommended that users prevent external user ...

The supply chain attack involving the GitHub Action "tj-actions/changed-files" started as a highly-targeted attack against one of Coinbase's open-source projects, before evolving into something more widespread in scope. "The payload was focused on exploiting the public CI/CD flow of one of their open source projects – agentkit, probably with the purpose of leveraging it for further compromises," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said in a report. "However, the attacker was not able to use Coinbase secrets or publish packages." The incident came to light on March 14, 2025, when it was found that "tj-actions/changed-files" was compromised to inject code that leaked sensitive secrets from repositories that ran the workflow. It has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2025-30066 (CVSS score: 8.6). According to Endor Labs, 218 GitHub repositories are estimated to have exposed their secrets due to the supply chain attack, and a majority of the leak...

The U.S. Treasury Department has announced that it's removing sanctions against Tornado Cash, a cryptocurrency mixer service that has been accused of aiding the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group to launder their ill-gotten proceeds. "Based on the Administration's review of the novel legal and policy issues raised by use of financial sanctions against financial and commercial activity occurring within evolving technology and legal environments, we have exercised our discretion to remove the economic sanctions against Tornado Cash," the Treasury said in a statement. In conjunction with the move, over 100 Ethereum (ETH) wallet addresses are also being removed from the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list. The department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added Tornado Cash to its sanctions list in August 2022. It was estimated to have been used to launder more than $7.6 billion worth of virtual assets since its creation in 2019, the Treasury said a...