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An Iranian national has pleaded guilty in the U.S. over his involvement in an international ransomware and extortion scheme involving the Robbinhood ransomware. Sina Gholinejad (aka Sina Ghaaf), 37, and his co-conspirators are said to have breached the computer networks of various organizations in the United States and encrypted files with Robbinhood ransomware to demand Bitcoin ransom payments. Gholinejad, who was arrested in North Carolina in early January, pleaded guilty to one count of computer fraud and abuse and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He faces a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison. He is scheduled for sentencing in August 2025. "These cyber attacks caused significant disruptions and tens of millions in losses, including to the City of Greenville, North Carolina, and the City of Baltimore, Maryland," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said . "Baltimore lost more than $19 million from the damage caused to their computer networks and t...

The Czech Republic on Wednesday formally accused a threat actor associated with the People's Republic of China (PRC) of targeting its Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In a public statement, the government said it identified China as the culprit behind a malicious campaign targeting one of the unclassified networks of the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The extent of the breach is presently not known. "The malicious activity [...] lasted from 2022 and affected an institution designated as Czech critical infrastructure," it added . The attack has been attributed to a state-sponsored threat actor tracked as APT31 , which also overlaps with threat clusters known as Altaire, Bronze Vinewood, Judgement Panda, PerplexedGoblin, RedBravo, Red Keres, and Violet Typhoon (formerly Zirconium). The hacking group, publicly associated with the Ministry of State Security (MSS) and the Hubei State Security Department, is assessed to be active since at least 2010, per the U.S. Departme...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a security flaw in Microsoft's OneDrive File Picker that, if successfully exploited, could allow websites to access a user's entire cloud storage content, as opposed to just the files selected for upload via the tool. "This stems from overly broad OAuth scopes and misleading consent screens that fail to clearly explain the extent of access being granted," the Oasis Research Team said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This flaw could have severe consequences, including customer data leakage and violation of compliance regulations." It's assessed that several apps are affected, such as ChatGPT, Slack, Trello, and ClickUp, given their integration with Microsoft's cloud service. The problem, Oasis said, is the result of excessive permissions requested by the OneDrive File Picker, which seeks read access to the entire drive, even in cases only a single file is uploaded due to the absence of fine-grai...

Embedded Linux-based Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become the target of a new botnet dubbed PumaBot . Written in Go, the botnet is designed to conduct brute-force attacks against SSH instances to expand in size and scale and deliver additional malware to the infected hosts. "Rather than scanning the internet, the malware retrieves a list of targets from a command-and-control (C2) server and attempts to brute force SSH credentials," Darktrace said in an analysis shared with The Hacker News. "Upon gaining access, it receives remote commands and establishes persistence using system service files." The botnet malware is designed to obtain initial access via successfully brute-forcing SSH credentials across a list of harvested IP addresses with open SSH ports. The list of IP addresses to target is retrieved from an external server ("ssh.ddos-cc[.]org"). As part of its brute-force attempts, the malware also performs various checks to determine if...

Stealer malware no longer just steals passwords. In 2025, it steals live sessions—and attackers are moving faster and more efficiently than ever. While many associate account takeovers with personal services, the real threat is unfolding in the enterprise. Flare's latest research, The Account and Session Takeover Economy , analyzed over 20 million stealer logs and tracked attacker activity across Telegram channels and dark web marketplaces. The findings expose how cybercriminals weaponize infected employee endpoints to hijack enterprise sessions—often in less than 24 hours. Here's the real timeline of a modern session hijacking attack. Infection and Data Theft in Under an Hour Once a victim runs a malicious payload—typically disguised as cracked software, fake updates, or phishing attachments—commodity stealers like Redline (44% of logs), Raccoon (25%), and LummaC2 (18%) take over. These malware kits: Extract browser cookies, saved credentials, session tokens, and crypto walle...

A financially motivated threat actor has been observed exploiting a recently disclosed remote code execution flaw affecting the Craft Content Management System (CMS) to deploy multiple payloads, including a cryptocurrency miner, a loader dubbed Mimo Loader, and residential proxyware. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-32432 , a maximum severity flaw in Craft CMS that was patched in versions 3.9.15, 4.14.15, and 5.6.17. The existence of the security defect was first disclosed in April 2025 by Orange Cyberdefense SensePost after it was observed in attacks earlier this February. According to a new report published by Sekoia, the threat actors behind the campaign weaponized CVE-2025-32432 to obtain unauthorized access to the target systems and then deploy a web shell to enable persistent remote access. The web shell is then used to download and execute a shell script ("4l4md4r.sh") from a remote server using curl, wget, or the Python library urllib2. "Regarding ...

Would you expect an end user to log on to a cybercriminal's computer, open their browser, and type in their usernames and passwords? Hopefully not! But that's essentially what happens if they fall victim to a Browser-in-the-Middle (BitM) attack. Like Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks, BiTM sees criminals look to control the data flow between the victim's computer and the target service , as University of Salento researchers Franco Tommasi, Christian Catalano, and Ivan Taurino have outlined in a paper for the International Journal of Information Security. However, there are several key differences. Man-in-the-Middle vs Browser-in-the-Middle A MiTM attack utilizes a proxy server that places itself between the victim's browser and the legitimate target service at the application layer. It needs some kind of malware to be placed and run on the victim's computer.  But a BiTM attack is different. Instead, the victim thinks they're using their own browser – conducting their normal on...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a coordinated cloud-based scanning activity that targeted 75 distinct "exposure points" earlier this month. The activity, observed by GreyNoise on May 8, 2025, involved as many as 251 malicious IP addresses that are all geolocated to Japan and hosted by Amazon. "These IPs triggered 75 distinct behaviors, including CVE exploits, misconfiguration probes, and recon activity," the threat intelligence firm said . "All IPs were silent before and after the surge, indicating temporary infrastructure rental for a single operation." The scanning efforts have been found to have targeted a wide array of technologies from Adobe ColdFusion, Apache Struts, Apache Tomcat, Drupal, Elasticsearch, and Oracle WebLogic, among others. The opportunistic operation ranged from exploitation attempts for known CVEs to probes for misconfigurations and other weak points in web infrastructure, indicating that the threat actors ...

Apple on Tuesday revealed that it prevented over $9 billion in fraudulent transactions in the last five years, including more than $2 billion in 2024 alone. The company said the App Store is confronted by a wide range of threats that seek to defraud users in various ways, ranging from "deceptive apps designed to steal personal information to fraudulent payment schemes that attempt to exploit users." The tech giant said it terminated more than 46,000 developer accounts over fraud concerns and rejected an additional 139,000 developer enrollment as part of efforts to prevent bad actors from submitting their apps to the App Store. Furthermore, the company said it rejected over 711 million customer account creations and deactivated nearly 129 million customer accounts last year with an aim to block these accounts from conducting nefarious activity, such as spamming or manipulating ratings and reviews, charts, and search results that could compromise the integrity of the App S...

Misconfigured Docker API instances have become the target of a new malware campaign that transforms them into a cryptocurrency mining botnet. The attacks, designed to mine for Dero currency, is notable for its worm-like capabilities to propagate the malware to other exposed Docker instances and rope them into an ever-growing horde of mining bots. Kaspersky said it observed an unidentified threat actor gaining initial access to a running containerized infrastructure by exploiting an insecurely published Docker API, and then weaponizing that access to create the illicit cryptojacking network. "This led to the running containers being compromised and new ones being created not only to hijack the victim's resources for cryptocurrency mining but also to launch external attacks to propagate to other networks," security researcher Amged Wageh said . The attack chain is realized through two components: A propagation malware "nginx" that scans the internet for expos...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new malicious campaign that uses a fake website advertising antivirus software from Bitdefender to dupe victims into downloading a remote access trojan called Venom RAT. The campaign indicates a "clear intent to target individuals for financial gain by compromising their credentials, crypto wallets, and potentially selling access to their systems," the DomainTools Intelligence (DTI) team said in a new report shared with The Hacker News. The website in question, "bitdefender-download[.]com," advertises site visitors to download a Windows version of the Antivirus software. Clicking on the prominent "Download for Windows" button initiates a file download from a Bitbucket repository that redirects to an Amazon S3 bucket. The Bitbucket account is no longer active. The ZIP archive ("BitDefender.zip") contains an executable called "StoreInstaller.exe," which includes malware configurations assoc...

Microsoft has shed light on a previously undocumented cluster of malicious activity originating from a Russia-affiliated threat actor dubbed Void Blizzard (aka Laundry Bear) that it said is attributed to "worldwide cloud abuse." Active since at least April 2024, the hacking group is linked to espionage operations mainly targeting organizations that are important to Russian government objectives, including those in government, defense, transportation, media, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and healthcare sectors in Europe and North America. "They often use stolen sign-in details that they likely buy from online marketplaces to gain access to organizations," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a report published today. "Once inside, they steal large amounts of emails and files." Attacks mounted by Void Blizzard have been found to disproportionately single out NATO member states and Ukraine, suggesting that the adversary is looking to ...