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A Chinese-speaking threat actor is suspected to be behind a fresh wave of cyber attacks targeting government organizations mainly located in Central Asia, including Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and the Syrian Arab Republic, since January 2025. These targeted organizations operate across several sectors, such as healthcare, research, government offices, ministries of foreign affairs, logistics, law-enforcement agencies, urban planning and facilities management, and public educational establishments, per Kaspersky. The activity has not been linked to any known adversary or group. The attacks are characterized by the use of two new obfuscated backdoors the Russian cybersecurity company is tracking as OctLurk and SilkLurk , as well as a specialized utility codenamed LurkProxy to proxy network traffic. "OctLurk and SilkLurk can download and inject additional plugins to perform further malicious actions, including launching command shells, perf...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a previously undocumented Go-based loader framework called HollowFrame and a Rust-based malware family tracked as Matryoshka . According to Blackpoint Cyber, the intrusion sequence begins with a spear-phishing message containing a link to an encrypted archive, which holds a Windows Shortcut (LNK). Executing the file triggers a multi-stage chain that involves privilege escalation, weakening Microsoft Defender protections, and downloading additional payloads. While HollowFrame is launched via a DLL side-loading pair comprising the legitimate Python binary ("python.exe") and a rogue DLL ("python311.dll"), Matryoshka comes in two variants, one which supports HTTP-based communication and command execution, and another that uses GitHub for command-and-control (C2), including beaconing, tasking, reconnaissance, file transfer, and secondary payload delivery. "Together, HollowFrame and Matryoshka gave the actor a pers...

Bitsight says some cheap Android TV boxes have shipped with apps that rewrite their hardware identity to mimic Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, or Vivo phones, then click ads on websites run by the same operators. Researchers named the operation Fuyao and attributed it to Zhejiang Fengwo IoT Technology Co., Ltd., a mainland China company founded in 2019. The same apps have a second job. When a box detects an HDMI signal, it usually switches to relaying other people's traffic through the owner's broadband line as a SOCKS5 exit node. With HDMI off, it goes back to waiting for ad-fraud tasks. Bitsight found the operation by registering an expired domain used as a factory backdoor and telemetry collector. Most identifiable devices reported the model name H96_MAX_V11, though Bitsight said its sinkhole view was skewed toward older models from one brand and did not establish a complete affected-model list. In one day, after filtering for devices carrying the Fuyao apps, the sinkhole ...

Google on Thursday announced that it fixed a whopping 1,072 security bugs in Chrome versions 149 and 150, surpassing the total number of flaws the company fixed across the prior 23 milestones combined. Both versions were released last month. In its latest patch for Chrome 151, released Wednesday, the tech giant resolved 370 flaws , out of which 349 were reported by Google itself. Seven of the vulnerabilities have been marked critical in severity. The development comes amid an exponential surge in vulnerability discovery, mainly fueled by the advent of large language models (LLMs) that have accelerated the process, leading to an unprecedented spike in new bug reports, so much so that issues are being flagged at a faster rate than companies can fix them. According to statistics shared by the U.S. National Vulnerabilities Database (NVD), 46,872 flaws have been recorded so far in 2026, nearing the 49,920 vulnerabilities reported for the entirety of 2025.

An academic study has disclosed a "widespread class" of security vulnerabilities impacting 4G and 5G core networks that, if successfully exploited, could trigger denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and even session hijacking, allowing an attacker to seize control of a user's network session. The findings have been released by a group of researchers from Singapore's Nanyang Technological University in a paper titled "Understanding Implicit Trust Errors in Core Carrier Networks through Multi-Agent Flaw Discovery and Analysis." The study has uncovered dozens of vulnerabilities in the signaling interfaces of LTE/5G core networks, and specifically covers two LTE implementations (Open5GS and OpenAirInterface) and five 5G implementations (Open5GS, free5GC, OpenAirInterface, SD-Core, and eUPF) across two core signaling protocols, GPRS Tunnelling Protocol Control Plane ( GTP-C ) and Packet Forwarding Control Protocol ( PFCP ). "Our research finds these vulne...

Device code phishing - the abuse of the OAuth 2.0 device authorization grant to steal access tokens - has evolved from a niche red-team technique to an industrial-scale threat in under six months. Designed for input-constrained devices like smart TVs, printers, and so on, the device authorization login flow has been adopted by a wide range of apps and use-cases that it wasn't originally intended for - most commonly CLI logins. Researchers first described the attack vector in 2020, but it took until 2024 before nation-state actors like Storm-2372 started using it in the wild. By 2025, ShinyHunters was using device code phishing against Salesforce tenants at scale, then in February 2026, the EvilTokens kit arrived and criminal adoption skyrocketed. By April, Microsoft was reporting 10 to 15 entirely new campaigns every 24 hours . Barracuda counted 7 million attacks in four weeks . The FBI issued a standalone advisory on Kali365 , the first US federal agency PSA about a specif...

Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 says a Chinese-speaking threat actor used DeepSeek through the open-source Hermes Agent framework to launch attacks autonomously. After an initial Telegram instruction, the agent found internet-facing systems and selected public exploits. The researchers recovered no further operator input in the session. The operator, tracked through the aliases knaithe and KnYuan , launched exploitation attempts against more than 460 targets using autonomous and conventional workflows. Unit 42 described seven exploit tracks. They span eight Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) identifiers because the n8n chain combines two vulnerabilities. The DeepSeek-led attacks against Langflow and n8n failed because the exposed systems did not meet the exploits' configuration requirements. In separate manual operations, Unit 42 reported data exfiltration from three organizations through the NetScaler memory-overread flaw CVE-2026-3055 and command execution on 11...

Anthropic on Thursday became the latest artificial intelligence (AI) company to reveal that three of its models, including Claude Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an unnamed research model, had breached three unnamed organizations during cybersecurity testing without its knowledge. The AI firm said the earliest incidents date back to April 2026, adding it made the discoveries after launching a "large-scale retrospective review" in response to a recent disclosure from OpenAI that a combination of its models escaped the sandboxed environment by exploiting a previously unreported zero-day in Artifactory to obtain internet access and break into Hugging Face's production systems with an end goal to cheat on an evaluation. "After reviewing 141,006 evaluation runs where Claude could have obtained internet access, we identified three incidents in which a model accessed the internet from within or while interacting with the evaluation environment of Irregular, one of our third-...

Threat actors with ties to North Korea have been attributed to a sophisticated macOS malvertising campaign that involves redirecting users to fake web pages displaying a full-screen non-existent update sequence to deliver malware as part of a new iteration of the long-running Contagious Interview campaign. The defining aspect of the attack is that bogus macOS software update screen stealthily copies an attack command to the clipboard and then prompts the victim to execute it via the Terminal app, a known technique referred to as ClickFix . "The experience is designed to induce panic," AllSecure said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The computer appears frozen or rebooting, so a user who believes the OS has failed follows instructions they would otherwise find suspicious." The campaign is also noteworthy for its use of blockchain-hosted command-and-control (C2), with the malware extracting the live server address from an Ethereum smart contract. Thi...

A lot of security still comes down to trusting the wrong screen. This week, that screen might be a login page, an install guide, a recruiter call, or a familiar service behaving slightly wrong. Behind it: reused credentials, exposed systems, quiet loaders, abused trust, and exploit paths that should have been harder. Some defenses improved. The loose parts still got found first. Anyway, here's the mess. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

A now-patched vulnerability in Azure Cosmos DB could have let an attacker escape the service's Gremlin query sandbox and obtain full read and write access to databases across customer tenants, according to Wiz. Wiz , which codenamed the chain CosmosEscape , said the exploit chain began with a crafted query against a Gremlin database controlled by the attacker. From there, code execution on a multi-tenant gateway exposed a platform-wide signing secret and a regional account directory, allowing the researchers to locate a target and retrieve its primary account key. Microsoft blocked the vulnerable Gremlin entry point within 48 hours of the November 2025 report. Wiz said Microsoft completed the longer-term fix across all regions in July 2026 and eliminated the platform-wide key. "We appreciate Wiz's work in identifying and reporting this issue through coordinated vulnerability disclosure," a Microsoft spokesperson told The Hacker News. "We have fully addres...

Hidden instructions in a Word document can make Microsoft 365 Copilot rewrite figures in a report, then copy the same instructions into the finished file. Håkon Måløy disclosed the technique on July 28, 144 days after reporting it to Microsoft. In his proof of concept, the internally generated file triggered the same behavior when it was used in a second Copilot drafting session. Måløy's timeline says Microsoft confirmed the reported behavior on March 31 and deployed two mitigations. The first blocked the original prompt wording; the second upgraded the underlying model to GPT-5.5. He said the full chain worked with modified instructions on GPT-5.6 the next day, and the attack class still reproduced on July 28. "The vulnerability class therefore remains exploitable at the time of publication," Måløy said. The attack is not zero-click and does not execute conventional malware. It requires a Copilot drafting or editing operation, and the malicious document must en...

Network firewalls are the workhorses of modern cybersecurity. They are trusted to protect the network, blocking malicious traffic and preventing intrusions and breaches. And for decades, network security teams have built controls around a relatively stable model: users connect to applications, applications exchange data, and security tools inspect packets, protocols, and destinations. Firewalls became exceptionally good at understanding where traffic was going and whether it should be allowed. But just as AI is reshaping every aspect of the business world, it's also had a monumental impact on how security teams view network traffic and the firewall. AI is driving new network dynamics that traditional security policies were never designed to govern. Employees, applications, and agents send prompts, call models, connect to services, and trigger actions across the environment, all activity most firewalls can't see, let alone understand. AI agents interact with external servic...

South Korean authorities and four security firms have disclosed a state-sponsored campaign that compromised trusted domestic websites. The attackers used those sites to exploit locally installed financial-security software and infect targeted visitors with SIGNBT or COPPERHEDGE backdoors. A compromised page could infect a system running a vulnerable AnySign4PC version without a prompt or user-initiated download. The Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA) says AnySign4PC versions 1.1.4.4 through 1.1.4.6 are affected and lists version 1.1.5.0 as the fixed release. It recommends deleting vulnerable installations. AhnLab refers to two exploited products only as financial-security software A and I. Its report does not disclose their identities, affected or fixed versions, or vulnerability identifiers. AhnLab said it identified evidence of related attacks at 72 organizations in 2026. The company also found 15 legitimate websites used as watering holes. Its investigation also foun...