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The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has warned that cybercriminals are impersonating financial institutions with an aim to steal money or sensitive information to facilitate account takeover (ATO) fraud schemes. The activity targets individuals, businesses, and organizations of varied sizes and across sectors, the agency said, adding the fraudulent schemes have led to more than $262 million in losses since the start of the year. The FBI said it has received over 5,100 complaints. ATO fraud typically refers to attacks that enable threat actors to obtain unauthorized access to an online financial institution, payroll system, or health savings account to siphon data and funds for personal gain. The access is often obtained by approaching targets through social engineering techniques, such as texts, calls, and emails that prey on users' fears, or via bogus websites. These methods make it possible for attackers to deceive users into providing their login credentials on a...

New research has found that organizations in various sensitive sectors, including governments, telecoms, and critical infrastructure, are pasting passwords and credentials into online tools like JSONformatter and CodeBeautify that are used to format and validate code. Cybersecurity company watchTowr Labs said it captured a dataset of over 80,000 files on these sites, uncovering thousands of usernames, passwords, repository authentication keys, Active Directory credentials, database credentials, FTP credentials, cloud environment keys, LDAP configuration information, helpdesk API keys, meeting room API keys, SSH session recordings, and all kinds of personal information. This includes five years of historical JSONFormatter content and one year of historical CodeBeautify content, totalling over 5GB worth of enriched, annotated JSON data. Organizations impacted by the leak span critical national infrastructure, government, finance, insurance, banking, technology, retail, aerospace, t...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new campaign that's leveraging a combination of ClickFix lures and fake adult websites to deceive users into running malicious commands under the guise of a "critical" Windows security update. "Campaign leverages fake adult websites (xHamster, PornHub clones) as its phishing mechanism, likely distributed via malvertising," Acronis said in a new report shared with The Hacker News. "The adult theme, and possible connection to shady websites, adds to the victim's psychological pressure to comply with sudden 'security update' installation." ClickFix-style attacks have surged over the past year, typically tricking users into running malicious commands on their own machines using prompts for technical fixes or completing CAPTCHA verification checks. According to data from Microsoft, ClickFix has become the most common initial access method, accounting for 47% of attacks. The latest camp...

The threat actor known as ToddyCat has been observed adopting new methods to obtain access to corporate email data belonging to target companies, including using a custom tool dubbed TCSectorCopy. "This attack allows them to obtain tokens for the OAuth 2.0 authorization protocol using the user's browser, which can be used outside the perimeter of the compromised infrastructure to access corporate mail," Kaspersky said in a technical breakdown. ToddyCat, assessed to be active since 2020, has a track record of targeting various organizations in Europe and Asia with various tools, Samurai and TomBerBil to retain access and steal cookies and credentials from web browsers like Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. Earlier this April, the hacking group was attributed to the exploitation of a security flaw in ESET Command Line Scanner (CVE-2024-11859, CVSS score: 6.8) to deliver a previously undocumented malware codenamed TCESB.  Kaspersky said it detected in attacks that ...

2026 will mark a pivotal shift in cybersecurity. Threat actors are moving from experimenting with AI to making it their primary weapon, using it to scale attacks, automate reconnaissance, and craft hyper-realistic social engineering campaigns. The Storm on the Horizon Global world instability, coupled with rapid technological advancement, will force security teams to adapt not just their defensive technologies but their entire workforce approach. The average SOC already processes about 11,000 alerts daily, but the volume and sophistication of threats are accelerating. For business leaders, this translates to direct impacts on operational continuity, regulatory compliance, and bottom-line financials. SOCs that can't keep pace won't just struggle; they'll fail spectacularly. Solve these three core issues now, or pay dearly later. 1. Evasive Threats Are Slipping Through—And Getting Smarter Fast Attackers have mastered evasion. ClickFix campaigns trick employees into pas...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new campaign that has leveraged Blender Foundation files to deliver an information stealer known as StealC V2 . "This ongoing operation, active for at least six months, involves implanting malicious .blend files on platforms like CGTrader," Morphisec researcher Shmuel Uzan said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Users unknowingly download these 3D model files, which are designed to execute embedded Python scripts upon opening in Blender -- a free, open-source 3D creation suite." The cybersecurity company said the activity shares similarities with a prior campaign linked to Russian-speaking threat actors that involved impersonating the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to target the online gaming community and infect them with StealC and Pyramid C2. This assessment is based on tactical similarities in both campaigns, including using decoy documents, evasive techniques, and background execution of...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday issued an alert warning of bad actors actively leveraging commercial spyware and remote access trojans (RATs) to target users of mobile messaging applications. "These cyber actors use sophisticated targeting and social engineering techniques to deliver spyware and gain unauthorized access to a victim's messaging app, facilitating the deployment of additional malicious payloads that can further compromise the victim's mobile device," the agency said . CISA cited as examples multiple campaigns that have come to light since the start of the year. Some of them include - The targeting of the Signal messaging app by multiple Russia-aligned threat actors by taking advantage of the service's "linked devices" feature to hijack target user accounts Android spyware campaigns codenamed ProSpy and ToSpy that impersonate apps like Signal and ToTok to target users in the United Arab Emi...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered five vulnerabilities in Fluent Bit , an open-source and lightweight telemetry agent, that could be chained to compromise and take over cloud infrastructures. The security defects "allow attackers to bypass authentication, perform path traversal, achieve remote code execution, cause denial-of-service conditions, and manipulate tags," Oligo Security said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Successful exploitation of the flaws could enable attackers to disrupt cloud services, manipulate data, and burrow deeper into cloud and Kubernetes infrastructure. The list of identified vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2025-12972 - A path traversal vulnerability stemming from the use of unsanitized tag values to generate output filenames, making it possible to write or overwrite arbitrary files on disk, enabling log tampering and remote code execution. CVE-2025-12970 - A stack buffer overflow vulnerability in the Docker Metrics inp...

Multiple security vendors are sounding the alarm about a second wave of attacks targeting the npm registry in a manner that's reminiscent of the Shai-Hulud attack . The new supply chain campaign, dubbed Sha1-Hulud , has compromised hundreds of npm packages, according to reports from Aikido , HelixGuard , JFrog , Koi Security , ReversingLabs , SafeDep , Socket , Step Security , and Wiz . The trojanized npm packages were uploaded to npm between November 21 and 23, 2025. The attack has impacted popular packages from Zapier, ENS Domains, PostHog, and Postman, among others. "The campaign introduces a new variant that executes malicious code during the preinstall phase, significantly increasing potential exposure in build and runtime environments," Wiz researchers Hila Ramati, Merav Bar, Gal Benmocha, and Gili Tikochinski said. Like the Shai-Hulud attack that came to light in September 2025, the latest activity also publishes stolen secrets to GitHub, this time with the rep...

This week saw a lot of new cyber trouble. Hackers hit Fortinet and Chrome with new 0-day bugs. They also broke into supply chains and SaaS tools. Many hid inside trusted apps, browser alerts, and software updates. Big firms like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Google had to react fast — stopping DDoS attacks, blocking bad links, and fixing live flaws. Reports also showed how fast fake news, AI risks, and attacks on developers are growing. Here's what mattered most in security this week. ⚡ Threat of the Week Fortinet Warns of Another Silently Patched and Actively Exploited FortiWeb Flaw — Fortinet has warned that a new security flaw in FortiWeb has been exploited in the wild. The medium-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-58034, carries a CVSS score of 6.7 out of a maximum of 10.0. It has been addressed in version 8.0.2. "An Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command ('OS Command Injection') vulnerability [CWE-78] in FortiWeb may allow an a...

New research from CrowdStrike has revealed that DeepSeek's artificial intelligence (AI) reasoning model DeepSeek-R1 produces more security vulnerabilities in response to prompts that contain topics deemed politically sensitive by China. "We found that when DeepSeek-R1 receives prompts containing topics the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) likely considers politically sensitive, the likelihood of it producing code with severe security vulnerabilities increases by up to 50%," the cybersecurity company said . The Chinese AI company previously attracted national security concerns, leading to a ban in many countries. Its open-source DeepSeek-R1 model was also found to censor topics considered sensitive by the Chinese government, refusing to answer questions about the Great Firewall of China or the political status of Taiwan, among others. In a statement released earlier this month, Taiwan's National Security Bureau warned citizens to be vigilant when using Chinese-m...

A recently patched security flaw in Microsoft Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) has been exploited by threat actors to distribute malware known as ShadowPad. "The attacker targeted Windows Servers with WSUS enabled, exploiting CVE-2025-59287 for initial access," AhnLab Security Intelligence Center (ASEC) said in a report published last week. "They then used PowerCat , an open-source PowerShell-based Netcat utility, to obtain a system shell (CMD). Subsequently, they downloaded and installed ShadowPad using certutil and curl." ShadowPad , assessed to be a successor to PlugX, is a modular backdoor widely used by Chinese state-sponsored hacking groups. It first emerged in 2015. In an analysis published in August 2021, SentinelOne called it a "masterpiece of privately sold malware in Chinese espionage." CVE-2025-59287 , addressed by Microsoft last month, refers to a critical deserialization flaw in WSUS that could be exploited to achieve remote code ...