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Cybersecurity researchers have unearthed new Android spyware artifacts that are likely affiliated with the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) and have been distributed to targets by masquerading as VPN apps and Starlink, a satellite internet connection service offered by SpaceX. Mobile security vendor Lookout said it discovered four samples of a surveillanceware tool it tracks as DCHSpy one week after the onset of the Israel-Iran conflict last month. Exactly how many people may have installed these apps is not clear. "DCHSpy collects WhatsApp data, accounts, contacts, SMS, files, location, and call logs, and can record audio and take photos," security researchers Alemdar Islamoglu and Justin Albrecht said . First detected in July 2024, DCHSpy is assessed to be the handiwork of MuddyWater , an Iranian nation-state group tied to MOIS. The hacking crew is also called Boggy Serpens, Cobalt Ulster, Earth Vetala, ITG17, Mango Sandstorm (formerly Mercury), Se...

The China-linked cyber espionage group tracked as APT41 has been attributed to a new campaign targeting government IT services in the African region. "The attackers used hardcoded names of internal services, IP addresses, and proxy servers embedded within their malware," Kaspersky researchers Denis Kulik and Daniil Pogorelov said . "One of the C2s [command-and-control servers] was a captive SharePoint server within the victim's infrastructure." APT41 is the moniker assigned to a prolific Chinese nation-state hacking group that's known for targeting organizations spanning multiple sectors, including telecom and energy providers, educational institutions, healthcare organizations and IT energy companies in more than three dozen countries. What makes the campaign noteworthy is its focus on Africa, which, as the Russian cybersecurity vendor noted, "had experienced the least activity" from this specific threat actor. That said, the findings line u...

Even in well-secured environments, attackers are getting in—not with flashy exploits, but by quietly taking advantage of weak settings, outdated encryption, and trusted tools left unprotected. These attacks don't depend on zero-days. They work by staying unnoticed—slipping through the cracks in what we monitor and what we assume is safe. What once looked suspicious now blends in, thanks to modular techniques and automation that copy normal behavior. The real concern? Control isn't just being challenged—it's being quietly taken. This week's updates highlight how default settings, blurred trust boundaries, and exposed infrastructure are turning everyday systems into entry points. ⚡ Threat of the Week Critical SharePoint Zero-Day Actively Exploited (Patch Released Today) — Microsoft has released fixes to address two security flaws in SharePoint Server that have come under active exploitation in the wild to breach dozens of organizations across the world. Details of exploitation emer...

By 2025, Zero Trust has evolved from a conceptual framework into an essential pillar of modern security. No longer merely theoretical, it's now a requirement that organizations must adopt. A robust, defensible architecture built on Zero Trust principles does more than satisfy baseline regulatory mandates. It underpins cyber resilience, secures third-party partnerships, and ensures uninterrupted business operations. In turn, more than 80% of organizations plan to implement Zero Trust strategies by 2026, according to a recent Zscaler report .  In the context of Zero Trust, artificial intelligence (AI) can assist greatly as a tool for implementing automation around adaptive trust and continuous risk evaluation. In a Zero Trust architecture, access decisions must adapt continuously to changing factors such as device posture, user behavior, location, workload sensitivity, and more. This constant evaluation generates massive volumes of data, far beyond what human teams can process alo...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a novel attack technique that allows threat actors to downgrade Fast IDentity Online ( FIDO ) key protections by deceiving users into approving authentication requests from spoofed company login portals. FIDO keys are hardware- or software-based authenticators designed to eliminate phishing by binding logins to specific domains using public-private key cryptography. In this case, attackers exploit a legitimate feature—cross-device sign-in—to trick victims into unknowingly authenticating malicious sessions. The activity, observed by Expel as part of a phishing campaign in the wild, has been attributed to a threat actor named PoisonSeed , which was recently flagged as leveraging compromised credentials associated with customer relationship management (CRM) tools and bulk email providers to send spam messages containing cryptocurrency seed phrases and drain victims' digital wallets. "The attacker does this by taking advantage of cross-d...

Microsoft on Sunday released security patches for an actively exploited security flaw in SharePoint and also disclosed details of another vulnerability that it said has been addressed with "more robust protections." The tech giant acknowledged it's "aware of active attacks targeting on-premises SharePoint Server customers by exploiting vulnerabilities partially addressed by the July Security Update." CVE-2025-53770 (CVSS score: 9.8), as the exploited Vulnerability is tracked, concerns a case of remote code execution that arises due to the deserialization of untrusted data in on-premise versions of Microsoft SharePoint Server. The newly disclosed shortcoming is a spoofing flaw in SharePoint ( CVE-2025-53771 , CVSS score: 7.1). Viettel Cyber Security and an anonymous researcher has been credited with discovering and reporting the bug. "Improper limitation of a pathname to a restricted directory ('path traversal') in Microsoft Office SharePoint...

Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) has released security updates to address a critical security flaw affecting Instant On Access Points that could allow an attacker to bypass authentication and gain administrative access to susceptible systems. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-37103, carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10.0. "Hard-coded login credentials were found in HPE Networking Instant On Access Points, allowing anyone with knowledge of it to bypass normal device authentication," the company said in an advisory. "Successful exploitation could allow a remote attacker to gain administrative access to the system." Also patched by HPE is an authenticated command injection flaw in the command-line interface of the HPE Networking Instant On Access Points (CVE-2025-37102, CVSS score: 7.2) that a remote attacker could exploit with elevated permissions to run arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system as a privileged user. This also me...

A new attack campaign has compromised more than 3,500 websites worldwide with JavaScript cryptocurrency miners, marking the return of browser-based cryptojacking attacks once popularized by the likes of CoinHive .  Although the service has since shuttered after browser makers took steps to ban miner-related apps and add-ons, researchers from the c/side said they found evidence of a stealthy miner packed within obfuscated JavaScript that assesses the computational power of a device and spawns background Web Workers to execute mining tasks in parallel without raising any alarm. More importantly, the activity has been found to leverage WebSockets to fetch mining tasks from an external server, so as to dynamically adjust the mining intensity based on the device capabilities and accordingly throttle resource consumption to maintain stealth. "This was a stealth miner, designed to avoid detection by staying below the radar of both users and security tools," security researcher ...

The financially motivated threat actor known as EncryptHub (aka LARVA-208 and Water Gamayun) has been attributed to a new campaign that's targeting Web3 developers to infect them with information stealer malware. "LARVA-208 has evolved its tactics, using fake AI platforms (e.g., Norlax AI, mimicking Teampilot) to lure victims with job offers or portfolio review requests," Swiss cybersecurity company PRODAFT said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. While the group has a history of deploying ransomware, the latest findings demonstrate an evolution of its tactics and a diversification of its monetization methods by using stealer malware to harvest data from cryptocurrency wallets. EncryptHub's focus on Web3 developers isn't random—these individuals often manage crypto wallets, access to smart contract repositories, or sensitive test environments. Many operate as freelancers or work across multiple decentralized projects, making them harder to protect wit...

A critical security vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint Server has been weaponized as part of an "active, large-scale" exploitation campaign. The zero-day flaw, tracked as CVE-2025-53770 (CVSS score: 9.8), has been described as a variant of CVE-2025-49704 (CVSS score: 8.8), a code injection and remote code execution bug in Microsoft SharePoint Server that was addressed by the tech giant as part of its July 2025 Patch Tuesday updates. "Deserialization of untrusted data in on-premises Microsoft SharePoint Server allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code over a network," Microsoft said in an advisory released on July 19, 2025. The Windows maker further noted that it's preparing and fully testing a comprehensive update to resolve the issue. It credited Viettel Cyber Security for discovering and reporting the flaw through Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI). In a separate alert issued Saturday, Redmond said it's aware of active attacks ta...

Cybersecurity researchers have alerted to a supply chain attack that has targeted popular npm packages via a phishing campaign designed to steal the project maintainers' npm tokens. The captured tokens were then used to publish malicious versions of the packages directly to the registry without any source code commits or pull requests on their respective GitHub repositories. The list of affected packages and their rogue versions, according to Socket, is listed below - eslint-config-prettier (versions 8.10.1, 9.1.1, 10.1.6, and 10.1.7) eslint-plugin-prettier (versions 4.2.2 and 4.2.3) synckit (version 0.11.9) @pkgr/core (version 0.2.8) napi-postinstall (version 0.3.1) "The injected code attempted to execute a DLL on Windows machines, potentially allowing remote code execution," the software supply chain security firm said. The development comes in the aftermath of a phishing campaign that has been found to send email messages impersonating npm in order to tr...

A newly disclosed critical security flaw in CrushFTP has come under active exploitation in the wild. Assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2025-54309 , the vulnerability carries a CVSS score of 9.0. "CrushFTP 10 before 10.8.5 and 11 before 11.3.4_23, when the DMZ proxy feature is not used, mishandles AS2 validation and consequently allows remote attackers to obtain admin access via HTTPS," according to a description of the vulnerability in the NIST's National Vulnerability Database (NVD). CrushFTP, in an advisory, said it first detected the zero-day exploitation of the vulnerability in the wild on July 18, 2025, 9 a.m. CST, although it acknowledged that it may have been weaponized much earlier. "The attack vector was HTTP(S) for how they could exploit the server," the company said . "We had fixed a different issue related to AS2 in HTTP(S) not realizing that a prior bug could be used like this exploit was. Hackers apparently saw our code change, and figured...