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The North Korean threat actor known as Kimsuky has been linked to a new campaign that distributes a new variant of Android malware called DocSwap via QR codes hosted on phishing sites mimicking Seoul-based logistics firm CJ Logistics (formerly CJ Korea Express). "The threat actor leveraged QR codes and notification pop-ups to lure victims into installing and executing the malware on their mobile devices," ENKI said . "The malicious app decrypts an embedded encrypted APK and launches a malicious service that provides RAT capabilities." "Since Android blocks apps from unknown sources and displays security warnings by default, the threat actor claims the app is a safe, official release to trick victims into ignoring the warning and installing the malware." According to the South Korean cybersecurity company, some of these artifacts masquerade as package delivery service apps. It's being assessed that the threat actors are using smishing texts or ph...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added a critical flaw impacting ASUS Live Update to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-59374 (CVSS score: 9.3), has been described as an "embedded malicious code vulnerability" introduced by means of a supply chain compromise that could allow attackers to perform unintended actions. "Certain versions of the ASUS Live Update client were distributed with unauthorized modifications introduced through a supply chain compromise," according to a description of the flaw published in CVE.org. "The modified builds could cause devices meeting specific targeting conditions to perform unintended actions. Only devices that met these conditions and installed the compromised versions were affected." It's worth noting that the vulnerability refers to the supply chain attack that came to li...

Cisco has alerted users to a maximum-severity zero-day flaw in Cisco AsyncOS software that has been actively exploited by a China-nexus advanced persistent threat (APT) actor codenamed UAT-9686 in attacks targeting Cisco Secure Email Gateway and Cisco Secure Email and Web Manager. The networking equipment major said it became aware of the intrusion campaign on December 10, 2025, and that it has singled out a "limited subset of appliances" with certain ports open to the internet. It's currently not known how many customers are affected. "This attack allows the threat actors to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges on the underlying operating system of an affected appliance," Cisco said in an advisory. "The ongoing investigation has revealed evidence of a persistence mechanism planted by the threat actors to maintain a degree of control over compromised appliances." The as-yet-unpatched vulnerability is being tracked as CVE-2025-20393 , ...

SonicWall has rolled out fixes to address a security flaw in Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 100 series appliances that it said has been actively exploited in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-40602 (CVSS score: 6.6), concerns a case of local privilege escalation that arises as a result of insufficient authorization in the appliance management console (AMC). It affects the following versions - 12.4.3-03093 (platform-hotfix) and earlier versions - Fixed in 12.4.3-03245 (platform-hotfix) 12.5.0-02002 (platform-hotfix) and earlier versions - Fixed in 12.5.0-02283 (platform-hotfix) "This vulnerability was reported to be leveraged in combination with CVE-2025-23006 (CVSS score 9.8) to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution with root privileges," SonicWall said. It's worth noting that CVE-2025-23006 was patched by the company in late January 2025 in version 12.4.3-02854 (platform-hotfix). Clément Lecigne and Zander Work of Google Threat Intelligen...

A new distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet known as Kimwolf has enlisted a massive army of no less than 1.8 million infected devices comprising Android-based TVs, set-top boxes, and tablets, and may be associated with another botnet known as AISURU , according to findings from QiAnXin XLab. "Kimwolf is a botnet compiled using the NDK [Native Development Kit]," the company said in a report published today. "In addition to typical DDoS attack capabilities, it integrates proxy forwarding, reverse shell, and file management functions." The hyper-scale botnet is estimated to have issued 1.7 billion DDoS attack commands within a three-day period between November 19 and 22, 2025, around the same time one of its command-and-control (C2) domains – 14emeliaterracewestroxburyma02132[.]su – came first in Cloudflare's list of top 100 domains, briefly even surpassing Google. Kimwolf's primary infection targets are TV boxes deployed in residential network en...

The Russian state-sponsored threat actor known as APT28 has been attributed to what has been described as a "sustained" credential-harvesting campaign targeting users of UKR[.]net, a webmail and news service popular in Ukraine. The activity, observed by Recorded Future's Insikt Group between June 2024 and April 2025, builds upon prior findings from the cybersecurity company in May 2024 that detailed the hacking group's attacks targeting European networks with the HeadLace malware and credential-harvesting web pages. APT28 is also tracked as BlueDelta, Fancy Bear, Forest Blizzard, FROZENLAKE, Iron Twilight, ITG05, Pawn Storm, Sednit, Sofacy, and TA422. It's assessed to be affiliated with Russia's Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Federation's Armed Forces (GRU). The latest attacks are characterized by the deployment of UKR[.]net-themed login pages on legitimate services like Mocky to entice recipients into entering their credential...

The threat actor linked to Operation ForumTroll has been attributed to a fresh set of phishing attacks targeting individuals within Russia, according to Kaspersky. The Russian cybersecurity vendor said it detected the new activity in October 2025. The origins of the threat actor are presently unknown. "While the spring cyberattacks focused on organizations, the fall campaign honed in on specific individuals: scholars in the field of political science, international relations, and global economics, working at major Russian universities and research institutions," security researcher Georgy Kucherin said . Operation ForumTroll refers to a series of sophisticated phishing attacks exploiting a then-zero-day vulnerability in Google Chrome (CVE-2025-2783) to deliver the LeetAgent backdoor and a spyware implant known as Dante. The latest attack wave also commences with emails that claimed to be from eLibrary, a Russian scientific electronic library, with the messages sent f...

Modern security teams often feel like they're driving through fog with failing headlights. Threats accelerate, alerts multiply, and SOCs struggle to understand which dangers matter right now for their business. Breaking out of reactive defense is no longer optional. It's the difference between preventing incidents and cleaning up after them. Below is the path from reactive firefighting to a proactive, context-rich SOC that actually sees what's coming. When the SOC Only Sees in the Rear-View Mirror Many SOCs still rely on a backward-facing workflow. Analysts wait for an alert, investigate it, escalate, and eventually respond. This pattern is understandable: the job is noisy, the tooling is complex, and alert fatigue bends even the toughest teams into reactive mode. But a reactive posture hides several structural problems: No visibility into what threat actors are preparing. Limited ability to anticipate campaigns targeting the organization's sector. Inability to adjust defenses...

The threat actor known as Jewelbug has been increasingly focusing on government targets in Europe since July 2025, even as it continues to attack entities located in Southeast Asia and South America. Check Point Research is tracking the cluster under the name Ink Dragon . It's also referenced by the broader cybersecurity community under the names CL-STA-0049 , Earth Alux , and REF7707 . The China-aligned hacking group is assessed to be active since at least March 2023. "The actor's campaigns combine solid software engineering, disciplined operational playbooks, and a willingness to reuse platform-native tools to blend into normal enterprise telemetry," the cybersecurity company said in a technical breakdown published Tuesday. "This mix makes their intrusions both effective and stealthy." Eli Smadja, group manager of Products R&D at Check Point Software, told The Hacker News that the activity is still ongoing, and that the campaign has "impacte...

A new campaign named GhostPoster has leveraged logo files associated with 17 Mozilla Firefox browser add-ons to embed malicious JavaScript code designed to hijack affiliate links, inject tracking code, and commit click and ad fraud. The extensions have been collectively downloaded over 50,000 times, according to Koi Security, which discovered the campaign. The add-ons are no longer available. These browser programs were advertised as VPNs, screenshot utilities, ad blockers, and unofficial versions of Google Translate. The oldest add-on, Dark Mode, was published on October 25, 2024, offering the ability to enable a dark theme for all websites. The full list of the browser add-ons is below - Free VPN Screenshot Weather (weather-best-forecast) Mouse Gesture (crxMouse) Cache - Fast site loader Free MP3 Downloader Google Translate (google-translate-right-clicks) Traductor de Google Global VPN - Free Forever Dark Reader Dark Mode Translator - Google Bing Baidu DeepL Weather...

An ongoing campaign has been observed targeting Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers using compromised Identity and Access Management ( IAM ) credentials to enable cryptocurrency mining. The activity, first detected by Amazon's GuardDuty managed threat detection service and its automated security monitoring systems on November 2, 2025, employs never-before-seen persistence techniques to hamper incident response and continue unimpeded, according to a new report shared by the tech giant ahead of publication. "Operating from an external hosting provider, the threat actor quickly enumerated resources and permissions before deploying crypto mining resources across ECS and EC2," Amazon said . "Within 10 minutes of the threat actor gaining initial access, crypto miners were operational." The multi-stage attack chain essentially begins with the unknown adversary leveraging compromised IAM user credentials with admin-like privileges to initiate a discovery phase des...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new malicious NuGet package that typosquats and impersonates the popular .NET tracing library and its author to sneak in a cryptocurrency wallet stealer. The malicious package, named " Tracer.Fody.NLog ," remained on the repository for nearly six years. It was published by a user named "csnemess" on February 26, 2020. It masquerades as " Tracer.Fody ," which is maintained by " csnemes ." The package continues to remain available as of writing, and has been downloaded at least 2,000 times, out of which 19 took place over the last six weeks for version 3.2.4.  "It presents itself as a standard .NET tracing integration but in reality functions as a cryptocurrency wallet stealer," Socket security researcher Kirill Boychenko said . "Inside the malicious package, the embedded Tracer.Fody.dll scans the default Stratis wallet directory, reads *.wallet.json files, extracts wallet data, and exf...

Amazon's threat intelligence team has disclosed details of a "years-long" Russian state-sponsored campaign that targeted Western critical infrastructure between 2021 and 2025. Targets of the campaign included energy sector organizations across Western nations, critical infrastructure providers in North America and Europe, and entities with cloud-hosted network infrastructure. The activity has been attributed with high confidence to Russia's Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), citing infrastructure overlaps with APT44 , which is also known as FROZENBARENTS, Sandworm, Seashell Blizzard, and Voodoo Bear. The activity is notable for using as initial access vectors misconfigured customer network edge devices with exposed management interfaces, as N-day and zero-day vulnerability exploitation activity declined over the time period – indicative of a shift in attacks aimed at critical infrastructure, the tech giant said. "This tactical adaptation enables the same o...

AI-assisted coding and AI app generation platforms have created an unprecedented surge in software development. Companies are now facing rapid growth in both the number of applications and the pace of change within those applications. Security and privacy teams are under significant pressure as the surface area they must cover is expanding quickly while their staffing levels remain largely unchanged. Existing data security and privacy solutions are too reactive for this new era. Many begin with data already collected in production, which is often too late. These solutions frequently miss hidden data flows to third party and AI integrations, and for the data sinks they do cover, they help detect risks but do not prevent them. The question is whether many of these issues can instead be prevented early. The answer is yes. Prevention is possible by embedding detection and governance controls directly into development. HoundDog.ai provides a privacy code scanner built for exactly this p...

Threat actors have begun to exploit two newly disclosed security flaws in Fortinet FortiGate devices, less than a week after public disclosure. Cybersecurity company Arctic Wolf said it observed active intrusions involving malicious single sign-on (SSO) logins on FortiGate appliances on December 12, 2025. The attacks exploit two critical authentication bypasses (CVE-2025-59718 and CVE-2025-59719, CVSS scores: 9.8). Patches for the flaws were released by Fortinet last week for FortiOS, FortiWeb, FortiProxy, and FortiSwitchManager. "These vulnerabilities allow unauthenticated bypass of SSO login authentication via crafted SAML messages, if the FortiCloud SSO feature is enabled on affected devices," Arctic Wolf Labs said in a new bulletin. It's worth noting that while FortiCloud SSO is disabled by default, it is automatically enabled during FortiCare registration unless administrators explicitly turn it off using the "Allow administrative login using FortiCloud SS...

The security vulnerability known as React2Shell is being exploited by threat actors to deliver malware families like KSwapDoor and ZnDoor, according to findings from Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 and NTT Security. "KSwapDoor is a professionally engineered remote access tool designed with stealth in mind," Justin Moore, senior manager of threat intel research at Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, said in a statement. "It builds an internal mesh network, allowing compromised servers to talk to each other and evade security blocks. It uses military-grade encryption to hide its communications and, most alarmingly, features a 'sleeper' mode that lets attackers bypass firewalls by waking the malware up with a secret, invisible signal." Moore told The Hacker News that the backdoor has been identified in two distinct regions and industries, and that it's likely the work of Chinese nation-state actors, based on the malware's code structure and functional overlap w...

Google has announced that it's discontinuing its dark web report tool in February 2026, less than two years after it was launched as a way for users to monitor if their personal information is found on the dark web. To that end, scans for new dark web breaches will be stopped on January 15, 2026, and the feature will cease to exist effective February 16, 2026. "While the report offered general information, feedback showed that it didn't provide helpful next steps," Google said in a support document. "We're making this change to instead focus on tools that give you more clear, actionable steps to protect your information online." The tech giant said it will delete all data related to dark web report once the feature is retired in February, but noted that users have an option to delete their monitoring profile ahead of time by following the steps below - Go to the Dark Web report Under "Results with your info," click Edit monitoring prof...

A Google Chrome extension with a "Featured" badge and six million users has been observed silently gathering every prompt entered by users into artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots like OpenAI ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Google Gemini, xAI Grok, Meta AI, and Perplexity. The extension in question is Urban VPN Proxy , which has a 4.7 rating on the Google Chrome Web Store. It's advertised as the "best secured Free VPN access to any website, and unblock content." Its developer is a Delaware-based company named Urban Cyber Security Inc . On the Microsoft Edge Add-ons marketplace, it has 1.3 million installations .  Despite claiming that it allows users to "protect your online identity, stay protected, and hide your IP," an update was pushed to users on July 9, 2025, when version 5.5.0 was released with the AI data harvesting enabled by default using hard-coded settings. Specifically, this is achieved by means of a t...

Multiple security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in the open-source private branch exchange (PBX) platform FreePBX, including a critical flaw that could result in an authentication bypass under certain configurations. The shortcomings, discovered by Horizon3.ai and reported to the project maintainers on September 15, 2025, are listed below - CVE-2025-61675 (CVSS score: 8.6) - Numerous authenticated SQL injection vulnerabilities impacting four unique endpoints (basestation, model, firmware, and custom extension) and 11 affected parameters that enable read and write access to the underlying SQL database CVE-2025-61678 (CVSS score: 8.6) - An authenticated arbitrary file upload vulnerability that allows an attacker to exploit the firmware upload endpoint to upload a PHP web shell after obtaining a valid PHPSESSID and run arbitrary commands to leak the contents of sensitive files (e.g., "/etc/passwd") CVE-2025-66039 (CVSS score: 9.3) - An authentication bypass vulne...

If you use a smartphone, browse the web, or unzip files on your computer, you are in the crosshairs this week. Hackers are currently exploiting critical flaws in the daily software we all rely on—and in some cases, they started attacking before a fix was even ready. Below, we list the urgent updates you need to install right now to stop these active threats. ⚡ Threat of the Week Apple and Google Release Fixes for Actively Exploited Flaws — Apple released security updates for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, visionOS, and Safari web browser to address two zero-days that the company said have been exploited in highly targeted attacks. CVE-2025-14174 has been described as a memory corruption issue, while the second, CVE-2025-43529, is a use-after-free bug. They can both be exploited using maliciously crafted web content to execute arbitrary code. CVE-2025-14174 was also addressed by Google in its Chrome browser since it resides in its open-source Almost Native Graphics Layer Engi...