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The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Friday announced that five individuals have pleaded guilty to assisting North Korea's illicit revenue generation schemes by enabling information technology (IT) worker fraud in violation of international sanctions. The five individuals are listed below - Audricus Phagnasay, 24 Jason Salazar, 30 Alexander Paul Travis, 34 Oleksandr Didenko, 28, and Erick Ntekereze Prince, 30 Phagnasay, Salazar, and Travis pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy for knowingly allowing IT workers located outside of the U.S. to use their U.S. identities between about September 2019 and November 2022 and secure jobs at American firms. The three defendants also served as facilitators, hosting the company-issued laptops at their residences and installing remote desktop software on those machines without authorization so that the IT workers could connect to them and give the impression that they were working remotely within the U.S. Furthermo...

The North Korean threat actors behind the Contagious Interview campaign have once again tweaked their tactics by using JSON storage services to stage malicious payloads. "The threat actors have recently resorted to utilizing JSON storage services like JSON Keeper, JSONsilo, and npoint.io to host and deliver malware from trojanized code projects, with the lure," NVISO researchers Bart Parys, Stef Collart, and Efstratios Lontzetidis said in a Thursday report. The campaign essentially involves approaching prospective targets on professional networking sites like LinkedIn, either under the pretext of conducting a job assessment or collaborating on a project, as part of which they are instructed to download a demo project hosted on platforms like GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket. In one such project spotted by NVISO, it has been found that a file named "server/config/.config.env" contains a Base64-encoded value that masquerades as an API key, but, in reality, is a URL ...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered critical remote code execution vulnerabilities impacting major artificial intelligence (AI) inference engines, including those from Meta, Nvidia, Microsoft, and open-source PyTorch projects such as vLLM and SGLang. "These vulnerabilities all traced back to the same root cause: the overlooked unsafe use of ZeroMQ (ZMQ) and Python's pickle deserialization," Oligo Security researcher Avi Lumelsky said in a report published Thursday. At its core, the issue stems from what has been described as a pattern called ShadowMQ , in which the insecure deserialization logic has propagated to several projects as a result of code reuse. The root cause is a vulnerability in Meta's Llama large language model (LLM) framework ( CVE-2024-50050 , CVSS score: 6.3/9.3) that was patched by the company last October. Specifically, it involved the use of ZeroMQ's recv_pyobj() method to deserialize incoming data using Python's pickle module. ...

The Iranian state-sponsored threat actor known as APT42 has been observed targeting individuals and organizations that are of interest to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as part of a new espionage-focused campaign. The activity, detected in early September 2025 and assessed to be ongoing, has been codenamed  SpearSpecter by the Israel National Digital Agency (INDA). "The campaign has systematically targeted high-value senior defense and government officials using personalized social engineering tactics," INDA researchers Shimi Cohen, Adi Pick, Idan Beit-Yosef, Hila David, and Yaniv Goldman said. "These include inviting targets to prestigious conferences or arranging significant meetings." What's notable about the effort is that it also extends to the targets' family members, creating a broader attack surface that exerts more pressure on the primary targets. APT42 was first publicly documented in late 2022 by Google Mandiant, detailing its...

Key Takeaways: 85 active ransomware and extortion groups observed in Q3 2025, reflecting the most decentralized ransomware ecosystem to date. 1,590 victims disclosed across 85 leak sites, showing high, sustained activity despite law-enforcement pressure. 14 new ransomware brands launched this quarter, proving how quickly affiliates reconstitute after takedowns. LockBit's reappearance with version 5.0 signals potential re-centralization after months of fragmentation. In Q3 2025, Check Point Research recorded a record 85 active ransomware and extortion groups , the highest ever observed. What was once a concentrated market dominated by a few ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) giants has splintered into dozens of smaller, short-lived operations. This proliferation of leak sites represents a fundamental structural shift. The same enforcement and market pressures that disrupted large RaaS groups have fueled a wave of opportunistic, decentralized actors, many run by former affiliat...

State-sponsored threat actors from China used artificial intelligence (AI) technology developed by Anthropic to orchestrate automated cyber attacks as part of a "highly sophisticated espionage campaign" in mid-September 2025. "The attackers used AI's 'agentic' capabilities to an unprecedented degree – using AI not just as an advisor, but to execute the cyber attacks themselves," the AI upstart said . The activity is assessed to have manipulated Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding tool, to attempt to break into about 30 global targets spanning large tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturing companies, and government agencies. A subset of these intrusions succeeded. Anthropic has since banned the relevant accounts and enforced defensive mechanisms to flag such attacks. The campaign, GTG-1002, marks the first time a threat actor has leveraged AI to conduct a "large-scale cyber attack" without major human intervention an...

Cybersecurity researchers are sounding the alert about an authentication bypass vulnerability in Fortinet Fortiweb Web Application Firewall (WAF) that could allow an attacker to take over admin accounts and completely compromise a device. "The watchTowr team is seeing active, indiscriminate in-the-wild exploitation of what appears to be a silently patched vulnerability in Fortinet's FortiWeb product," Benjamin Harris, watchTowr CEO and founder, said in a statement. "Patched in version 8.0.2 , the vulnerability allows attackers to perform actions as a privileged user - with in-the-wild exploitation focusing on adding a new administrator account as a basic persistence mechanism for the attackers." The cybersecurity company said it was able to successfully reproduce the vulnerability and create a working proof-of-concept (Poc). It has also released an artifact generator tool for the authentication bypass to help identify susceptible devices. According to d...

A Russian-speaking threat behind an ongoing, mass phishing campaign has registered more than 4,300 domain names since the start of the year. The activity , per Netcraft security researcher Andrew Brandt, is designed to target customers of the hospitality industry, specifically hotel guests who may have travel reservations with spam emails. The campaign is said to have begun in earnest around February 2025. Of the 4,344 domains tied to the attack, 685 domains contain the name "Booking", followed by 18 with "Expedia," 13 with "Agoda," and 12 with "Airbnb," indicating an attempt to target all popular booking and rental platforms. "The ongoing campaign employs a sophisticated phishing kit that customizes the page presented to the site visitor depending on a unique string in the URL path when the target first visits the website," Brandt said. "The customizations use the logos from major online travel industry brands, including Airb...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a malicious Chrome extension that poses as a legitimate Ethereum wallet but harbors functionality to exfiltrate users' seed phrases. The name of the extension is "Safery: Ethereum Wallet," with the threat actor describing it as a "secure wallet for managing Ethereum cryptocurrency with flexible settings." It was uploaded to the Chrome Web Store on September 29, 2025, and was updated as recently as November 12. It's still available for download as of writing. "Marketed as a simple, secure Ethereum (ETH) wallet, it contains a backdoor that exfiltrates seed phrases by encoding them into Sui addresses and broadcasting microtransactions from a threat actor-controlled Sui wallet," Socket security researcher Kirill Boychenko said . Specifically, the malware present within the browser add-on is designed to steal wallet mnemonic phrases by encoding them as fake Sui wallet addresses and then using micro-transact...

The Race for Every New CVE Based on multiple 2025 industry reports: roughly 50 to 61 percent of newly disclosed vulnerabilities saw exploit code weaponized within 48 hours. Using the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog as a reference, hundreds of software flaws are now confirmed as actively targeted within days of public disclosure. Each new announcement now triggers a global race between attackers and defenders. Both sides monitor the same feeds, but one moves at machine speed while the other moves at human speed. Major threat actors have fully industrialized their response. The moment a new vulnerability appears in public databases, automated scripts scrape, parse, and assess it for exploitation potential, and now these efforts are getting ever more streamlined through the use of AI. Meanwhile, IT and security teams often enter triage mode, reading advisories, classifying severity, and queuing updates for the next patch cycle. That delay is precisely the gap the adversar...

Malware families like Rhadamanthys Stealer , Venom RAT , and the Elysium botnet have been disrupted as part of a coordinated law enforcement operation led by Europol and Eurojust. The activity, which is taking place between November 10 and 13, 2025, marks the latest phase of Operation Endgame , an ongoing operation designed to take down criminal infrastructures and combat ransomware enablers worldwide. Besides dismantling the "three large cybercrime enablers," authorities have also arrested the main suspect behind Venom RAT in Greece on November 3, more than 1,025 servers have been taken down, and 20 domains have been seized. "The dismantled malware infrastructure consisted of hundreds of thousands of infected computers containing several million stolen credentials," Europol said in a statement. "Many of the victims were not aware of the infection of their systems." It's worth noting that the Elysium botnet neutralized by authorities is the sam...

Behind every click, there's a risk waiting to be tested. A simple ad, email, or link can now hide something dangerous. Hackers are getting smarter, using new tools to sneak past filters and turn trusted systems against us. But security teams are fighting back. They're building faster defenses, better ways to spot attacks, and stronger systems to keep people safe. It's a constant race — every move by attackers sparks a new response from defenders. In this week's ThreatsDay Bulletin, we look at the latest moves in that race — from new malware and data leaks to AI tools, government actions, and major security updates shaping the digital world right now. U.K. moves to tighten cyber rules for key sectors U.K. Debuts Cyber Security and Resilience Bill The U.K. government has proposed a new Cyber Security and Resilience Bill that aims to strengthen national security and secure public services like healthcare, drinking wat...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added a critical security flaw impacting WatchGuard Fireware to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-9242 (CVSS score: 9.3), an out-of-bounds write vulnerability affecting Fireware OS 11.10.2 up to and including 11.12.4_Update1, 12.0 up to and including 12.11.3 and 2025.1. It was patched by WatchGuard in September. "WatchGuard Firebox contains an out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the OS iked process that may allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code," CISA said in an advisory. Details of the vulnerability were shared by watchTowr Labs last month, with the cybersecurity company stating that the issue stems from a missing length check on an identification buffer used during the IKE handshake process. "The server does attempt certificate validation, but that valid...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a large-scale spam campaign that has flooded the npm registry with thousands of fake packages since early 2024 as part of a likely financially motivated effort. "The packages were systematically published over an extended period, flooding the npm registry with junk packages that survived in the ecosystem for almost two years," Endor Labs researchers Cris Staicu and Kiran Raj said in a Tuesday report. The coordinated campaign has so far published as many as 67,579 packages , according to SourceCodeRED security researcher Paul McCarty, who first flagged the activity. The end goal is quite unusual – It's designed to inundate the npm registry with random packages rather than focusing on data theft or other malicious behaviors. The worm-life propagation mechanism and the use of a distinctive naming scheme that relies on Indonesian names and food terms for the newly created packages have lent it the moniker IndonesianFood...

Google has filed a civil lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) against China-based hackers who are behind a massive Phishing-as-a-Service (PhaaS) platform called Lighthouse that has ensnared over 1 million users across 120 countries. The PhaaS kit is used to conduct large-scale SMS phishing attacks that exploit trusted brands like E-ZPass and USPS to steal people's financial information by prompting them to click on a link using lures related to fake toll fees or package deliveries. While the scam in itself is fairly simple, it's the industrial scale of the operation that has allowed it to illegally make more than a billion dollars over the past three years. "They exploit the reputations of Google and other brands by illegally displaying our trademarks and services on fraudulent websites," Halimah DeLaine Prado, General Counsel at Google, said . "We found at least 107 website templates featuring Google's branding ...

Amazon's threat intelligence team on Wednesday disclosed that it observed an advanced threat actor exploiting two then-zero-day security flaws in Cisco Identity Service Engine (ISE) and Citrix NetScaler ADC products as part of attacks designed to deliver custom malware. "This discovery highlights the trend of threat actors focusing on critical identity and network access control infrastructure – the systems enterprises rely on to enforce security policies and manage authentication across their networks," CJ Moses, CISO of Amazon Integrated Security, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The attacks were flagged by its MadPot honeypot network, with the activity weaponizing the following two vulnerabilities - CVE-2025-5777 or Citrix Bleed 2 (CVSS score: 9.3) - An insufficient input validation vulnerability in Citrix NetScaler ADC and Gateway that could be exploited by an attacker to bypass authentication. (Fixed by Citrix in June 2025 ) CVE-2025-20337 (CV...