AI | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Europol on Monday announced the takedown of a cryptocurrency investment fraud ring that laundered €460 million ($540 million) from more than 5,000 victims across the world. The operation, the agency said, was carried out by the Spanish Guardia Civil, along with support from law enforcement authorities from Estonia, France, and the United States. Europol said the investigation into the syndicate started in 2023. In addition, the five alleged suspects behind the cryptocurrency scam were arrested on June 25, 2025. Three of the arrests took place in the Canary Islands, while two others were apprehended from Madrid. "To carry out their fraudulent activities, the leaders of the criminal network allegedly used a net of associates spread around the world to raise funds through cash withdrawals, bank transfers, and crypto-transfers," Europol said . These types of scams often follow a pattern known as cryptocurrency confidence or romance baiting (formerly "pig butchering"...

Facebook, the social network platform owned by Meta, is asking for users to upload pictures from their phones to suggest collages, recaps, and other ideas using artificial intelligence (AI), including those that have not been directly uploaded to the service. According to TechCrunch, which first reported the feature, users are being served a new pop-up message asking for permission to "allow cloud processing" when they are attempting to create a new Story on Facebook. "To create ideas for you, we'll select media from your camera roll and upload it to our cloud on an ongoing basis, based on info like time, location or themes," the company notes in the pop-up. "Only you can see suggestions. Your media won't be used for ads targeting. We'll check it for safety and integrity purposes." Should users consent to their photos being processed on the cloud, Meta also states that they are agreeing to its AI terms , which allow it to analyze their med...

Popular messaging platform WhatsApp has added a new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered feature that leverages its in-house solution Meta AI to summarize unread messages in chats. The feature, called Message Summaries, is currently rolling out in the English language to users in the United States, with plans to bring it to other regions and languages later this year. It "uses Meta AI to privately and quickly summarize unread messages in a chat, so you can get an idea of what is happening, before reading the details in your unread messages," WhatsApp said in a post. Message Summaries is optional and is disabled by default. The Meta-owned service said users can also enable " Advanced Chat Privacy " to choose which chats can be shared for providing AI-related features. Most importantly, it's made possible by Private Processing , which WhatsApp launched back in April as a way to enable AI capabilities in a privacy-preserving manner. Private Processing is de...

I had the honor of hosting the first episode of the Xposure Podcast live from Xposure Summit 2025. And I couldn't have asked for a better kickoff panel: three cybersecurity leaders who don't just talk security, they live it. Let me introduce them. Alex Delay , CISO at IDB Bank, knows what it means to defend a highly regulated environment. Ben Mead , Director of Cybersecurity at Avidity Biosciences, brings a forward-thinking security perspective that reflects the innovation behind Avidity's targeted RNA therapeutics. Last but not least, Michael Francess , Director of Cybersecurity Advanced Threat at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, leads the charge in protecting the franchise. Each brought a unique vantage point to a common challenge: applying Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) to complex production environments. Gartner made waves in 2023 with a bold prediction: organizations that prioritize CTEM will be three times less likely to be breached by 2026. But here's the kicker -...

It sure is a hard time to be a SOC analyst. Every day, they are expected to solve high-consequence problems with half the data and twice the pressure. Analysts are overwhelmed—not just by threats, but by the systems and processes in place that are meant to help them respond. Tooling is fragmented. Workflows are heavy. Context lives in five places, and alerts never slow down. What started as a fast-paced, high-impact role has, for many analysts, become a repetitive loop of alert triage and data wrangling that offers little room for strategy or growth.  Most SOC teams also run lean. Last year, our annual SANS SOC Survey found that a majority of SOCs only consist of just 2–10 full-time analysts , a number unchanged since the survey began tracking in 2017. Meanwhile, the scope of coverage has exploded, ranging from on-prem infrastructure to cloud environments, remote endpoints, SaaS platforms, and beyond. Compounded at scale, this has led to systemic burnout across SOC environment...

Hackers never sleep, so why should enterprise defenses? Threat actors prefer to target businesses during off-hours. That's when they can count on fewer security personnel monitoring systems, delaying response and remediation. When retail giant Marks & Spencer experienced a security event over Easter weekend, they were forced to shut down their online operations, which account for approximately a third of the retailer's clothing and home sales. As most staff are away during off-hours and holidays, it takes time to assemble an incident response team and initiate countermeasures. This gives attackers more time to move laterally within the network and wreak havoc before the security team reacts. While not every organization may be ready to staff an in-house team around the clock, building a 24/7 SOC remains one of the most robust and proactive ways to protect against off-hours attacks. In the rest of this post, we'll explore why 24/7 vigilance is so important, the challenges ...

A quiet tweak in a popular open-source tool opened the door to a supply chain breach—what started as a targeted attack quickly spiraled, exposing secrets across countless projects. That wasn't the only stealth move. A new all-in-one malware is silently stealing passwords, crypto, and control—while hiding in plain sight. And over 300 Android apps joined the chaos, running ad fraud at scale behind innocent-looking icons. Meanwhile, ransomware gangs are getting smarter—using stolen drivers to shut down defenses—and threat groups are quietly shifting from activism to profit. Even browser extensions are changing hands, turning trusted tools into silent threats. AI is adding fuel to the fire—used by both attackers and defenders—while critical bugs, cloud loopholes, and privacy shakeups are keeping teams on edge. Let's dive into the threats making noise behind the scenes. ⚡ Threat of the Week Coinbase the Initial Target of GitHub Action Supply Chain Breach — The supply chain compromise...

We've been hearing the same story for years: AI is coming for your job. In fact, in 2017, McKinsey printed a report, Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation , predicting that by 2030, 375 million workers would need to find new jobs or risk being displaced by AI and automation. Queue the anxiety.  There have been ongoing whispers about what roles would be impacted, and pentesting has recently come into question. With AI now able to automate tasks such as vulnerability scans and network scans—among other things—and with platforms like PlexTrac adding AI capabilities to cut back on the manual effort, will pentesters be out of a job? Let's start with some optimism. This year, McKinsey retracted its former prediction that 375 million workers would be displaced by AI, lowering the prediction to roughly 92 million workers. The article continued to ease concern stating that although some jobs may become obsolete, it's more likely that jobs will simply unde...

Google has stepped in to clarify that a newly introduced Android System SafetyCore app does not perform any client-side scanning of content. "Android provides many on-device protections that safeguard users against threats like malware, messaging spam and abuse protections, and phone scam protections, while preserving user privacy and keeping users in control of their data," a spokesperson for the company told The Hacker News when reached for comment. "SafetyCore is a new Google system service for Android 9+ devices that provides the on-device infrastructure for securely and privately performing classification to help users detect unwanted content. Users are in control over SafetyCore and SafetyCore only classifies specific content when an app requests it through an optionally enabled feature." SafetyCore (package name "com.google.android.safetycore") was first introduced by Google in October 2024, as part of a set of security measures designed to...

DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that has captured much of the artificial intelligence (AI) buzz in recent days, said it's restricting registrations on the service, citing malicious attacks. "Due to large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek's services, we are temporarily limiting registrations to ensure continued service," the company said in an incident report page. "Existing users can log in as usual. Thanks for your understanding and support." Users attempting to sign up for an account are being displayed a similar message, stating "registration may be busy" and that they should wait and try again. "With the popularity of DeepSeek growing, it's not a big surprise that they are being targeted by malicious web traffic," Erich Kron, security awareness advocate at KnowBe4, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "These sorts of attacks could be a way to extort an organization by promising to stop attacks and rest...

Cybersecurity researchers have found that it's possible to use large language models (LLMs) to generate new variants of malicious JavaScript code at scale in a manner that can better evade detection. "Although LLMs struggle to create malware from scratch, criminals can easily use them to rewrite or obfuscate existing malware, making it harder to detect," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers said in a new analysis. "Criminals can prompt LLMs to perform transformations that are much more natural-looking, which makes detecting this malware more challenging." With enough transformations over time, the approach could have the advantage of degrading the performance of malware classification systems, tricking them into believing that a piece of nefarious code is actually benign. While LLM providers have increasingly enforced security guardrails to prevent them from going off the rails and producing unintended output, bad actors have advertised tools like WormGPT...

The 2025 cybersecurity landscape is increasingly complex, driven by sophisticated cyber threats, increased regulation, and rapidly evolving technology. In 2025, organizations will be challenged with protecting sensitive information for their customers while continuing to provide seamless and easy user experiences. Here's a closer look at ten emerging challenges and threats set to shape the coming year. 1. AI as a weapon for attackers The dual-use nature of AI has created a great deal of risk to organizations as cybercriminals increasingly harness the power of AI to perpetrate highly sophisticated attacks. AI-powered malware can change its behavior in real-time. This means it can evade traditional methods of detection and find and exploit vulnerabilities with uncanny precision. Automated reconnaissance tools let attackers compile granular intelligence about systems, employees, and defenses of a target at unprecedented scale and speed. AI use also reduces the planning time for a...

Run by the team at orchestration, AI, and automation platform Tines, the Tines library contains pre-built workflows shared by real security practitioners from across the community, all of which are free to import and deploy via the Community Edition of the platform.  Their bi-annual "You Did What with Tines?!" competition highlights some of the most interesting workflows submitted by their users, many of which demonstrate practical applications of large language models (LLMs) to address complex challenges in security operations. One recent winner is a workflow designed to automate CrowdStrike RFM reporting. Developed by Tom Power, a security analyst at The University of British Columbia, it uses orchestration, AI and automation to reduce the time spent on manual reporting. Here, we'll share an overview of the workflow, plus a step-by-step guide for getting it up and running. The problem - time-consuming reporting The workflow's builder, Tom Power, explains, "The CrowdStrike ...