Blockchain Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Threat actors are leveraging the trusted Node.js JavaScript runtime in multiple cyber attacks as a way to deploy malicious payloads. According to a new report published by the Symantec Threat Hunter Team today, the attack method has been put to use in attacks targeting government departments, technology companies, and hotels since February 2026. "The technique's appeal is that node.exe (the binary that runs Node.js) is a legitimate, signed developer tool," the Broadcom-owned cybersecurity division said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The attacker's malicious code lives in interpreted scripts rather than in a binary, making it less likely to trigger signature-based detection, while a registry Run key entry can relaunch the payload at every login." In one intrusion observed between March 23 and July 25, 2026, targeting an unspecified Asian technology company, attackers downloaded the official Node.js installer from nodejs[.]org and used the t...

Cosmos Labs has warned that a critical balance-handling flaw in the shared Cosmos EVM module was exploited to drain funds from six blockchains between August 20 and August 25, 2026. The vulnerability, designated GHSA-7g4w-cg88-2cq2 , is rated Critical by Cosmos Labs and was published without a CVE identifier, a weakness classification, or a CVSS score. Affected versions are < 0.6.2 and >= 0.7.0 < 0.7.2 , and the fix shipped in v0.6.2 and v0.7.2 on August 19. Chain operators are told to upgrade to one of those releases or later, a change that is state-breaking and requires a coordinated network upgrade. Operators who cannot upgrade immediately are told to halt the chain rather than attempt a coordinated governance upgrade. In a post-mortem published August 28 , Cosmos Labs said the flaw was reported through its bug bounty program on April 25 and was assessed at the time as posing no risk to funds on live networks. "We were unable to reproduce the vulnerability ...

The ransomware group known as DeadLock has been observed using decentralized infrastructure to facilitate victim communications and data leak operations in a bid to improve operational resilience. "Its recovery ecosystem combines the Session messaging network with blockchain-backed services that store and deliver resources used throughout the extortion process," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said . The tech giant said it observed the ransomware being deployed by multiple threat actors, including an affiliate for Lynx and INC ransomware. DeadLock was first detected in July 2025, employing double extortion tactics to encrypt victim environments and apply pressure by threatening to publicly release exfiltrated data. As of this month, the group has claimed 96 victims , with most of them located in Italy, Spain, Poland, Türkiye, and the U.S. In an analysis published earlier this January, Singapore-headquartered Group-IB said the group has managed to keep a lowe...

Researchers at KU Leuven tested 85 of the most popular crypto wallets that run as browser extensions and found that the wallets themselves leak enough to link and track the people using them. The way these wallets talk to websites and blockchain servers can tie a person's separate addresses together and let outsiders follow them from site to site. And on a site that already holds a name or email, the same leaks can put a real name to an "anonymous" crypto identity. This is not a hack. The wallets behave exactly as they were built to. The 85 extensions together have about 35 million users listed on the Chrome Web Store. The team, from the university's DistriNet security group,  posted the paper  this month and will present it at the PETS 2026 privacy conference in Calgary in late July. They ran real wallets against real Web3 sites and mapped out five privacy weaknesses in how wallets and websites interact. When they reported the most far-reaching one to the wa...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new malicious extension in the Open VSX registry that harbors a remote access trojan called SleepyDuck . According to Secure Annex's John Tuckner, the extension in question, juan-bianco.solidity-vlang (version 0.0.7), was first published on October 31, 2025, as a completely benign library that was subsequently updated to version 0.0.8 on November 1 to include new malicious capabilities after reaching 14,000 downloads. "The malware includes sandbox evasion techniques and utilizes an Ethereum contract to update its command and control address in case the original address is taken down," Tuckner added . Campaigns distributing rogue extensions targeting Solidity developers have been repeatedly detected across both the Visual Studio Extension Marketplace and Open VSX. In July 2025, Kaspersky disclosed that a Russian developer lost $500,000 in cryptocurrency assets after installing one such extension through Cursor. In the latest...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new malicious package on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that masquerades as a library from the Solana blockchain platform but is actually designed to steal victims' secrets. "The legitimate Solana Python API project is known as 'solana-py' on GitHub, but simply ' solana ' on the Python software registry, PyPI," Sonatype researcher Ax Sharma said in a report published last week. "This slight naming discrepancy has been leveraged by a threat actor who published a 'solana-py' project on PyPI." The malicious "solana-py" package attracted a total of 1,122 downloads since it was published on August 4, 2024. It's no longer available for download from PyPI. The most striking aspect of the library is that it carried the version numbers 0.34.3, 0.34.4, and 0.34.5. The latest version of the legitimate "solana" package is 0.34.3. This clearly indicates an attempt o...