Chinese Hackers | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Threat hunters have discovered a set of previously unreported domains, some going back to May 2020, that are associated with China-linked threat actors Salt Typhoon and UNC4841. "The domains date back several years, with the oldest registration activity occurring in May 2020, further confirming that the 2024 Salt Typhoon attacks were not the first activity carried out by this group," Silent Push said in a new analysis shared with The Hacker News. The identified infrastructure, totaling 45 domains, has also been identified as sharing some level of overlap with another China-associated hacking group tracked as UNC4841 , which is best known for its zero-day exploitation of a security flaw in Barracuda Email Security Gateway (ESG) appliances (CVE-2023-2868, CVSS score: 9.8). Salt Typhoon , active since 2019, drew widespread attention last year for its targeting of telecommunications services providers in the U.S. Believed to be operated by China's Ministry of State Secur...

The China-linked advanced persistent threat (APT) actor known as Salt Typhoon has continued its attacks targeting networks across the world, including organizations in the telecommunications, government, transportation, lodging, and military infrastructure sectors. "While these actors focus on large backbone routers of major telecommunications providers, as well as provider edge (PE) and customer edge (CE) routers, they also leverage compromised devices and trusted connections to pivot into other networks," according to a joint cybersecurity advisory published Wednesday. "These actors often modify routers to maintain persistent, long-term access to networks." The bulletin , courtesy of authorities from 13 countries, said the malicious activity has been linked to three Chinese entities, Sichuan Juxinhe Network Technology Co., Ltd., Beijing Huanyu Tianqiong Information Technology Co., Ltd., and Sichuan Zhixin Ruijie Network Technology Co., Ltd. These companies,...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a novel attack chain that employs phishing emails to deliver an open-source backdoor called VShell . The "Linux-specific malware infection chain that starts with a spam email with a malicious RAR archive file," Trellix researcher Sagar Bade said in a technical write-up. "The payload isn't hidden inside the file content or a macro, it's encoded directly in the filename itself. Through clever use of shell command injection and Base64-encoded Bash payloads, the attacker turns a simple file listing operation into an automatic malware execution trigger." The technique, the cybersecurity company added, takes advantage of a simple yet dangerous pattern commonly observed in shell scripts that arises when file names are evaluated with inadequate sanitization, thereby causing a trivial command like eval or echo to facilitate the execution of arbitrary code. What's more, the technique offers the added advantage of...

Financial institutions like trading and brokerage firms are the target of a new campaign that delivers a previously unreported remote access trojan called GodRAT . The malicious activity involves the "distribution of malicious .SCR (screen saver) files disguised as financial documents via Skype messenger," Kaspersky researcher Saurabh Sharma said in a technical analysis published today. The attacks, which have been active as recently as August 12, 2025, employ a technique called steganography to conceal within image files shellcode used to download the malware from a command-and-control (C2) server. The screen saver artifacts have been detected since September 9, 2024, targeting countries and territories like Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Malaysia, and Jordan. Assessed to be based on Gh0st RAT, GodRAT follows a plugin-based approach to augment its functionality in order to harvest sensitive information and deliver secondary payloads like AsyncRAT. It'...

The threat actor linked to the exploitation of the recently disclosed security flaws in Microsoft SharePoint Server is using a bespoke command-and-control (C2) framework called AK47 C2 (also spelled ak47c2) in its operations. The framework includes at least two different types of clients, HTTP-based and Domain Name System ( DNS )-based, which have been dubbed AK47HTTP and AK47DNS, respectively, by Check Point Research. The activity has been attributed to Storm-2603 , which, according to Microsoft, is a suspected China-based threat actor that has leveraged the SharePoint flaws – CVE-2025-49706 and CVE-2025-49704 (aka ToolShell) – to deploy Warlock (aka X2anylock) ransomware. A previously unreported threat cluster, evidence gathered following an analysis of VirusTotal artifacts shows that the group may have been active since at least March 2025, deploying ransomware families like LockBit Black and Warlock together – something that's not observed commonly among established e-c...