Cloud security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

In the wake of high-profile attacks on UK retailers Marks & Spencer and Co-op, Scattered Spider has been all over the media, with coverage spilling over into the mainstream news due to the severity of the disruption caused — currently looking like hundreds of millions in lost profits for M&S alone.  This coverage is extremely valuable for the cybersecurity community as it raises awareness of the battles that security teams are fighting every day. But it's also created a lot of noise that can make it tricky to understand the big picture.  The headline story from the recent campaign against UK retailers is the use of help desk scams. This typically involves the attacker calling up a company's help desk with some level of information — at minimum, PII that allows them to impersonate their victim, and sometimes a password, leaning heavily on their native English-speaking abilities to trick the help desk operator into giving them access to a user account.  Help Des...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new cryptojacking campaign that's targeting publicly accessible DevOps web servers such as those associated with Docker, Gitea, and HashiCorp Consul and Nomad to illicitly mine cryptocurrencies. Cloud security firm Wiz, which is tracking the activity under the name JINX-0132 , said the attackers are exploiting a wide range of known misconfigurations and vulnerabilities to deliver the miner payload. "Notably, this campaign marks what we believe to be the first publicly documented instance of Nomad misconfigurations being exploited as an attack vector in the wild," researchers Gili Tikochinski, Danielle Aminov, and Merav Bar said in a report shared with The Hacker News. What sets these attacks further stand out is that the bad actors download the necessary tools directly from GitHub repositories rather than using their own infrastructure for staging purposes. The use of off-the-shelf tools is seen as a deliberate attempt to c...

If this had been a security drill, someone would've said it went too far. But it wasn't a drill—it was real. The access? Everything looked normal. The tools? Easy to find. The detection? Came too late. This is how attacks happen now—quiet, convincing, and fast. Defenders aren't just chasing hackers anymore—they're struggling to trust what their systems are telling them. The problem isn't too few alerts. It's too many, with no clear meaning. One thing is clear: if your defense still waits for obvious signs, you're not protecting anything. You're just watching it happen. This recap highlights the moments that mattered—and why they're worth your attention. ⚡ Threat of the Week APT41 Exploits Google Calendar for Command-and-Control — The Chinese state-sponsored threat actor known as APT41 deployed a malware called TOUGHPROGRESS that uses Google Calendar for command-and-control (C2). Google said it observed the spear-phishing attacks in October 2024 and that the malware was hosted on...

Google on Wednesday disclosed that the Chinese state-sponsored threat actor known as APT41 leveraged a malware called TOUGHPROGRESS that uses Google Calendar for command-and-control (C2). The tech giant, which discovered the activity in late October 2024, said the malware was hosted on a compromised government website and was used to target multiple other government entities. "Misuse of cloud services for C2 is a technique that many threat actors leverage in order to blend in with legitimate activity," Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) researcher Patrick Whitsell said . APT41, also tracked as Axiom, Blackfly, Brass Typhoon (formerly Barium), Bronze Atlas, Earth Baku, HOODOO, RedGolf, Red Kelpie, TA415, Wicked Panda, and Winnti, is the name assigned to a prolific nation-state group known for its targeting of governments and organizations within the global shipping and logistics, media and entertainment, technology, and automotive sectors. In July 2024, Google reve...

Stealer malware no longer just steals passwords. In 2025, it steals live sessions—and attackers are moving faster and more efficiently than ever. While many associate account takeovers with personal services, the real threat is unfolding in the enterprise. Flare's latest research, The Account and Session Takeover Economy , analyzed over 20 million stealer logs and tracked attacker activity across Telegram channels and dark web marketplaces. The findings expose how cybercriminals weaponize infected employee endpoints to hijack enterprise sessions—often in less than 24 hours. Here's the real timeline of a modern session hijacking attack. Infection and Data Theft in Under an Hour Once a victim runs a malicious payload—typically disguised as cracked software, fake updates, or phishing attachments—commodity stealers like Redline (44% of logs), Raccoon (25%), and LummaC2 (18%) take over. These malware kits: Extract browser cookies, saved credentials, session tokens, and crypto walle...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a coordinated cloud-based scanning activity that targeted 75 distinct "exposure points" earlier this month. The activity, observed by GreyNoise on May 8, 2025, involved as many as 251 malicious IP addresses that are all geolocated to Japan and hosted by Amazon. "These IPs triggered 75 distinct behaviors, including CVE exploits, misconfiguration probes, and recon activity," the threat intelligence firm said . "All IPs were silent before and after the surge, indicating temporary infrastructure rental for a single operation." The scanning efforts have been found to have targeted a wide array of technologies from Adobe ColdFusion, Apache Struts, Apache Tomcat, Drupal, Elasticsearch, and Oracle WebLogic, among others. The opportunistic operation ranged from exploitation attempts for known CVEs to probes for misconfigurations and other weak points in web infrastructure, indicating that the threat actors ...

Misconfigured Docker API instances have become the target of a new malware campaign that transforms them into a cryptocurrency mining botnet. The attacks, designed to mine for Dero currency, is notable for its worm-like capabilities to propagate the malware to other exposed Docker instances and rope them into an ever-growing horde of mining bots. Kaspersky said it observed an unidentified threat actor gaining initial access to a running containerized infrastructure by exploiting an insecurely published Docker API, and then weaponizing that access to create the illicit cryptojacking network. "This led to the running containers being compromised and new ones being created not only to hijack the victim's resources for cryptocurrency mining but also to launch external attacks to propagate to other networks," security researcher Amged Wageh said . The attack chain is realized through two components: A propagation malware "nginx" that scans the internet for expos...

Microsoft has shed light on a previously undocumented cluster of malicious activity originating from a Russia-affiliated threat actor dubbed Void Blizzard (aka Laundry Bear) that it said is attributed to "worldwide cloud abuse." Active since at least April 2024, the hacking group is linked to espionage operations mainly targeting organizations that are important to Russian government objectives, including those in government, defense, transportation, media, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and healthcare sectors in Europe and North America. "They often use stolen sign-in details that they likely buy from online marketplaces to gain access to organizations," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a report published today. "Once inside, they steal large amounts of emails and files." Attacks mounted by Void Blizzard have been found to disproportionately single out NATO member states and Ukraine, suggesting that the adversary is looking to ...

Cyber threats don't show up one at a time anymore. They're layered, planned, and often stay hidden until it's too late. For cybersecurity teams, the key isn't just reacting to alerts—it's spotting early signs of trouble before they become real threats. This update is designed to deliver clear, accurate insights based on real patterns and changes we can verify. With today's complex systems, we need focused analysis—not noise. What you'll see here isn't just a list of incidents, but a clear look at where control is being gained, lost, or quietly tested. ⚡ Threat of the Week Lumma Stealer, DanaBot Operations Disrupted — A coalition of private sector companies and law enforcement agencies have taken down the infrastructure associated with Lumma Stealer and DanaBot . Charges have also been unsealed against 16 individuals for their alleged involvement in the development and deployment of DanaBot. The malware is equipped to siphon data from victim computers, hijack banking session...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday revealed that Commvault is monitoring cyber threat activity targeting applications hosted in their Microsoft Azure cloud environment. "Threat actors may have accessed client secrets for Commvault's (Metallic) Microsoft 365 (M365) backup software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, hosted in Azure," the agency said . "This provided the threat actors with unauthorized access to Commvault's customers' M365 environments that have application secrets stored by Commvault." CISA further noted that the activity may be part of a broader campaign targeting various software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers' cloud infrastructures with default configurations and elevated permissions. The advisory comes weeks after Commvault revealed that Microsoft notified the company in February 2025 of unauthorized activity by a nation-state threat actor within its Azure environment. The incident led to th...

A sprawling operation undertaken by global law enforcement agencies and a consortium of private sector firms has disrupted the online infrastructure associated with a commodity information stealer known as Lumma (aka LummaC or LummaC2), seizing 2,300 domains that acted as the command-and-control (C2) backbone to commandeer infected Windows systems. "Malware like LummaC2 is deployed to steal sensitive information such as user login credentials from millions of victims in order to facilitate a host of crimes, including fraudulent bank transfers and cryptocurrency theft," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a statement. The confiscated infrastructure has been used to target millions across the world through affiliates and other cyber criminals. Lumma Stealer, active since late 2022, is estimated to have been used in at least 1.7 million instances to steal information, such as browser data, autofill information, login credentials, and cryptocurrency seed phrases. Th...

A threat actor known as Hazy Hawk has been observed hijacking abandoned cloud resources of high-profile organizations, including Amazon S3 buckets and Microsoft Azure endpoints, by leveraging misconfigurations in the Domain Name System (DNS) records. The hijacked domains are then used to host URLs that direct users to scams and malware via traffic distribution systems (TDSes), according to Infoblox. Some of the other resources usurped by the threat actor include those hosted on Akamai, Bunny CDN, Cloudflare CDN, GitHub, and Netlify. The DNS threat intelligence firm said it first discovered the threat actor after it gained control of several sub-domains associated with the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) in February 2025. It has since been determined that other government agencies across the globe, prominent universities, and international corporations such as Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Ernst & Young have been victimized by the same threat actor since at least ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered risky default identity and access management (IAM) roles impacting Amazon Web Services that could open the door for attackers to escalate privileges, manipulate other AWS services, and, in some cases, even fully compromise AWS accounts. "These roles, often created automatically or recommended during setup, grant overly broad permissions, such as full S3 access," Aqua researchers Yakir Kadkoda and Ofek Itach said in an analysis. "These default roles silently introduce attack paths that allow privilege escalation, cross-service access, and even potential account compromise." The cloud security firm said it identified security issues in default IAM roles created by AWS services like SageMaker, Glue, EMR, and Lightsail. A similar flaw has also been unearthed in a popular open-source framework called Ray, which automatically creates a default IAM role (ray-autoscaler-v1) with the AmazonS3FullAccess policy. What's concer...