Cloud security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The comfort zone in cybersecurity is gone. Attackers are scaling down, focusing tighter, and squeezing more value from fewer, high-impact targets. At the same time, defenders face growing blind spots — from spoofed messages to large-scale social engineering. This week's findings show how that shrinking margin of safety is redrawing the threat landscape. Here's what's making headlines. Hijack Loader expands its reach in Latin America LATAM Targeted by PureHVNC Phishing emails containing SVG file attachments targeting Colombian, Spanish-speaking individuals with themes relating to the Attorney General's office of Colombia have been used to deliver PureHVNC RAT . "The emails entice the user to download an 'official document' from the judicial information system, which starts the infection chain of executing a Hijack Loader executable that leads to the PureHVNC Remote Access Trojan (RAT)," IBM X-Force said . The activity ...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a spike in automated attacks targeting PHP servers, IoT devices, and cloud gateways by various botnets such as Mirai , Gafgyt , and Mozi . "These automated campaigns exploit known CVE vulnerabilities and cloud misconfigurations to gain control over exposed systems and expand botnet networks," the Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU) said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The cybersecurity company said PHP servers have emerged as the most prominent targets of these attacks owing to the widespread use of content management systems like WordPress and Craft CMS . This, in turn, creates a large attack surface as many PHP deployments can suffer from misconfigurations, outdated plugins and themes, and insecure file storage. Some of the prominent weaknesses in PHP frameworks that have been exploited by threat actors are listed below - CVE-2017-9841 - A Remote code execution vulnerability in PHPUnit CVE-2021-3129 - A Re...

The New Reality for Lean Security Teams If you're the first security or IT hire at a fast-growing startup, you've likely inherited a mandate that's both simple and maddeningly complex: secure the business without slowing it down. Most organizations using Google Workspace start with an environment built for collaboration, not resilience. Shared drives, permissive settings, and constant integrations make life easy for employees—and equally easy for attackers. The good news is that Google Workspace provides an excellent security foundation. The challenge lies in properly configuring it, maintaining visibility, and closing the blind spots that Google's native controls leave open. This article breaks down the key practices every security team—especially small, lean ones—should follow to harden Google Workspace and defend against modern cloud threats. 1. Lock Down the Basics Enforce Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) MFA is the single most effective way to stop account compromise. In ...

Security, trust, and stability — once the pillars of our digital world — are now the tools attackers turn against us. From stolen accounts to fake job offers, cybercriminals keep finding new ways to exploit both system flaws and human behavior. Each new breach proves a harsh truth: in cybersecurity, feeling safe can be far more dangerous than being alert. Here's how that false sense of security was broken again this week. ⚡ Threat of the Week Newly Patched Critical Microsoft WSUS Flaw Comes Under Attack — Microsoft released out-of-band security updates to patch a critical-severity Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) vulnerability that has since come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-59287 (CVSS score: 9.8), a remote code execution flaw in WSUS that was originally fixed by the tech giant as part of its Patch Tuesday update published last week. According to Eye Security and Huntress, the security flaw is being weaponized to drop a .N...

AI is everywhere—and your company wants in. Faster products, smarter systems, fewer bottlenecks. But if you're in security, that excitement often comes with a sinking feeling. Because while everyone else is racing ahead, you're left trying to manage a growing web of AI agents you didn't create, can't fully see, and weren't designed to control. Join our upcoming webinar and learn how to make AI security work with you, not against you . The Quiet Crisis No One Talks About Did you know most companies now have 100 AI agents for every one human employee? Even more shocking? 99% of those AI identities are completely unmanaged. No oversight. No lifecycle controls. And every one of them could be a backdoor waiting to happen. It's not your fault. Traditional tools weren't built for this new AI world. But the risks are real—and growing. Let's Change That. Together. In our free webinar, " Turning Controls into Accelerators of AI Adoption ," we'll help you flip the script. Th...

Criminals don't need to be clever all the time; they just follow the easiest path in: trick users, exploit stale components, or abuse trusted systems like OAuth and package registries. If your stack or habits make any of those easy, you're already a target. This week's ThreatsDay highlights show exactly how those weak points are being exploited — from overlooked misconfigurations to sophisticated new attack chains that turn ordinary tools into powerful entry points. Lumma Stealer Stumbles After Doxxing Drama Decline in Lumma Stealer Activity After Doxxing Campaign The activity of the Lumma Stealer (aka Water Kurita) information stealer has witnessed a "sudden drop" since last months after the identities of five alleged core group members were exposed as part of what's said to be an aggressive underground exposure campaign dubbed Lumma Rats since late August 2025. The targeted individuals are affiliated with the malware's development and administ...

As machine identities explode across cloud environments, enterprises report dramatic productivity gains from eliminating static credentials. And only legacy systems remain the weak link. For decades, organizations have relied on static secrets, such as API keys, passwords, and tokens, as unique identifiers for workloads. While this approach provides clear traceability, it creates what security researchers describe as an "operational nightmare" of manual lifecycle management, rotation schedules, and constant credential leakage risks. This challenge has traditionally driven organizations toward centralized secret management solutions like HashiCorp Vault or CyberArk, which provide universal brokers for secrets across platforms. However, these approaches perpetuate the fundamental problem: the proliferation of static secrets requiring careful management and rotation. "Having a workload in Azure that needs to read data from AWS S3 is not ideal from a security perspective...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a cybercriminal group called Jingle Thief that has been observed targeting cloud environments associated with organizations in the retail and consumer services sectors for gift card fraud. "Jingle Thief attackers use phishing and smishing to steal credentials, to compromise organizations that issue gift cards," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers Stav Setty and Shachar Roitman said in a Wednesday analysis. "Once they gain access to an organization, they pursue the type and level of access needed to issue unauthorized gift cards." The end goal of these efforts is to leverage the issued gift cards for monetary gain by likely reselling them on gray markets. Gift cards make for a lucrative choice as they can be easily redeemed with minimal personal information and are difficult to trace, making it harder for defenders to investigate the fraud. The name Jingle Thief is a nod to the threat actor's pattern of conduc...

From Detection to Resolution: Why the Gap Persists A critical vulnerability is identified in an exposed cloud asset. Within hours, five different tools alert you about it: your vulnerability scanner, XDR, CSPM, SIEM, and CMDB each surface the issue in their own way, with different severity levels, metadata, and context. What's missing is a system of action. How do you transition from the detection and identification of a security issue to remediation and resolution? The Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) framework was introduced to help organizations address this challenge, calling for a repeatable approach to scoping, discovery, validation, and ultimately, the mobilization of remediation efforts. The goal is not just to identify risk, but to act on it, continuously and at scale. In most environments, that mobilization happens, but it relies on manual processes. Findings remain fragmented across tools, each with its own format, language, and logic. The responsibility to ...

It's easy to think your defenses are solid — until you realize attackers have been inside them the whole time. The latest incidents show that long-term, silent breaches are becoming the norm. The best defense now isn't just patching fast, but watching smarter and staying alert for what you don't expect. Here's a quick look at this week's top threats, new tactics, and security stories shaping the landscape. ⚡ Threat of the Week F5 Exposed to Nation-State Breach — F5 disclosed that unidentified threat actors broke into its systems and stole files containing some of BIG-IP's source code and information related to undisclosed vulnerabilities in the product. The company said it learned of the incident on August 9, 2025, although it's believed that the attackers were in its network for at least 12 months. The attackers are said to have used a malware family called BRICKSTORM, which is attributed to a China-nexus espionage group dubbed UNC5221. GreyNoise said it observed elevat...

A financially motivated threat actor codenamed UNC5142 has been observed abusing blockchain smart contracts as a way to facilitate the distribution of information stealers, such as Atomic (AMOS), Lumma, Rhadamanthys (aka RADTHIEF), and Vidar, targeting both Windows and Apple macOS systems. "UNC5142 is characterized by its use of compromised WordPress websites and 'EtherHiding,' a technique used to obscure malicious code or data by placing it on a public blockchain, such as the BNB Smart Chain," Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said in a report shared with The Hacker News. As of June 2025, Google said it flagged about 14,000 web pages containing injected JavaScript that exhibit behavior associated with an UNC5142, indicating indiscriminate targeting of vulnerable WordPress sites. However, the tech giant noted that it has not spotted any UNC5142 activity since July 23, 2025, either signaling a pause or an operational pivot. EtherHiding was first documented ...

Scaling the SOC with AI - Why now?  Security Operations Centers (SOCs) are under unprecedented pressure. According to SACR's AI-SOC Market Landscape 2025 , the average organization now faces around 960 alerts per day , while large enterprises manage more than 3,000 alerts daily from an average of 28 different tools . Nearly 40% of those alerts go uninvestigated , and 61% of security teams admit to overlooking alerts that later proved critical. The takeaway is clear: the traditional SOC model can't keep up. AI has now moved from experimentation to execution inside the SOC. 88% of organizations that don't yet run an AI-driven SOC plan to evaluate or deploy one within the next year. But as more vendors promote "AI-powered SOC automation," the challenge for security leaders has shifted from awareness to evaluation. The key question is no longer whether AI belongs in the SOC, but how to measure its real impact and select a platform that delivers value without introducing signi...

Penetration testing helps organizations ensure IT systems are secure, but it should never be treated in a one-size-fits-all approach. Traditional approaches can be rigid and cost your organization time and money – while producing inferior results.  The benefits of pen testing are clear. By empowering "white hat" hackers to attempt to breach your system using similar tools and techniques to an adversary, pen testing can provide reassurance that your IT set-up is secure. Perhaps more importantly, it can also flag areas for improvement.  As the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) notes, it's comparable to a financial audit . "Your finance team tracks expenditure and income day to day. An audit by an external group ensures that your internal team's processes are sufficient." While the advantages are obvious, it's vital to understand the true cost of the process: indeed, the classic approach can often demand significant time and effort from your team. You need to get yo...

The online world is changing fast. Every week, new scams, hacks, and tricks show how easy it's become to turn everyday technology into a weapon. Tools made to help us work, connect, and stay safe are now being used to steal, spy, and deceive. Hackers don't always break systems anymore — they use them. They hide inside trusted apps, copy real websites, and trick people into giving up control without even knowing it. It's no longer just about stealing data — it's about power, money, and control over how people live and communicate. This week's ThreatsDay issue looks at how that battle is unfolding — where criminals are getting smarter, where defenses are failing, and what that means for anyone living in a connected world. Crypto empire built on slavery Historic Operation Targets SE Asian Scam Networks with $15B Seizure The U.S. government has seized $15 billion (approximately 127,271 bitcoin) worth of cryptocurrency assets from one of the world's largest operators ...