Command and Control | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Bad actors are leveraging browser notifications as a vector for phishing attacks to distribute malicious links by means of a new command-and-control (C2) platform called Matrix Push C2. "This browser-native, fileless framework leverages push notifications, fake alerts, and link redirects to target victims across operating systems," Blackfog researcher Brenda Robb said in a Thursday report. In these attacks, prospective targets are tricked into allowing browser notifications through social engineering on malicious or legitimate-but-compromised websites. Once a user agrees to receive notifications from the site, the attackers take advantage of the web push notification mechanism built into the web browser to send alerts that look like they have been sent by the operating system or the browser itself, leveraging trusted branding, familiar logos, and convincing language to maintain the ruse. These include alerts about, say, suspicious logins or browser updates, along with ...

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of an actively expanding botnet dubbed Tsundere that's targeting Windows users. Active since mid-2025, the threat is designed to execute arbitrary JavaScript code retrieved from a command-and-control (C2) server, Kaspersky researcher Lisandro Ubiedo said in an analysis published today. There are currently no details on how the botnet malware is propagated; however, in at least one case, the threat actors behind the operation are said to have leveraged a legitimate Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tool as a conduit to download an MSI installer file from a compromised site. The names given to the malware artifacts – Valorant, r6x (Rainbow Six Siege X), and cs2 (Counter-Strike 2) – also suggest that the implant is likely being disseminated using game-related lures. It's possible that users searching for pirated versions of these games are the target. Regardless of the method used, the fake MSI installer is designed to install Node...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new campaign that leverages a combination of social engineering and WhatsApp hijacking to distribute a Delphi-based banking trojan named Eternidade Stealer as part of attacks targeting users in Brazil. "It uses Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) to dynamically retrieve command-and-control (C2) addresses, allowing the threat actor to update its C2 server," Trustwave SpiderLabs researchers Nathaniel Morales, John Basmayor, and Nikita Kazymirskyi said in a technical breakdown of the campaign shared with The Hacker News. "It is distributed through a WhatsApp worm campaign, with the actor now deploying a Python script, a shift from previous PowerShell-based scripts to hijack WhatsApp and spread malicious attachments. The findings come close on the heels of another campaign dubbed Water Saci that has targeted Brazilian users with a worm that propagates via WhatsApp Web known as SORVEPOTEL, which then acts as a c...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a cyber attack targeting a major U.S.-based real-estate company that involved the use of a nascent command-and-control (C2) and red teaming framework known as Tuoni . "The campaign leveraged the emerging Tuoni C2 framework, a relatively new, command-and-control (C2) tool (with a free license) that delivers stealthy, in-memory payloads," Morphisec researcher Shmuel Uzan said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Tuoni is advertised as an advanced C2 framework designed for security professionals, facilitating penetration testing operations, red team engagements, and security assessments. A "Community Edition" of the software is freely available for download from GitHub. It was first released in early 2024. The attack, per Morphisec, unfolded in mid-October 2025, with the unknown threat actor likely leveraging social engineering via Microsoft Teams impersonation for initial access. It's suspected that t...

The Iranian state-sponsored threat actor known as APT42 has been observed targeting individuals and organizations that are of interest to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as part of a new espionage-focused campaign. The activity, detected in early September 2025 and assessed to be ongoing, has been codenamed  SpearSpecter by the Israel National Digital Agency (INDA). "The campaign has systematically targeted high-value senior defense and government officials using personalized social engineering tactics," INDA researchers Shimi Cohen, Adi Pick, Idan Beit-Yosef, Hila David, and Yaniv Goldman said. "These include inviting targets to prestigious conferences or arranging significant meetings." What's notable about the effort is that it also extends to the targets' family members, creating a broader attack surface that exerts more pressure on the primary targets. APT42 was first publicly documented in late 2022 by Google Mandiant, detailing its...

Microsoft has disclosed details of a novel backdoor dubbed SesameOp that uses OpenAI Assistants Application Programming Interface (API) for command-and-control (C2) communications. "Instead of relying on more traditional methods, the threat actor behind this backdoor abuses OpenAI as a C2 channel as a way to stealthily communicate and orchestrate malicious activities within the compromised environment," the Detection and Response Team (DART) at Microsoft Incident Response said in a technical report published Monday. "To do this, a component of the backdoor uses the OpenAI Assistants API as a storage or relay mechanism to fetch commands, which the malware then runs." The tech giant said it discovered the implant in July 2025 as part of a sophisticated security incident in which unknown threat actors had managed to maintain persistence within the target environment for several months. It did not name the impacted victim. Further investigation into the intrusio...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a previously undocumented threat actor called TA585 that has been observed delivering an off-the-shelf malware called MonsterV2 via phishing campaigns. The Proofpoint Threat Research Team described the threat activity cluster as sophisticated, leveraging web injections and filtering checks as part of its attack chains. "TA585 is notable because it appears to own its entire attack chain with multiple delivery techniques," researchers Kyle Cucci, Tommy Madjar, and Selena Larson said . "Instead of leveraging other threat actors – like paying for distribution, buying access from initial access brokers, or using a third-party traffic delivery system – TA585 manages its own infrastructure, delivery, and malware installation." MonsterV2 is a remote access trojan (RAT), stealer, and loader, which Proofpoint first observed being advertised on criminal forums in February 2025. It's worth noting that MonsterV2 is also calle...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a series of cyber attacks targeting financial organizations across Africa since at least July 2023 using a mix of open-source and publicly available tools to maintain access. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 is tracking the activity under the moniker CL-CRI-1014 , where "CL" refers to "cluster" and "CRI" stands for "criminal motivation." It's suspected that the end goal of the attacks is to obtain initial access and then sell it to other criminal actors on underground forums, making the threat actor an initial access broker (IAB). "The threat actor copies signatures from legitimate applications to forge file signatures , to disguise their toolset and mask their malicious activities," researchers Tom Fakterman and Guy Levi said . "Threat actors often spoof legitimate products for malicious purposes." The attacks are characterized by the deployment of tools like PoshC2 fo...

A new malware campaign is exploiting a weakness in Discord's invitation system to deliver an information stealer called Skuld and the AsyncRAT remote access trojan. "Attackers hijacked the links through vanity link registration, allowing them to silently redirect users from trusted sources to malicious servers," Check Point said in a technical report. "The attackers combined the ClickFix phishing technique, multi-stage loaders, and time-based evasions to stealthily deliver AsyncRAT, and a customized Skuld Stealer targeting crypto wallets." The issue with Discord's invite mechanism is that it allows attackers to hijack expired or deleted invite links and secretly redirect unsuspecting users to malicious servers under their control. This also means that a Discord invite link that was once trusted and shared on forums or social media platforms could unwittingly lead users to malicious sites. Details of the campaign come a little over a month after the ...

The Russia-linked threat actor known as Gamaredon (aka Shuckworm) has been attributed to a cyber attack targeting a foreign military mission based in Ukraine with an aim to deliver an updated version of a known malware called GammaSteel. The group targeted the military mission of a Western country, per the Symantec Threat Hunter team, with first signs of the malicious activity detected on February 26, 2025. "The initial infection vector used by the attackers appears to have been an infected removable drive," the Broadcom-owned threat intelligence division said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The attack started with the creation of a Windows Registry value under the UserAssist key, followed by launching "mshta.exe" using "explorer.exe" to initiate a multi-stage infection chain and launch two files. The first file, named "NTUSER.DAT.TMContainer00000000000000000001.regtrans-ms," is used to establish communications with a command-and...

Google is warning of multiple threat actors sharing a public proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit that leverages its Calendar service to host command-and-control (C2) infrastructure. The tool, called Google Calendar RAT (GCR) , employs Google Calendar Events for C2 using a Gmail account. It was first published to GitHub in June 2023. "The script creates a 'Covert Channel' by exploiting the event descriptions in Google Calendar," according to its developer and researcher Valerio Alessandroni, who goes by the online alias MrSaighnal. "The target will connect directly to Google." The tech giant, in its eighth Threat Horizons Report [PDF], said it has not observed the use of the tool in the wild, but noted its Mandiant threat intelligence unit has detected several threat actors sharing the PoC on underground forums. "GCR, running on a compromised machine, periodically polls the Calendar event description for new commands, executes those commands on the t...

As many as 85 command-and-control (C2) servers have been  discovered  supported by the ShadowPad malware since September 2021, with infrastructure detected as recently as October 16, 2022. That's according to VMware's Threat Analysis Unit (TAU), which  studied  three ShadowPad variants using TCP, UDP, and HTTP(S) protocols for C2 communications. ShadowPad , seen as a successor to  PlugX , is a modular malware platform privately shared among multiple Chinese state-sponsored actors since 2015. Taiwanese cybersecurity firm TeamT5, earlier this May, disclosed details of another China-nexus modular implant named  Pangolin8RAT , which is believed to be the successor of the PlugX and ShadowPad malware families, linking it to a threat group dubbed Tianwu. An analysis of the three ShadowPad artifacts, which have been previously put to use by  Winnti ,  Tonto Team , and an emerging threat cluster codenamed  Space Pirates , made it possible to di...

A nascent service called Dark Utilities has already attracted 3,000 users for its ability to provide command-and-control (C2) services with the goal of commandeering compromised systems. "It is marketed as a means to enable remote access, command execution, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and cryptocurrency mining operations on infected systems," Cisco Talos  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. Dark Utilities, which emerged in early 2022, is advertised as a "C2-as-a-Service" (C2aaS), offering access to infrastructure hosted on the clearnet as well as the TOR network and associated payloads with support for Windows, Linux, and Python-based implementations for a mere €9.99. Authenticated users on the platform are presented with a dashboard that makes it possible to generate new payloads tailored to a specific operating system that can then be deployed and executed on victim hosts. Additionally, users are provided an administrative panel ...