Credential Theft | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The maintainer of the Axios npm package has confirmed that the supply chain compromise was the result of a highly-targeted social engineering campaign orchestrated by North Korean threat actors tracked as UNC1069 . Maintainer Jason Saayman said the attackers tailored their social engineering efforts "specifically to me" by first approaching him under the guise of the founder of a legitimate, well-known company. "They had cloned the company's founders' likeness as well as the company itself," Saayman said in a post-mortem of the incident. "They then invited me to a real Slack workspace. This workspace was branded to the company's CI and named in a plausible manner. The Slack [workspace] was thought out very well; they had channels where they were sharing LinkedIn posts." Subsequently, the threat actors are said to have scheduled a meeting with him on Microsoft Teams. Upon joining the fake call, he was presented with a fake error mes...

An ongoing phishing campaign is targeting French-speaking corporate environments with fake resumes that lead to the deployment of cryptocurrency miners and information stealers. "The campaign uses highly obfuscated VBScript files disguised as resume/CV documents, delivered through phishing emails," Securonix researchers Shikha Sangwan, Akshay Gaikwad, and Aaron Beardslee said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Once executed, the malware deploys a multi-purpose toolkit that combines credential theft, data exfiltration, and Monero cryptocurrency mining for maximum monetization." The activity has been codenamed FAUX#ELEVATE by the cybersecurity company. The campaign is noteworthy for the abuse of legitimate services and infrastructure, such as Dropbox for staging payloads, Moroccan WordPress sites for hosting command-and-control (C2) configuration, and mail[.]ru SMTP infrastructure for exfiltrating stolen browser credentials and desktop files. This is an ...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new set of malicious npm packages that are designed to steal cryptocurrency wallets and sensitive data. The activity is being tracked by ReversingLabs as the Ghost campaign. The list of identified packages, all published by a user named mikilanjillo, is below - react-performance-suite react-state-optimizer-core react-fast-utilsa ai-fast-auto-trader pkgnewfefame1 carbon-mac-copy-cloner coinbase-desktop-sdk "The packages themselves are phishing for sudo password with which the last stage is executed, and are trying to hide their real functionality and avoid detection in a sophisticated way: displaying fake npm install logs," Lucija Valentić, software threat researcher at ReversingLabs, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The identified Node.js libraries, besides falsely claiming to download additional packages, insert random delays to give the impression that the installation process is underway. At one point du...

A suspected China-based cyber espionage operation has targeted Southeast Asian military organizations as part of a state-sponsored campaign that dates back to at least 2020. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 is tracking the threat activity under the moniker CL-STA-1087 , where CL refers to cluster, and STA stands for state-backed motivation. "The activity demonstrated strategic operational patience and a focus on highly targeted intelligence collection, rather than bulk data theft," security researchers Lior Rochberger and Yoav Zemah said. "The attackers behind this cluster actively searched for and collected highly specific files concerning military capabilities, organizational structures, and collaborative efforts with Western armed forces." The campaign exhibits hallmarks commonly associated with advanced persistent threat (APT) operations, including carefully crafted delivery methods, defense evasion strategies, highly stable operational infrastructure, and custom ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new banking malware targeting Brazilian users that's written in Rust, marking a significant departure from other known Delphi-based malware families associated with the Latin American cybercrime ecosystem. The malware, which is designed to infect Windows systems and was first discovered last month, has been codenamed VENON by Brazilian cybersecurity company ZenoX. What makes VENON notable is that it shares behaviors that are consistent with established banking trojans targeting the region, such as Grandoreiro, Mekotio, and Coyote, specifically when it comes to features like banking overlay logic, active window monitoring, and a shortcut (LNK) hijacking mechanism. The malware has not been attributed to any previously documented group or campaign. However, an earlier version of the artifact, dating back to January 2026, has been found to expose full paths from the malware author's development environment. The paths repea...

A threat actor known as UNC6426 leveraged keys stolen following the supply chain compromise of the nx npm package last year to completely breach a victim's cloud environment within a span of 72 hours. The attack started with the theft of a developer's GitHub token, which the threat actor then used to gain unauthorized access to the cloud and steal data. "The threat actor, UNC6426, then used this access to abuse the GitHub-to-AWS OpenID Connect (OIDC) trust and create a new administrator role in the cloud environment," Google said in its Cloud Threat Horizons Report for H1 2026. "They abused this role to exfiltrate files from the client's Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets and performed data destruction in their production cloud environments." The supply chain attack targeting the nx npm package took place in August 2025, when unknown threat actors exploited a vulnerable pull_request_target workflow – an attack type ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered five malicious Rust crates that masquerade as time-related utilities to transmit .env file data to the threat actors. The Rust packages, published to crates.io, are listed below - chrono_anchor dnp3times time_calibrator time_calibrators time-sync The crates, per Socket, impersonate timeapi.io and were published between late February and early March 2026. It's assessed to be the work of a single threat actor based on the use of the same exfiltration methodology and the lookalike domain ("timeapis[.]io") to stash the stolen data. "Although the crates pose as local time utilities, their core behavior is credential and secret theft," security researcher Kirill Boychenko said . "They attempt to collect sensitive data from developer environments, most notably .env files, and exfiltrate it to threat actor-controlled infrastructure." While four of the aforementioned packages exhibit fairly straightforward ...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new campaign where threat actors are abusing FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) appliances as entry points to breach victim networks.  The activity involves the exploitation of recently disclosed security vulnerabilities or weak credentials to extract configuration files containing service account credentials and network topology information, SentinelOne said in a report published today. The security outfit said the campaign has singled out environments tied to healthcare, government, and managed service providers. "FortiGate network appliances have considerable access to the environments they were installed to protect," security researchers Alex Delamotte, Stephen Bromfield, Mary Braden Murphy, and Amey Patne said . "In many configurations, this includes service accounts which are connected to the authentication infrastructure, such as Active Directory (AD) and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)....

Two Google Chrome extensions have turned malicious after what appears to be a case of ownership transfer , offering attackers a way to push malware to downstream customers, inject arbitrary code, and harvest sensitive data. The extensions in question, both originally associated with a developer named "akshayanuonline@gmail.com" (BuildMelon), are listed below - QuickLens - Search Screen with Google Lens (ID: kdenlnncndfnhkognokgfpabgkgehodd) - 7,000 users ShotBird - Scrolling Screenshots, Tweet Images & Editor (ID: gengfhhkjekmlejbhmmopegofnoifnjp) - 800 users While QuickLens is no longer available for download from the Chrome Web Store, ShotBird remains accessible as of writing. ShotBird was originally launched in November 2024, with its developer, Akshay Anu S (@AkshayAnuOnline), claiming on X that the extension is suitable for "creating professional, studio-like visuals," and that all processing happens locally. According to research published by mo...

High-value organizations located in South, Southeast, and East Asia have been targeted by a Chinese threat actor as part of a years-long campaign. The activity, which has targeted aviation, energy, government, law enforcement, pharmaceutical, technology, and telecommunications sectors, has been attributed by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 to a previously undocumented threat activity group dubbed CL-UNK-1068 , where "CL" refers to "cluster" and "UNK" stands for unknown motivation. However, the security vendor has assessed with "moderate-to-high confidence" that the primary objective of the campaign is cyber espionage. "Our analysis reveals a multi-faceted tool set that includes custom malware, modified open-source utilities, and living-off-the-land binaries (LOLBINs)," security researcher Tom Fakterman said . "These provide a simple, effective way for the attackers to maintain a persistent presence within targeted environments....

Microsoft on Thursday disclosed details of a new widespread ClickFix social engineering campaign that has leveraged the Windows Terminal app as a way to activate a sophisticated attack chain and deploy the Lumma Stealer malware. The activity, observed in February 2026, makes use of the terminal emulator program instead of instructing users to launch the Windows Run dialog and paste a command into it. "This campaign instructs targets to use the Windows + X → I shortcut to launch Windows Terminal (wt.exe) directly, guiding users into a privileged command execution environment that blends into legitimate administrative workflows and appears more trustworthy to users," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a series of posts on X. What makes the latest variant notable is that it bypasses detections specifically designed to flag Run dialog abuse, not to mention take advantage of the legitimacy of Windows Terminal to trick unsuspecting users into running malicious ...

Organizations typically roll out multi-factor authentication (MFA) and assume stolen passwords are no longer enough to access systems. In Windows environments, that assumption is often wrong. Attackers still compromise networks every day using valid credentials. The issue is not MFA itself, but coverage.  Enforced through an identity provider (IdP) such as Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, or Google Workspace, MFA works well for cloud apps and federated sign-ins. But many Windows logons rely solely on Active Directory (AD) authentication paths that never trigger MFA prompts. To reduce credential-based compromise, security teams need to understand where Windows authentication happens outside their identity stack. Seven Windows authentication paths that attackers rely on 1. Interactive Windows logon (local or domain joined) When a user signs in directly to a Windows workstation or server, authentication is typically handled by AD (via Kerberos or NTLM), not by a cloud IdP.  In h...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed what they say is an active "Shai-Hulud-like" supply chain worm campaign that has leveraged a cluster of at least 19 malicious npm packages to enable credential harvesting and cryptocurrency key theft. The campaign has been codenamed SANDWORM_MODE by supply chain security company Socket. As with prior Shai-Hulud attack waves , the malicious code embedded into the packages comes with capabilities to siphon system information, access tokens, environment secrets, and API keys from developer environments and automatically propagate by abusing stolen npm and GitHub identities to extend its reach. "The sample retains Shai-Hulud hallmarks and adds GitHub API exfiltration with DNS fallback, hook-based persistence, SSH propagation fallback, MCP server injection with embedded prompt injection targeting AI coding assistants, and LLM API Key harvesting," the company said . The packages, published to npm by two npm publisher aliases,...

A Russian-speaking, financially motivated threat actor has been observed taking advantage of commercial generative artificial intelligence (AI) services to compromise over 600 FortiGate devices located in 55 countries. That's according to new findings from Amazon Threat Intelligence, which said it observed the activity between January 11 and February 18, 2026. "No exploitation of FortiGate vulnerabilities was observed—instead, this campaign succeeded by exploiting exposed management ports and weak credentials with single-factor authentication, fundamental security gaps that AI helped an unsophisticated actor exploit at scale," CJ Moses, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of Amazon Integrated Security, said in a report. The tech giant described the threat actor as having limited technical capabilities, a constraint they overcame by relying on multiple commercial generative AI tools to implement various phases of the attack cycle, such as tool development, attac...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new SmartLoader campaign that involves distributing a trojanized version of a Model Context Protocol ( MCP ) server associated with Oura Health to deliver an information stealer known as StealC . "The threat actors cloned a legitimate Oura MCP Server – a tool that connects AI assistants to Oura Ring health data – and built a deceptive infrastructure of fake forks and contributors to manufacture credibility," Straiker's AI Research (STAR) Labs team said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The end game is to leverage the trojanized version of the Oura MCP server to deliver the StealC infostealer, allowing the threat actors to steal credentials, browser passwords, and data from cryptocurrency wallets. SmartLoader, first highlighted by OALABS Research in early 2024, is a malware loader that's known to be distributed via fake GitHub repositories containing artificial intelligence (AI)-generated lures to giv...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered what they said is the first known malicious Microsoft Outlook add-in detected in the wild. In this unusual supply chain attack detailed by Koi Security, an unknown attacker claimed the domain associated with a now-abandoned legitimate add-in to serve a fake Microsoft login page, stealing over 4,000 credentials in the process. The activity has been codenamed AgreeToSteal by the cybersecurity company. The Outlook add-in in question is AgreeTo , which is advertised by its developer as a way for users to connect different calendars in a single place and share their availability through email. The add-in was last updated in December 2022. Idan Dardikman, co-founder and CTO of Koi, told The Hacker News that the incident represents a broadening of supply chain attack vectors. "This is the same class of attack we've seen in browser extensions, npm packages, and IDE plugins: a trusted distribution channel where the content can change aft...

Are ransomware and encryption still the defining signals of modern cyberattacks, or has the industry been too fixated on noise while missing a more dangerous shift happening quietly all around them? According to Picus Labs’ new Red Report 2026, which analyzed over 1.1 million malicious files and mapped 15.5 million adversarial actions observed across 2025, attackers are no longer optimizing for disruption. Instead, their goal is now long-term, invisible access. To be clear, ransomware isn’t going anywhere, and adversaries continue to innovate. But the data shows a clear strategic pivot away from loud, destructive attacks toward techniques designed to evade detection, persist inside environments, and quietly exploit identity and trusted infrastructure. Rather than breaking in and burning systems down, today’s attackers increasingly behave like Digital Parasites. They live inside the host, feed on credentials and services, and remain undetected for as long as possible. Public attent...

Microsoft has warned that information-stealing attacks are "rapidly expanding" beyond Windows to target Apple macOS environments by leveraging cross-platform languages like Python and abusing trusted platforms for distribution at scale. The tech giant's Defender Security Research Team said it observed macOS-targeted infostealer campaigns using social engineering techniques such as ClickFix since late 2025 to distribute disk image (DMG) installers that deploy stealer malware families like Atomic macOS Stealer ( AMOS ), MacSync , and DigitStealer . The campaigns have been found to use techniques like fileless execution, native macOS utilities, and AppleScript automation to facilitate data theft. This includes details like web browser credentials and session data, iCloud Keychain, and developer secrets. The starting point of these attacks is often a malicious ad, often served through Google Ads, that redirects users searching for tools like DynamicLake and artificial i...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new dual-vector campaign that leverages stolen credentials to deploy legitimate Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software for persistent remote access to compromised hosts. "Instead of deploying custom viruses, attackers are bypassing security perimeters by weaponizing the necessary IT tools that administrators trust," KnowBe4 Threat Labs researchers Jeewan Singh Jalal, Prabhakaran Ravichandhiran, and Anand Bodke said . "By stealing a 'skeleton key' to the system, they turn legitimate Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software into a persistent backdoor." The attack unfolds in two distinct waves, where the threat actors leverage fake invitation notifications to steal victim credentials, and then leverage those pilfered credentials to deploy RMM tools to establish persistent access. The bogus emails are disguised as an invitation from a legitimate platform called Greenvelope, and aim to tri...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a malware campaign that's targeting software developers with a new information stealer called Evelyn Stealer by weaponizing the Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension ecosystem. "The malware is designed to exfiltrate sensitive information, including developer credentials and cryptocurrency-related data. Compromised developer environments can also be abused as access points into broader organizational systems," Trend Micro said in an analysis published Monday. The activity is designed to single out organizations with software development teams that rely on VS Code and third-party extensions, along with those with access to production systems, cloud resources, or digital assets, it added. It's worth noting that details of the campaign were first documented by Koi Security last month, when details emerged of three VS Code extensions – BigBlack.bitcoin-black, BigBlack.codo-ai, and BigBlack.mrbigblacktheme...