Credential Theft | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The maintainers of the nx build system have alerted users to a supply chain attack that allowed attackers to publish malicious versions of the popular npm package and other auxiliary plugins with data-gathering capabilities. "Malicious versions of the nx package, as well as some supporting plugin packages, were published to npm, containing code that scans the file system, collects credentials, and posts them to GitHub as a repo under the user's accounts," the maintainers said in an advisory published Wednesday. Nx is an open-source, technology-agnostic build platform that's designed to manage codebases. It's advertised as an "AI-first build platform that connects everything from your editor to CI [continuous integration]." The npm package has over 3.5 million weekly downloads. The list of affected packages and versions is below. These versions have since been removed from the npm registry. The compromise of the nx package took place on August 26, 20...

The financially motivated threat actor known as Storm-0501 has been observed refining its tactics to conduct data exfiltration and extortion attacks targeting cloud environments. "Unlike traditional on-premises ransomware, where the threat actor typically deploys malware to encrypt critical files across endpoints within the compromised network and then negotiates for a decryption key, cloud-based ransomware introduces a fundamental shift," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Leveraging cloud-native capabilities, Storm-0501 rapidly exfiltrates large volumes of data, destroys data and backups within the victim environment, and demands ransom -- all without relying on traditional malware deployment." Storm-0501 was first documented by Microsoft almost a year ago, detailing its hybrid cloud ransomware attacks targeting government, manufacturing, transportation, and law enforcement sectors in the U.S., with the thr...

A widespread data theft campaign has allowed hackers to breach sales automation platform Salesloft to steal OAuth and refresh tokens associated with the Drift artificial intelligence (AI) chat agent. The activity, assessed to be opportunistic in nature, has been attributed to a threat actor tracked by Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) and Mandiant, tracked as UNC6395. GTIG told The Hacker News that it's aware of over 700 potentially impacted organizations. "Beginning as early as August 8, 2025, through at least August 18, 2025, the actor targeted Salesforce customer instances through compromised OAuth tokens associated with the Salesloft Drift third-party application," researchers Austin Larsen, Matt Lin, Tyler McLellan, and Omar ElAhdan said . In these attacks, the threat actors have been observed exporting large volumes of data from numerous corporate Salesforce instances, with the likely aim of harvesting credentials that could be then used to compromise vic...

The advanced persistent threat (APT) actor known as Transparent Tribe has been observed targeting both Windows and BOSS (Bharat Operating System Solutions) Linux systems with malicious Desktop shortcut files in attacks targeting Indian Government entities. "Initial access is achieved through spear-phishing emails," CYFIRMA said . "Linux BOSS environments are targeted via weaponized .desktop shortcut files that, once opened, download and execute malicious payloads." Transparent Tribe, also called APT36, is assessed to be of Pakistani origin, with the group – along with its sub-cluster SideCopy – having a storied history of breaking into Indian government institutions with a variety of remote access trojans (RATs). The latest dual-platform demonstrates the adversarial collective's continued sophistication, allowing it to broaden its targeting footprint and ensure access to compromised environments. The attack chains begin with phishing emails bearing sup...

When an organization's credentials are leaked, the immediate consequences are rarely visible—but the long-term impact is far-reaching. Far from the cloak-and-dagger tactics seen in fiction, many real-world cyber breaches begin with something deceptively simple: a username and password. According to Verizon's 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report, leaked credentials accounted for 22% of breaches in 2024, outpacing phishing and even software exploitation. That's nearly a quarter of all incidents, initiated not through zero-days or advanced persistent threats, but by logging in through the front door. This quiet and persistent threat has been growing. New data compiled by Cyberint—an external risk management and threat intelligence company recently acquired by Check Point—shows a 160% increase in leaked credentials in 2025 compared to the previous year. The report, titled The Rise of Leaked Credentials , provides a look into not just the volume of these leaks, but how they are exploi...

A fresh set of 60 malicious packages has been uncovered targeting the RubyGems ecosystem by posing as seemingly innocuous automation tools for social media, blogging, or messaging services to steal credentials from unsuspecting users and likely resell them on dark web forums like Russian Market. The activity is assessed to be active since at least March 2023, according to the software supply chain security company Socket. Cumulatively, the gems have been downloaded more than 275,000 times. That said, it bears noting that the figure may not accurately represent the actual number of compromised systems, as not every download results in execution, and it's possible several of these gems have been downloaded to a single machine. "Since at least March 2023, a threat actor using the aliases zon, nowon, kwonsoonje, and soonje has published 60 malicious gems posing as automation tools for Instagram, Twitter/X, TikTok, WordPress, Telegram, Kakao, and Naver," security researche...

Cybersecurity researchers have lifted the veil on a widespread malicious campaign that's targeting TikTok Shop users globally with an aim to steal credentials and distribute trojanized apps. "Threat actors are exploiting the official in-app e-commerce platform through a dual attack strategy that combines phishing and malware to target users," CTM360 said . "The core tactic involves a deceptive replica of TikTok Shop that tricks users into thinking theyʼre interacting with a legitimate affiliate or the real platform." The scam campaign has been codenamed FraudOnTok  by the Bahrain-based cybersecurity company, calling out the threat actor's multi-pronged distribution strategy that involves Meta ads and artificial intelligence (AI)-generated TikTok videos that mimic influencers or official brand ambassadors. Central to the effort is the use of lookalike domains that resemble legitimate TikTok URLs. Over 15,000 such impersonated websites have been identified...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a previously undocumented Linux backdoor dubbed Plague that has managed to evade detection for a year. "The implant is built as a malicious PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module), enabling attackers to silently bypass system authentication and gain persistent SSH access," Nextron Systems researcher Pierre-Henri Pezier said . Pluggable Authentication Modules refers to a suite of shared libraries used to manage user authentication to applications and services in Linux and UNIX-based systems. Given that PAM modules are loaded into privileged authentication processes, a rogue PAM can enable theft of user credentials, bypass authentication checks, and remain undetected by security tools. The cybersecurity company said it uncovered multiple Plague artifacts uploaded to VirusTotal since July 29, 2024, with none of them detected by antimalware engines as malicious. What's more, the presence of several samples signals active developme...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new phishing campaign that conceals malicious payloads by abusing link wrapping services from Proofpoint and Intermedia to bypass defenses. "Link wrapping is designed by vendors like Proofpoint to protect users by routing all clicked URLs through a scanning service, allowing them to block known malicious destinations at the moment of click," the Cloudflare Email Security team said . "While this is effective against known threats, attacks can still succeed if the wrapped link hasn't been flagged by the scanner at click time." The activity, observed over the last two months, once again illustrates how threat actors find different ways to leverage legitimate features and trusted tools to their advantage and perform malicious actions, in this case, redirecting victims to Microsoft 365 phishing pages. It's noteworthy that the abuse of link wrapping involves the attackers gaining unauthorized access to em...

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as UNC4899 has been attributed to attacks targeting two different organizations by approaching their employees via LinkedIn and Telegram. "Under the guise of freelance opportunities for software development work, UNC4899 leveraged social engineering techniques to successfully convince the targeted employees to execute malicious Docker containers in their respective workstations," Google's cloud division said [PDF] in its Cloud Threat Horizons Report for H2 2025. UNC4899 overlaps with activity tracked under the monikers Jade Sleet, PUKCHONG, Slow Pisces, and TraderTraitor. Active since at least 2020, the state-sponsored actor is known for its targeting of cryptocurrency and blockchain industries. Notably, the hacking group has been implicated in significant cryptocurrency heists , including that of Axie Infinity in March 2022 ($625 million), DMM Bitcoin in May 2024 ($308 million), and Bybit in February 2025 ($1.4 billion). ...

Google Cloud's Mandiant Consulting has revealed that it has witnessed a drop in activity from the notorious Scattered Spider group, but emphasized the need for organizations to take advantage of the lull to shore up their defenses. "Since the recent arrests tied to the alleged Scattered Spider (UNC3944) members in the U.K., Mandiant Consulting hasn't observed any new intrusions directly attributable to this specific threat actor," Charles Carmakal, CTO of Mandiant Consulting at Google Cloud, told The Hacker News in a statement. "This presents a critical window of opportunity that organizations must capitalize on to thoroughly study the tactics UNC3944 wielded so effectively, assess their systems, and reinforce their security posture accordingly." Carmakal also warned businesses not to "let their guard down entirely," as other threat actors like UNC6040 are employing similar social engineering tactics as Scattered Spider to breach target netwo...

The maintainers of the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository have issued a warning about an ongoing phishing attack that's targeting users in an attempt to redirect them to fake PyPI sites. The attack involves sending email messages bearing the subject line "[PyPI] Email verification" that are sent from the email address noreply@pypj[.]org (note that the domain is not " pypi[.]org "). "This is not a security breach of PyPI itself, but rather a phishing attempt that exploits the trust users have in PyPI," Mike Fiedler, PyPI Admin, said in a post Monday. The email messages instruct users to follow a link to verify their email address, which leads to a replica phishing site that impersonates PyPI and is designed to harvest their credentials. But in a clever twist, once the login information is entered on the bogus site, the request is routed to the legitimate PyPI site, effectively fooling the victims into thinking that nothing is amiss when, in r...

Until recently, the cyber attacker methodology behind the biggest breaches of the last decade or so has been pretty consistent: Compromise an endpoint via software exploit, or social engineering a user to run malware on their device;  Find ways to move laterally inside the network and compromise privileged identities; Repeat as needed until you can execute your desired attack — usually stealing data from file shares, deploying ransomware, or both.  But attacks have fundamentally changed as networks have evolved. With the SaaS-ification of enterprise IT, core business systems aren't locally deployed and centrally managed in the way they used to be. Instead, they're logged into over the internet, and accessed via a web browser. Attacks have shifted from targeting local networks to SaaS services, accessed through employee web browsers. Under the shared responsibility model, the part that's left to the business consuming a SaaS service is mostly constrained to how they ma...

In what's the latest instance of a software supply chain attack, unknown threat actors managed to compromise Toptal's GitHub organization account and leveraged that access to publish 10 malicious packages to the npm registry. The packages contained code to exfiltrate GitHub authentication tokens and destroy victim systems, Socket said in a report published last week. In addition, 73 repositories associated with the organization were made public. The list of affected packages is below - @toptal/picasso-tailwind @toptal/picasso-charts @toptal/picasso-shared @toptal/picasso-provider @toptal/picasso-select @toptal/picasso-quote @toptal/picasso-forms @xene/core @toptal/picasso-utils @toptal/picasso-typograph All the Node.js libraries were embedded with identical payloads in their package.json files, attracting a total of about 5,000 downloads before they were removed from the repository. The nefarious code has been found to specifically target the preinstall and p...

Picture this: you've hardened every laptop in your fleet with real‑time telemetry, rapid isolation, and automated rollback. But the corporate mailbox—the front door for most attackers—is still guarded by what is effectively a 1990s-era filter. This isn't a balanced approach. Email remains a primary vector for breaches, yet we often treat it as a static stream of messages instead of a dynamic, post-delivery environment. This environment is rich with OAuth tokens, shared drive links, and years of sensitive data. The conversation needs to shift. We should stop asking, "Did the gateway block the bad thing?" and start asking, "How quickly can we see, contain, and undo the damage when an attacker inevitably gets in?" Looking at email security through this lens forces a fundamental shift toward the same assume-breach, detect-and-respond mindset that already revolutionized endpoint protection. The day the wall crumbled Most security professionals know the statisti...

Microsoft has revealed that one of the threat actors behind the active exploitation of SharePoint flaws is deploying Warlock ransomware on targeted systems. The tech giant, in an update shared Wednesday, said the findings are based on an "expanded analysis and threat intelligence from our continued monitoring of exploitation activity by Storm-2603 ." The threat actor attributed to the financially motivated activity is a suspected China-based threat actor that's known to drop Warlock and LockBit ransomware in the past. The attack chains entail the exploitation of CVE-2025-49706, a spoofing vulnerability, and CVE-2025-49704, a remote code execution vulnerability, targeting unpatched on-premises SharePoint servers to deploy the spinstall0.aspx web shell payload. "This initial access is used to conduct command execution using the w3wp.exe process that supports SharePoint," Microsoft said. "Storm-2603 then initiates a series of discovery commands, incl...

The Windows banking trojan known as Coyote has become the first known malware strain to exploit the Windows accessibility framework called UI Automation (UIA) to harvest sensitive information. "The new Coyote variant is targeting Brazilian users, and uses UIA to extract credentials linked to 75 banking institutes' web addresses and cryptocurrency exchanges," Akamai security researcher Tomer Peled said in an analysis. Coyote, first revealed by Kaspersky in 2024, is known for targeting Brazilian users. It comes with capabilities to log keystrokes, capture screenshots, and serve overlays on top of login pages associated with financial enterprises. Part of the Microsoft .NET Framework, UIA is a legitimate feature offered by Microsoft to allow screen readers and other assistive technology products to programmatically access user interface (UI) elements on a desktop.  That UIA can be a potential pathway for abuse, including data theft, was previously demonstrated as a...

The China-linked cyber espionage group tracked as APT41 has been attributed to a new campaign targeting government IT services in the African region. "The attackers used hardcoded names of internal services, IP addresses, and proxy servers embedded within their malware," Kaspersky researchers Denis Kulik and Daniil Pogorelov said . "One of the C2s [command-and-control servers] was a captive SharePoint server within the victim's infrastructure." APT41 is the moniker assigned to a prolific Chinese nation-state hacking group that's known for targeting organizations spanning multiple sectors, including telecom and energy providers, educational institutions, healthcare organizations and IT energy companies in more than three dozen countries. What makes the campaign noteworthy is its focus on Africa, which, as the Russian cybersecurity vendor noted, "had experienced the least activity" from this specific threat actor. That said, the findings line u...