Credential Theft | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

YouTube videos promoting game cheats are being used to deliver a previously undocumented stealer malware called Arcane likely targeting Russian-speaking users. "What's intriguing about this malware is how much it collects," Kaspersky said in an analysis. "It grabs account information from VPN and gaming clients, and all kinds of network utilities like ngrok, Playit, Cyberduck, FileZilla, and DynDNS." The attack chains involve sharing links to a password-protected archive on YouTube videos, which, when opened, unpacks a start.bat batch file that's responsible for retrieving another archive file via PowerShell. The batch file then utilizes PowerShell to launch two executables embedded within the newly downloaded archive, while also disabling Windows SmartScreen protections and every drive root folder to SmartScreen filter exceptions. Of the two binaries, one is a cryptocurrency miner and the other is a stealer dubbed VGS that's a variant of the Phe...

Cybersecurity researchers have warned about a large-scale ad fraud campaign that has leveraged hundreds of malicious apps published on the Google Play Store to serve full-screen ads and conduct phishing attacks. "The apps display out-of-context ads and even try to persuade victims to give away credentials and credit card information in phishing attacks," Bitdefender said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Details of the activity were first disclosed by Integral Ad Science (IAS) earlier this month, documenting the discovery of over 180 apps that were engineered to deploy endless and intrusive full-screen interstitial video ads. The ad fraud scheme was codenamed Vapor. These apps, which have since been taken down by Google, masqueraded as legitimate apps and collectively amassed more than 56 million downloads between them, generating over 200 million bid requests daily. "Fraudsters behind the Vapor operation have created multiple developer accounts, each host...

Most microsegmentation projects fail before they even get off the ground—too complex, too slow, too disruptive. But Andelyn Biosciences proved it doesn't have to be that way.  Microsegmentation: The Missing Piece in Zero Trust Security   Security teams today are under constant pressure to defend against increasingly sophisticated cyber threats. Perimeter-based defenses alone can no longer provide sufficient protection as attackers shift their focus to lateral movement within enterprise networks. With over 70% of successful breaches involving attackers moving laterally, organizations are rethinking how they secure internal traffic.  Microsegmentation has emerged as a key strategy in achieving Zero Trust security by restricting access to critical assets based on identity rather than network location. However, traditional microsegmentation approaches—often involving VLAN reconfigurations, agent deployments, or complex firewall rules—tend to be slow, operationally disrupt...

Microsoft is calling attention to a novel remote access trojan (RAT) named StilachiRAT that it said employs advanced techniques to sidestep detection and persist within target environments with an ultimate aim to steal sensitive data. The malware contains capabilities to "steal information from the target system, such as credentials stored in the browser, digital wallet information, data stored in the clipboard, as well as system information," the Microsoft Incident Response team said in an analysis. The tech giant said it discovered StilachiRAT in November 2024, with its RAT features present in a DLL module named "WWStartupCtrl64.dll." The malware has not been attributed to any specific threat actor or country. It's currently not clear how the malware is delivered to targets, but Microsoft noted that such trojans can be installed via various initial access routes, making it crucial for organizations to implement adequate security measures. StilachiRAT i...

Is AI really reshaping the cyber threat landscape, or is the constant drumbeat of hype drowning out actual, more tangible, real-world dangers? According to Picus Labs' Red Report 2025 which analyzed over one million malware samples, there's been no significant surge, so far, in AI-driven attacks. Yes, adversaries are definitely continuing to innovate, and while AI will certainly start playing a larger and larger role, the latest data suggests that a set of well-known tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) are still dominating the field. The hype around artificial intelligence has certainly been dominating media headlines; yet the real-world data paints a far more nuanced picture of which malware threats are thriving, and why. Here's a glimpse at the most critical findings and trends shaping the year's most deployed adversarial campaigns and what steps cybersecurity teams need to take to respond to them. Why the AI Hype is Falling Short…at Least For Now While headl...

Cybercriminals are increasingly leveraging legitimate HTTP client tools to facilitate account takeover (ATO) attacks on Microsoft 365 environments. Enterprise security company Proofpoint said it observed campaigns using HTTP clients Axios and Node Fetch to send HTTP requests and receive HTTP responses from web servers with the goal of conducting ATO attacks. "Originally sourced from public repositories like GitHub, these tools are increasingly used in attacks like Adversary-in-the-Middle (AitM) and brute force techniques, leading to numerous account takeover (ATO) incidents," security researcher Anna Akselevich said . The use of HTTP client tools for brute-force attacks has been a long-observed trend since at least February 2018, with successive iterations employing variants of OkHttp clients to target Microsoft 365 environments at least until early 2024. But by March 2024, Proofpoint said it began to observe a wide range of HTTP clients gaining traction, with the atta...

A malware campaign has been observed delivering a remote access trojan (RAT) named AsyncRAT by making use of Python payloads and TryCloudflare tunnels. "AsyncRAT is a remote access trojan (RAT) that exploits the async/await pattern for efficient, asynchronous communication," Forcepoint X-Labs researcher Jyotika Singh said in an analysis. "It allows attackers to control infected systems stealthily, exfiltrate data and execute commands while remaining hidden – making it a significant cyberthreat." The starting point of the multi-stage attack chain is a phishing email that contains a Dropbox URL that, upon clicking, downloads a ZIP archive. Present within the file is an internet shortcut (URL) file, which serves as a conduit for a Windows shortcut (LNK) file responsible for taking the infection further, while a seemingly benign decoy PDF document is displayed to the message recipient. Specifically, the LNK file is retrieved by means of a TryCloudflare URL embed...

Brazilian Windows users are the target of a campaign that delivers a banking malware known as Coyote . "Once deployed, the Coyote Banking Trojan can carry out various malicious activities, including keylogging, capturing screenshots, and displaying phishing overlays to steal sensitive credentials," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin said in an analysis published last week. The cybersecurity company said it discovered over the past month several Windows Shortcut (LNK) file artifacts that contain PowerShell commands responsible for delivering the malware. Coyote was first documented by Kaspersky in early 2024, detailing its attacks targeting users in the South American nation. It's capable of harvesting sensitive information from over 70 financial applications. In the previous attack chain documented by the Russian cybersecurity firm, a Squirrel installer executable is used to trigger a Node.js application compiled with Electron, that, for its part, runs a...

U.S. and Dutch law enforcement agencies have announced that they have dismantled 39 domains and their associated servers as part of efforts to disrupt a network of online marketplaces originating from Pakistan. The action, which took place on January 29, 2025, has been codenamed Operation Heart Blocker. The vast array of sites in question peddled phishing toolkits and fraud-enabling tools and was operated by a group known as Saim Raza since at least 2020, which is also known as HeartSender. These offerings were then used by transnational organized crime groups to target several victims in the United States as part of various business email compromise ( BEC ) schemes, leading to losses totaling over $3 million. "The Saim Raza-run websites operated as marketplaces that advertised and facilitated the sale of tools such as phishing kits, scam pages, and email extractors, often used to build and maintain fraud operations," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said . "N...

Cybersecurity researchers have alerted to a new malvertising campaign that's targeting individuals and businesses advertising via Google Ads by attempting to phish for their credentials via fraudulent ads on Google. "The scheme consists of stealing as many advertiser accounts as possible by impersonating Google Ads and redirecting victims to fake login pages," Jérôme Segura, senior director of threat intelligence at Malwarebytes, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. It's suspected the end goal of the campaign is to reuse the stolen credentials to further perpetuate the campaigns, while also selling them to other criminal actors on underground forums. Based on posts shared on Reddit , Bluesky , and Google's own support forums , the threat has been active since at least mid-November 2024. The activity cluster is a lot similar to campaigns that leverage stealer malware to steal data related to Facebook advertising and business accounts in order to ...

Threat hunters are calling attention to a new campaign that has targeted Fortinet FortiGate firewall devices with management interfaces exposed on the public internet. "The campaign involved unauthorized administrative logins on management interfaces of firewalls, creation of new accounts, SSL VPN authentication through those accounts, and various other configuration changes," cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf said in an analysis published last week. The malicious activity is believed to have commenced in mid-November 2024, with unknown threat actors gaining unauthorized access to management interfaces on affected firewalls to alter configurations and extract credentials using DCSync . The exact initial access vector is currently not known, although it has been assessed with "high confidence" that it's likely driven by the exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability given the "compressed timeline across affected organizations as well as firmware versions af...

News has been making headlines over the weekend of the extensive attack campaign targeting browser extensions and injecting them with malicious code to steal user credentials. Currently, over 25 extensions, with an install base of over two million users, have been found to be compromised, and customers are now working to figure out their exposure (LayerX, one of the companies involved in protecting against malicious extensions is offering a complimentary service to audit and remediate organizations' exposure - to sign-up click here ). While this is not the first attack to target browser extensions, the scope and sophistication of this campaign are a significant step up in terms of the threats posed by browser extensions and the risks they pose to organizations. Now that details of the attack have been publicized, users and organizations need to assess their risk exposure to this attack and to browser extensions in general. This article is aimed at helping organizations understand t...

A new attack campaign has targeted known Chrome browser extensions, leading to at least 35 extensions being compromised and exposing over 2.6 million users to data exposure and credential theft. The attack targeted publishers of browser extensions on the Chrome Web Store via a phishing campaign and used their access permissions to insert malicious code into legitimate extensions in order to steal cookies and user access tokens. The first company to shed light the campaign was cybersecurity firm Cyberhaven, one of whose employees was targeted by a phishing attack on December 24, allowing the threat actors to publish a malicious version of the extension. On December 27, Cyberhaven disclosed that a threat actor compromised its browser extension and injected malicious code to communicate with an external command-and-control (C&C) server located on the domain cyberhavenext[.]pro, download additional configuration files, and exfiltrate user data. The phishing email, which purported...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged two malicious packages that were uploaded to the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository and came fitted with capabilities to exfiltrate sensitive information from compromised hosts, according to new findings from Fortinet FortiGuard Labs. The packages, named zebo and cometlogger , attracted 118 and 164 downloads each, prior to them being taken down. According to ClickPy statistics, a majority of these downloads came from the United States, China, Russia, and India.  Zebo is a "typical example of malware, with functions designed for surveillance, data exfiltration, and unauthorized control," security researcher Jenna Wang said, adding cometlogger "also shows signs of malicious behavior, including dynamic file manipulation, webhook injection, stealing information, and anti-[virtual machine] checks." The first of the two packages, zebo, uses obfuscation techniques, such as hex-encoded strings, to conceal the URL of the co...

A new social engineering campaign has leveraged Microsoft Teams as a way to facilitate the deployment of a known malware called DarkGate . "An attacker used social engineering via a Microsoft Teams call to impersonate a user's client and gain remote access to their system," Trend Micro researchers Catherine Loveria, Jovit Samaniego, and Gabriel Nicoleta said . "The attacker failed to install a Microsoft Remote Support application but successfully instructed the victim to download AnyDesk, a tool commonly used for remote access." As recently documented by cybersecurity firm Rapid7, the attack involved bombarding a target's email inbox with "thousands of emails," after which the threat actors approached them via Microsoft Teams by masquerading as an employee of an external supplier. The attacker then went on to instruct the victim to install AnyDesk on their system, with the remote access subsequently abused to deliver multiple payloads, includ...