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Low-cost Android smartphones have been shipped with malicious software baked into the device firmware, allowing bad actors to covertly install apps, conduct ad fraud, and turn devices into residential proxies. The activity, which targets Android devices built on MediaTek platforms across several brands, is being tracked by Bitdefender under the moniker Midnight Mimosa . The preinstalled malware ("com.android.system.lite") runs with system-level privileges, which make it possible to install or uninstall a rotating set of at least 32 disguised apps, grant itself additional permissions to accessibility services, notifications, and SMS, and load arbitrary code supplied remotely by the operators. Specifically, it fetches a remote configuration from an external server and then downloads and executes additional payloads designed to conduct ad fraud and silent installation or removal of partner apps. These apps incorporate proxyware, ad fraud, and code execution features. It...

Cryptocurrency hardware maker Ledger has temporarily paused sales of its products via CryptoBilis following reports of stolen funds linked to devices sold by the reseller. On Friday, the company said it was investigating reports of loss of funds from users in Southeast Asia who had purchased products from CryptoBilis. The incident is said to have resulted in losses totaling more than $86 million, according to pseudonymous blockchain investigator Specter . "We recommend Ledger users who purchased from this reseller in the last 90 days to not initiate set up if you have not done so yet," Ledger said in an X post. "If you have set up your Ledger device, consider moving assets to a new Ledger signer (with new seed)." The company has since revealed that one of the impacted users' devices contained an unauthorized hardware implant, and that it's reaching out to impacted users as part of an ongoing probe into the incident. Out of an abundance of caution, ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a two-pronged artificial intelligence (AI)-augmented initial access campaign targeting WordPress sites, e-commerce platforms, and critical infrastructure entities in Ukraine. The activity, which brings together commodity offensive tools like Cobalt Strike with an AI orchestration layer powered by Anthropic's Claude Code, has been attributed to a Russian-speaking, financially motivated initial access broker codenamed CyberXero . The threat actor is assessed to be active since at least July 2026. "The operation runs two pipelines at once: a global, automated campaign against WordPress and e-commerce platforms, and a curated, manual campaign against Ukrainian energy and critical infrastructure," SOCRadar said in a report published last week. The global campaign specifically focuses on known security flaws like wp2shell (CVE-2026-63030 and CVE-2026-60137) and CVE-2026-4815 , an SQL injection vulnerability impactin...

The FBI has arrested another suspected co-conspirator of ShinyHunters, FBI Director Kash Patel said on October 9 in a  post on X . ShinyHunters is the extortion group that said in September it had  breached the FBI's jobs portal  and stolen sensitive data on almost all FBI agents and job applicants. The FBI has not named the suspect, and no charges have been made public. The suspect is a Canadian citizen who was arrested in Pennsylvania, according to  The New York Times  and  CBS News . Both cited unnamed sources. The Times reported that the arrest was made on suspicion of involvement in the theft of FBI data. A law enforcement source told CBS News that the suspect is believed to have been directly involved in the hack. An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the Times report, CBS News said. Patel's post does not say whether the suspect took part in the breach. It calls ShinyHunters "the group believed to be responsible for the recent FBIjobs.g...

The crooks have trust problems of their own. One ransomware affiliate decided to keep the profits for himself. Elsewhere, an attacker left a server exposed, complete with tools and traces of an intrusion. Apparently, keeping things secure is a problem on both sides of the fence. The rest of the week isn't much more reassuring. Malicious code turned up in developer packages and extensions that looked harmless. Familiar online services helped phishing emails appear legitimate. A basic file upload flaw gave attackers a way in, while weak session cookies made impersonation far too easy. Even AI assistants are getting their own instructions hidden inside phishing messages now. What's interesting is the gap between effort and results. Some attacks involve several stages, careful timing, and plenty of tricks. Others get surprisingly far because of a bad design choice or something nobody bothered to check. Both seem to be working well enough. Anyway, here's what else turned u...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a targeted campaign aimed at South Korean financial organizations that used an artificial intelligence (AI) pen testing tool named ARTEX to carry out the attacks. The activity , per CrowdStrike Intelligence, was active from late September to early October 2026, and resulted in data exfiltration from various South Korea-based financial firms , including Shinhan Bank and Yegaram Savings Bank. "In this activity, the threat actor leveraged ARTEX, a recently released open-source agentic penetration testing (pentesting) tool developed in China, alongside large language models (LLMs)," the cybersecurity company said . CrowdStrike said it discovered the campaign after it identified a set of open directories hosted at a Hong Kong-based IP address, exposing Claude Code session histories, Claude memory files, and ARTEX configuration files. The campaign has not been attributed to any known threat actor or group. But evidenc...

Phishing kits are no longer limited to copying a familiar login page and waiting for a victim to enter credentials. Attackers are increasingly building filtering, session management, and traffic controls into the infrastructure that delivers the phishing page itself. ANY.RUN has identified Wazza, a new phishkit targeting banking, manufacturing, and government organizations across the US, Europe, and Australia. The campaign uses a multi-stage routing chain to screen visitors and automated traffic before delivering an Adobe-themed Device Code phishing page. For security teams, that makes Wazza more than another malicious URL. The campaign shows how attackers can control the path to the final lure, making the initial link less informative and potentially complicating automated detection. MSSPs face an added challenge, as they investigate alerts across multiple customer environments while keeping response times under control. That uncertainty can translate directly into longer in...

The U.S. State Department is offering up to $10 million for information leading to the identification or location of Zhang Yu, a Chinese national charged in the United States in connection with the 2021 Microsoft Exchange Server attacks known as HAFNIUM. The reward is for information leading to his identification or location, the news outlet  NTD reported  this week, citing a notice from the department's Rewards for Justice program. Zhang remains at large, U.S. authorities say, meaning he has not been arrested. The charges against him have not been tested in court. Rewards for Justice  is the State Department's national security rewards program. It says it has paid more than $250 million to over 125 people since 1984. Zhang is wanted for his alleged role in "malicious cyber activities against U.S. critical infrastructure," NTD quoted the notice as saying. The amount and that wording match an offer the program was already making  in January 2025 . That of...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday announced charges against a 50-year-old U.S. and Israeli national for allegedly defrauding ransomware victims by secretly paying the attackers to obtain decryptors while claiming to use proprietary tools to recover their data. Zohar Pinhasi (aka Zack Silver and Zack Green) has been charged with two counts of wire fraud and one count of wire fraud conspiracy. If convicted, the defendant faces up to 20 years in prison for each count. "By falsely claiming to decrypt ransomware without paying off the ransomers, the defendant re-victimized his clients while extracting a hefty profit for himself," said U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella, Jr. for the Eastern District of New York. Pinhasi, who owned and operated a Florida company called MonsterCloud, is alleged to have made false representations to ransomware victims, urging them not to pay a ransom and claiming to have "proprietary tools" and "advanced decryption tec...

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Secret Service (USSS) on Tuesday warned that the FortiBleed credential harvesting campaign remains an active threat aimed at internet-facing Fortinet FortiGate firewalls and secure socket layer (SSL) virtual private network (VPN) gateways. "The campaign exploits reused or leaked credentials and legacy SHA-256 password storage, enabling threat actors to harvest and crack authentication data at scale," the agencies said . "Initial findings indicate attackers are continuing to scan internet-exposed Fortinet firewalls using previously obtained compromised credentials." FortiBleed was first documented by SOCRadar and Hudson Rock in June 2026, with the activity targeting thousands of Fortinet firewalls as part of a global campaign. In all, the Russian-speaking operation is estimated to have netted more than 86,644 working device credentials spanning 194 countries as of June 19, 2026. "The scale under discus...

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has removed an Accenture contractor for their alleged role in a ShinyHunters-breach that led to the theft of personal details of thousands of bureau employees. That's according to a report from Reuters, citing two sources familiar with the matter. "To date, our review has determined that the incident occurred as the result of a security failure ​of a platform managed by a third-party organization — after a contractor failed to implement a security patch explicitly issued to secure the ​platform," Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI's cyber division, was quoted as saying to Reuters. "As such, the FBI has removed the contractor and taken all necessary steps to both mitigate any further risk and protect our workforce." Although the name of the third-party organization was not disclosed by the FBI, Reuters reported that it's Oracle PeopleSoft, which the ShinyHunters group said it exploited...

A suspected member of the ShinyHunters digital extortion group, who goes by the online alias "Rey," has been allegedly detained by authorities in Jordan, Reuters reported , citing three people familiar with the matter. Rey, whose real name is Saif ‌al-Din Khader, is said to have been brought into custody on September 29, 2026, and cooperating with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and law enforcement to identify other members of the group. "His cooperation is critical to ongoing efforts to arrest these hackers," a source told the news agency. Rey, who also went by the online alias ReyXBF, is not an unknown face. In a report published in November 2025, independent security journalist Brian Krebs labeled him as one of the three administrators of Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters (SLH or SLSH), a group that's assessed to be an amalgamation of Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$, and ShinyHunters. "Previously, Rey was an administrator of the data leak w...

Police in Spain have arrested a 16-year-old whom investigators suspect of running the KillSec ransomware group. KillSec is accused of stealing data from organizations and threatening to publish it on its leak site unless they paid. The 16-year-old was one of 3 people arrested on September 30, when police also took control of that site. Investigators identified him as KillSec's suspected administrator and main operator,  Hamburg police said  on October 1. Police and prosecutors in Hamburg, Germany, led the operation. The Guardia Civil and the Mossos d'Esquadra, both Spanish police forces, detained him in Alicante and searched a home and an office at a hotel in the province. Their joint statement,  carried by elperiodic.com , calls him one of the group's administrators and its presumed main administrator. The other 2 people arrested are in their 20s, one in the U.K. and one in Romania, a spokesperson for Europol, the European Union's police agency,  told Reute...

This week, the useful words are boring ones: inspect, cache, compile, store, trust. Each sounds harmless. Each can become an attack path when a system does a little more than people expect. A model check can run code. A cache can mix up requests. A public secret can stay useful for years. That is the lesson running through the list. Attackers do not always need a brilliant new trick. They can hide commands in public infrastructure, reuse old flaws, abuse weak defaults, or let automation stitch together a rough path that still works. Faster tools are changing the pace, but basic mistakes are still doing plenty of the work. So the interesting question this week is not “what broke?” It is “what did we assume was safe because it looked ordinary?” The full list has answers. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

Dutch authorities have confirmed that they arrested a 24-year-old man from Amsterdam in connection with the ShinyHunters group. "It is true that this month a 24-year-old man from Amsterdam was arrested in an investigation into the hacker group ShinyHunters," the Politie Landelijke Opsporing en Interventies said in an X post Monday. Police said the individual is expected to appear before the Rotterdam District Court on September 29, 2026. Although law enforcement officials did not disclose any additional details, independent security journalist Brian Krebs and DataBreaches.Net identified the arrested man as Pepijn van der Stap (aka Umbreon), who was previously apprehended in 2023 for his role in a series of data thefts and extortions. Per DataBreaches.Net, van der Stap was arrested on September 15, 2026. In 2023, it emerged that the individual worked at cybersecurity company Hadrian and volunteered at the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD). ...

The attacker who stole about $388 million from the cryptocurrency exchange Bitget gained access through a vulnerability in a third-party security product the exchange used, Bitget said on Monday. The attacker exploited the flaw to obtain high-level internal credentials and then, on September 24, used them to send fraudulent withdrawal commands to Bitget's wallet system. Exchanges keep most customer funds in offline cold wallets and use hot and warm wallets to process withdrawals. Transfers from those wallets must still be approved before they are signed. The stolen funds came from part of Bitget's hot and warm wallets, and its cold wallets were not affected. Bitget  said last week  that a critical backend system in its wallet infrastructure had been compromised and used to spoof transaction data and trigger its approval process. It had not said how the attacker got in. Bitget CEO Gracy Chen described the attack on Monday in a livestream, in an interview with  The...

Google is warning of renewed mass exploitation of a known security vulnerability in Oracle PeopleSoft as part of a campaign targeting multiple sectors globally. The ShinyHunters-linked activity involves the weaponization of CVE-2026-35273 (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical security flaw that could result in unauthenticated remote code execution. The vulnerability was first exploited as a zero-day in attacks against academic institutions to conduct reconnaissance, deploy remote access software like MeshCentral agent for persistence, move laterally over SSH, run a shell script to connect via SSH to other internal PeopleSoft machines using known username/password combinations, and steal data. At that time, Google-owned Mandiant said it initiated notifications to over 100 global organizations whose IP addresses matched vulnerable endpoints, most of them located in the U.S. "This new wave of activity stems from UNC6240 modifying its exploit to bypass web application firewall (WAF...

Cryptocurrency exchange Bitget said suspected North Korean threat actors have stolen $351.6 million from its hot and warm wallets.  "At 18:31 UTC on September 24, 2026, Bitget's security systems identified unauthorized transfers involving a limited number of hot wallets," Bitget said in a post shared on X. "Bitget's cold wallets and the overwhelming majority of platform assets remain secure and unaffected." The company emphasized that customer account balances remain accurate, and deposits and trading continue to operate normally. However, withdrawals have been temporarily suspended out of an abundance of caution while a "comprehensive security review" is underway. Bitget did not disclose any details on how the attack took place, but said it has enlisted the help of Google-owned Mandiant and SlowMist for a third-party investigation. "Bitget Wallet operates as a self-custodial wallet on a completely separate and independent infrastruc...

This week, the dangerous stuff keeps arriving dressed as something boring. An update. A login box. A search answer. A coding tool. A link you have clicked a hundred times before. That is the thread running through the pile. Trusted paths get poisoned. Old bugs find new jobs. AI tools leak more than expected. Fake prompts look real enough. And some attacks barely need an exploit at all — just one weak setting or one person doing what the screen tells them. Nothing here looks especially dramatic. That is what makes it useful. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

ClickFix has become the most common way attackers get into enterprise networks, and it does it without an exploit, an attachment, or a file on disk. Our new global threat report traces the technique from a novelty in late 2023 to a subscription product with on-chain infrastructure and a state-sponsored user base, and explains why blocking malicious domains is no longer a useful defense. Read the full report here:   https://www.ctm360.com/reports/clickfix-beyond A particular kind of security problem no patch will close. ClickFix is one of them. The attack begins with a page that presents a problem the user believes is theirs to solve. A human verification check that will not complete. A browser that cannot render the page. A document that will not open. A Mac that is running low on storage. The page offers a remedy in the form of instructions, quietly writes the "fix" to the clipboard, and asks the user to open a system interface they already trust, paste, and press Ent...