Cybercrime | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Russian authorities have arrested three suspected members of a threat group known as VasyGrek and dismantled its criminal infrastructure. Also known as Fluffy Wolf, the threat actor has a history of targeting Russian and international companies since 2016. The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation (MVD) said members of the group are "suspected of embezzling funds from the accounts of organizations, as well as creating, distributing, and using malicious software." In one September 2025 case highlighted by the ministry, the attackers are said to have sent a phishing email to an unnamed organization, masquerading it as business correspondence and instructing recipients to open a reconciliation report that triggered the execution of malware. The incident resulted in losses of 660,000 rubles ($8,000) from the organization's bank account, with the attackers transferring the funds to accounts under their control. "The attacks utilized a vast ...

Google on Monday warned that threat actors are hijacking enterprise access to Large Language Models (LLMs) to fraudulently leverage expensive computing resources and AI services. The tactic is called LLMjacking , a form of resource hijacking adapted for the LLM era, where an attacker obtains an API key through phishing, source code leaks, misconfigured environments, or exposed client-side code to gain unauthorized access to an organization's LLM accounts, while the legitimate owner covers the consumption costs. Such attacks have a wide geographical footprint, with impacted entities located in North America, South America, and Asia Pacific across the financial services, retail, technology, and transportation sectors. "Unlike the gradual resource consumption associated with cryptojacking, LLMJacking can generate large spikes in fraudulent cloud charges in a matter of hours," Google Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant said in a report shared with The Hacker News...

BTCPay Server, a self-hosted, open-source cryptocurrency payment processor, has urged users to install the latest version of its software in response to reports of Bitcoin and Litecoin being stolen from hot wallets on instances running older versions. "Our investigation found that these attacks targeted servers running BTCPay Server 2.4.1 (released on 23 July 2026) or earlier," BTCPay Server said . "The attackers used a different method to exploit the vulnerability fixed in 2.4.2, released on 7 August 2026." Users who are running versions 2.4.1 or earlier are recommended to move to a fresh server with a new wallet, even in scenarios where users have not noticed a theft. In the event of stolen funds or suspected unauthorized access, it's imperative that users consider the entire machine and all secrets stored on it as compromised and follow the same recovery procedures. It's currently unknown when the attackers behind the campaign first began exploi...

A botnet of more than 1.3 million Android devices, mostly TV set-top boxes, lost control of its servers in late October in a takedown led by Google. Google says  it is highly confident that device maker Videostrong intentionally put a backdoor in the boxes and sold access to criminals. They used the boxes for ad fraud and to pass other people's internet traffic through owners' home connections. The backdoor is still on the boxes, and owners cannot remove it themselves. Videostrong, based in Shenzhen, China, makes Android TV boxes and other devices under its own name and for other brands. The backdoor, called x.cpe, was built into many device models and brands over several years. Google does not believe a rogue insider or a mistake was to blame. Google used legal action to take down the domains and servers that controlled the botnet. It also took down the control domains of more than a dozen malware families loaded through the backdoor. Japan's National Police Agenc...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new Windows infostealer malware called VOLTA-AUTODOXER (aka VOLTA) that makes use of a large language model (LLM) to rank a victim's stolen data by their monetization value. Like other typical stealer families, VOLTA is equipped to harvest passwords and cookies from Chromium-based web browsers; data from Outlook profiles and Slack workspaces; payment cards; cryptocurrency wallet seed phrases; Discord, Telegram, Steam, and Roblox sessions; Microsoft OAuth tokens; SSH and cloud-provider keys; Wi-Fi profiles; and screenshots. "VOLTA builds a structured evidence bundle about the person behind the machine," Cisco Talos researcher Ryan Fetterman said . "This bundle contains geolocation and home address, employer and employer domain, inferred birth year, card last-4 digits, Slack workspaces, document authorship metadata, iPhone backup indicators, and a live Roblox account valuation." To make this information more va...

A Trezor Safe 5 hardware wallet bought from the reseller CryptoBilis has an extra circuit board that sends out the recovery phrase over a mobile network, a customer has reported. Trezor has not yet examined the device. It is telling everyone who bought a Trezor from CryptoBilis since March 2026 to move their funds to a new wallet with a new recovery phrase. Trezor said in a  blog post  on October 30 that the report came in two days earlier from a customer in Indonesia. He bought the wallet from CryptoBilis in August, through the marketplace Tokopedia. The board sits between the wallet's main board and its screen, with a cellular module and an antenna, according to the report. It reads the screen, including the recovery phrase (Trezor calls it the wallet backup), and sends it out whenever the device is plugged in. Trezor has the customer's photos and description and has interviewed him on a video call. It is arranging for the wallet to be sent to its lab. Trezor find...

Cryptocurrency giant Binance said on Thursday that a "security incident" on its platform has impacted about $6.3 billion worth of assets. The world's biggest cryptocurrency exchange said nearly $3 billion of those assets have been frozen on-chain so far.  Tether and Circle said they have frozen more than 1.567 billion USDT and 800 million USDC related to the incident, respectively. The Arbitrum Security Council is said to have executed a transaction to freeze about $30.5 million from the Binance Exploit.  "Initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions," Binance said in an update. The company said there is no evidence of a wallet private key leak, adding it will cover all losses from the Secure Asset Fund for Users ( SAFU ) fund and its own funds. Out of an abundance of c...

Some attacks take real skill. Others just need someone to leave a door open. This week has both. Exposed passwords, old bugs still getting exploited, and trusted software doing things it shouldn't. There's a strange mix of clever tricks and careless mistakes. Hackers are borrowing trust from familiar apps, websites, and AI tools. Some are using AI to speed things up. Others are leaving their own attack files exposed. Not exactly careful work. Different stories, familiar weak spots. Here's what showed up this week. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

Threat actors are delivering malicious loaders and cryptocurrency miners under the guise of artificial intelligence (AI) desktop applications for Anthropic Claude and OpenAI ChatGPT as part of a campaign dubbed Yoba . The activity involves creating fake GitHub projects that claim to be desktop applications like GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-6 Astra, and Claude Opus, only to deliver a malware family called YobaLoader. "The malware is placed next to legitimate, signed executables from OpenAI and Anthropic so it can be loaded indirectly, a technique commonly known as DLL sideloading, which is often used to bypass security protections," Check Point Research said in an analysis. To add to the project's credibility, the attackers set up GitHub.io pages to describe the capabilities of the software. Although the GitHub projects' popularity is not manipulated using techniques like ghost networks , signs point to the use of SEO poisoning tactics to ensure that links to them are sur...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Tuesday announced the seizure of a domain associated with a bulletproof hosting provider (BPH) named Virtualine . The move was in response to the service being used to commit and facilitate prolific criminal activity, including "the advertisement of sexually explicit images of minors, the intentional disclosure of nonconsensual intimate visual depictions of adults and minors, and international money laundering designed to conceal and promote criminal conduct," the DoJ said . Visitors to the "virtualine[.]net" domain are now greeted by a message that states it has been seized by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation as part of a coordinated operation between international law enforcement agencies and private sector entities, including the Hessen State Police, the National Police Corps of the Netherlands, the U.K. National Crime Agency, OverRIPE, and Lumen Technologies. According to court documents, Virtualine, which a...

Japan's GMO Internet Group is  offering up to $1 million in total  for tips that help catch the attackers who breached its Onamae.com Desktop Cloud service, after refusing to pay an extortion demand. The reward program opened on October 28 and pays only if a tip helps lead to an arrest or an international wanted notice. The service  hosts Windows desktops  used for FX trading, and a broker has linked unauthorized trades on some of its customers' accounts to logins leaked from the service. GMO says the attackers took customer information. It received a demand for about  $50 million (about ¥8 billion)  on October 21 from people it believes carried out the attack. They have also threatened its customers' trading accounts and data. On October 27, the attackers posted material on their website that they say is information about GMO and its customers. The site's domain, including its mirror sites,  was shut down  at about 4 a.m. Japan time on O...

Fake login pages are nothing new, but generative AI is making them easier to build and more convincing. Attackers can recreate familiar login screens, impersonate trusted brands and tailor phishing attempts to specific employees or organizations.  Some fake login pages go beyond stealing passwords. They can also capture MFA codes or hijack authenticated sessions, allowing attackers to gain access to corporate accounts even when additional security measures are in place. How AI is making fake login pages more convincing Attackers have long used fake login pages to steal credentials, but generative AI makes it easier to create convincing replicas of legitimate authentication portals. From company logos and page layouts to login prompts, these fraudulent pages can closely resemble the websites employees regularly access. AI also makes it easier to tailor phishing campaigns to specific organizations or employees. For example, attackers can create personalized IT notifications ...

A criminal using the Amadey malware can no longer access or steal data from 180,000 infected computers around the world, including some in Australia, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) says. The agency's operators gained access to the criminal's operation's backend and cut it off from those computers. "The next steps that we took were to disconnect that Amadey controller from all those victims," Tauri Gregory, ASD's acting deputy director-general of intelligence,  told ABC News  in an interview published on October 27. ASD is Australia's foreign signals intelligence and cyber security agency. Its  offensive cyber operations  need explicit approval from the Australian government and can disrupt cybercriminals overseas by disabling their infrastructure. Amadey was sold to criminals as a service in 2018, according to  ESET's analysis of Amadey . Each buyer runs its own control panel on its own servers. Computers infected with Amadey check ...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to what they say is a "recurring social engineering pattern" across hundreds of cases in which threat actors use Microsoft Teams' external chat creation feature to conduct impersonation scams or to deliver malware. "A consistent pattern of attacker behavior has emerged across these incidents: the use of the same throwaway tenants, the same 'IT Support (Internal)' display names, the same remote-access tools, and increasingly, the same payload domains," Arctic Wolf Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The attacks consistently employ IT-themed display names or friendly-sounding first names to subvert external-user warnings in Teams. These messages originate from Teams identities established through newly created or acquired Microsoft 365 tenants. Nearly 30–40% of the cases investigated by the cybersecurity company involve the use of *.onmicrosoft[.]com , a permanent fallback domain auto...

A rentable Android spyware kit called uCreator takes over Telegram and WeChat accounts by hiding its code inside working copies of the two apps, researcher Ovi found . It only reaches people who install one of these tampered copies, spread outside the official app stores, or who run WeChat inside the kit makers' own container app. The kit's Telegram part matches Baohuo , a backdoor that Doctor Web reported in October 2025 . Doctor Web found Baohuo in tampered copies of Telegram X, an Android app from Telegram. At the time, the company estimated that more than 58,000 devices were infected. The Hacker News compared the two reports. Doctor Web's technical description of Baohuo lists the same code namespace, com.ucreator.tgjar , the same command-and-control (C2) server, and matching command names as Ovi's analysis. Ovi's analysis, published October 21, 2026, does not mention Doctor Web's findings, and Doctor Web did not name the kit. It is not clear whether...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven intrusion ecosystem run by affiliates of the INC and The Gentlemen ransomware groups. Central to the operation is an "Autonomous Red Team Kill Chain Framework" referred to as Phantom. The threat actor is assessed to be Russian-speaking and functions both as an intrusion and data-extortion operator, as well as an infrastructure provider supporting different partners across the ransomware ecosystem. "The operators exploited edge and remote-access systems at scale, including FortiClient EMS, SimpleHelp, cPanel, and VPN gateways," SOCRadar said . "They used AI-managed knowledge bases to track victims, stolen credentials, and campaign progress." A notable aspect that defines the campaign is its "AI-executed, human-approved operating structure" in which a human operator provides a victim-specific prompt and reviews every step, while the intrusions themselves are e...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a large-scale campaign that has targeted exposed network edge devices such as Fortinet FortiGate and Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect firewalls. "Artifacts from this investigation also indicate that operators in this campaign have obtained access to numerous organizations worldwide, and have attempted to further compromise some victims, resulting in persistent remote access and data exfiltration," according to a joint investigation published by Group-IB and NyxLab. The widespread exploitation activity has been attributed to a threat actor known as k0t, who also goes by the aliases CryptoFeel, Member19, and QazWsxShop. The cybercriminal actor was first seen in the wild on October 22, 2025. The threat actor is assessed to share connections with ransomware groups such as Qilin and The Gentlemen, likely operating as an initial access broker or an affiliate. Analysis of the threat actor's dark web activity reveals a k...

This week has already been rough for cybersecurity. Critical PHP and GitLab RCE flaws, serious Linux security bugs , compromised eMudhra certificates , a Node.js RCE flaw , a hacked LiteLLM release, and hundreds of hijacked Tor relays . That's a lot to deal with in just a few days. And the week isn't even over yet. But those big headlines are only half the story. Stolen passwords, exposed databases, broken login checks, and trusted tools being turned against their users are causing trouble too. Some attacks are clever. Others work because someone left a simple security gap open. This ThreatsDay, we're digging into the stories that didn't make as much noise but still deserve attention. Some are strange, some are serious, and a few might surprise you. Here's everything else you shouldn't miss this week. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

INTERPOL on Thursday announced that a coordinated law enforcement action has disrupted 10,909 malicious networks and recovered more than $105 million in illicit funds. In tandem, the effort saw law enforcement agencies from 21 countries arrest 1,462 suspects. Codenamed Operation Serengeti III , the cybercrime crackdown took place between June 29 and August 31, 2026. "Authorities identified 65,929 victims targeted by cybercriminal networks, underscoring the scale and sophistication of today's digital threats," INTERPOL said in a statement. "Financial investigations linked criminal activity to losses exceeding USD 385 million."

Google on Tuesday said it's rolling out improved safeguards in its Chrome browser to secure users against ClickFix attacks when Enhanced Protection is enabled. ClickFix is a popular social engineering technique in which bad actors trick users into copying and pasting malicious code directly into their computer's operating system, thereby bypassing conventional security controls. As part of these attacks, unsuspecting users who land on legitimate-but-compromised sites or click on malicious ads are redirected to phishing landing pages that display fake Cloudflare or Google reCAPTCHA verification or other non-existent errors and instruct users to copy and paste a command on the Windows Run dialog (or the Mac Terminal app) to address it. The moment a user presses the Enter key after pasting the command, it triggers a multi-stage infection chain that leads to the deployment of malware, such as information stealers or remote access trojans. In an attempt to blend in with re...