DLL Sideloading | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The China-aligned espionage group  Mustang Panda  is running two campaigns against the Indian government and hydropower targets, deploying new malware and turning a legitimate cloud service into its command channel. Acronis Threat Research Unit  found active compromises inside Indian government networks, including machines used by senior administrative staff, and worked with  CERT-In  on notification and cleanup. The malware abuses  Zoho WorkDrive , a cloud storage platform common in India's government sector, to pass commands and exfiltrate data. That is the whole idea: the traffic looks like ordinary cloud activity, so it hides inside the network it is stealing from. Acronis names three new tools. SHARDLOADER is a loader that runs by sideloading a malicious DLL through a legitimately signed binary, a Solid PDF Creator executable in one campaign, and a Citrix Receiver binary in the other. It deploys one of two implants. MINIRECON is a rewor...

Unknown threat actors compromised CPUID ("cpuid[.]com"), a website that hosts popular hardware monitoring tools like CPU-Z, HWMonitor, HWMonitor Pro, and PerfMonitor, for less than 24 hours to serve malicious executables for the software and deploy a remote access trojan called STX RAT. The incident lasted from approximately April 9, 15:00 UTC, to about April 10, 10:00 UTC, with the download URLs for CPU-Z and HWMonitor installers replaced with links to malicious websites. In a post shared on X, CPUID confirmed the breach, attributing it to a compromise of a "secondary feature (basically a side API)" that caused the main site to randomly display malicious links. It's worth noting that the attack did not impact its signed original files. According to Kaspersky , the names of the rogue websites are as follows - cahayailmukreatif.web[.]id pub-45c2577dbd174292a02137c18e7b1b5a.r2[.]dev transitopalermo[.]com vatrobran[.]hr "The t...

A China-linked threat actor known as Lotus Blossom has been attributed with medium confidence to the recently discovered compromise of the infrastructure hosting Notepad++. The attack enabled the state-sponsored hacking group to deliver a previously undocumented backdoor codenamed Chrysalis to users of the open-source editor, according to new findings from Rapid7. The development comes shortly after Notepad++ maintainer Don Ho said that a compromise at the hosting provider level allowed threat actors to hijack update traffic starting June 2025 and selectively redirect such requests from certain users to malicious servers to serve a tampered update by exploiting insufficient update verification controls that existed in older versions of the utility. The weakness was plugged in December 2025 with the release of version 8.8.9. It has since emerged that the hosting provider for the software was breached to perform targeted traffic redirections until December 2, 2025, when the atta...

The threat actor known as Storm-0249 is likely shifting from its role as an initial access broker to adopt a combination of more advanced tactics like domain spoofing, DLL side-loading, and fileless PowerShell execution to facilitate ransomware attacks. "These methods allow them to bypass defenses, infiltrate networks, maintain persistence, and operate undetected, raising serious concerns for security teams," ReliaQuest said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Storm-0249 is the moniker assigned by Microsoft to an initial access broker that has sold footholds into organizations to other cybercrime groups, including ransomware and extortion actors like Storm-0501 . It was first highlighted by the tech giant in September 2024. Then, earlier this year, Microsoft also revealed details of a phishing campaign mounted by the threat actor that used tax-related themes to target users in the U.S. ahead of the tax filing season and infect them with Latrodectus and the BruteR...

An advanced persistent threat (APT) group from China has been attributed to the compromise of a Philippines-based military company using a previously undocumented fileless malware framework called EggStreme . "This multi-stage toolset achieves persistent, low-profile espionage by injecting malicious code directly into memory and leveraging DLL sideloading to execute payloads," Bitdefender researcher Bogdan Zavadovschi said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The core component, EggStremeAgent, is a full-featured backdoor that enables extensive system reconnaissance, lateral movement, and data theft via an injected keylogger." The targeting of the Philippines is something of a recurring pattern for Chinese state-sponsored hacking groups, particularly in light of geopolitical tensions fueled by territorial disputes in the South China Sea between China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Brunei. That said, the latest activity has not been a...

The official site for RVTools has been hacked to serve a compromised installer for the popular VMware environment reporting utility. "Robware.net and RVTools.com are currently offline. We are working expeditiously to restore service and appreciate your patience," the company said in a statement posted on its website. "Robware.net and RVTools.com are the only authorized and supported websites for RVTools software. Do not search for or download purported RVTools software from any other websites or sources." The development comes after security researcher Aidan Leon revealed that an infected version of the installer downloaded from the website was being used to sideload a malicious DLL that turned out to be a known malware loader called Bumblebee . It's currently not known how long the trojanized version of RVTools had been available for download and how many had installed it before the site was taken offline. In the interim, users are recommended to veri...