Darktrace | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A European telecommunications organization is said to have been targeted by a threat actor that aligns with a China-nexus cyber espionage group known as Salt Typhoon . The organization, per Darktrace , was targeted in the first week of July 2025, with the attackers exploiting a Citrix NetScaler Gateway appliance to obtain initial access. Salt Typhoon, also known as Earth Estries, FamousSparrow, GhostEmperor, and UNC5807, is the name given to an advanced persistent threat actor with ties to China. Known to be active since 2019, the group gained prominence last year following its attacks on telecommunications services providers, energy networks, and government systems in the U.S. The adversary has a track record of exploiting security flaws in edge devices, maintaining deep persistence, and exfiltrating sensitive data from victims in more than 80 countries across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In the incident observed against the European telecommunications enti...

Threat actors have been observed exploiting a now-patched critical SAP NetWeaver flaw to deliver the Auto-Color backdoor in an attack targeting a U.S.-based chemicals company in April 2025. "Over the course of three days, a threat actor gained access to the customer's network, attempted to download several suspicious files and communicated with malicious infrastructure linked to Auto-Color malware," Darktrace said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-31324 , a severe unauthenticated file upload bug in SAP NetWeaver that enables remote code execution (RCE). It was patched by SAP in April. Auto-Color, first documented by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 earlier this February, functions akin to a remote access trojan, enabling remote access to compromised Linux hosts. It was observed in attacks targeting universities and government organizations in North America and Asia between November and December 2024. The malware has been...

Cybersecurity researchers are alerting to a new malware campaign that employs the ClickFix social engineering tactic to trick users into downloading an information stealer malware known as Atomic macOS Stealer ( AMOS ) on Apple macOS systems. The campaign, according to CloudSEK, has been found to leverage typosquat domains mimicking U.S.-based telecom provider Spectrum. "macOS users are served a malicious shell script designed to steal system passwords and download an AMOS variant for further exploitation," security researcher Koushik Pal said in a report published this week. "The script uses native macOS commands to harvest credentials, bypass security mechanisms, and execute malicious binaries." It's believed that the activity is the work of Russian-speaking cybercriminals owing to the presence of Russian language comments in the malware's source code. The starting point of the attack is a web page that impersonates Spectrum ("panel-spectrum[....

A new phishing campaign has been observed delivering remote access trojans (RAT) such as VCURMS and STRRAT by means of a malicious Java-based downloader. "The attackers stored malware on public services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) and GitHub, employing a commercial protector to avoid detection of the malware," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Yurren Wan  said . An unusual aspect of the campaign is VCURMS' use of a Proton Mail email address ("sacriliage@proton[.]me") for communicating with a command-and-control (C2) server. The attack chain commences with a phishing email that urges recipients to click on a button to verify payment information, resulting in the download of a malicious JAR file ("Payment-Advice.jar") hosted on AWS. Executing the JAR file leads to the retrieval of two more JAR files, which are then run separately to launch the twin trojans. Besides sending an email with the message "Hey master, I am online" to the actor-controlled address, VCURMS RAT peri...