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A financially motivated operation codenamed REF1695  has been observed leveraging fake installers to deploy remote access trojans (RATs) and cryptocurrency miners since November 2023. "Beyond cryptomining, the threat actor monetizes infections through CPA (Cost Per Action) fraud, directing victims to content locker pages under the guise of software registration," Elastic Security Labs researchers Jia Yu Chan, Cyril François, and Remco Sprooten said in an analysis published this week. Recent iterations of the campaign have also been found to deliver a previously undocumented .NET implant codenamed CNB Bot. These attacks leverage an ISO file as the infection vector to deliver a .NET Reactor-protected loader and a text file with explicit instructions to the user to bypass Microsoft Defender SmartScreen protections against running unrecognized applications by clicking on "More info" and "Run anyway...

A previously unknown vulnerability in OpenAI ChatGPT allowed sensitive conversation data to be exfiltrated without user knowledge or consent, according to new findings from Check Point. "A single malicious prompt could turn an otherwise ordinary conversation into a covert exfiltration channel, leaking user messages, uploaded files, and other sensitive content," the cybersecurity company said in a report published today. "A backdoored GPT could abuse the same weakness to obtain access to user data without the user's awareness or consent." Following responsible disclosure, OpenAI addressed the issue on February 20, 2026. There is no evidence that the issue was ever exploited in a malicious context. While ChatGPT is built with various guardrails to prevent unauthorized data sharing or generate direct outbound network requests , the newly discovered vulnerability bypasses these safeguards entirely by exploiting a side channel originating from the Linux runtime ...

Secrets sprawl isn't slowing down: in 2025, it accelerated faster than most security teams anticipated. GitGuardian's State of Secrets Sprawl 2026 report analyzed billions of commits across public GitHub and uncovered 29 million new hardcoded secrets in 2025 alone, a 34% increase year over year and the largest single-year jump ever recorded. This year's findings reveal three core trends: AI has fundamentally reshaped how and where credentials leak, internal systems are far more exposed than most organizations realize, and remediation continues to be the industry's Achilles heel. Here are nine strategic takeaways that matter. 1. Secrets are growing faster than the developer population Since 2021, leaked secrets have grown 152%, while GitHub's public developer base expanded 98%. More developers and more AI-assisted code generation mean more credentials in circulation, and detection alone can't keep pace. 2. AI services drove 81% more leaks year over year ...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new set of malicious npm packages that are designed to steal cryptocurrency wallets and sensitive data. The activity is being tracked by ReversingLabs as the Ghost campaign. The list of identified packages, all published by a user named mikilanjillo, is below - react-performance-suite react-state-optimizer-core react-fast-utilsa ai-fast-auto-trader pkgnewfefame1 carbon-mac-copy-cloner coinbase-desktop-sdk "The packages themselves are phishing for sudo password with which the last stage is executed, and are trying to hide their real functionality and avoid detection in a sophisticated way: displaying fake npm install logs," Lucija Valentić, software threat researcher at ReversingLabs, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The identified Node.js libraries, besides falsely claiming to download additional packages, insert random delays to give the impression that the installation process is underway. At one point du...

Two more GitHub Actions workflows have become the latest to be compromised by credential-stealing malware by a threat actor known as TeamPCP, the cloud-native cybercriminal operation also behind the Trivy supply chain attack . The workflows, both maintained by the supply chain security company Checkmarx, are listed below - checkmarx/ast-github-action checkmarx/kics-github-action Cloud security company Sysdig said it observed an identical credential stealer as the one used in TeamPCP's operations targeting Aqua Security's Trivy vulnerability scanner and its associated GitHub Actions, about four days after the breach on March 19, 2026. The Trivy supply chain compromise is being tracked under the CVE identifier CVE-2026-33634 (CVSS score: 9.4). "This suggests that the stolen credentials from the Trivy compromise were used to poison additional actions in affected repositories," Sysdig said . The stealer, referred to as "TeamPCP Cloud stealer," is desig...

The North Korean threat actors behind the Contagious Interview campaign, also tracked as WaterPlum, have been attributed to a malware family tracked as StoatWaffle that's distributed via malicious Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) projects. The use of VS Code "tasks.json" to distribute malware is a relatively new tactic adopted by the threat actor since December 2025 , with the attacks leveraging the "runOn: folderOpen" option to automatically trigger its execution every time any file in the project folder is opened in VS Code. "This task is configured so that it downloads data from a web application on Vercel regardless of executing OS [operating system]," NTT Security said in a report published last week. "Though we assume that the executing OS is Windows in this article, the essential behaviors are the same for any OS." The downloaded payload first checks whether Node.js is installed in the executing environment. If it's ab...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered malicious artifacts distributed via Docker Hub following the Trivy supply chain attack , highlighting the widening blast radius across developer environments. The last known clean release of Trivy on Docker Hub is 0.69.3. The malicious versions 0.69.4, 0.69.5, and 0.69.6 have since been removed from the container image library. "New image tags 0.69.5 and 0.69.6 were pushed on March 22 without corresponding GitHub releases or tags. Both images contain indicators of compromise associated with the same TeamPCP infostealer observed in earlier stages of this campaign," Socket security researcher Philipp Burckhardt said . The development comes in the wake a supply chain compromise of Trivy, a popular open-source vulnerability scanner maintained by Aqua Security, allowing the threat actors to leverage a compromised credential to push a credential stealer within trojanized versions of the tool and two related GitHub Actions "aquasec...

Trivy, a popular open-source vulnerability scanner maintained by Aqua Security, was compromised a second time within the span of a month to deliver malware capable of stealing sensitive CI/CD secrets. The latest incident impacted GitHub Actions " aquasecurity/trivy-action " and " aquasecurity/setup-trivy ," which are used to scan Docker container images for vulnerabilities and set up GitHub Actions workflow with a specific version of the scanner, respectively. "We identified that an attacker force-pushed 75 out of 76 version tags in the aquasecurity/trivy-action repository, the official GitHub Action for running Trivy vulnerability scans in CI/CD pipelines," Socket security researcher Philipp Burckhardt said . "These tags were modified to serve a malicious payload, effectively turning trusted version references into a distribution mechanism for an infostealer." The payload executes within GitHub Actions runners and aims to extract valuable de...

The GlassWorm malware campaign is being used to fuel an ongoing attack that leverages the stolen GitHub tokens to inject malware into hundreds of Python repositories. "The attack targets Python projects — including Django apps, ML research code, Streamlit dashboards, and PyPI packages — by appending obfuscated code to files like setup.py, main.py, and app.py," StepSecurity said . "Anyone who runs pip install from a compromised repo or clones and executes the code will trigger the malware." According to the software supply chain security company, the earliest injections date back to March 8, 2026. The attackers, upon gaining access to the developer accounts, rebasing the latest legitimate commits on the default branch of the targeted repositories with malicious code, and then force-pushing the changes, while keeping the original commit's message, author, and author date intact. This new offshoot of the GlassWorm campaign has been codenamed ForceMemo. The a...

China's National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team (CNCERT) has issued a warning about the security stemming from the use of OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot and Moltbot), an open-source and self-hosted autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) agent. In a post shared on WeChat, CNCERT noted that the platform's "inherently weak default security configurations," coupled with its privileged access to the system to facilitate autonomous task execution capabilities, could be explored by bad actors to seize control of the endpoint. This includes risks arising from prompt injections, where malicious instructions embedded within a web page can cause the agent to leak sensitive information if it's tricked into accessing and consuming the content. The attack is also referred to as indirect prompt injection (IDPI) or cross-domain prompt injection (XPIA), as adversaries, instead of interacting directly with a large language model (LLM), weaponize benign AI f...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new iteration of the GlassWorm campaign that they say represents a "significant escalation" in how it propagates through the Open VSX registry. "Instead of requiring every malicious listing to embed the loader directly, the threat actor is now abusing extensionPack and extensionDependencies to turn initially standalone-looking extensions into transitive delivery vehicles in later updates, allowing a benign-appearing package to begin pulling a separate GlassWorm-linked extension only after trust has already been established," Socket said in a report published Friday. The software supply chain security company said it discovered at least 72 additional malicious Open VSX extensions since January 31, 2026, targeting developers. These extensions mimic widely used developer utilities, including linters and formatters, code runners, and tools for artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistants like Clade Code and Google...

A threat actor known as UNC6426 leveraged keys stolen following the supply chain compromise of the nx npm package last year to completely breach a victim's cloud environment within a span of 72 hours. The attack started with the theft of a developer's GitHub token, which the threat actor then used to gain unauthorized access to the cloud and steal data. "The threat actor, UNC6426, then used this access to abuse the GitHub-to-AWS OpenID Connect (OIDC) trust and create a new administrator role in the cloud environment," Google said in its Cloud Threat Horizons Report for H1 2026. "They abused this role to exfiltrate files from the client's Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets and performed data destruction in their production cloud environments." The supply chain attack targeting the nx npm package took place in August 2025, when unknown threat actors exploited a vulnerable pull_request_target workflow – an attack type ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered five malicious Rust crates that masquerade as time-related utilities to transmit .env file data to the threat actors. The Rust packages, published to crates.io, are listed below - chrono_anchor dnp3times time_calibrator time_calibrators time-sync The crates, per Socket, impersonate timeapi.io and were published between late February and early March 2026. It's assessed to be the work of a single threat actor based on the use of the same exfiltration methodology and the lookalike domain ("timeapis[.]io") to stash the stolen data. "Although the crates pose as local time utilities, their core behavior is credential and secret theft," security researcher Kirill Boychenko said . "They attempt to collect sensitive data from developer environments, most notably .env files, and exfiltrate it to threat actor-controlled infrastructure." While four of the aforementioned packages exhibit fairly straightforward ...

A vulnerability in GitHub Codespaces could have been exploited by bad actors to seize control of repositories by injecting malicious Copilot instructions in a GitHub issue. The artificial intelligence (AI)-driven vulnerability has been codenamed RoguePilot by Orca Security. It has since been patched by Microsoft following responsible disclosure. "Attackers can craft hidden instructions inside a GitHub issue that are automatically processed by GitHub Copilot, giving them silent control of the in-codespaces AI agent," security researcher Roi Nisimi said in a report. The vulnerability has been described as a case of passive or indirect prompt injection where a malicious instruction is embedded within data or content that's processed by the large language model (LLM), causing it to produce unintended outputs or carry out arbitrary actions. The cloud security company also called it a type of AI-mediated supply chain attack that induces the LLM to automatically execute ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed what they say is an active "Shai-Hulud-like" supply chain worm campaign that has leveraged a cluster of at least 19 malicious npm packages to enable credential harvesting and cryptocurrency key theft. The campaign has been codenamed SANDWORM_MODE by supply chain security company Socket. As with prior Shai-Hulud attack waves , the malicious code embedded into the packages comes with capabilities to siphon system information, access tokens, environment secrets, and API keys from developer environments and automatically propagate by abusing stolen npm and GitHub identities to extend its reach. "The sample retains Shai-Hulud hallmarks and adds GitHub API exfiltration with DNS fallback, hook-based persistence, SSH propagation fallback, MCP server injection with embedded prompt injection targeting AI coding assistants, and LLM API Key harvesting," the company said . The packages, published to npm by two npm publisher aliases,...

In yet another software supply chain attack, the open-source, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistant Cline CLI was updated to stealthily install OpenClaw , a self-hosted autonomous AI agent that has become exceedingly popular in the past few months. "On February 17, 2026, at 3:26 AM PT, an unauthorized party used a compromised npm publish token to publish an update to Cline CLI on the NPM registry: cline@2.3.0," the maintainers of the Cline package said in an advisory. "The published package contains a modified package.json with an added postinstall script: 'postinstall": "npm install -g openclaw@latest.'" As a result, this causes OpenClaw to be installed on the developer's machine when Cline version 2.3.0 is installed. Cline said no additional modifications were introduced to the package and there was no malicious behavior observed. However, it noted that the installation of OpenClaw was not authorized or intended. The s...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new SmartLoader campaign that involves distributing a trojanized version of a Model Context Protocol ( MCP ) server associated with Oura Health to deliver an information stealer known as StealC . "The threat actors cloned a legitimate Oura MCP Server – a tool that connects AI assistants to Oura Ring health data – and built a deceptive infrastructure of fake forks and contributors to manufacture credibility," Straiker's AI Research (STAR) Labs team said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The end game is to leverage the trojanized version of the Oura MCP server to deliver the StealC infostealer, allowing the threat actors to steal credentials, browser passwords, and data from cryptocurrency wallets. SmartLoader, first highlighted by OALABS Research in early 2024, is a malware loader that's known to be distributed via fake GitHub repositories containing artificial intelligence (AI)-generated lures to giv...

As many as 3,136 individual IP addresses linked to likely targets of the Contagious Interview activity have been identified, with the campaign claiming 20 potential victim organizations spanning artificial intelligence (AI), cryptocurrency, financial services, IT services, marketing, and software development sectors in Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, and Central America. The new findings come from Recorded Future's Insikt Group, which is tracking the North Korean threat activity cluster under the moniker PurpleBravo . First documented in late 2023, the campaign is also known as CL-STA-0240, DeceptiveDevelopment, DEV#POPPER, Famous Chollima, Gwisin Gang, Tenacious Pungsan, UNC5342, Void Dokkaebi, and WaterPlum. The 3,136 individual IP addresses, primarily concentrated around South Asia and North America, are assessed to have been targeted by the adversary from August 2024 to September 2025. The 20 victim companies are said to be based in Belgium, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, In...

A critical misconfiguration in Amazon Web Services (AWS) CodeBuild could have allowed complete takeover of the cloud service provider's own GitHub repositories, including its AWS JavaScript SDK, putting every AWS environment at risk. The vulnerability has been codenamed CodeBreach by cloud security company Wiz. The issue was fixed by AWS in September 2025 following responsible disclosure on August 25, 2025. "By exploiting CodeBreach, attackers could have injected malicious code to launch a platform-wide compromise, potentially affecting not just the countless applications depending on the SDK, but the Console itself, threatening every AWS account," researchers Yuval Avrahami and Nir Ohfeld said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The flaw, Wiz noted, is the result of a weakness in the continuous integration (CI) pipelines that could have enabled unauthenticated attackers to breach the build environment, leak privileged credentials like GitHub admin tokens, and...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new campaign that's leveraging GitHub-hosted Python repositories to distribute a previously undocumented JavaScript-based Remote Access Trojan (RAT) dubbed PyStoreRAT . "These repositories, often themed as development utilities or OSINT tools, contain only a few lines of code responsible for silently downloading a remote HTA file and executing it via 'mshta.exe,'" Morphisec researcher Yonatan Edri said in a report shared with The Hacker News. PyStoreRAT has been described as a "modular, multi-stage" implant that can execute EXE, DLL, PowerShell, MSI, Python, JavaScript, and HTA modules. The malware also deploys an information stealer known as Rhadamanthys as a follow-on payload. Attack chains involve distributing the malware through Python or JavaScript loader stubs embedded in GitHub repositories masquerading as OSINT tools, DeFi bots, GPT wrappers, and security-themed utilities that are designed...