Information security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The China-linked advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as Aquatic Panda has been linked to a "global espionage campaign" that took place in 2022 targeting seven organizations. These entities include governments, Catholic charities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and think tanks across Taiwan, Hungary, Turkey, Thailand, France, and the United States. The activity, which took place over a period of 10 months between January and October 2022, has been codenamed Operation FishMedley by ESET. "Operators used implants – such as ShadowPad, SodaMaster, and Spyder – that are common or exclusive to China-aligned threat actors," security researcher Matthieu Faou said in an analysis. Aquatic Panda , also called Bronze University, Charcoal Typhoon, Earth Lusca, and RedHotel, is a cyber espionage group from China that's known to be active since at least 2019. The Slovakian cybersecurity company is tracking the hacking crew under the name FishMonger. Sai...

Two known threat activity clusters codenamed Head Mare and Twelve have likely joined forces to target Russian entities, new findings from Kaspersky reveal. "Head Mare relied heavily on tools previously associated with Twelve. Additionally, Head Mare attacks utilized command-and-control (C2) servers exclusively linked to Twelve prior to these incidents," the company said . "This suggests potential collaboration and joint campaigns between the two groups." Both Head Mare and Twelve were previously documented by Kaspersky in September 2024, with the former leveraging a now-patched vulnerability in WinRAR (CVE-2023-38831) to obtain initial access and deliver malware and in some cases, even deploy ransomware families like LockBit for Windows and Babuk for Linux (ESXi) in exchange for a ransom. Twelve, on the other hand, has been observed staging destructive attacks, taking advantage of various publicly available tools to encrypt victims' data and irrevocably d...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) is warning of a new campaign that targets the defense sectors with Dark Crystal RAT (aka DCRat ). The campaign, detected earlier this month, has been found to target both employees of enterprises of the defense-industrial complex and individual representatives of the Defense Forces of Ukraine. The activity involves distributing malicious messages via the Signal messaging app that contain supposed meeting minutes. Some of these messages are sent from previously compromised Signal accounts so as to increase the likelihood of success of the attacks. The reports are shared in the form of archive files, which contain a decoy PDF and an executable, a .NET-based evasive crypter named DarkTortilla that decrypts and launches the DCRat malware. DCRat, a well-documented remote access trojan (RAT), facilitates the execution of arbitrary commands, steals valuable information, and establishes remote control over infected devices. CE...

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Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a widespread phishing campaign that uses fake CAPTCHA images shared via PDF documents hosted on Webflow's content delivery network (CDN) to deliver the Lumma stealer malware. Netskope Threat Labs said it discovered 260 unique domains hosting 5,000 phishing PDF files that redirect victims to malicious websites. "The attacker uses SEO to trick victims into visiting the pages by clicking on malicious search engine results," security researcher Jan Michael Alcantara said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "While most phishing pages focus on stealing credit card information, some PDF files contain fake CAPTCHAs that trick victims into executing malicious PowerShell commands, ultimately leading to the Lumma Stealer malware." The phishing campaign is estimated to have affected more than 1,150 organizations and more than 7,000 users since the second half of 2024, with the attacks primarily singling out victims in Nort...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday placed two security flaws impacting Microsoft Partner Center and Synacor Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerabilities in question are as follows - CVE-2024-49035 (CVSS score: 8.7) - An improper access control vulnerability in Microsoft Partner Center that allows an attacker to escalate privileges. (Fixed in November 2024 ) CVE-2023-34192 (CVSS score: 9.0) - A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in Synacor ZCS that allows a remote authenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code via a crafted script to the /h/autoSaveDraft function. (Fixed in July 2023 with version 8.8.15 Patch 40) Last year, Microsoft acknowledged that CVE-2024-49035 had been exploited in the wild, but did not reveal any additional details on how it was weaponized in real-world attacks. There are currently no public repor...

Opposition activists in Belarus as well as Ukrainian military and government organizations are the target of a new campaign that employs malware-laced Microsoft Excel documents as lures to deliver a new variant of PicassoLoader .  The threat cluster has been assessed to be an extension of a long-running campaign mounted by a Belarus-aligned threat actor dubbed Ghostwriter (aka Moonscape, TA445, UAC-0057, and UNC1151) since 2016. It's known to align with Russian security interests and promote narratives critical of NATO. "The campaign has been in preparation since July-August 2024 and entered the active phase in November-December 2024," SentinelOne researcher Tom Hegel said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "Recent malware samples and command-and-control (C2) infrastructure activity indicate that the operation remains active in recent days." The starting point of the attack chain analyzed by the cybersecurity company is a Google Drive shar...

The first quarter of 2025 has been a battlefield in the world of cybersecurity. Cybercriminals continued launching aggressive new campaigns and refining their attack methods. Below is an overview of five notable malware families, accompanied by analyses conducted in controlled environments. NetSupport RAT Exploiting the ClickFix Technique In early 2025, threat actors began exploiting a technique known as ClickFix to distribute the NetSupport Remote Access Trojan (RAT).  This method involves injecting fake CAPTCHA pages into compromised websites, prompting users to execute malicious PowerShell commands that download and run the NetSupport RAT.  Once installed, this RAT grants attackers full control over the victim's system, allowing activities such as real-time screen monitoring, file manipulation, and execution of arbitrary commands. Main technical characteristics of NetSupport RAT Attackers can view and control the victim’s screen in real time. Uploads, downloads, m...

Various industrial organizations in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region have been targeted as part of phishing attacks designed to deliver a known malware called FatalRAT. "The threat was orchestrated by attackers using legitimate Chinese cloud content delivery network (CDN) myqcloud and the Youdao Cloud Notes service as part of their attack infrastructure," Kaspersky ICS CERT said in a Monday report. "The attackers employed a sophisticated multi-stage payload delivery framework to ensure evasion of detection." The activity has singled out government agencies and industrial organizations, particularly manufacturing, construction, information technology, telecommunications, healthcare, power and energy, and large-scale logistics and transportation, in Taiwan, Malaysia, China, Japan, Thailand, South Korea, Singapore, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Hong Kong. The lure attachments used in the email messages suggest that the phishing campaign, dubbed Operation SalmonSla...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning of a new campaign that leverages cracked versions of software as a lure to distribute information stealers like Lumma and ACR Stealer. The AhnLab Security Intelligence Center (ASEC) said it has observed a spike in the distribution volume of ACR Stealer since January 2025. A notable aspect of the stealer malware is the use of a technique called dead drop resolver to extract the actual command-and-control (C2) server. This includes relying on legitimate services like Steam, Telegram's Telegraph, Google Forms, and Google Slides. "Threat actors enter the actual C2 domain in Base64 encoding on a specific page," ASEC said . "The malware accesses this page, parses the string, and obtains the actual C2 domain address to perform malicious behaviors." ACR Stealer, previously distributed via Hijack Loader malware, is capable of harvesting a wide range of information from compromised systems, including files, web browser data, ...

A malware campaign distributing the XLoader malware has been observed using the DLL side-loading technique by making use of a legitimate application associated with the Eclipse Foundation. "The legitimate application used in the attack, jarsigner, is a file created during the installation of the IDE package distributed by the Eclipse Foundation," the AhnLab SEcurity Intelligence Center (ASEC) said . "It is a tool for signing JAR (Java Archive) files." The South Korean cybersecurity firm said the malware is propagated in the form of a compressed ZIP archive that includes the legitimate executable as well as the DLLs that are sideloaded to launch the malware - Documents2012.exe, a renamed version of the legitimate jarsigner.exe binary, jli.dll, a DLL file that's modified by the threat actor to decrypt and inject concrt140e.dll, and concrt140e.dll, the XLoader payload The attack chain crosses over to the malicious phase when "Documents2012.exe...

A new variant of the Snake Keylogger malware is being used to actively target Windows users located in China, Turkey, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Spain. Fortinet FortiGuard Labs said the new version of the malware has been behind over 280 million blocked infection attempts worldwide since the start of the year. "Typically delivered through phishing emails containing malicious attachments or links, Snake Keylogger is designed to steal sensitive information from popular web browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Firefox by logging keystrokes, capturing credentials, and monitoring the clipboard," security researcher Kevin Su said . Its other features allow it to exfiltrate the stolen information to an attacker-controlled server using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and Telegram bots, allowing the threat actors to access stolen credentials and other sensitive data." What's notable about the latest set of attacks is that it makes use of the AutoIt scripting language ...

Microsoft is calling attention to an emerging threat cluster it calls Storm-2372 that has been attributed to a new set of cyber attacks aimed at a variety of sectors since August 2024. The attacks have targeted government, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), information technology (IT) services and technology, defense, telecommunications, health, higher education, and energy/oil and gas sectors in Europe, North America, Africa, and the Middle East.  The threat actor, assessed with medium confidence to be aligned with Russian interests, victimology, and tradecraft, has been observed targeting users via messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and Microsoft Teams by falsely claiming to be a prominent person relevant to the target in an attempt to build trust. "The attacks use a specific phishing technique called 'device code phishing' that tricks users to log into productivity apps while Storm-2372 actors capture the information from the log in (tokens) that they can us...