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Cybersecurity researchers have flagged two new malware families called WordlistLoader and SynkLoader that's used to deliver next-stage payloads and likely sell access to ransomware groups. According to findings from Gen Digital, WordlistLoader is being used to deliver Amatera Stealer (aka ACR Stealer or AcridRain Stealer) via ClearFake campaigns, which employ the ClickFix (aka FakeCaptcha) technique to dupe victims into running malicious commands under the pretext of completing CAPTCHA verification checks. "Once the visitor clicks on the 'I'm not a robot' checkbox, they're walked through the well-known ClickFix flow, where a malicious command is copied into their clipboard and the victim is instructed to paste it into the Windows Run dialog and execute it, leading to the download of WordlistLoader that ultimately results in the execution of Amatera," security researcher Vojtěch Krejsa said . The ClickFix prompts are displayed on real websites th...

A federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, sentenced Maksim Silnikau to 16 years in prison on August 5 for creating and running Ransom Cartel , the ransomware-as-a-service operation he stood up in 2021. Between 2021 and 2023, Ransom Cartel conspirators attacked at least 18 companies, including firms in California, New York and Nebraska, and others abroad, according to the Justice Department. Silnikau, a 40-year-old Belarusian national who worked under the handles "J.P. Morgan," "lansky" and "xxx," did not carry out most of those intrusions himself. He built the business around them: the locking software, the stolen credentials he bought from initial access brokers, and a hidden panel where affiliates monitored attacks, negotiated with victims and split proceeds. He ran a ratings system that rewarded the productive ones, and pushed ransom payments through cryptocurrency mixers. Sixteen years run past the 13 years and seven months handed to Yaroslav ...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning of a new campaign that's targeting Portuguese-speaking users in Brazil with trial versions of commercial remote monitoring and management (RMM) software since January 2025. "The spam message uses the Brazilian electronic invoice system, NF-e, as a lure to entice users into clicking hyperlinks and accessing malicious content hosted in Dropbox," Cisco Talos researcher Guilherme Venere said in a Thursday report. The attack chains begin with specially crafted spam emails that claim to originate from financial institutions or cell phone carriers, warning of overdue bills or outstanding payments in order to trick users into clicking on bogus Dropbox links that point to a binary installer for the RMM tool. Two notable RMM tools observed are N-able RMM Remote Access and PDQ Connect , granting attackers the ability to read and write files to the remote file system. In some cases, the threat actors then use the remote capabilities of th...