Malware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A new Android malware called RatOn  has evolved from a basic tool capable of conducting Near Field Communication ( NFC ) relay attacks to a sophisticated remote access trojan with Automated Transfer System ( ATS ) capabilities to conduct device fraud. "RatOn merges traditional overlay attacks with automatic money transfers and NFC relay functionality – making it a uniquely powerful threat," the Dutch mobile security company said in a report published today. The banking trojan comes fitted with account takeover functions targeting cryptocurrency wallet applications like MetaMask, Trust, Blockchain.com, and Phantom, while also capable of carrying out automated money transfers abusing George Česko, a bank application used in the Czech Republic. Furthermore, it can perform ransomware-like attacks using custom overlay pages and device locking. It's worth noting that a variant of the HOOK Android trojan was also observed incorporating ransomware-style overlay screens to d...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a phishing campaign that delivers a stealthy banking malware-turned-remote access trojan called MostereRAT . The phishing attack incorporates a number of advanced evasion techniques to gain complete control over compromised systems, siphon sensitive data, and extend its functionality by serving secondary plugins, Fortinet FortiGuard Labs said. "These include the use of an Easy Programming Language ( EPL ) to develop a staged payload, concealing malicious operations and disabling security tools to prevent alert triggers, securing command-and-control (C2) communications using mutual TLS (mTLS), supporting various methods for deploying additional payloads, and even installing popular remote access tools," Yurren Wan said . EPL is an obscure visual programming language that supports traditional Chinese, simplified Chinese, English, and Japanese variants. It's chiefly meant for users who may not be proficient in English....

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a variant of a recently disclosed campaign that abuses the TOR network for cryptojacking attacks targeting exposed Docker APIs. Akamai, which discovered the latest activity last month, said it's designed to block other actors from accessing the Docker API from the internet. The findings build on a prior report from Trend Micro in late June 2025, which uncovered a malicious campaign that targeted exposed Docker instances to stealthily drop an XMRig cryptocurrency miner using a TOR domain for anonymity. "This new strain seems to use similar tooling to the original, but may have a different end goal – including possibly setting up the foundation of a complex botnet," security researcher Yonatan Gilvarg said . The attack chain essentially involves breaking into misconfigured Docker APIs to execute a new container based on the Alpine Docker image and mount the host file system into it. This is followed by the threat actors runn...

Multiple npm packages have been compromised as part of a software supply chain attack after a maintainer's account was compromised in a phishing attack. The attack targeted Josh Junon (aka Qix ), who received an email message that mimicked npm ("support@npmjs[.]help"), urging them to update their update their two-factor authentication (2FA) credentials before September 10, 2025, by clicking on embedded link. The phishing page is said to have prompted the co-maintainer to enter their username, password, and two-factor authentication (2FA) token, only for it to be stolen likely by means of an adversary-in-the-middle ( AitM ) attack and used to publish the rogue version to the npm registry. The following 20 packages, which collectively attract over 2 billion weekly downloads, have been confirmed as affected as part of the incident - ansi-regex@6.2.1 ansi-styles@6.2.2 backslash@0.2.1 chalk@5.6.1 chalk-template@1.1.1 color-convert@3.1.1 color-name@2.0.1...

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed a new sophisticated malware campaign that leverages paid ads on search engines like Google to deliver malware to unsuspecting users looking for popular tools like GitHub Desktop. While malvertising campaigns have become commonplace in recent years, the latest activity gives it a little twist of its own: Embedding a GitHub commit into a page URL containing altered links that point to attacker-controlled infrastructure. "Even when a link seems to point to a reputable platform such as GitHub, the underlying URL can be manipulated to resolve to a counterfeit site," Arctic Wolf said in a report published last week. Exclusively targeting IT and software development companies within Western Europe since at least December 2024, the links within the rogue GitHub commit are designed to funnel users to a malicious download hosted on a lookalike domain ("gitpage[.]app"). The activity was first detected on August 19, 2025. The first...

Cybersecurity never slows down. Every week brings new threats, new vulnerabilities, and new lessons for defenders. For security and IT teams, the challenge is not just keeping up with the news—it's knowing which risks matter most right now. That's what this digest is here for: a clear, simple briefing to help you focus where it counts. This week, one story stands out above the rest: the Salesloft–Drift breach, where attackers stole OAuth tokens and accessed Salesforce data from some of the biggest names in tech. It's a sharp reminder of how fragile integrations can become the weak link in enterprise defenses. Alongside this, we'll also walk through several high-risk CVEs under active exploitation, the latest moves by advanced threat actors, and fresh insights on making security workflows smarter, not noisier. Each section is designed to give you the essentials—enough to stay informed and prepared, without getting lost in the noise. ⚡ Threat of the Week Salesloft to Take Drift Of...

A threat actor possibly of Russian origin has been attributed to a new set of attacks targeting the energy sector in Kazakhstan. The activity, codenamed Operation BarrelFire, is tied to a new threat group tracked by Seqrite Labs as Noisy Bear. The threat actor has been active since at least April 2025. "The campaign is targeted towards employees of KazMunaiGas or KMG where the threat entity delivered a fake document related to the KMG IT department, mimicking official internal communication and leveraging themes such as policy updates, internal certification procedures, and salary adjustments," security researcher Subhajeet Singha said . The infection chain begins with a phishing email containing a ZIP attachment, which includes a Windows shortcut (LNK) downloader, a decoy document related to KazMunaiGas, and a README.txt file with instructions written in both Russian and Kazakh to run a program named "KazMunayGaz_Viewer." The email, per the cybersecurity compa...

A new set of four malicious packages have been discovered in the npm package registry with capabilities to steal cryptocurrency wallet credentials from Ethereum developers. "The packages masquerade as legitimate cryptographic utilities and Flashbots MEV infrastructure while secretly exfiltrating private keys and mnemonic seeds to a Telegram bot controlled by the threat actor," Socket researcher Kush Pandya said in an analysis. The packages were uploaded to npm by a user named " flashbotts ," with the earliest library uploaded as far back as September 2023. The most recent upload took place on August 19, 2025. The packages in question, all of which are still available for download as of writing, are listed below - @flashbotts/ethers-provider-bundle (52 Downloads) flashbot-sdk-eth (467 Downloads) sdk-ethers (90 Downloads) gram-utilz (83 Downloads) The impersonation of Flashbots is not coincidental, given its role in combating the adverse effects of...

Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies are being advised to update their Sitecore instances by September 25, 2025, following the discovery of a security flaw that has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability , tracked as CVE-2025-53690 , carries a CVSS score of 9.0 out of a maximum of 10.0, indicating critical severity. "Sitecore Experience Manager (XM), Experience Platform (XP), Experience Commerce (XC), and Managed Cloud contain a deserialization of untrusted data vulnerability involving the use of default machine keys," the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said . "This flaw allows attackers to exploit exposed ASP.NET machine keys to achieve remote code execution." Google-owned Mandiant, which discovered the active ViewState deserialization attack, said the activity leveraged a sample machine key that had been exposed in Sitecore deployment guides from 2017 and earlier. The threat intelligence team ...

The threat actor behind the malware-as-a-service (MaaS) framework and loader called CastleLoader has also developed a remote access trojan known as CastleRAT . "Available in both Python and C variants, CastleRAT's core functionality consists of collecting system information, downloading and executing additional payloads, and executing commands via CMD and PowerShell," Recorded Future Insikt Group said . The cybersecurity company is tracking the threat actor behind the malware families as TAG-150. Believed to be active since at least March 2025, CastleLoader et al are seen as initial access vectors for a wide range of secondary payloads, including remote access trojans, information stealers, and even other loaders. CastleLoader (aka CastleBot) was first documented by Swiss cybersecurity company PRODAFT in July 2025, as having been put to use in various campaigns distributing DeerStealer, RedLine, StealC, NetSupport RAT, SectopRAT, and Hijack Loader. A subsequent anal...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new malware campaign that has leveraged Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) files as part of phishing attacks impersonating the Colombian judicial system. The SVG files, according to VirusTotal , are distributed via email and designed to execute an embedded JavaScript payload, which then decodes and injects a Base64-encoded HTML phishing page masquerading as a portal for Fiscalía General de la Nación, the Office of the Attorney General of Colombia. The page then simulates an official government document download process with a fake progress bar, while it stealthily triggers the download of a ZIP archive in the background. The exact nature of the ZIP file was not disclosed. The Google-owned malware scanning service said it found 44 unique SVG files, all of which have remained undetected by antivirus engines, owing to the use of techniques like obfuscation, polymorphism, and large amounts of junk code to evade static detection methods. In all, as ...

The Russian state-sponsored hacking group tracked as APT28 has been attributed to a new Microsoft Outlook backdoor called NotDoor in attacks targeting multiple companies from different sectors in NATO member countries. NotDoor "is a VBA macro for Outlook designed to monitor incoming emails for a specific trigger word," S2 Grupo's LAB52 threat intelligence team said . "When such an email is detected, it enables an attacker to exfiltrate data, upload files, and execute commands on the victim's computer." The artifact gets its name from the use of the word "Nothing" within the source code, the Spanish cybersecurity company added. The activity highlights the abuse of Outlook as a stealthy communication, data exfiltration, and malware delivery channel. The exact initial access vector used to deliver the malware is currently not known, but analysis shows that it's deployed via Microsoft's OneDrive executable ("onedrive.exe") using a t...

Cybersecurity researchers have lifted the lid on a previously undocumented threat cluster dubbed GhostRedirector that has managed to compromise at least 65 Windows servers primarily located in Brazil, Thailand, and Vietnam. The attacks, per Slovak cybersecurity company ESET, led to the deployment of a passive C++ backdoor called Rungan and a native Internet Information Services (IIS) module codenamed Gamshen. The threat actor is believed to be active since at least August 2024. "While Rungan has the capability of executing commands on a compromised server, the purpose of Gamshen is to provide SEO fraud as-a-service, i.e., to manipulate search engine results, boosting the page ranking of a configured target website," ESET researcher Fernando Tavella said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Even though Gamshen only modifies the response when the request comes from Googlebot – i.e., it does not serve malicious content or otherwise affect regular visitors of the ...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new technique that cybercriminals have adopted to bypass social media platform X's malvertising protections and propagate malicious links using its artificial intelligence (AI) assistant Grok. The findings were highlighted by Nati Tal, head of Guardio Labs, in a series of posts on X. The technique has been codenamed Grokking. The approach is designed to get around restrictions imposed by X in Promoted Ads that allow users to only include text, images, or videos, and subsequently amplify them to a broader audience, attracting hundreds of thousands of impressions through paid promotion. To achieve this, malvertisers have been found to run video card-promoted posts with adult content as bait, with the spurious link hidden in the "From:" metadata field below the video player by taking advantage of the fact that it's not scanned by the social media platform. It's worth mentioning here that the "From:" field is t...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two new malicious packages on the npm registry that make use of smart contracts for the Ethereum blockchain to carry out malicious actions on compromised systems, signaling the trend of threat actors constantly on the lookout for new ways to distribute malware and fly under the radar. "The two npm packages abused smart contracts to conceal malicious commands that installed downloader malware on compromised systems," ReversingLabs researcher Lucija Valentić said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The packages, both uploaded to npm in July 2025 and no longer available for download, are listed below - colortoolsv2 (7 downloads) mimelib2 (1 download) The software supply chain security firm said the libraries are part of a larger and sophisticated campaign impacting both npm and GitHub, tricking unsuspecting developers into downloading and running them. While the packages themselves make no effort to conceal their malici...

An Iran-nexus group has been linked to a "coordinated" and "multi-wave" spear-phishing campaign targeting the embassies and consulates in Europe and other regions across the world. The activity has been attributed by Israeli cybersecurity company Dream to Iranian-aligned operators connected to broader offensive cyber activity undertaken by a group known as Homeland Justice . "Emails were sent to multiple government recipients worldwide, disguising legitimate diplomatic communication," the company said . "Evidence points toward a broader regional espionage effort aimed at diplomatic and governmental entities during a time of heightened geopolitical tension." The attack chains involve the use of spear-phishing emails with themes related to geopolitical tensions between Iran and Israel to send a malicious Microsoft Word that, when opened, urges recipients to "Enable Content" in order to execute an embedded Visual Basic for Application...