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Microsoft on Monday confirmed that it temporarily removed some GitHub repositories in response to a recent security incident that led to 73 of its open-source projects being compromised to inject an information stealer into the code. "Our priority is to protect customers and the broader ecosystem," a Microsoft spokesperson told The Hacker News via email. "We temporarily removed some repositories as we investigated potential malicious content. Some of these repos have been restored after review, while others may remain offline while work continues." "As part of our investigation, we notified a small number of customers who may have pulled down content from the affected repositories. We will continue to investigate, and if anything further is identified that requires customer action, we will reach out directly through our established support channels." The development comes days after the Windows maker cut off access to dozens of its open-source proj...

Two Russia-aligned cyber attack campaigns have continued to exploit a security flaw in WinRAR to target Ukrainian organisations, almost a year after patches for the vulnerability were released. The activity has been attributed by Trend Micro to Earth Dahu (aka Gamaredon) and SHADOW-EARTH-066 (aka UAC-0226). It involves the exploitation of CVE-2025-8088 , a path traversal flaw that allows an attacker to write files outside the extraction directory via NTFS Alternate Data Streams (ADS). It was patched by WinRAR in July 2025. The findings show "how unmanaged software keeps an exploited entry point open long after the fix ships," Trend Micro researchers Hiroyuki Kakara and Feike Hacquebord said in an analysis published Monday. The WinRAR exploit chain exploited by SHADOW-EARTH-066 is a departure from Excel macro droppers previously used by the threat actor to deliver an information stealer called GIFTEDCROOK. The latest iteration makes use of crafted RAR archives featur...

University of Toronto researchers have built and tested a proof-of-concept AI-driven computer worm that uses a locally hosted open-weight large language model to reason its way through a network, generate tailored attack strategies for each target it encounters, and replicate itself, all without human intervention and without touching a commercial AI service. The preprint, posted to arXiv on June 2 and currently under peer review, shows why single-CVE patching breaks down when malware can inspect exposed services, read fresh advisories, and generate a new attack path at runtime. In 15 isolated runs on a deliberately vulnerable 33-host network, the worm identified an average of 31.3 vulnerabilities and gained elevated access on 23.1 hosts, roughly three-quarters of the hosts it actively targeted. It then replicated autonomously to 20.4 of those hosts, or 62% of the full network, over seven days, with no prior knowledge of the network topology and no human input. Traditional worm...

The Miasma supply chain campaign has sparked a fresh attack wave called Hades , this time involving 37 malicious wheel artifacts across 19 packages in the Python Package Index (PyPI) registry, as the Mini Shai-Hulud-style attacks continue to be refined and splintered to target specific ecosystems. "The compromised releases shipped a *-setup.pth file that attempts to execute automatically during Python startup, download the Bun JavaScript runtime, and run an obfuscated JavaScript payload named _index.js," Socket said in a new analysis. The list of identified packages is below - bramin 0.0.2, 0.0.3, 0.0.4 cmd2func 0.2.2, 0.2.3 coolbox 0.4.1, 0.4.2 dynamo-release 1.5.4 executor-engine 0.3.4, 0.3.5 executor-http 0.1.3, 0.1.4 funcdesc 0.2.2, 0.2.3 magique 0.6.8, 0.6.9 magique-ai 0.4.4, 0.4.5 mrbios 0.1.1, 0.1.2 napari-ufish 0.0.2, 0.0.3 nucbox 0.1.2, 0.1.3 okite 0.0.7, 0.0.8 pantheon-agents 0.6.1, 0.6.2 pantheon-toolsets 0.5....

Phishing has always been a numbers game. AI has turned it into a volume machine. Attackers can now create convincing emails, fake login pages, and tailored lures in minutes. Every polished message adds another case for Tier 1 to review, another link to inspect, and another alert that cannot be dismissed at a glance. As the queue grows, a credential theft attempt or malware delivery can easily get buried among routine checks. SOC leaders need to help their teams cut through the noise faster and catch the alerts that could turn into a serious incident. Where Tier 1 Teams Lose Time on AI Phishing AI helps attackers launch more convincing campaigns, vary the message, and rotate infrastructure faster. For Tier 1 teams, that means fewer alerts can be ruled out quickly. AI-driven change What Tier 1 has to deal with SOC impact More lure variations Similar campaigns no longer look identical. More alert...

Monday again. The weekend was meant to be quiet. It wasn't. Last week had poisoned packages, a broken AI helper, and a worm tearing through repos. The ugly part: basic tricks still worked. A chatbot got fooled. A bot token got leaked inside the malware. The same old mistakes showed up again. And while everyone chased the loud stuff, quieter attackers sat in inboxes for months, reading mail and stealing it bit by bit. Lots to cover. Grab coffee. Read up. ⚡ Threat of the Week Miasma Worm Hits 73 Microsoft GitHub Repositories in Supply Chain Attack - Microsoft's GitHub repositories became the latest to fall victim to the ongoing Miasma self-replicating supply chain attack campaign. The incident impacted 73 Microsoft repositories across four of its GitHub organizations, including Azure, Azure-Samples, Microsoft, and MicrosoftDocs. The development prompted GitHub to disable access to those repositories. Miasma is assessed to be a variant of the Mini Shai-Hulud worm that T...

Mythos is real. I know a big chunk of the industry thinks it's a marketing stunt, and I get why. I get it. But I've seen the findings, and they're bad. These aren't "whoops, this line right here is wrong, and that's RCE." They're novel combinations of a few dozen issues out of thousands of things every SAST scanner already finds, chained together into something much worse. It's real creativity, like Move 37. That's not a better scanner. That's a different category of threat. In some ways, it doesn't even matter. Even if this specific model were a hoax, the capability is coming regardless. Some days, I wish it were a hoax. We'd have more time. But you can believe me or not. The rest of this post is about what we do about it either way, and I'm getting started now. Washington has been tracking this for a while, but you can't regulate something most of the industry thinks is made up. Now that every boardroom is in preparat...

Microsoft's GitHub repositories have become the latest to fall victim to the ongoing Miasma self-replicating supply chain attack campaign. The incident impacted 73 Microsoft repositories across four of its GitHub organizations, including Azure, Azure-Samples, Microsoft, and MicrosoftDocs, per OpenSourceMalware . The development has prompted GitHub to disable access to those repositories. "Access to this repository has been disabled by GitHub Staff due to a violation of GitHub's terms of service," reads the message when attempting to access the " Azure/azure-functions-host " repository. "If you are the owner of the repository, you may reach out to GitHub Support for more information." According to OpenSourceMalware, some of the repositories impacted by the incident are listed below - azure-search-openai-demo-purviewdatasecurity Connectors-NET-LSP Connectors-NET-SDK durabletask durabletask-dotnet durabletask-go durablet...

Multiple software supply chain attacks have hit the npm ecosystem, with threat actors using both malicious and poisoned versions of over 50 legitimate packages to distribute a Rust-based information stealer and a self-spreading worm, respectively. According to JFrog , the information stealer "scrapes every secret it can find on a developer's machine, hides behind an eBPF kernel rootkit, and answers to its operator over Tor." The stealer also uses the stolen credentials as a propagation mechanism, drawing similarities to the infamous Shai-Hulud worm. The new malware has been codenamed IronWorm by the software supply chain security company. By publishing itself to the npm registry in the form of trojanized packages, the approach results in a self-replicating attack. The malicious activity has been traced back to a compromised npm account named " asteroiddao ," which has been found to publish package versions containing the Rust ELF binary that's exec...

Arabic-speaking users have emerged as the target of a new Android spyware codenamed Asin , according to findings from ESET. The Slovakian cybersecurity company said it first detected the malware spread via multiple campaigns in early 2025, with each attack wave making use of distinct websites mimicking utilities, war-related updates, and a government news source: govlens[.]net, which impersonates a government news source (registered on May 27, 2025) pdf-reader[.]help, which impersonates a secure PDF editor (registered on May 29, 2025) live-war-map[.]com, which claims to offer updates on military incidents (registered on January 20, 2025) Two of these websites - govlens[.]net and live-war-map[.]com - were also marketed via dedicated accounts on social media platforms like Facebook and Telegram - www.facebook[.]com/GovLens t[.]me/liveuamap_ar "Each of these websites distributes a malicious app that combines legitimate functionality with stealthy spyware ca...

Security researchers and the FBI are warning that a wave of FIFA-themed fraud is already hitting World Cup 2026 fans, days before the June 11 kickoff. Recent reports describe thousands of lookalike FIFA domains, banking malware hidden inside pirate streaming apps, and at least one operation that copies FIFA's login page well enough to take over real accounts. It is an obvious target. More than six million fans are expected across 16 cities in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and FIFA said it received more than 150 million ticket requests in the first 15 days, leaving the tournament around 30 times oversubscribed. Tickets are scarce, fans are anxious, and money is moving fast, which is exactly what fraud needs. One Operator, 300 Cloned FIFA Sites The most detailed findings come from Group-IB , which tracked more than 4,300 fraudulent FIFA domains registered since August 2025. At the center is a group it calls GHOST STADIUM , a Chinese-speaking, money-driven operation...

It got stupid again. The internet still feels held together with tape. Bad plugins, old bugs, fake tools, trusted apps doing shady things. Same mess, new wrapper. And now the weird stuff is normal. Forums go down and come back worse. Cheap hackers get better toys. AI starts breaking real systems. Great. Read the whole thing before it ruins your week anyway.

A new China-linked cybercrime group known as TA4922 has expanded its targeting focus to target European organizations in the U.K., Germany, Italy, and South Africa. These efforts have been complemented by a "rapid operational tempo" and a continually evolving malware arsenal comprising known families like ValleyRAT (aka Winos 4.0) and Atlas RAT (aka AtlasCross RAT), as well as previously undocumented tools called RomulusLoader and SilentRunLoader , according to Proofpoint. The enterprise security company is keeping tabs on the activity under the moniker TA4922, describing it as a Chinese-speaking threat actor largely targeting East Asia. TA4922 is assessed to share some level of overlap with Silver Fox , with the threat actor's tradecraft more focused on cybercriminal objectives than espionage. "The actor is likely financially motivated and focused on obtaining remote access to victim environments for financial gain, such as data theft, fraud, access resale...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a large-scale operation that impersonates open-source and freeware projects to funnel unsuspecting users through a Traffic Distribution System (TDS) and deliver malware families like Remus Stealer, AnimateClipper, and the SessionGate framework. "The sites are well-designed and often look like legitimate project portals at a glance, sometimes referencing real upstream resources," Check Point security researcher Alexey Bukhteyev said in a breakdown of the campaign. "The deception is not in the page content alone, it's in what happens when a user interacts." "These pages load a CloudFront-hosted JavaScript staging layer that converts a click on a 'download' button/link into a handoff to a Traffic Distribution System (TDS). The TDS enforces strict gating: first-visit state, mandatory click confirmation, anti-bot/anti-analysis logic, VPN/datacenter filtering, and frequency capping." It's suspected t...

Unknown attackers spent at least five months inside the Outlook mailbox of a senior executive at a major global stock exchange, copying the inbox out in small, repeated batches and routing it through Dropbox and OneDrive so the traffic blended into normal cloud activity. Symantec and Carbon Black's Threat Hunter Team reported the campaign this week. This points to espionage, not a money grab: Symantec said the commands indicate intelligence collection, not theft for profit. Neither the executive nor the exchange was named. The value is plain enough: an exchange executive's inbox can hold non-public listing details, enforcement matters, deal terms, market-moving plans, plus the executive's calendar and contacts. Five months of quiet access handed the attacker a detailed read on the executive's dealings and where the organization was heading, without needing broad access to other business systems. The first malicious activity showed up on October 10, 2025. By th...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new malspam campaign that makes use of Google's DoubleClick domain as a way to evade detection and ultimately deliver an unidentified .NET-based loader. "Before the victim ever reaches attacker-controlled infrastructure, the lure routes through DoubleClick, a legitimate Google-owned domain that many security tools are less likely to treat as suspicious," Huntress researchers Anna Pham and Adam Mooney said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "From there, the victim is passed into a malspam kit that personalizes itself on the fly using the victim's email address, dynamically pulling in company branding and location details to make the page feel convincing without requiring the operators to handcraft a lure for each target." What makes this attack noteworthy is that it eliminates the need for having a bespoke kit for each targeted organization, thereby making these operations more scalable and cost-effective...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new campaign targeting Minecraft players via YouTube to spread malware capable of gaining control of victims' systems. The Minecraft-focused malware-as-a-service (MaaS) campaign has been codenamed Weedhack by McAfee Labs, stating the activity has been active since January 2026 and impersonates Minecraft clients and mods to infect users. In all, 3820 unique malicious JAR files and over 240 URLs responsible for distributing the malware have been identified. "This campaign utilizes SEO poisoning and YouTube to generate traffic to these malicious URLs," security researcher Aayush Tyagi said . "We also found two YouTube channels and multiple videos that demonstrate Minecraft Mods and Clients and redirect viewers to these URLs." Central to the campaign is an enterprise-grade dashboard ("weedhack[.]to") that enables customers to view stolen credentials and system information, as well as remotely keep tabs on th...

The Russian hacking group known as Gamaredon has been attributed to the continued exploitation of a WinRAR vulnerability to deliver multiple malware families aimed at data theft and propagation. Per Sekoia, the activity involves the weaponization of CVE-2025-8088 , a path traversal flaw in WinRAR, to launch an HTML Application payload dubbed GammaPhish, which is then used to retrieve an intermediate Visual Basic Script (VBScript) downloaders codenamed GammaLoad. The infection chain was observed by the French cybersecurity company in January 2026. "Their primary objectives are to fingerprint the host system, update the network configuration in the registry using dead drop resolvers (DDRs), fetch and execute arbitrary VBScript payloads from the C2 servers," Sekoia said . One of the payloads is a VBScript worm known as GammaWorm that establishes persistence via scheduled tasks and is designed to hide legitimate directories in network shares and USB drives and replace wit...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a spear-phishing campaign likely undertaken by the Pakistan-aligned SideCopy group targeting Afghanistan's Ministry of Finance with an open-source remote access trojan called Xeno RAT . "The campaign opens with a spear phishing delivery - a ZIP archive containing a malicious LNK file bearing a carefully crafted Pashto-language filename," Seqrite Labs researcher Dixit Panchal said in a technical breakdown of the activity. Also targeted as part of the campaign are provincial revenue and finance directorates, Pashto-speaking government officials, and provincial-level government employees. The campaign has been codenamed Operation XENOFISCAL. The choice of Pashto for the lure file is a deliberate choice on the part of the attacker, as it's the main language spoken in the Afghan government circles. This aspect reflects the attacker's familiarity with the target environment. SideCopy is the name given to a P...

A new Mini Shai-Hulud supply chain attack campaign, codenamed Miasma , has compromised @redhat-cloud-services packages to steal credentials and secrets from developer machines and deliver a self-propagating worm. "This is effectively a Mini Shai-Hulud campaign: it uses the same core tactics of install-time execution, credential harvesting, CI/CD targeting, encrypted exfiltration, and potential downstream propagation," Socket said . Exactly who is behind the attack activity is presently unknown given that TeamPCP (aka Replicating Marauder, TGR-CRI-1135, and UNC6780), an infamous cybercrime group, has open-sourced the attack tools linked to the Shai-Hulud worm, opening the door for other threat actors to pull off similar attacks and making definitive attribution harder. The names of some of the affected packages are listed below - @redhat-cloud-services/vulnerabilities-client @redhat-cloud-services/tsc-transform-imports @redhat-cloud-services/topological-inv...