Malware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The malware known as GootLoader has resurfaced yet again after a brief spike in activity earlier this March, according to new findings from Huntress. The cybersecurity company said it observed three GootLoader infections since October 27, 2025, out of which two resulted in hands-on keyboard intrusions with domain controller compromise taking place within 17 hours of initial infection. "GootLoader is back and now leveraging custom WOFF2 fonts with glyph substitution to obfuscate filenames," security researcher Anna Pham said , adding the malware "exploits WordPress comment endpoints to deliver XOR-encrypted ZIP payloads with unique keys per file." GootLoader, affiliated with a threat actor tracked as Hive0127 (aka UNC2565), is a JavaScript-based malware loader that's often distributed via search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning tactics to deliver additional payloads, including ransomware. In a report published last September, Microsoft revealed the th...

AI-enabled supply chain attacks jumped 156% last year. Discover why traditional defenses are failing and what CISOs must do now to protect their organizations. Download the full CISO's expert guide to AI Supply chain attacks here .  TL;DR AI-enabled supply chain attacks are exploding in scale and sophistication - Malicious package uploads to open-source repositories jumped 156% in the past year . AI-generated malware has game-changing characteristics - It's polymorphic by default, context-aware, semantically camouflaged, and temporally evasive. Real attacks are already happening - From the 3CX breach affecting 600,000 companies to NullBulge attacks weaponizing Hugging Face and GitHub repositories. Detection times have dramatically increased - IBM's 2025 report shows breaches take an average of 276 days to identify, with AI-assisted attacks potentially extending this window. Traditional security tools are struggling - Static analysis and signature-based detec...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malicious npm package named "@acitons/artifact" that typosquats the legitimate " @actions/artifact " package with the intent to target GitHub-owned repositories. "We think the intent was to have this script execute during a build of a GitHub-owned repository, exfiltrate the tokens available to the build environment, and then use those tokens to publish new malicious artifacts as GitHub," Veracode said in an analysis. The cybersecurity company said it observed six versions of the package – from 4.0.12 to 4.0.17 – that incorporated a post-install hook to download and run malware. That said, the latest version available for download from npm is 4.0.10, indicating that the threat actor behind the package, blakesdev , has removed all the offending versions. The package was first uploaded on October 29, 2025, and has since accrued 31,398 weekly downloads. In total, it has been downloaded 47,405 times , according...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new Android remote access trojan (RAT) called Fantasy Hub that's sold on Russian-speaking Telegram channels under a Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) model. According to its seller, the malware enables device control and espionage, allowing threat actors to collect SMS messages, contacts, call logs, images, and videos, as well as intercept, reply, and delete incoming notifications. "It's a MaaS product with seller documentation, videos, and a bot-driven subscription model that helps novice attackers by providing a low barrier to entry," Zimperium researcher Vishnu Pratapagiri said in a report last week. "Because it targets financial workflows (fake windows for banks) and abuses the SMS handler role (for intercepting 2-factor SMS), it poses a direct threat to enterprise customers using BYOD and to any organization whose employees rely on mobile banking or sensitive mobile apps." The threat actor, in their...

Google's Mandiant Threat Defense on Monday said it discovered n-day exploitation of a now-patched security flaw in Gladinet's Triofox file-sharing and remote access platform. The critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-12480 (CVSS score: 9.1), allows an attacker to bypass authentication and access the configuration pages, resulting in the upload and execution of arbitrary payloads.  The tech giant said it observed a threat cluster tracked as UNC6485 weaponizing the flaw as far back as August 24, 2025, nearly a month after Gladinet released patches for the flaw in version 16.7.10368.56560 . It's worth noting that CVE-2025-12480 is the third flaw in Triofox that has come under active exploitation this year alone, after CVE-2025-30406 and CVE-2025-11371 . "Added protection for the initial configuration pages," according to release notes for the software. "These pages can no longer be accessed after Triofox has been set up." Mandiant said the th...

The North Korea-affiliated threat actor known as Konni (aka Earth Imp, Opal Sleet, Osmium, TA406, and Vedalia) has been attributed to a new set of attacks targeting both Android and Windows devices for data theft and remote control. "Attackers impersonated psychological counselors and North Korean human rights activists, distributing malware disguised as stress-relief programs," the Genians Security Center (GSC) said in a technical report. What's notable about the attacks targeting Android devices is also the destructive ability of the threat actors to exploit Google's asset tracking services Find Hub (formerly Find My Device) to remotely reset victim devices, thereby leading to the unauthorized deletion of personal data. The activity was detected in early September 2025. The development marks the first time the hacking group has weaponized legitimate management functions to remotely reset mobile devices. The activity is also preceded by an attack chain in whic...

Cyber threats didn't slow down last week—and attackers are getting smarter. We're seeing malware hidden in virtual machines, side-channel leaks exposing AI chats, and spyware quietly targeting Android devices in the wild. But that's just the surface. From sleeper logic bombs to a fresh alliance between major threat groups, this week's roundup highlights a clear shift: cybercrime is evolving fast, and the lines between technical stealth and strategic coordination are blurring. It's worth your time. Every story here is about real risks that your team needs to know about right now. Read the whole recap. ⚡ Threat of the Week Curly COMrades Abuses Hyper-V to Hide Malware in Linux VMs — Curly COMrades, a threat actor supporting Russia's geopolitical interests, has been observed abusing Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor in compromised Windows machines to create a hidden Alpine Linux-based virtual machine and deploy malicious payloads. This method allows the malware to run completel...

Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to a massive phishing campaign targeting the hospitality industry that lures hotel managers to ClickFix-style pages and harvest their credentials by deploying malware like PureRAT . "The attacker's modus operandi involved using a compromised email account to send malicious messages to multiple hotel establishments," Sekoia said . "This campaign leverages spear-phishing emails that impersonate Booking.com to redirect victims to malicious websites, employing the ClickFix social engineering tactic to deploy PureRAT." The end goal of the campaign is to steal credentials from compromised systems that grant threat actors unauthorized access to booking platforms like Booking.com or Expedia, which are then either sold on cybercrime forums or used to send fraudulent emails to hotel customers to conduct fraud. The activity is assessed to be active since at least April 2025 and operational as of early October 2025. It...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new set of three extensions associated with the GlassWorm campaign, indicating continued attempts on part of threat actors to target the Visual Studio Code (VS Code) ecosystem. The extensions in question , which are still available for download, are listed below - ai-driven-dev.ai-driven-dev (3,402 downloads) adhamu.history-in-sublime-merge (4,057 downloads) yasuyuky.transient-emacs (2,431 downloads) GlassWorm, first documented by Koi Security late last month, refers to a campaign in which threat actors leverage VS Code extensions on the Open VSX Registry and the Microsoft Extension Marketplace to harvest Open VSX, GitHub, and Git credentials, drain funds from 49 different cryptocurrency wallet extensions, and drop additional tools for remote access. What makes the malware notable is that it uses invisible Unicode characters to hide malicious code in code editors and abuses the pilfered credentials to compromise additional extens...

A China-linked threat actor has been attributed to a cyber attack targeting an U.S. non-profit organization with an aim to establish long-term persistence, as part of broader activity aimed at U.S. entities that are linked to or involved in policy issues. The organization, according to a report from Broadcom's Symantec and Carbon Black teams, is "active in attempting to influence U.S. government policy on international issues." The attackers managed to gain access to the network for several weeks in April 2025. The first sign of activity occurred on April 5, 2025, when mass scanning efforts were detected against a server by leveraging various well-known exploits, including CVE-2022-26134 (Atlassian), CVE-2021-44228 (Apache Log4j), CVE-2017-9805 (Apache Struts), and CVE-2017-17562 (GoAhead Web Server). Symantec and Carbon Black told The Hacker News that there is no indication that these exploitation efforts were successful. It's suspected that the attackers ul...

A set of nine malicious NuGet packages has been identified as capable of dropping time-delayed payloads to sabotage database operations and corrupt industrial control systems. According to software supply chain security company Socket, the packages were published in 2023 and 2024 by a user named " shanhai666 " and are designed to run malicious code after specific trigger dates in August 2027 and November 2028. The packages were collectively downloaded 9,488 times. "The most dangerous package, Sharp7Extend, targets industrial PLCs with dual sabotage mechanisms: immediate random process termination and silent write failures that begin 30-90 minutes after installation, affecting safety-critical systems in manufacturing environments," security researcher Kush Pandya said . The list of malicious packages is below - MyDbRepository (Last updated on May 13, 2023) MCDbRepository (Last updated on June 5, 2024) Sharp7Extend (Last updated on August 14, 2024) SqlDbRepo...

Google on Thursday said it's rolling out a dedicated form to allow businesses listed on Google Maps to report extortion attempts made by threat actors who post inauthentic bad reviews on the platform and demand ransoms to remove the negative comments. The approach is designed to tackle a common practice called review bombing , where online users intentionally post negative user reviews in an attempt to harm a product, a service, or a business. "Bad actors try to circumvent our moderation systems and flood a business's profile with fake one-star reviews," Laurie Richardson, vice president of Trust & Safety at Google, said . "Following this initial attack, the scammers directly contact the business owner, often through third-party messaging apps, to demand payment." The threat actors warn of further escalation should the victim fail to pay the fee, risking potential damage to their public rating and reputation. These ploys are seen as an attempt to coe...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a malicious Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension with basic ransomware capabilities that appears to be created with the help of artificial intelligence – in other words, vibe-coded. Secure Annex researcher John Tuckner, who flagged the extension " susvsex ," said it does not attempt to hide its malicious functionality. The extension was uploaded on November 5, 2025, by a user named "suspublisher18" along with the description "Just testing" and the email address "donotsupport@example[.]com." "Automatically zips, uploads, and encrypts files from C:\Users\Public\testing (Windows) or /tmp/testing (macOS) on first launch," reads the description of the extension. As of November 6, Microsoft has stepped in to remove it from the official VS Code Extension Marketplace.  According to details shared by "suspublisher18," the extension is designed to automatically activate itself on any even...

A previously unknown threat activity cluster has been observed impersonating Slovak cybersecurity company ESET as part of phishing attacks targeting Ukrainian entities. The campaign, detected in May 2025, is tracked by the security outfit under the moniker InedibleOchotense , describing it as Russia-aligned. "InedibleOchotense sent spear-phishing emails and Signal text messages, containing a link to a trojanized ESET installer, to multiple Ukrainian entities," ESET said in its APT Activity Report Q2 2025–Q3 2025 shared with The Hacker News. InedibleOchotense is assessed to share tactical overlaps with a campaign documented by EclecticIQ that involved the deployment of a backdoor called BACKORDER and by CERT-UA as UAC-0212 , which it describes as a sub-cluster within the Sandworm (aka APT44) hacking group. While the email message is written in Ukrainian, ESET said the first line uses a Russian word, likely indicating a typo or a translation error. The email, which purp...

Cisco on Wednesday disclosed that it became aware of a new attack variant that's designed to target devices running Cisco Secure Firewall Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) Software releases that are susceptible to CVE-2025-20333 and CVE-2025-20362 . "This attack can cause unpatched devices to unexpectedly reload, leading to denial-of-service (DoS) conditions," the company said in an updated advisory, urging customers to apply the updates as soon as possible. Both vulnerabilities were disclosed in late September 2025, but not before they were exploited as zero-day vulnerabilities in attacks delivering malware such as RayInitiator and LINE VIPER , according to the U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). While successful exploitation of CVE-2025-20333 allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code as root using crafted HTTP requests, CVE-2025-20362 makes it possible to access a restricted URL without authentica...

Cybercrime has stopped being a problem of just the internet — it's becoming a problem of the real world. Online scams now fund organized crime, hackers rent violence like a service, and even trusted apps or social platforms are turning into attack vectors. The result is a global system where every digital weakness can be turned into physical harm, economic loss, or political leverage. Understanding these links is no longer optional — it's survival. For a full look at the most important security news stories of the week, keep reading. Hidden flaws resurface in Windows core Security Flaws in Windows GDI Details have emerged about three now-patched security vulnerabilities in Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI) that could enable remote code execution and information disclosure. These issues – CVE-2025-30388 , CVE-2025-53766 , and CVE-2025-47984 – involve out-of-bounds memory access triggered through malformed e...

The threat actor known as Curly COMrades has been observed exploiting virtualization technologies as a way to bypass security solutions and execute custom malware. According to a new report from Bitdefender, the adversary is said to have enabled the Hyper-V role on selected victim systems to deploy a minimalistic, Alpine Linux-based virtual machine. "This hidden environment, with its lightweight footprint (only 120MB disk space and 256MB memory), hosted their custom reverse shell, CurlyShell, and a reverse proxy, CurlCat," security researcher Victor Vrabie, along with Adrian Schipor and Martin Zugec, said in a technical report. Curly COMrades was first documented by the Romanian cybersecurity vendor in August 2025 in connection with a series of attacks targeting Georgia and Moldova. The activity cluster is assessed to be active since late 2023, operating with interests that are aligned with Russia. These attacks were found to deploy tools like CurlCat for bidirection...

Google on Wednesday said it discovered an unknown threat actor using an experimental Visual Basic Script (VB Script) malware dubbed PROMPTFLUX that interacts with its Gemini artificial intelligence (AI) model API to write its own source code for improved obfuscation and evasion. "PROMPTFLUX is written in VB Script and interacts with Gemini's API to request specific VBScript obfuscation and evasion techniques to facilitate 'just-in-time' self-modification, likely to evade static signature-based detection," Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The novel feature is part of its "Thinking Robot" component, which periodically queries the large language model (LLM), Gemini 1.5 Flash or later in this case, to obtain new code so as to sidestep detection. This, in turn, is accomplished by using a hard-coded API key to send the query to the Gemini API endpoint. The prompt sent to the model is both highly speci...