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Unknown threat actors have been distributing a trojanized version of SonicWall's SSL VPN NetExtender application to steal credentials from unsuspecting users who may have installed it. "NetExtender enables remote users to securely connect and run applications on the company network," SonicWall researcher Sravan Ganachari said . "Users can upload and download files, access network drives, and use other resources as if they were on the local network." The malicious payload delivered via the rogue VPN software has been codenamed SilentRoute by Microsoft, which detected the campaign along with the network security company. SonicWall said the malware-laced NetExtender impersonates the latest version of the software (10.3.2.27) and has been found to be distributed via a fake website that has since been taken down. The installer is digitally signed by CITYLIGHT MEDIA PRIVATE LIMITED." This suggests that the campaign is targeting users searching for NetExten...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a fresh batch of malicious npm packages linked to the ongoing Contagious Interview operation originating from North Korea. According to Socket , the ongoing supply chain attack involves 35 malicious packages that were uploaded from 24 npm accounts. These packages have been collectively downloaded over 4,000 times. The complete list of the JavaScript libraries is below - react-plaid-sdk sumsub-node-websdk vite-plugin-next-refresh vite-plugin-purify nextjs-insight vite-plugin-svgn node-loggers react-logs reactbootstraps framer-motion-ext serverlog-dispatch mongo-errorlog next-log-patcher vite-plugin-tools pixel-percent test-topdev-logger-v1 test-topdev-logger-v3 server-log-engine logbin-nodejs vite-loader-svg struct-logger flexible-loggers beautiful-plugins chalk-config jsonpacks jsonspecific jsonsecs util-buffers blur-plugins proc-watch node-orm-mongoose prior-config use-videos lucide-node, and router-parse ...

Cybersecurity researchers have detailed two novel methods that can be used to disrupt cryptocurrency mining botnets. The methods take advantage of the design of various common mining topologies in order to shut down the mining process , Akamai said in a new report published today. "We developed two techniques by leveraging the mining topologies and pool policies that enable us to reduce a cryptominer botnet's effectiveness to the point of completely shutting it down, which forces the attacker to make radical changes to their infrastructure or even abandon the entire campaign," security researcher Maor Dahan said . The techniques, the web infrastructure company said, hinge on exploiting the Stratum mining protocol such that it causes an attacker's mining proxy or wallet to be banned, effectively disrupting the operation. The first of the two approaches, dubbed bad shares, entails banning the mining proxy from the network, which, in turn, results in the shutdow...

Unidentified threat actors have been observed targeting publicly exposed Microsoft Exchange servers to inject malicious code into the login pages that harvest their credentials. Positive Technologies, in a new analysis published last week, said it identified two different kinds of keylogger code written in JavaScript on the Outlook login page - Those that save collected data to a local file accessible over the internet Those that immediately send the collected data to an external server The Russian cybersecurity vendor said the attacks have targeted 65 victims in 26 countries worldwide, and marks a continuation of a campaign that was first documented in May 2024 as targeting entities in Africa and the Middle East. At that time, the company said it had detected no less than 30 victims spanning government agencies, banks, IT companies, and educational institutions, with evidence of the first compromise dating back to 2021. The attack chains involve exploiting known flaws in M...

Misconfigured Docker instances are the target of a campaign that employs the Tor anonymity network to stealthily mine cryptocurrency in susceptible environments. "Attackers are exploiting misconfigured Docker APIs to gain access to containerized environments, then using Tor to mask their activities while deploying crypto miners," Trend Micro researchers Sunil Bharti and Shubham Singh said in an analysis published last week. In using Tor, the idea is to anonymize their origins during the installation of the miner on compromised systems. The attacks, per the cybersecurity company, commence with a request from the IP address 198.199.72[.]27 to obtain a list of all containers on the machine. If no containers are present, the attacker proceeds to create a new one based on the "alpine" Docker image and mounts the "/hostroot" directory – i.e., the root directory ("/") of the physical or virtual host machine – as a volume inside it. This behavior p...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of a new cyber attack campaign by the Russia-linked APT28 (aka UAC-0001) threat actors using Signal chat messages to deliver two previously undocumented malware families dubbedd BEARDSHELL and COVENANT. BEARDSHELL, per CERT-UA, is written in C++ and offers the ability to download and execute PowerShell scripts, as well as upload the results of the execution back to a remote server over the Icedrive API. The agency said it first observed BEARDSHELL, alongside a screenshot-taking tool named SLIMAGENT, as part of incident response efforts in March-April 2024 in a Windows computer. While there were no details available on how the infection took place at that time, the agency said it received threat intelligence from ESET more than a year later that detected evidence of unauthorized access to a "gov.ua" email account. The exact nature of the information shared was not disclosed, but it likely pertains to a...

The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have issued an advisory warning of cyber attacks mounted by the China-linked Salt Typhoon actors to breach major global telecommunications providers as part of a cyber espionage campaign. The attackers exploited a critical Cisco IOS XE software ( CVE-2023-20198 , CVSS score: 10.0) to access configuration files from three network devices registered to a Canadian telecommunications company in mid-February 2025. The threat actors are also said to have modified at least one of the files to configure a Generic Routing Encapsulation ( GRE ) tunnel, enabling traffic collection from the network. The name of the targeted company was not disclosed. Stating that the targeting likely goes beyond the telecommunications sector, the agencies said the targeting of Canadian devices may permit the threat actors to collect information from the compromised networks and use them as leverage to breach additiona...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a Go-based malware called XDigo that has been used in attacks targeting Eastern European governmental entities in March 2025. The attack chains are said to have leveraged a collection of Windows shortcut ( LNK ) files as part of a multi-stage procedure to deploy the malware, French cybersecurity company HarfangLab said . XDSpy is the name assigned to a cyber espionage that's known to target government agencies in Eastern Europe and the Balkans since 2011. It was first documented by the Belarusian CERT in early 2020.  In recent years, companies in Russia and Moldova have been targeted by various campaigns to deliver malware families like UTask, XDDown, and DSDownloader that can download additional payloads and steal sensitive information from compromised hosts. HarfangLab said it observed the threat actor leveraging a remote code execution flaw in Microsoft Windows that's triggered when processing specially crafted LNK files. The v...

Not every risk looks like an attack. Some problems start as small glitches, strange logs, or quiet delays that don't seem urgent—until they are. What if your environment is already being tested, just not in ways you expected? Some of the most dangerous moves are hidden in plain sight. It's worth asking: what patterns are we missing, and what signals are we ignoring because they don't match old playbooks? This week's reports bring those quiet signals into focus—from attacks that bypassed MFA using trusted tools, to supply chain compromises hiding behind everyday interfaces. Here's what stood out across the cybersecurity landscape: ⚡ Threat of the Week Cloudflare Blocks Massive 7.3 Tbps DDoS Attack — Cloudflare said it autonomously blocked the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack ever recorded, which hit a peak of 7.3 terabits per second (Tbps). The attack, the company said, targeted an unnamed hosting provider and delivered 37.4 terabytes in 45 seconds. It origi...

The threat actors behind the Qilin ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) scheme are now offering legal counsel for affiliates to put more pressure on victims to pay up, as the cybercrime group intensifies its activity and tries to fill the void left by its rivals. The new feature takes the form of a "Call Lawyer" feature on the affiliate panel, per Israeli cybersecurity company Cybereason. The development represents a newfound resurgence of the e-crime group as once-popular ransomware groups like LockBit, Black Cat, RansomHub, Everest, and BlackLock have suffered abrupt cessations, operational failures, and defacements. The group, also tracked as Gold Feather and Water Galura, has been active since October 2022. Data compiled from the dark web leak sites run by ransomware groups shows that Qilin led with 72 victims in April 2025. In May, it is estimated to be behind 55 attacks , putting it behind Safepay (72) and Luna Moth (67). It's also the third most active group after...

Cloudflare on Thursday said it autonomously blocked the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack ever recorded, which hit a peak of 7.3 terabits per second (Tbps). The attack, which was detected in mid-May 2025, targeted an unnamed hosting provider. "Hosting providers and critical Internet infrastructure have increasingly become targets of DDoS attacks," Cloudflare's Omer Yoachimik said . "The 7.3 Tbps attack delivered 37.4 terabytes in 45 seconds." Earlier this January, the web infrastructure and security company said it had mitigated a 5.6 Tbps DDoS attack aimed at an unnamed internet service provider (ISP) from Eastern Asia. The attack originated from a Mirai-variant botnet in October 2024. Then in April 2025, Cloudflare revealed it defended against a massive 6.5 Tbps flood that likely emanated from Eleven11bot, a botnet comprising roughly 30,000 webcams and video recorders. The hyper-volumetric attack lasted about 49 seconds. The 7.3 Tbps...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new campaign in which the threat actors have published more than 67 GitHub repositories that claim to offer Python-based hacking tools, but deliver trojanized payloads instead. The activity, codenamed Banana Squad by ReversingLabs, is assessed to be a continuation of a rogue Python campaign that was identified in 2023 as targeting the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository with bogus packages that were downloaded over 75,000 times and came with information-stealing capabilities on Windows systems. The findings build on a previous report from the SANS's Internet Storm Center in November 2024 that detailed a supposed "steam-account-checker" tool hosted on GitHub, which incorporated stealthy features to download additional Python payloads that can inject malicious code into the Exodus cryptocurrency wallet app and harvest sensitive data to an external server ("dieserbenni[.]ru"). Further analysis of the repository a...

Cybersecurity researchers have exposed the inner workings of an Android malware called AntiDot that has compromised over 3,775 devices as part of 273 unique campaigns. "Operated by the financially motivated threat actor LARVA-398, AntiDot is actively sold as a Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) on underground forums and has been linked to a wide range of mobile campaigns," PRODAFT said in a report shared with The Hacker News. AntiDot is advertised as a "three-in-one" solution with capabilities to record the device screen by abusing Android's accessibility services, intercept SMS messages, and extract sensitive data from third-party applications. The Android botnet is suspected to be delivered via malicious advertising networks or through highly tailored phishing campaigns based on activity that indicates selective targeting of victims based on language and geographic location. AntiDot was first publicly documented in May 2024 after it was spotted being distribu...

The North Korea-aligned threat actor known as BlueNoroff has been observed targeting an employee in the Web3 sector with deceptive Zoom calls featuring deepfaked company executives to trick them into installing malware on their Apple macOS devices. Huntress, which revealed details of the cyber intrusion, said the attack targeted an unnamed cryptocurrency foundation employee, who received a message from an external contact on Telegram. "The message requested time to speak to the employee, and the attacker sent a Calendly link to set up meeting time," security researchers Alden Schmidt, Stuart Ashenbrenner, and Jonathan Semon said . "The Calendly link was for a Google Meet event, but when clicked, the URL redirects the end user to a fake Zoom domain controlled by the threat actor." After several weeks, the employee is said to have joined a group Zoom meeting that included several deepfakes of known members of the senior leadership of their company, along with oth...

Most cyberattacks today don't start with loud alarms or broken firewalls. They start quietly—inside tools and websites your business already trusts. It's called " Living Off Trusted Sites " (LOTS)—and it's the new favorite strategy of modern attackers. Instead of breaking in, they blend in. Hackers are using well-known platforms like Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, and Slack as launchpads. They hide malicious code inside routine traffic, making it incredibly difficult for traditional defenses to detect them. And here's the scary part: many security teams don't even realize it's happening—until it's too late. Why You're Not Seeing These Attacks LOTS tactics don't look suspicious at first glance. There's no malware signature to flag, and no unusual IP address to trace. It's legitimate traffic—until it's not. Attackers are exploiting: Common business tools like Teams, Zoom, and GitHub Shortened or vanity URLs to redirect users Trusted cloud services to host malicious payloads ...

A new campaign is making use of Cloudflare Tunnel subdomains to host malicious payloads and deliver them via malicious attachments embedded in phishing emails. The ongoing campaign has been codenamed SERPENTINE#CLOUD by Securonix. It leverages "the Cloudflare Tunnel infrastructure and Python-based loaders to deliver memory-injected payloads through a chain of shortcut files and obfuscated scripts," security researcher Tim Peck said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The attack starts with sending payment- or invoice-themed phishing emails bearing a link to a zipped document that contains a Windows shortcut (LNK) file. These shortcuts are disguised as documents to trick victims into opening them, effectively activating the infection sequence. The elaborate multi-step process culminates in the execution of a Python-based shellcode loader that executes payloads packed with the open-source Donut loader entirely in memory. Securonix said the campaign has targeted the...

A new multi-stage malware campaign is targeting Minecraft users with a Java-based malware that employs a distribution-as-service (DaaS) offering called Stargazers Ghost Network . "The campaigns resulted in a multi-stage attack chain targeting Minecraft users specifically," Check Point researchers Jaromír Hořejší and Antonis Terefos said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The malware was impersonating Oringo and Taunahi, which are 'Scripts and macros tools' (aka cheats). Both the first and second stages are developed in Java and can only be executed if the Minecraft runtime is installed on the host machine." The end goal of the attack is to trick players into downloading a Minecraft mod from GitHub and deliver a .NET information stealer with comprehensive data theft capabilities. The campaign was first detected by the cybersecurity company in March 2025. What makes the activity notable is its use of an illicit offering called the Stargazers Ghost...