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A lot of this week’s trouble starts with something that looks close enough. A familiar repo. A useful installer. A harmless sync setting. Then the handoff goes bad, the box starts talking to someone else, and the damage moves faster than the explanation. Old bugs are back, weak defaults are earning their keep, and some attack paths are so plain they barely feel like research. Here’s the mess. Game cheats drop spyware 11 Malicious NuGet Tools Masquerade as Game Cheats to Drop Windows Surveillance Payload Cybersecurity researchers 11 malicious NuGet packages published as .NET command-line tools that present themselves as game utilities, bots, and "panels," each of which act as a first-stage downloader responsible for fetching and executing a second-stage Python payload named "pepesoft.exe" from GitHub Releases and Hugging Face paths under the username "pepegit666," along with a dormant BitTorrent fallback...

Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to a new modular malware called TELEPUZ that's been spreading via websites infected with ClickFix lures since late April 2026. "The malware is full-featured, lightweight, and modular," Elastic Security Labs researcher Cyril François said in a technical report. "While the number of C2 [command-and-control] domains is currently small, the daily volume of builds uploaded to VirusTotal and the rapid pace of updates indicate active development and likely further growth." The disclosure makes it the second new threat actor after SCMBANKER to be propagated via ClickFix , a pervasive social engineering attack that tricks users into manually running malicious commands by disguising them as innocent fixes for fake browser errors, software updates, or CAPTCHA verifications. Underpinning the technique is an approach called clipboard hijacking. Because web pages using ClickFix inject malicious script or commands into...

ClickLock Stealer , a new macOS infostealer, answers a victim's refusal by killing their apps on a loop until they hand over the login password. It arrives as a command pasted into Terminal, asks for the password behind a fake system dialog, and when the victim cancels, installs two LaunchAgents and quietly exits. At the next login, Finder, the Dock, Spotlight, Terminal, Activity Monitor, and the major browsers start dying every 210 milliseconds, for up to 83 hours, leaving one password box on a dead desktop. Type it, and the machine gives up the Keychain, the browser credentials, and the crypto wallets. Group-IB's telemetry counts at least 100 targets across 33 countries since May, over half of them in Europe. Its analysts assume from the code structure that the malware is still under development. Uploaded to VirusTotal on June 9, the orchestrator script had  zero detections  there when Group-IB analyzed it. And the analysts never found the front door. They have the ...

More than 20 Brazilian government websites were hijacked and turned into malware delivery channels in an active PhantomEnigma campaign uncovered by ANY.RUN , a leading provider of interactive malware analysis and threat intelligence solutions. The investigation revealed previously undocumented backdoor behavior, hidden infrastructure relationships, and multiple attack arms behind a campaign putting banks and public agencies at risk. By connecting hundreds of seemingly unrelated sandbox sessions, ANY.RUN researchers exposed the operation’s broader scope and showed how trusted .gov.br links and authenticated emails helped the activity remain hidden. For the complete technical analysis, infrastructure details, indicators, and detection guidance, read the full PhantomEnigma investigation report Trusted Government Infrastructure Became the Lure The attack began with fake police-themed documents presented as official “Ofício Polícia Civil” or “Procuração Digital” notices. Some ...

An advanced malware previously attributed to a China-linked threat actor has resurfaced after more than four years within a Taiwan manufacturing firm, along with a previously unreported backdoor dubbed Stupig . Daxin ("srt64.sys"), as the kernel-mode rootkit is referred to, was first documented by Broadcom-owned Symantec in March 2022, with evidence indicating its use in targeted attacks aimed at governments and other critical infrastructure targets since 2013. The latest findings from the Symantec and Carbon Black Threat Hunter Team show that Daxin is still operational, after it was found running on a compromised host in Taiwan in 2026. The same machine, belonging to a Taiwan-based subsidiary of a multinational high-tech manufacturer, is also said to have been infected with Stupig ("a.dll" or "kbdus1.dll"). The file name is an attempt to masquerade as "kbdus.dll," a legitimate Microsoft DLL associated with the U.S. English keyboard layout...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a previously unreported Internet-of-Things (IoT) botnet framework dubbed TuxBot v3 Evolution that shows signs of being developed with assistance from a large language model (LLM), albeit with not so successful results. "While the AI complied with their request to generate botnet code, it included a safety disclaimer that the developer failed to remove before shipping," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said . "Although the LLM clearly aided in constructing the botnet, several functions in the analyzed samples failed to work correctly." The cybersecurity company said a manual code review would have resolved these errors and that it's possible more polished iterations of the malware exist out there in the wild. The botnet framework consists of multiple components: a C-based bot agent that cross-compiles for multiple architectures (e.g., ARM, MIPS, MIPSEL, MIPS64, x86_64, PowerPC, and RISC-V), a Go-based command-...

A malware framework called OkoBot has been running on Windows machines since April 2025, and one of its modules is built to con hardware wallet owners out of their recovery phrase. On an infected PC, the request comes from inside the wallet's own desktop software. Sometimes it waits until you plug the device in first. The page is malicious. The app around it is the real one you installed, and the phrase is the wallet. Kaspersky's GReAT team  published the teardown  on Wednesday, counting hundreds of victims in its telemetry across more than 25 countries. The largest share of attacked users is in Brazil, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, and Türkiye. How many of them typed a phrase in, the report does not say. OkoBot carries more than 20 payloads and implants and was still active as of the July 15 report. SeedHunter Waits for the Device SeedHunter is the OkoBot module that steals the phrase. Once the framework lands, it watches for Trezor Suite, Ledger Wallet, and Ledger Live...

Four compromised npm packages in the @asyncapi namespace have been observed distributing a multi-stage botnet loader, according to findings from OX Security , SafeDep , Socket , and StepSecurity . The affected packages are listed below - @asyncapi/generator-helpers@1.1.1 @asyncapi/generator-components@0.7.1 @asyncapi/generator@3.3.1 @asyncapi/specs(v6.11.2, v6.11.2-alpha.1) "The compromised packages deploy an obfuscated first-stage payload that downloads an encrypted second-stage payload, identified as Miasma, from IPFS," Socket said. The poisoned packages ship a hidden JavaScript implant, with each of them containing an injected source file that decodes to the same second-stage downloader. Unlike previous iterations that leveraged install hooks to trigger the execution of a JavaScript payload, the malicious code in this case is run when the infected module is loaded by Node.js, after which it launches a detached background node that downloads and execute...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a previously undocumented Rust-based remote access trojan (RAT) codenamed LabubaRAT that masquerades as NVIDIA software to blend into target environments. "LabubaRAT creates a reusable foothold for hands-on activity," Blackpoint Cyber researchers Sam Decker and Nevan Beal said in an analysis published today. "Once deployed, it can profile the host, identify security tools, receive operator commands, move files, capture screenshots, and proxy traffic through the affected system." The implant also supports multiple communication methods, including HTTPS, WebView2, and DNS tunneling, allowing attackers to maintain access to compromised hosts even if one pathway is detected and closed off. There are some signs that LabubuRAT is being offered under a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model. The starting point of the attack chain is an executable named "nvidia-sysruntime.exe," which impersonates NVIDIA's container ru...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered 11 old, Microsoft-signed, Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) applications that could be abused to bypass Secure Boot on most systems using the modern firmware standard. "An attacker exploiting one of these vulnerable applications can execute untrusted code during system boot, enabling deployment of malicious UEFI bootkits or other malware," ESET researcher Martin Smolár said in a report published today. The UEFI shim bootloaders expose any UEFI-based machine that trusts Microsoft's " Microsoft Corporation UEFI CA 2011 " third-party UEFI certificate authority (CA) certificate, irrespective of the installed operating system. The certificate is used to sign third-party boot components intended to run under Secure Boot. It expired as of June 27, 2026, and has been replaced by Microsoft UEFI CA 2023 and Microsoft Option ROM UEFI CA 2023. The shim is a lightweight, open-source UEFI bootloader that acts as an ...

The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has designated two individuals and a VPN service provider for enabling ransomware actors' and other cybercriminals' malicious activities, including ransomware attacks against Americans. The VPN, named First VPN Service ( 1VPNS ), has been accused of offering its tools to ransomware groups, along with its 45-year-old Ukrainian administrator, Dmytro Rashevskyi. The department has also sanctioned Yegeniy Vladimirovich Silayev, a Belarusian national, for selling cryptors to help conceal ransomware and other malware as safe programs to avoid being detected by security tools. First VPN was dismantled in May 2026 as part of a joint law enforcement operation by European and North American authorities for assisting criminal actors to obscure the origins of ransomware attacks, data theft, scanning, and denial-of-service attacks. The service had been operational since 2014, advertising that it neither keeps...

A campaign of 148 npm packages disguised as student web proxies turned visitors' browsers into a distributed denial-of-service botnet for roughly two weeks in May, according to new research from JFrog. The packages did not go after the developers who might install them. The operators used the registry as free hosting for a booby-trapped proxy site and let the students who came to dodge school web filters supply the attack traffic. The packages shipped under names like charlie-kirk, ilovefemboys, and miguelphonk, each carrying a proxy app branded "Lucide" and dressed as a tutoring landing page called Riverbend Tutoring or Northstar Tutoring. On the surface, the proxy worked, letting students slip past content filters to reach games and blocked sites. Underneath, it loaded a remote code loader whose payload the operators could swap at will, plus a WebSocket flood generator built to speak the Wisp proxy protocol. Anyone who opened a page joined the swarm without ...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new macOS information stealer called CrashStealer that's capable of harvesting sensitive data from compromised systems. Unlike other information stealers that are built on AppleScript droppers or Objective-C-based wrappers, CrashStealer is implemented in native C++, according to Jamf Threat Labs. "It validates the victim's login password locally before harvesting, collects broadly across browsers, cryptocurrency wallets, password managers, and the keychain, encrypts what it collects with AES-GCM before exfiltrating over libcurl, and persists by copying and re-signing itself," security researcher Thijs Xhaflaire said in a report shared with The Hacker News. CrashStealer is said to be distributed by means of a signed and Apple-notarized dropper that's distributed as a disk image file named "Werkbit.app." Because both the disk image and binary are notarized and carry a valid developer ID ("Emil Grigorov...

Somewhere right now, a security tool is quietly finding bugs faster than any human can fix them. That's supposed to be the good news. The catch is that the attackers have the same tools, pointed the other way, and they don't file tickets. That's the shape of this week. Trusted code turns on the people who installed it. Old bugs from last year are still landing because the fix sat in a queue too long. Fake installers, poisoned packages, systems left facing the open internet, and helpful little AI assistants running instructions that were never yours. The gap between "patch exists" and "already exploited" keeps shrinking, and nobody's closing it. None of it is exotic. That's what wears you down. Same ordinary mistakes, just happening faster than we can keep up. Here's the full mess, top to bottom. ⚡ Threat of the Week Progress Tells ShareFile Customers to Shut Down Storage Zone Controllers — Progress urged customers to shut down Win...

The jscrambler npm package was compromised, and simply installing its 8.14.0 release runs an infostealer on your machine. Published on July 11, 2026, the malicious version carries a preinstall hook that drops and executes a native binary, one build each for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Socket flagged the release  six minutes after it was published . If you or one of your build systems pulled it in that window, the payload has already run with whatever access your install process had. None of this is in the prior release, 8.13.0.  The package diff  shows two new files under dist/: setup.js, a small loader, and intro.js. Despite the name, intro.js is not JavaScript but a roughly 7.8MB container packing three gzip-compressed native binaries, one each for Linux, Windows, and macOS. On install, setup.js picks the binary for the host operating system, writes it under a random name in the system temp directory...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of sustained cyber espionage activity against several Pakistani law enforcement organizations undertaken by suspected China- and India-aligned threat actors between February 2024 and April 2026. "At Balochistan Police, the compromised assets included servers hosting web applications that manage police and citizen data, such as criminal and biometric records," Aleksandar Milenkoski, principal threat researcher at SentinelOne SentinelLABS, said in a report published this week. The activity targeted network appliances and servers hosting web applications that manage biometric records, hotel and tenant registrations linked to national identity records, criminal case files, and personnel records. The China-nexus threat actor is also said to have compromised one of these web applications to deploy a custom implant masquerading as a portal update. The application in question, named Complaint Management System (CMS), serves pol...

Unknown threat actors compromised the Injective Labs SDK project's GitHub repository and leveraged it to publish a malicious package on the npm registry to steal cryptocurrency wallet private keys and mnemonic seed phrases. The compromised version, @injectivelabs/sdk-ts@1.20.21 , came embedded with fake telemetry functionality that exfiltrated data from cryptocurrency wallets. The version was released on July 8, 2026, but has since been deprecated on the registry. That said, the release artifacts belonging to the compromised version are still available for download from GitHub as of writing. "The malicious functionality was introduced to the project's official GitHub repository through commits submitted by a GitHub account belonging to a developer with an established history of contributions to the repository," Socket said . The software supply chain security firm said the threat actor behind the attack also published version 1.20.21 across 17 additional @inj...

The China-linked cybercrime group known as Silver Fox has been attributed to a new Rust-based remote access trojan (RAR) called MODBEACON . Chinese cybersecurity company QiAnXin said that while the threat cluster may appear like a low-sophistication, high-activity operation that propagates malware via counterfeit installers using SEO poisoning techniques, it belies their true organizational structure , which compromises multiple distributors. "These distributors conduct activities across Asia using counterfeit software installers distributed through SEO campaigns, leveraging variants of Gh0st RAT and WinOS (ValleyRAT) trojan families," QiAnXin said . One such campaign observed in mid-June 2026 involved a distributor delivering a previously undocumented modular RAT targeting technology, education, and state-owned enterprises in the country. MODBEACON's requested command-and-control (C2) infrastructure is hosted on Amazon and Cloudflare's Content Delivery Networ...

A cybercrime crew left one of its own servers wide open on the internet for three weeks, and it exposed the operation's inner workings: the hacking tools, the activity logs, and target lists naming more than 1.4 million websites. Far fewer were actually broken into, but the exposed files showed researchers how a mass site-hacking operation runs from the inside. The operation, now tracked as WP-SHELLSTORM , is what  SOCRadar  calls a webshell access brokerage: a crew that breaks into sites at scale, plants a hidden backdoor (a "webshell") on each, and packages that access for resale. The strongest activity hit WordPress sites running out-of-date plugins. If you run WordPress or Joomla, the two flaws that mattered most were in the Breeze caching plugin and Joomla's JCE editor; skip to the checklist below if that's you. A forgotten server Two teams dug into the same exposed folder. SOCRadar's threat intelligence team spotted it on June 11, 2026, on a U...

Microsoft has taken apart a destructive Windows backdoor it calls GigaWiper . What stands out is how it is built: not one tool but three older destructive programs bolted into one, offered as commands the operator can choose from. Each is a different way to break a machine: wipe the whole disk, overwrite the Windows drive, or run fake "ransomware" that scrambles files with a key it never saves. Because this is malware and not a single flaw, there is no patch to chase; GigaWiper is what an attacker runs after they are already inside, which makes early detection and clean, offline backups the real defense. The same malicious files show up in a second report under another name: BLUERABBIT , a backdoor Binary Defense flagged last month . Microsoft lists four hashes for the GigaWiper backdoor ; Binary Defense lists the same four for BLUERABBIT , and both command servers match. Binary Defense, citing Google's Threat Intelligence Group, ties the malware to a likely Ir...