Malware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A search result isn't always safe. An access request isn't always harmless. And a familiar account doesn't always mean a familiar person is using it. Simple things to remember. Yet a surprising amount of this week's trouble starts right there. Attackers are using fake websites, stolen access, and trusted tools to get into places they shouldn't be. AI is helping them build attacks faster, while also giving them new systems to target. Some intruders are staying hidden even after security holes are fixed. Others are moving stolen money through a maze of transactions. And researchers keep finding small coding mistakes that can cause much bigger problems. Different stories, but much of the trouble comes down to making something dangerous look normal. There is some good news, too. Criminal servers have been seized, and a few defenses are getting stronger. Still, plenty of things are going wrong in ways that shouldn't be this easy. Here's what turned up this w...

Cybersecurity researchers have found that lookalike domains masquerading as artificial intelligence (AI) tools are being used to serve ClickFix -style lures, browser-hijacking malware, and a set of extensions that hijack user searches. This delivery pattern has been codenamed TypoPrompting by Island. "AI-app lookalikes that turn an attempt to reach a familiar tool into a prompt to verify, install or run something else," the cybersecurity company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. In all, the campaign spans 186 bogus domains spanning 27 AI brands, including Anthropic Claude, OpenAI ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM), Microsoft Copilot, SpaceXAI Grok, DeepSeek, Mistral, Perplexity, Midjourney, ElevenLabs, Lovable, and Cursor. While one category leads to a ClickFix lure that serves a PowerShell command via a fake Cloudflare verification page, the second route takes unsuspecting users to "Security Check" pages that del...

The ongoing campaign targeting ConnectWise ScreenConnect deployments involves the exploitation of a now-patched critical security flaw in the remote access software, and not a new vulnerability, it has emerged. Blackpoint Cyber's Adversary Pursuit Group (APG), which shared the details with The Hacker News, said the recovered attacker toolkit exploits CVE-2026-84869 (CVSS score: 9.9), an improper privilege management and missing authorization vulnerability that could allow an attacker to file transfer and execute through an active remote session without authorization or host confirmation. The cybersecurity company confirmed that testing against a fully patched ScreenConnect client successfully prevents execution of the exploit's payload. "Our testing confirmed that the exploit targets CVE-2026-84869 and that the existing patch successfully blocks it," APG researchers Sam Decker and Nevan Beal said. "That's an important finding for security teams....

Starting Tuesday, an attacker used stolen credentials for 4,837 GitHub accounts to plant a secret stealer in repositories those accounts could write to, according to Aikido Security, a security software company. The stealer is built to take the secrets and cloud credentials that a repository's CI workflows can reach. It ran in at least 1,806 repositories, where the attacker has likely collected those credentials, the company says. Each attack started with a pull request titled docs: dependency audit notes, opened from a branch named wfx-docs to test whether the account could write to the repository. These test pull requests were opened in 61,764 repositories, and the stealer followed in some of them. In a separate analysis , researchers at SafeDep, which sells software supply chain security tools, counted 8,093 repositories that received malicious commits between 12:46 UTC on Tuesday and 04:36 UTC today. That count covers every repository that received malicious commits, no...

ConnectWise has taken the precautionary step of disabling five third-party extensions in partner environments following reports of unauthorized access . In an advisory posted on its site, the company said there is no evidence that the incident involves a compromise of its infrastructure or a vulnerability in the ScreenConnect software. "Our initial assessment suggests the activity may involve a threat actor's abuse of independent third-party extensions installed in partner environments," it said . "We are continuing to validate this assessment. The initial access method and full scope remain under investigation." ConnectWise has identified about 400 partner environments with at least one of the third-party extensions installed. It also emphasized that the presence of the extensions alone does not indicate or establish compromise. While these extensions provide an API capable of executing remote commands, access to that API is secured by a passphrase c...