Malware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Thursday released an advisory warning of North Korean state-sponsored threat actors leveraging malicious QR codes in spear-phishing campaigns targeting entities in the country. "As of 2025, Kimsuky actors have targeted think tanks, academic institutions, and both U.S. and foreign government entities with embedded malicious Quick Response (QR) codes in spear-phishing campaigns," the FBI said in the flash alert. "This type of spear-phishing attack is referred to as quishing." The use of QR codes for phishing is a tactic that forces victims to shift from a machine that's secured by enterprise policies to a mobile device that may not offer the same level of protection, effectively allowing threat actors to bypass traditional defenses. Kimsuky, also tracked as APT43, Black Banshee, Emerald Sleet, Springtail, TA427, and Velvet Chollima, is a threat group that's assessed to be affiliated with North Korea's...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new campaign that uses WhatsApp as a distribution vector for a Windows banking trojan called Astaroth in attacks targeting Brazil. The campaign has been codenamed Boto Cor-de-Rosa by Acronis Threat Research Unit. "The malware retrieves the victim's WhatsApp contact list and automatically sends malicious messages to each contact to further spread the infection," the cybersecurity company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "While the core Astaroth payload remains written in Delphi and its installer relies on Visual Basic script, the newly added WhatsApp-based worm module is implemented entirely in Python, highlighting the threat actors' growing use of multi-language modular components." Astaroth, also called Guildma, is a banking malware that has been detected in the wild since 2015, primarily targeting users in Latin America, notably Brazil, to facilitate data theft. In 2024, two diffe...

A China-nexus threat actor known as UAT-7290 has been attributed to espionage-focused intrusions against entities in South Asia and Southeastern Europe. The activity cluster, which has been active since at least 2022, primarily focuses on extensive technical reconnaissance of target organizations before initiating attacks, ultimately leading to the deployment of malware families such as RushDrop, DriveSwitch, and SilentRaid, according to a Cisco Talos report published today. "In addition to conducting espionage-focused attacks where UAT-7290 burrows deep inside a victim enterprise's network infrastructure, their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and tooling suggest that this actor also establishes Operational Relay Box (ORBs) nodes," researchers Asheer Malhotra, Vitor Ventura, and Brandon White said . "The ORB infrastructure may then be used by other China-nexus actors in their malicious operations, signifying UAT-7290's dual role as an espionage-motiva...

The internet never stays quiet. Every week, new hacks, scams, and security problems show up somewhere. This week's stories show how fast attackers change their tricks, how small mistakes turn into big risks, and how the same old tools keep finding new ways to break in. Read on to catch up before the next wave hits. Honeypot Traps Hackers Hackers Fall for Resecurity's Honeypot Cybersecurity company Resecurity revealed that it deliberately lured threat actors who claimed to be associated with Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters ( SLH ) into a trap, after the group claimed on Telegram that it had hacked the company and stolen internal and client data. The company said it set up a honeytrap account populated with fake data designed to resemble real-world business data and planted a fake account on an underground marketplace for compromised credentials after it uncovered a threat actor attempting to conduct malicious activity targeting its resou...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered three malicious npm packages that are designed to deliver a previously undocumented malware called NodeCordRAT . The names of the packages, all of which were taken down as of November 2025, are listed below. They were uploaded by a user named "wenmoonx." bitcoin-main-lib (2,300 Downloads) bitcoin-lib-js (193 Downloads) bip40 (970 Downloads) "The bitcoin-main-lib and bitcoin-lib-js packages execute a postinstall.cjs script during installation, which installs bip40, the package that contains the malicious payload," Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers Satyam Singh and Lakhan Parashar said. "This final payload, named NodeCordRAT by ThreatLabz, is a remote access trojan (RAT) with data-stealing capabilities." NodeCordRAT gets its name from the use of npm as a propagation vector and Discord servers for command-and-control (C2) communications. The malware is equipped to steal Google Chrome credentials, API tokens,...