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A solo Russian-speaking threat actor known as " bandcampro " outsourced a chunk of their operations to Google's open-source Gemini CLI artificial intelligence (AI) and commandeered a live botnet. The findings come from an analysis of 200 Gemini CLI session logs between March 19 and April 21, 2026, which found the threat actor using AI, among other things, to crack passwords, set up a residential proxy, compromise WordPress merchants, and plan a phone-based cryptocurrency fraud scheme aimed at elderly people in the U.S. and Canada. "The logs documented how the threat actor used an AI agent to migrate a command-and-control (C&C) server, and to control a small-scale botnet, among other hacking activities," Trend Micro researchers Joseph C Chen, Philippe Lin, Lucas Silva, Vladimir Kropotov, and Fyodor Yarochkin said . "The entire C&C operation fits in three plaintext files totaling roughly 5 KB, making it highly replicable and effectively disposa...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new software supply chain attack codenamed SleeperGem targeting the Ruby ecosystem after three malicious gems were published to RubyGems with the end goal of serving additional payloads. The rogue gems are listed below - git_credential_manager (versions 2.8.0, 2.8.1, 2.8.2, 2.8.3) - Published on July 18, 2026 Dendreo (versions 1.1.3, 1.1.4) - Published on October 14, 2017 fastlane-plugin-run_tests_firebase_testlab (version 0.3.2) - Published on February 06, 2018 "Each malicious release is a loader," StepSecurity said in an analysis. "It fetches a second stage from an attacker controlled Forgejo host, checks whether it is running in a build system and skips if it is, and on a developer machine it drops a native daemon and installs persistence." One aspect of the attack that immediately stands out is that "git_credential_manager" impersonates the official Microsoft Git Credential Manager, while t...

Russian state-sponsored threat actors have been observed leveraging the infamous ClickFix strategy to trick Ukrainian targets into infecting their own machines with data-stealing malware. According to the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA), the activity has been attributed to UAC-0145 , a sub-cluster within Sandworm , an advanced hacking unit affiliated with GRU, Russia's primary foreign military intelligence agency. In these attacks, threat actors have been found to leverage fake CAPTCHA checks on compromised websites that instruct prospective targets to execute a PowerShell command in the terminal. "The mentioned command, as an example, could be intended for downloading and saving a VBS file in the Startup autorun directory; one of the variants of such a program was called GHETTOVIBE," CERT-UA said in an alert. The attacks also involve the use of SCOUTCURL, a PowerShell script that performs basic reconnaissance by harvesting details about t...

A previously undocumented threat actor has been attributed to the exploitation of recently disclosed SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 1000 series VPN appliances as zero-days prior their public disclosure since June 22, 2026. Cybersecurity company Volexity is tracking the activity under the moniker UTA0533 . The discovery was made following an incident response investigation earlier this month. The impacted organization has not been identified. "This threat actor was observed using multiple zero-day exploits, malware designed specifically for SonicWall SMA VPN appliances, as well as other attacker tradecraft," security researchers Sean Koessel and Steven Adair said in an analysis. The vulnerabilities in question are CVE-2026-15409 (CVSS score: 10.0) and CVE-2026-15410 (CVSS score: 7.2), both of which could be chained to facilitate arbitrary command execution and take over susceptible devices. Patches for both the vulnerabilities were released by SonicWall this wee...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a cluster of seven malicious npm packages targeting the Vite frontend tooling ecosystem as part of a software supply chain attack. The malicious package campaign, codenamed ViteVenom by Checkmarx, marks an expansion of ChainVeil , which was observed using an "unprecedented" four-tier blockchain-based command-and-control (C2) infrastructure spanning Tron, Aptos, and Binance Smart Chain to deliver a remote access trojan (RAT) capable reverse shell, credential harvesting, file exfiltration, and persistent backdoor injection. "This tactic makes disabling or destroying the C2 infrastructure extremely difficult," Checkmarx researcher Pavan Gudimalla said in an analysis published last month. The activity has been attributed to a threat actor named SuccessKey, with evidence of malicious activity detected as far back as February 27, 2026, when cryptocurrency wallets linked to ViteVenom were activated. While the typosquats pub...