Malware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new Lua-based malware created years before the notorious Stuxnet worm that aimed to sabotage Iran's nuclear program by destroying uranium enrichment centrifuges. According to a new report published by SentinelOne, the previously undocumented cyber sabotage framework dates back to 2005, primarily targeting high-precision calculation software to tamper with results. It has been codenamed fast16 . "By combining this payload with self-propagation mechanisms, the attackers aim to produce equivalent inaccurate calculations across an entire facility," researchers Vitaly Kamluk and Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade said in an exhaustive report published this week. Fast16 is assessed to predate Stuxnet , the first known digital weapon engineered for disruptive actions , and which served as the basis for the Duqu information stealer rootkit, by at least five years. Stuxnet is widely believed to have been developed by the U.S. and Israel....

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has revealed that an unnamed federal civilian agency's Cisco Firepower device running Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software was compromised in September 2025 with a new malware called FIRESTARTER . FIRESTARTER, per CISA and the U.K.'s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), is assessed to be a backdoor designed for remote access and control. It's believed to be deployed as part of a "widespread" campaign orchestrated by an advanced persistent threat (APT) actor to obtain access to Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) firmware by exploiting now-patched security flaws such as - CVE-2025-20333 (CVSS score: 9.9) - An improper validation of user-supplied input vulnerability that could allow an authenticated, remote attacker with valid VPN user credentials to execute arbitrary code as root on an affected device by sending crafted HTTP requests. CVE-2025-20362 (CVSS score: 6.5) - An improper...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a set of malicious apps on the Apple App Store that impersonate popular cryptocurrency wallets in an attempt to steal recovery phrases and private keys since at least fall 2025. "Once launched, these apps redirect users to browser pages designed to look similar to the App Store and distribute trojanized versions of legitimate wallets," Kaspersky researcher Sergey Puzan said . "The infected apps are specifically engineered to hijack recovery phrases and private keys." The 26 apps, collectively dubbed FakeWallet , mimic various popular wallets like Bitpie, Coinbase, imToken, Ledger, MetaMask, TokenPocket, and Trust Wallet. Many of these apps have since been taken down by Apple following disclosure. There is no evidence that these apps were distributed via the Google Play Store. While malicious cryptocurrency wallets distributed in the past via bogus websites have abused iOS provisioning profiles to get users to install th...

Chinese-speaking individuals are the target of a new campaign that uses a trojanized version of SumatraPDF reader to deploy the AdaptixC2 Beacon post-exploitation agent and ultimately facilitate the abuse of Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) tunnels for remote access. Zscaler ThreatLabz, which discovered the campaign last month, has attributed it with high confidence to Tropic Trooper (aka APT23, Earth Centaur, KeyBoy, and Pirate Panda), a hacking group known for its targeting of various entities in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. It's assessed to be active since at least 2011. "The threat actors created a custom AdaptixC2 Beacon listener, leveraging GitHub as their command-and-control (C2) platform," security researcher Yin Hong Chang said in an analysis. It's believed that Chinese-speaking individuals in Taiwan, and individuals in South Korea and Japan, are the targets of the campaign. The starting point of the attack is a ZIP archive containing...

A previously undocumented threat activity cluster known as UNC6692 has been observed leveraging social engineering tactics via Microsoft Teams to deploy a custom malware suite on compromised hosts. "As with many other intrusions in recent years, UNC6692 relied heavily on impersonating IT help desk employees, convincing their victim to accept a Microsoft Teams chat invitation from an account outside their organization," Google-owned Mandiant said in a report published today. UNC6692 has been attributed to a large email campaign that's designed to overwhelm a target's inbox with a flood of spam emails, creating a false sense of urgency. The threat actor then approaches the target over Microsoft Teams by sending a message claiming to be from the IT support team to offer assistance with the email bombing problem. It's worth noting that this combination of bombarding a victim's email inbox followed by Microsoft Teams-based help desk impersonation has been a ...