Malware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Threat actors are leveraging the trusted Node.js JavaScript runtime in multiple cyber attacks as a way to deploy malicious payloads. According to a new report published by the Symantec Threat Hunter Team today, the attack method has been put to use in attacks targeting government departments, technology companies, and hotels since February 2026. "The technique's appeal is that node.exe (the binary that runs Node.js) is a legitimate, signed developer tool," the Broadcom-owned cybersecurity division said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The attacker's malicious code lives in interpreted scripts rather than in a binary, making it less likely to trigger signature-based detection, while a registry Run key entry can relaunch the payload at every login." In one intrusion observed between March 23 and July 25, 2026, targeting an unspecified Asian technology company, attackers downloaded the official Node.js installer from nodejs[.]org and used the t...

In early August, GitGuardian researchers found that a recent Shai-Hulud infostealer worm variant had evolved to scan for credentials across 469 locations across developer environments , Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) tooling, cloud configurations, and even AI tool configs. Earlier variants of the infostealer worm only checked 189 paths. The jump says a lot. Attackers have stopped trying to break trust relationships and started using the credentials that already make those relationships work. Software supply chains have always depended on trust.  Developers trust package registries. Organizations trust maintainers. CI/CD systems trust the credentials and identities they're given. Applications trust the dependencies they pull down during a build.  Attackers realized they don't need to break any of that. They just needed to find where the credentials and standing privileges already sit. This is what is driving the current focus on software supply ...

The iPhone belonging to a member of Serbia's student protest movement was infected with NSO Group's Pegasus spyware , according to new findings from the Citizen Lab in collaboration with the SHARE Foundation. "Our analysis confirmed that an iMessage zero-click exploit was used to infect the device with NSO Group's Pegasus spyware," the Citizen Lab said . "We found high-confidence indicators of infection from a period across December 2025 – January 2026; however, this does not preclude the possibility of additional infections." It's assessed that the zero-click exploit used in the attack targeted Apple iMessage, and has been addressed by Apple with iOS 18.4.1 , which was released in April 2025. The discovery comes in the aftermath of Apple sending a new set of threat notifications to customers whom it suspected may have been targeted by mercenary spyware attacks. The alerts were sent to an unspecified number of users in 110 countries. In a...

An active malware campaign is using bogus software-download websites to impersonate trusted vendors and distribute malicious installers. "The campaign has targeted users looking to download popular software and has resulted in compromises across multiple organizations and industries, primarily affecting China-based operations of multinational organizations and Chinese-speaking users," Microsoft said . The installers, once launched, deploy malware that's capable of setting up persistence, weakening security protections, and communicating with attacker-controlled infrastructure. The activity has resulted in victims spanning healthcare, manufacturing, gaming, technology, logistics, government, and education sectors. The Windows maker has assessed with moderate confidence that the campaign is consistent with a Chinese threat cluster dubbed Silver Fox (aka Yinhu), which has a track record of using spoofed vendor download pages to distribute Gh0st RAT and ValleyRAT (a...

A Chinese-speaking cybercrime cluster known as Gambling Goblin has been observed installing malicious Apache modules on compromised web servers run by Brazilian government and educational institutions, and using them to divert visitors to attacker-controlled pages promoting online gambling and sports betting. Check Point Research said it has tracked the campaign since mid-2025. The modules reverse-proxy visitors to a set of phishing pages while the traffic still appears to originate from the legitimate domain. The site's own security headers are stripped, allowing the injected content to run freely. Those pages pose as trusted app stores including Google Play, Microsoft Store, and Amazon, and push online gambling and sports betting behind that facade. Check Point said the likely goal is search engine optimization (SEO) manipulation at scale, with compromised high-reputation domains, many of them Brazilian government sites, chained together to inflate search rankings. AN...