Malware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has designated two individuals and a VPN service provider for enabling ransomware actors' and other cybercriminals' malicious activities, including ransomware attacks against Americans. The VPN, named First VPN Service ( 1VPNS ), has been accused of offering its tools to ransomware groups, along with its 45-year-old Ukrainian administrator, Dmytro Rashevskyi. The department has also sanctioned Yegeniy Vladimirovich Silayev, a Belarusian national, for selling cryptors to help conceal ransomware and other malware as safe programs to avoid being detected by security tools. First VPN was dismantled in May 2026 as part of a joint law enforcement operation by European and North American authorities for assisting criminal actors to obscure the origins of ransomware attacks, data theft, scanning, and denial-of-service attacks. The service had been operational since 2014, advertising that it neither keeps...

A campaign of 148 npm packages disguised as student web proxies turned visitors' browsers into a distributed denial-of-service botnet for roughly two weeks in May, according to new research from JFrog. The packages did not go after the developers who might install them. The operators used the registry as free hosting for a booby-trapped proxy site and let the students who came to dodge school web filters supply the attack traffic. The packages shipped under names like charlie-kirk, ilovefemboys, and miguelphonk, each carrying a proxy app branded "Lucide" and dressed as a tutoring landing page called Riverbend Tutoring or Northstar Tutoring. On the surface, the proxy worked, letting students slip past content filters to reach games and blocked sites. Underneath, it loaded a remote code loader whose payload the operators could swap at will, plus a WebSocket flood generator built to speak the Wisp proxy protocol. Anyone who opened a page joined the swarm without ...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new macOS information stealer called CrashStealer that's capable of harvesting sensitive data from compromised systems. Unlike other information stealers that are built on AppleScript droppers or Objective-C-based wrappers, CrashStealer is implemented in native C++, according to Jamf Threat Labs. "It validates the victim's login password locally before harvesting, collects broadly across browsers, cryptocurrency wallets, password managers, and the keychain, encrypts what it collects with AES-GCM before exfiltrating over libcurl, and persists by copying and re-signing itself," security researcher Thijs Xhaflaire said in a report shared with The Hacker News. CrashStealer is said to be distributed by means of a signed and Apple-notarized dropper that's distributed as a disk image file named "Werkbit.app." Because both the disk image and binary are notarized and carry a valid developer ID ("Emil Grigorov...

Somewhere right now, a security tool is quietly finding bugs faster than any human can fix them. That's supposed to be the good news. The catch is that the attackers have the same tools, pointed the other way, and they don't file tickets. That's the shape of this week. Trusted code turns on the people who installed it. Old bugs from last year are still landing because the fix sat in a queue too long. Fake installers, poisoned packages, systems left facing the open internet, and helpful little AI assistants running instructions that were never yours. The gap between "patch exists" and "already exploited" keeps shrinking, and nobody's closing it. None of it is exotic. That's what wears you down. Same ordinary mistakes, just happening faster than we can keep up. Here's the full mess, top to bottom. ⚡ Threat of the Week Progress Tells ShareFile Customers to Shut Down Storage Zone Controllers — Progress urged customers to shut down Win...

The jscrambler npm package was compromised, and simply installing its 8.14.0 release runs an infostealer on your machine. Published on July 11, 2026, the malicious version carries a preinstall hook that drops and executes a native binary, one build each for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Socket flagged the release  six minutes after it was published . If you or one of your build systems pulled it in that window, the payload has already run with whatever access your install process had. None of this is in the prior release, 8.13.0.  The package diff  shows two new files under dist/: setup.js, a small loader, and intro.js. Despite the name, intro.js is not JavaScript but a roughly 7.8MB container packing three gzip-compressed native binaries, one each for Linux, Windows, and macOS. On install, setup.js picks the binary for the host operating system, writes it under a random name in the system temp directory...