Malware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new botnet loader called Aeternum C2 that uses a blockchain-based command-and-control (C2) infrastructure to make it resilient to takedown efforts. "Instead of relying on traditional servers or domains for command-and-control, Aeternum stores its instructions on the public Polygon blockchain," Qrator Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This network is widely used by decentralized applications, including Polymarket, the world's largest prediction market. This approach makes Aeternum's C2 infrastructure effectively permanent and resistant to traditional takedown methods." This is not the first time botnets have been found relying on blockchain for C2. In 2021, Google said it took steps to disrupt a botnet known as Glupteba that uses the Bitcoin blockchain as a backup C2 mechanism to fetch the actual C2 server address. Details of Aeternum C2 first emerged in December 2025, when Outpos...

A previously undocumented threat activity cluster has been attributed to an ongoing malicious campaign targeting education and healthcare sectors in the U.S. since at least December 2025. The campaign is being tracked by Cisco Talos under the moniker UAT-10027 . The end goal of the attacks is to deliver a never-before-seen backdoor codenamed Dohdoor. "Dohdoor utilizes the DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) technique for command-and-control (C2) communications and has the ability to download and execute other payload binaries reflectively," security researchers Alex Karkins and Chetan Raghuprasad said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. Although the initial access vector used in the campaign is currently not known, it's suspected to involve the use of social engineering phishing techniques, leading to the execution of a PowerShell script. The script then proceeds to download and run a Windows batch script from a remote staging server, which, for its part, facilitat...

Nothing here looks dramatic at first glance. That’s the point. Many of this week’s threats begin with something ordinary, like an ad, a meeting invite, or a software update. Behind the scenes, the tactics are sharper. Access happens faster. Control is established sooner. Cleanup becomes harder. Here is a quick look at the signals worth paying attention to. AI-powered command execution Kali Linux Integrates Claude AI Assistant via MCP Kali Linux, an advanced penetration testing Linux distribution used for ethical hacking and network security assessments, has added an integration with Anthropic's Claude large language model through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to issue commands in natural language and translate them into technical commands. Belarus-linked Android spyware ResidentBat Infrastructure Analyzed ResidentBat is an Android spyware implant used by Belarusian autho...

A "coordinated developer-targeting campaign" is using malicious repositories disguised as legitimate Next.js projects and technical assessments to trick victims into executing them and establish persistent access to compromised machines. "The activity aligns with a broader cluster of threats that use job-themed lures to blend into routine developer workflows and increase the likelihood of code execution," the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team said in a report published this week. The tech giant said the campaign is characterized by the use of multiple entry points that lead to the same outcome, where attacker-controlled JavaScript is retrieved at runtime and executed to facilitate command-and-control (C2). The attacks rely on the threat actors setting up fake repositories on trusted developer platforms like Bitbucket, using names like "Cryptan-Platform-MVP1" to trick developers looking for jobs into running as part of an assessment process. F...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new malicious package discovered on the NuGet Gallery, impersonating a library from financial services firm Stripe in an attempt to target the financial sector. The package, codenamed StripeApi.Net, attempts to masquerade as Stripe.net , a legitimate library from Stripe that has over 75 million downloads. It was uploaded by a user named StripePayments on February 16, 2026. The package is no longer available. "The NuGet page for the malicious package is set up to resemble the official Stripe.net package as closely as possible," ReversingLabs Petar Kirhmajer said . "It uses the same icon as the legitimate package and contains a nearly identical readme, only swapping the 'Stripe.net' references to read 'Stripe-net.'" In a further effort to lend credibility to the typosquatted package, the threat actor behind the campaign is said to have artificially inflated the download count to more than 180,00...