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A vulnerability in GitHub Codespaces could have been exploited by bad actors to seize control of repositories by injecting malicious Copilot instructions in a GitHub issue. The artificial intelligence (AI)-driven vulnerability has been codenamed RoguePilot by Orca Security. It has since been patched by Microsoft following responsible disclosure. "Attackers can craft hidden instructions inside a GitHub issue that are automatically processed by GitHub Copilot, giving them silent control of the in-codespaces AI agent," security researcher Roi Nisimi said in a report. The vulnerability has been described as a case of passive or indirect prompt injection where a malicious instruction is embedded within data or content that's processed by the large language model (LLM), causing it to produce unintended outputs or carry out arbitrary actions. The cloud security company also called it a type of AI-mediated supply chain attack that induces the LLM to automatically execute ...

A Russia-aligned threat actor has been observed targeting a European financial institution as part of a social engineering attack to likely facilitate intelligence gathering or financial theft, signaling a possible expansion of the threat actor's targeting beyond Ukraine and into entities supporting the war-torn nation . The activity, which targeted an unnamed entity involved in regional development and reconstruction initiatives, has been attributed to a cybercrime group tracked as UAC-0050 (aka DaVinci Group ). BlueVoyant has designated the name Mercenary Akula to the threat cluster. The attack was observed earlier this month. "The attack spoofed a Ukrainian judicial domain to deliver an email containing a link to a remote access payload," researchers Patrick McHale and Joshua Green said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The target was a senior legal and policy advisor involved in procurement, a role with privileged insight into institutional operation...

The North Korea-linked Lazarus Group (aka Diamond Sleet and Pompilus) has been observed using Medusa ransomware in an attack targeting an unnamed entity in the Middle East, according to a new report by the Symantec and Carbon Black Threat Hunter Team. Broadcom's threat intelligence division said it also identified the same threat actors mounting an unsuccessful attack against a healthcare organization in the U.S. Medusa is a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation launched by a cybercrime group known as Spearwing in 2023. The group has claimed more than 366 attacks to date. "Analysis of the Medusa leak site reveals attacks against four healthcare and non-profit organizations in the U.S. since the beginning of November 2025," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Victims included a non-profit in the mental health sector and an educational facility for autistic children. It is unknown if all these victims were targeted by North Korean opera...

The threat activity cluster known as UnsolicitedBooker has been observed targeting telecommunications companies in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, marking a shift from prior attacks aimed at Saudi Arabian entities. The attacks involve the deployment of two distinct backdoors codenamed LuciDoor and MarsSnake, according to a report published by Positive Technologies last week. "The group used several unique and rare instruments of Chinese origin," researchers Alexander Badaev and Maxim Shamanov said . UnsolicitedBooker was first documented by ESET in May 2025, attributing the China-aligned threat actor to a cyber attack targeting an unnamed international organization in Saudi Arabia with a backdoor dubbed MarsSnake. The group is assessed to be active since at least March 2023 and has a history of targeting organizations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Further analysis of the threat actor has uncovered tactical overlaps with two other clusters, including Space Pirates an...

The Russia-linked state-sponsored threat actor tracked as APT28 has been attributed to a new campaign targeting specific entities in Western and Central Europe. The activity, per S2 Grupo's LAB52 threat intelligence team, was active between September 2025 and January 2026. It has been codenamed Operation MacroMaze . "The campaign relies on basic tooling and the exploitation of legitimate services for infrastructure and data exfiltration," the cybersecurity company said . The attack chains employ spear-phishing emails as a starting point to distribute lure documents that contain a common structural element within their XML, a field named "INCLUDEPICTURE" that points to a webhook[.]site URL that hosts a JPG image. This, in turn, causes the image file to be fetched from the remote server when the document is opened. Put differently, this mechanism acts as a beaconing mechanism akin to a tracking pixel that triggers an outbound HTTP request to the webhook[.]si...