Malware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The Pakistan-aligned threat actor known as Transparent Tribe has become the latest hacking group to embrace artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding tools to strike targets with various implants. The activity is designed to produce a "high-volume, mediocre mass of implants" that are developed using lesser-known programming languages like Nim, Zig, and Crystal and rely on trusted services like Slack, Discord, Supabase, and Google Sheets to fly under the radar, according to new findings from Bitdefender. "Rather than a breakthrough in technical sophistication, we are seeing a transition toward AI-assisted malware industrialization that allows the actor to flood target environments with disposable, polyglot binaries," security researchers Radu Tudorica, Adrian Schipor, Victor Vrabie, Marius Baciu, and Martin Zugec said in a technical breakdown of the campaign. The transition towards vibe-coded malware, aka vibeware , as a means to complicate detection has been...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a multi-stage malware campaign that uses batch scripts as a pathway to deliver various encrypted remote access trojan (RATs) payloads that correspond to XWorm , AsyncRAT , and Xeno RAT . The stealthy attack chain has been codenamed VOID#GEIST by Securonix Threat Research. At a high level, the obfuscated batch script is used to deploy a second batch script, stage a legitimate embedded Python runtime, and decrypt encrypted shellcode blobs, which are executed directly in memory by injecting them into separate instances of "explorer.exe" using a technique called Early Bird Asynchronous Procedure Call (APC) injection . "Modern malware campaigns increasingly shift from standalone executables toward complex, script-based delivery frameworks that closely mimic legitimate user activity," researchers Akshay Gaikwad, Shikha Sangwan, and Aaron Beardslee said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "Rath...

New research from Broadcom's Symantec and Carbon Black Threat Hunter Team has discovered evidence of an Iranian hacking group embedding itself in several U.S. companies' networks, including banks, airports, non-profit, and the Israeli arm of a software company. The activity has been attributed to a state-sponsored hacking group called MuddyWater (aka Seedworm). It's affiliated with the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). The campaign is assessed to have begun in early February, with recent activity detected following U.S. and Israeli military strikes on Iran . "The software company is a supplier to the defense and aerospace industries, among others, and has a presence in Israel, with the company's Israel operation seeming to be the target in this activity," the security vendor said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The attacks targeting the software company, as well as a U.S. bank and a Canadian non-profit, have been found to p...

A China-linked advanced persistent threat (APT) actor has been targeting critical telecommunications infrastructure in South America since 2024, targeting Windows and Linux systems and edge devices with three different implants. The activity is being tracked by Cisco Talos under the moniker UAT-9244 , describing it as closely associated with another cluster known as FamousSparrow . It's worth noting that FamousSparrow is assessed to share tactical overlaps with Salt Typhoon , a China-nexus espionage group known for its targeting of telecommunication service providers. Despite the similar targeting footprint between UAT-9244 and Salt Typhoon, there is no conclusive evidence that ties the two clusters together. In the campaign analyzed by the cybersecurity company, the attack chains have been found to distribute three previously undocumented implants: TernDoor targeting Windows, PeerTime (aka angrypeer) targeting Linux, and BruteEntry, which is installed on network edge device...

Microsoft on Thursday disclosed details of a new widespread ClickFix social engineering campaign that has leveraged the Windows Terminal app as a way to activate a sophisticated attack chain and deploy the Lumma Stealer malware. The activity, observed in February 2026, makes use of the terminal emulator program instead of instructing users to launch the Windows Run dialog and paste a command into it. "This campaign instructs targets to use the Windows + X → I shortcut to launch Windows Terminal (wt.exe) directly, guiding users into a privileged command execution environment that blends into legitimate administrative workflows and appears more trustworthy to users," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a series of posts on X. What makes the latest variant notable is that it bypasses detections specifically designed to flag Run dialog abuse, not to mention take advantage of the legitimacy of Windows Terminal to trick unsuspecting users into running malicious ...