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Category — Malware
Fake Software Installers Disable Windows Update and Weaken Microsoft Defender

Fake Software Installers Disable Windows Update and Weaken Microsoft Defender

Sep 02, 2026 Malware / Social Engineering
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...
Malicious Apache Modules Hijack Brazilian Government Site Traffic to Push Betting Pages

Malicious Apache Modules Hijack Brazilian Government Site Traffic to Push Betting Pages

Sep 02, 2026 Web Security / Malware
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...
BGP Hijack Delivers Malicious Virtualizor Update That Establishes Persistent Root Access

BGP Hijack Delivers Malicious Virtualizor Update That Establishes Persistent Root Access

Sep 02, 2026 Network Security / Supply Chain Attack
Virtualizor said hackers used a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) hijack to divert Softaculous traffic. The hackers then used the diverted update traffic to deliver a malicious Virtualizor package to some installations. A hosting-provider account separately said 5 of its 34 checked Virtualizor hypervisors sustained root-level compromise. The incident window ran from approximately August 28 at 20:57 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to August 30 at 06:10 UTC. Virtualizor said every operator should check its servers because the company has no affected-version range or definitive list of installations that received the package. Virtualizor released Patch 9 with a Security Analyzer on September 1, but the vendor said cryptographic package signing remained future work. Operators should run the official scanner, rotate and restrict application programming interface (API) credentials, and audit each server for persistence and unauthorized access. "This affected a handful of servers rat...
cyber security

Shadow AI Agents Are Multiplying. Here's How to Find and Secure Them

websiteNudge SecuritySaaS Security / AI Security
Learn how eight common discovery approaches work, what they find, and what they don’t.
cyber security

Gartner: 70% of SOCs Will Pilot AI Agents. Only 15% Will See Results

websiteProphet SecurityAI SOC / Cybersecurity
Here are Gartner’s key questions to ask when pressure-testing AI SOC vendors in production.
Meta Ads Push StreamRat Android Trojan That Can Gain Near-Complete Device Control

Meta Ads Push StreamRat Android Trojan That Can Gain Near-Complete Device Control

Sep 02, 2026 Malvertising / Mobile Security
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new Android banking trojan called StreamRat that was promoted to Spanish-speaking users through a fake television-streaming campaign on Meta and can give operators near-complete control of infected devices. ThreatFabric said the campaign's advertisement focused on Spain and reached an estimated 570,950 Meta accounts in the European Union that saw it at least once, with totals for infected devices and confirmed victims remaining unreported. Device takeover requires the victim to grant a succession of controls after sideloading the Android Package (APK). Users should stop the installation when a streaming app requests system controls unrelated to streaming. "There is little doubt that StreamRat is a new and technically sophisticated threat, developed by individuals with prior experience in the Android malware ecosystem," ThreatFabric said in its  StreamRat analysis . ThreatFabric did not attribute the campaign t...
Extradited Russian Hacker Faces Charges Over Excel Malware Campaign That Infected Thousands

Extradited Russian Hacker Faces Charges Over Excel Malware Campaign That Infected Thousands

Sep 02, 2026 Malware / Cybercrime
The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) has charged a Russian national, extradited from Cyprus on August 28, with using roughly 255 fake accounts on a freelance platform to send malware-laced Excel attachments to about 80,000 of its users in 2016 and 2017. Searzhudin Tamirlanovich Aktulaev , 40, was arrested in Cyprus in May 2025, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California said in a press release. He made his initial appearance in federal court in San Francisco on August 31 and was remanded to federal custody. The indictment, filed on June 1, 2021, and unsealed the same day as his appearance, describes the platform only as "a well-known freelance employment technology company" based in the Northern District of California. Thousands of computers infected with TVRAT , one of two malware types named in the indictment, were calling back to a command-and-control (C2) domain hosted in the U.S., with approximately half of the victims located in the ...
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