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A previously undocumented threat cluster dubbed UAT-10362 has been attributed to spear-phishing campaigns targeting Taiwanese non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and suspected universities to deploy a new Lua-based malware called LucidRook. "LucidRook is a sophisticated stager that embeds a Lua interpreter and Rust-compiled libraries within a dynamic-link library (DLL) to download and execute staged Lua bytecode payloads," Cisco Talos researcher Ashley Shen said . The cybersecurity company said it discovered the activity in October 2025, with the attack using RAR or 7-Zip archives lures to deliver a dropper called LucidPawn, which then opens a decoy file and launches LucidRook. A notable characteristic of the intrusion set is the use of DLL side-loading to execute both LucidPawn and LucidRook. There are two distinct infection chains that lead to LucidRook, one using a Windows Shortcut (LNK) file with a PDF icon and another involving an executable that masquer...

Thursday. Another week, another batch of things that probably should've been caught sooner but weren't. This one's got some range — old vulnerabilities getting new life, a few "why was that even possible" moments, attackers leaning on platforms and tools you'd normally trust without thinking twice. Quiet escalations more than loud zero-days, but the kind that matter more in practice anyway. Mix of malware, infrastructure exposure, AI-adjacent weirdness, and some supply chain stuff that's... not great. Let's get into it. Resilient hybrid botnet surge Phorpiex Botnet Detailed A new variant of the botnet known as Phorpiex (aka Trik) has been observed, using a hybrid communication model that combines traditional C2 HTTP polling with a peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol over both TCP and UDP to ensure operational continuity in the face of server takedowns. The malware acts as a conduit for encrypted payloads, ma...

Threat actors have been exploiting a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Reader using maliciously crafted PDF documents since at least December 2025. The finding, detailed by EXPMON's Haifei Li, has been described as a highly-sophisticated PDF exploit. The artifact ("Invoice540.pdf") first appeared on the VirusTotal platform on November 28, 2025. A second sample was uploaded to VirusTotal on March 23, 2026. Given the name of the PDF document, it's likely that there is an element of social engineering involved, with the attackers luring unsuspecting users into opening the files on Adobe Reader. Once launched, it automatically triggers the execution of obfuscated JavaScript to harvest sensitive data and receive additional payloads. Security researcher Gi7w0rm, in an X post , said the PDF documents observed contain Russian language lures and refer to issues regarding current events related to the oil and gas industry i...

An apparent hack-for-hire campaign likely orchestrated by a threat actor with suspected ties to the Indian government targeted journalists, activists, and government officials across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), according to findings from Access Now , Lookout , and SMEX . Two of the targets included prominent Egyptian journalists and government critics, Mostafa Al-A'sar and Ahmed Eltantawy, who were at the receiving end of a series of spear-phishing attacks that sought to compromise their Apple and Google accounts in October 2023 and January 2024 by directing them to fake pages that tricked them into entering their credentials and two-factor authentication (2FA) codes. "The attacks were carried out from 2023 to 2024, and both targets are prominent critics of the Egyptian government who have previously faced political imprisonment; one of them was previously targeted with spyware ," Access Now's Digital Security Helpline said. Also...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new variant ofmalware called Chaos that'scapable of hitting misconfigured cloud deployments, marking an expansion of the botnet's targeting infrastructure. "Chaos malware is increasingly targeting misconfigured cloud deployments, expanding beyond its traditional focus on routers and edge devices," Darktrace said in a new report. Chaos was first documented by Lumen Black Lotus Labs in September 2022, describing it as a cross-platform malware capable of targeting Windows and Linux environments to run remote shell commands, drop additional modules, propagate to other hosts by brute-forcing SSH keys, mine cryptocurrency, and launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks via HTTP, TLS, TCP, UDP, and WebSocket. The malware is assessed to be an evolution of another DDoS malware known as Kaiji  that has singled out misconfigured Docker instances.It's currently not known wh...