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Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new Russian cyber campaign that has targeted Ukrainian entities with two previously undocumented malware families named BadPaw and MeowMeow . "The attack chain initiates with a phishing email containing a link to a ZIP archive. Once extracted, an initial HTA file displays a lure document written in Ukrainian concerning border crossing appeals to deceive the victim," ClearSky said in a report published this week. In parallel, the attack chain leads to the deployment of a .NET-based loader called BadPaw, which then establishes communication with a remote server to fetch and deploy a sophisticated backdoor called MeowMeow. The campaign has been attributed with moderate confidence to the Russian state-sponsored threat actor known as APT28 , based on the targeting footprint, the geopolitical nature of the lures used, and overlaps with techniques observed in previous Russian cyber operations. 

A joint law enforcement operation has dismantled LeakBase , one of the world's largest online forums for cybercriminals to buy and sell stolen data and cybercrime tools. The LeakBase forum, per the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), had over 142,000 members and more than 215,000 messages between members as of December 2025. Those attempting to access the forum's website (" leakbase[.]la ") are now greeted with a seizure banner that says it was confiscated by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as part of an international law enforcement effort. "All forum content, including users' accounts, posts, credit details, private messages, and IP logs, has been secured and preserved for evidentiary purposes," the banner reads. Available in English and accessible over the clearnet, LeakBase offered hacked databases , including hundreds of millions of account credentials and financial information such as credit and debit card numbers, banking account ...

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of a surge in retaliatory hacktivist activity following the U.S.-Israel coordinated military campaign against Iran , codenamed Epic Fury and Roaring Lion. "The hacktivist threat in the Middle East is highly lopsided, with two groups, Keymous+ and DieNet, driving nearly 70% of all attack activity between February 28 and March 2," Radware said in a Tuesday report. The first distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack was launched by Hider Nex (aka Tunisian Maskers Cyber Force) on February 28, 2026. According to details shared by Orange Cyberdefense, Hider Nex is a shadowy Tunisian hacktivist group that supports pro-Palestinian causes. It leverages a hack-and-leak strategy combining DDoS attacks with data breaches to leak sensitive data and advance its geopolitical agenda. The group emerged in mid-2025. In all, a total of 149 hacktivist DDoS claims were recorded targeting 110 distinct organizations across 16 countries. The attacks were...

Google said it identified a "new and powerful" exploit kit dubbed Coruna (aka CryptoWaters) targeting Apple iPhone models running iOS versions between 13.0 and 17.2.1. The exploit kit featured five full iOS exploit chains and a total of 23 exploits, Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said. It's not effective against the latest version of iOS. The findings were first reported by WIRED. "The core technical value of this exploit kit lies in its comprehensive collection of iOS exploits, with the most advanced ones using non-public exploitation techniques and mitigation bypasses," according to GTIG. "The framework surrounding the exploit kit is extremely well engineered; the exploit pieces are all connected naturally and combined together using common utility and exploitation frameworks." The kit is said to have circulated among multiple threat actors since February 2025, moving from a commercial surveillance operation to a government-backed att...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged malicious Packagist PHP packages masquerading as Laravel utilities that act as a conduit for a cross-platform remote access trojan (RAT) that's functional on Windows, macOS, and Linux systems. The names of the packages are listed below - nhattuanbl/lara-helper (37 Downloads) nhattuanbl/simple-queue (29 Downloads) nhattuanbl/lara-swagger (49 Downloads) According to Socket, the package "nhattuanbl/lara-swagger" does not directly embed malicious code, lists "nhattuanbl/lara-helper" as a Composer dependency , causing it to install the RAT. The packages are still available for download from the PHP package registry. Both lara-helper and simple-queue have been found to contain a PHP file named "src/helper.php," which employs a number of tricks to complicate static analysis by making use of techniques like control flow obfuscation, encoding domain names, command names, and file paths, and randomized identifie...