Malware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Security firm Sysdig says it has found what it believes is the first ransomware attack run from start to finish by an AI agent. Its Threat Research Team calls the operator JADEPUFFER and says a large language model handled the whole job: breaking in, stealing credentials, moving deeper into the network, then encrypting and wiping a company's production database. Ransomware has always needed a skilled person somewhere in the loop, either at the keyboard or writing the script the malware follows. If a model can chain those steps on its own, the skill needed to run an attack drops to whatever it costs to rent an AI agent. The way in was an old, already-patched bug. JADEPUFFER exploited  CVE-2025-3248 , a missing-authentication flaw in  Langflow , an open-source tool for building AI apps and agent workflows. The flaw lets anyone who can reach the server run their own Python code on it, no login needed. Langflow boxes are a tempting target because they often sit ...

Attackers are hiding a data-stealing trojan inside fake exploit code aimed at the people who hunt bugs for a living. The malware, called ChocoPoC , travels in Python proof-of-concept (PoC) repositories on GitHub that claim to exploit hot new CVEs. Run one, and it quietly lifts your saved passwords, browser cookies, and files, then hands the attacker a shell on your machine.  YesWeHack and Sekoia  published their joint findings on July 1 and warned that, as of that report, the malware and its servers were still live, so do not run any of these PoCs. The trick is where the code sits. The visible PoC looks clean. The malware hides in a Python package that the PoC pulls in as a dependency, so it slips past a quick code review. How the trap works The bait is time pressure. When a big flaw drops, researchers race to test it and grab community PoCs to move fast. This campaign turns that habit into an infection route. The chain, in plain terms: You clone the repo and r...

Unknown threat actors are leveraging the ScreenConnect remote access tool as a way to deploy and execute AsyncRAT . Kaspersky said the activity is part of a "massive, multi-domain, multi-language" campaign that distributes malicious installer archives hosted on spoofed websites. These installers masquerade as popular software like OBS Studio, DNS Jumper, DS4Windows, and Bandicam, among others. The Russian cybersecurity company said it identified more than 90 domain names localized across 10 languages, including English, Russian, Chinese, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic. Some of these domains were set up between August 2025 and March 2026. "The malicious archives bundle a legitimate, signed Microsoft install.exe binary alongside a rogue install.res.1033.dll library," security researcher Denis Kulik said . "It is loaded onto the device via DLL side-loading and deploys the ScreenConnect service, which awaits further instructions from the thr...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new multi-stage malware delivery attack chain that uses social engineering and Blogger pages to deliver an information stealer called PureLogs . The activity has been codenamed VEIL#DROP by Securonix. It's suspected that the initial payloads are distributed either via spear-phishing or a drive-by compromise , which occurs when an unsuspecting user lands on a website (legitimate or otherwise) under the attacker's control. "The infection chain begins with a deceptively named JavaScript file masquerading as a document (e.g., transcript.pdf.js), which executes through Windows Script Host and launches PowerShell with execution policy bypasses enabled," researchers Akshay Gaikwad, Shikha Sangwan, and Aaron Beardslee said in a report shared with The Hacker News. At a high level, the PowerShell script is responsible for retrieving a next-stage payload hosted on Blogger ("htlwub00klocate.blogspot[.]com"), allowing the ...

A Brazilian banking trojan called Ousaban is going after Windows users who bank in Spain and Portugal.  Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs  identified the campaign in May 2026. It opens with a phishing PDF disguised as a corrupted file, checks that the visitor is really in Spain or Portugal, and hides its real payload inside an image. The goal is the usual one: steal banking logins and take over accounts. Ousaban sits quietly on a Windows PC and waits for the user to open a banking site. When a target bank loads, it can capture screenshots and keystrokes, tamper with the clipboard, show fake messages, and give the attacker remote control. Together, those are the tools for hijacking a live banking session and taking over an account. Ousaban watches for more than two dozen banks across the two countries, among them Banco Santander, BBVA, CaixaBank, Bankinter, and Caixa Geral de Depósitos. How the attack works It starts with a phishing PDF disguised as a corrupted file. Th...