Malware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a cluster of 18 Google Chrome and one Microsoft Edge extensions that were published over the last six months and harbored wallet secret stealing and cryptocurrency draining capabilities. The extensions , per Socket security researcher Karlo Zanki, share similarities in code and tradecraft, with evidence indicating that the campaign may have been active since February 2024. Socket is tracking the activity under the name Superior. The modus operandi is relatively straightforward: the threat actor either acquires legitimate extensions with proper functionality or pushes a clean version that's devoid of any malware. Once the extensions begin to gather user downloads, a new version with the malicious behavior is published.

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a fresh set of campaigns targeting government and diplomatic organizations in Romania, Spain, and Türkiye between late September 2025 and early April 2026. These campaigns, per Recorded Future Insikt Group, have led to the deployment of a previously undocumented backdoor dubbed HOOKEDGE , a lightweight Windows batch script that's distributed via macro-enabled Microsoft Word documents bearing diplomatic-themed lures. Early versions are said to have impersonated Spanish government material, before switching to a social engineering approach a month later. The activity has been attributed with moderate confidence to a Russian state-sponsored hacking group known as APT28 (aka Fancy Bear and Forest Blizzard). It's tracked by the Mastercard-owned cybersecurity and threat intelligence firm under the moniker BlueDelta. This determination is based on what Recorded Future described as significant code and tradecraft overlap between HOOKEDGE a...

A fake login page. A fake security scan. A fake productivity app. Apparently, pretending to be useful is still one of the easier ways into a machine. The rest of the week gets stranger: botnets borrowing AI, command traffic hiding in public infrastructure, malicious tools waiting before showing their real behavior, exposed systems getting scanned, and exploit windows shrinking again. Different tricks, same advantage: attackers keep finding places where trust is cheap and friction is low. That sets the tone. Here’s the full list of what surfaced this week. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

The Australian Federal Police (AFP) has charged two Western Australian men with a combined total of 14 offences over their alleged role in TeamPCP , the cybercrime group behind the March 2026 compromise of the open-source security scanners Trivy and Checkmarx KICS and the AI gateway LiteLLM. Louis Michael Gaebler , 23, and Ruben Ian Thomson , 21, appeared in Perth Magistrates Court on August 27, 2026, a day after the AFP and the Western Australia Police Force (WAPF) executed search warrants at properties in Cottesloe, Hamilton Hill, and Mandurah and seized electronic devices for forensic analysis. Police allege the two men were principal participants in the syndicate and received payments in cryptocurrency, the value of which is still under investigation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said in a July 2 advisory that organizations impacted by the campaign should treat exfiltrated data and credentials as a persistent risk, since affiliated threat actors are "likely...

Individuals and organizations in Cambodia have emerged as the target of a new campaign that delivers an open-source remote access trojan (RAT) called Spark RAT . "The samples employ diverse lure themes, suggesting an effort to appeal to a broad range of potential victims. These include government notices, public health materials, real estate-related content, and other topics," Acronis Threat Research Unit (TRU) researchers Darrel Virtusio and Subhajeet Singha said in an analysis published Wednesday. The multi-stage attack is notable for employing the bring your own vulnerable driver (BYOVD) technique to load a legitimate-but-vulnerable driver associated with OPSWAT AppRemover ("ardrv.sys") to escalate privileges and neutralize security software. Attack chains likely make use of targeting phishing emails to distribute compressed archives containing an Inno Setup executable and trick recipients into running it using wide-ranging lures, including Cambodian gove...