Malware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Dysphoria , an Internet of Things (IoT) botnet line tracked by CNCERT and XLab, has adopted blockchain-based name services and infected-device relays after a March law-enforcement operation against JackSkid infrastructure. The researchers say the design makes the botnet harder to disrupt. CNCERT, China's national computer emergency response team, and XLab, the threat-intelligence lab of Chinese firm Qi'anxin, put its population above 200,000 bots. Their telemetry logged 4,401 confirmed active devices inside China between July 14 and 20 and a single-day peak of 239,000 bots abroad. None of the counts has been independently reproduced. The researchers published no counting or de-duplication methodology, so the numbers should not be read as a precise device census. Defenders should patch exposed IoT gear, replace devices that can no longer be updated, eliminate default and weak credentials, and disable remote management and UPnP where they are not needed. The lineage runs...

Monday starts with the usual promise that everything is under control. Then the logs wake up. This week, trusted tools crossed lines, old flaws found new work, exposed systems stayed exposed, and attackers kept hiding inside normal-looking services. Nothing looked strange at first. That helped. That is the mood. Here is the full recap. ⚡ Threat of the Week OpenAI Says Its AI Agent Went Rogue and Targeted Hugging Face - OpenAI disclosed that it lost control of two AI models during a security evaluation that ended in a breach of Hugging Face. The AI company said its AI models broke out of a sealed testing environment and broke into Hugging Face's production system to find solutions for the ExploitGym benchmark. "The incident also makes clear that advanced models can discover and exploit novel attack paths in real-world systems without source-code access," OpenAI said. "It highlights that advanced cyber capabilities must be developed alongside stronger safegua...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a Microsoft Teams-themed phishing campaign that employs "secure document" lures to deliver legitimate remote monitoring and management ( RMM ) tools. "The victim was directed through compromised web infrastructure to a counterfeit Microsoft Store page claiming that Microsoft Teams had to be updated before the shared document could be opened," ZeroBEC said in a report published last week. The bogus Teams page in question is "teamvem[.]com." The active download is used to deliver "supportdev.exe," an Inno Setup-based loader that launches PowerShell in a hidden window, fetches an official Level RMM installer, and registers the endpoint using an attacker-controlled enrollment secret ("LEVEL_API_KEY=GxSCHE8EZwfyYN3iPQHPai8D"). The same PowerShell command has been found to download and deploy ConnectWise ScreenConnect in parallel, indicating an attempt to drop multiple RMM tools with an intent to...

The China-linked cybercrime group behind the use of income tax-related phishing lures targeting Indian taxpayers, tax professionals, and corporate finance teams has been observed using a sophisticated crypter service called Cruciferra . According to a new analysis by Proofpoint, Cruciferra has been utilized by various unrelated cybercriminal threat clusters to deliver a wide array of remote access trojans (RATs) and information stealer malware. "Cruciferra is written in Mono and features numerous techniques designed to evade detection, analysis, and incident response efforts," the enterprise security company said in an analysis published last week. "These include using indirect system calls, API and Import Address Table (IAT) unhooking, bring-your-own-vulnerable-driver ( BYOVD )-based EDR tampering, privilege escalation, persistence mechanisms, and a customized implementation of Process Ghosting used to execute payloads while minimizing forensic artifacts."...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged fresh malicious cyber activity by a threat actor with ties to East Asia targeting government entities in the Middle East. The intrusions have resulted in the deployment of previously unreported malware families dubbed TELESHIM, MIXEDKEY, and BINDCLOAK, according to Zscaler ThreatLabz. The cybersecurity firm said it detected the campaign earlier this month. "The campaign used a multi-stage attack chain to establish and maintain access on infected systems, with TELESHIM abusing the Telegram API for command-and-control (C2) communication to blend in with legitimate internet traffic," Sudeep Singh, senior manager of APT research at Zscaler ThreatLabz, said in a technical write-up published last week. The attack chain starts with an ISO file containing a legitimate executable ("RegSchdTask.exe") that's used to sideload a rogue DLL ("AsTaskSched.dll"), a 32-bit Windows backdoor called TELESHIM that then leverage...