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The Pakistan-aligned threat group tracked as Transparent Tribe (aka APT36 and Earth Karkaddan) has been attributed to a fresh set of cyber attacks targeting government and defense entities in India and Afghanistan. The attacks, per Zscaler ThreatLabz, involve the use of previously undocumented tools called RUSTYSHADE, RUSTYMOVE, PSNATCH, and BASHNATCH. The activity has been codenamed Operation RapidRust . "APT36 has maintained a high operational tempo and updated their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) in continued attacks targeting government and defense organizations in India and Afghanistan," Sudeep Singh , senior manager of APT Research at Zscaler ThreatLabz, said in a technical report published this week. The discovery comes a little over a month after  Acronis Threat Research Unit (TRU) tied the long-running persistent threat group to another campaign aimed at Afghan telecom providers and South Asian critical infrastructure organizations using a backdo...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a cluster of 13 npm packages that have been found to deliver a previously undocumented JavaScript stealer codenamed WeaselBiscuit . The new malware family, per OpenSourceMalware , exhibits functional overlaps with two malware strains associated with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's (DPRK) Contagious Interview campaign: BeaverTail and OtterCookie . "It's smaller, lighter, and stripped down, with many of the heavier functions removed entirely," security researcher Paul McCarty (aka 6mile) said. The names of the packages are below - @biz44/id10-client @biz44/id12-client @biz44/id44-client @biz44/id79-client @biz44/id95-client @biz44/id99-client @biz44/process-runtime-utils @biz44/runtime-utils engin1 id79-client process-lhpm process-mite process-tailwind "It's a stripped down stealer that borrows several functions from DPRK's BeaverTail and OtterCookie,...

A financially motivated threat actor has been linked to the development and distribution of a JavaScript (JS)-based information stealer known as PhantomRaven via the npm package registry. "The developer likely wrote the malware using a large language model (LLM), an assessment made with high confidence based on verbose comments, placeholder code, and statistical token-analysis patterns," CrowdStrike's Counter Adversary Operations said in an analysis published this week. PhantomRaven was first flagged by Koi Security and DCODX in late October 2025, calling attention to a slopsquatting and typosquatted campaign in which more than 100 malicious packages were uploaded to npm to steal authentication tokens, CI/CD secrets, and GitHub credentials from developers' machines. The software supply chain attack used these packages as a cover to retrieve a remote dynamic dependency (RDD) from an external server so that the libraries themselves are not flagged by security ...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new Android malware called RatHat that's assessed to be operated by China-based threat actors and features an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered system to navigate and control compromised devices. "Distributed primarily via targeted smishing (SMS/text phishing) and malvertising campaigns leading to deceptive third-party download portals, RatHat uses an automated multi-stage infection pipeline," Zimperium researchers Gianluca Braga, Vishnu Pratapagiri, and Fernando Ortega said . "Once deployed, it pairs Accessibility abuse with autonomous local ADB (Android Debug Bridge) self-pairing to break out of the standard Android application sandbox, staging independent native daemons that execute with shell-level privileges." RatHat is propagated via deceptive phishing sites promoted via malvertising, smishing campaigns, and third-party forums that trick unsuspecting users into installing malware-laced APKs. These pa...

Attackers keep finding new keys. The funny part is that defenders keep inventing where to store them. This week, those keys sit in AI tools, exposed services, old bugs, weak logins, and software sold like a monthly subscription. Some attacks use new tricks. Others just reuse what was already lying around. Both work often enough. So the threat landscape is not getting cleaner. It is just getting more places to make the same mistake. Here’s what showed up this week. The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.