Malware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A new malware campaign is exploiting a weakness in Discord's invitation system to deliver an information stealer called Skuld and the AsyncRAT remote access trojan. "Attackers hijacked the links through vanity link registration, allowing them to silently redirect users from trusted sources to malicious servers," Check Point said in a technical report. "The attackers combined the ClickFix phishing technique, multi-stage loaders, and time-based evasions to stealthily deliver AsyncRAT, and a customized Skuld Stealer targeting crypto wallets." The issue with Discord's invite mechanism is that it allows attackers to hijack expired or deleted invite links and secretly redirect unsuspecting users to malicious servers under their control. This also means that a Discord invite link that was once trusted and shared on forums or social media platforms could unwittingly lead users to malicious sites. Details of the campaign come a little over a month after the ...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a "large-scale campaign" that has been observed compromising legitimate websites with malicious JavaScript injections. According to Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, these malicious injects are obfuscated using JSFuck , which refers to an "esoteric and educational programming style" that uses only a limited set of characters to write and execute code. The cybersecurity company has given the technique an alternate name JSFireTruck owing to the profanity involved. "Multiple websites have been identified with injected malicious JavaScript that uses JSFireTruck obfuscation, which is composed primarily of the symbols [, ], +, $, {, and }," security researchers Hardik Shah, Brad Duncan, and Pranay Kumar Chhaparwal said . "The code's obfuscation hides its true purpose, hindering analysis." Further analysis has determined that the injected code is designed to check the website referrer (" docu...

The threat actors behind the VexTrio Viper Traffic Distribution Service (TDS) have been linked to other TDS services like Help TDS and Disposable TDS, indicating that the sophisticated cybercriminal operation is a sprawling enterprise of its own that's designed to distribute malicious content. "VexTrio is a group of malicious adtech companies that distribute scams and harmful software via different advertising formats, including smartlinks and push notifications," Infoblox said in a deep-dive report shared with The Hacker News. Some of the malicious adtech companies under VexTrio Viper include Los Pollos, Taco Loco, and Adtrafico. These companies operate what's called a commercial affiliate network that connects malware actors whose websites unsuspecting users land on and so-called "advertising affiliates" who offer various forms of illicit schemes like gift card fraud, malicious apps, phishing sites, and scams. Put differently, these malicious traffi...

AI is changing everything — from how we code, to how we sell, to how we secure. But while most conversations focus on what AI can do, this one focuses on what AI can break — if you're not paying attention. Behind every AI agent, chatbot, or automation script lies a growing number of non-human identities — API keys, service accounts, OAuth tokens — silently operating in the background. And here's the problem: 🔐 They're invisible 🧠 They're powerful 🚨 They're unsecured In traditional identity security, we protect users. With AI, we've quietly handed over control to software that impersonates users — often with more access, fewer guardrails, and no oversight. This isn't theoretical. Attackers are already exploiting these identities to: Move laterally through cloud infrastructure Deploy malware via automation pipelines Exfiltrate data — without triggering a single alert Once compromised, these identities can silently unlock critical systems. You don't get a second cha...

Former members tied to the Black Basta ransomware operation have been observed sticking to their tried-and-tested approach of email bombing and Microsoft Teams phishing to establish persistent access to target networks. "Recently, attackers have introduced Python script execution alongside these techniques, using cURL requests to fetch and deploy malicious payloads," ReliaQuest said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The development is a sign that the threat actors are continuing to pivot and regroup, despite the Black Basta brand suffering a huge blow and a decline after the public leak of its internal chat logs earlier this February. The cybersecurity company said half of the Teams phishing attacks that were observed between February and May 2025 originated from onmicrosoft[.]com domains, and that breached domains accounted for 42% of the attacks during the same period. The latter is a lot more stealthy and allows threat actors to impersonate legitimate traffi...

INTERPOL on Wednesday announced the dismantling of more than 20,000 malicious IP addresses or domains that have been linked to 69 information-stealing malware variants. The joint action, codenamed Operation Secure , took place between January and April 2025, and involved law enforcement agencies from 26 countries to identify servers, map physical networks, and execute targeted takedowns. "These coordinated efforts resulted in the takedown of 79 percent of identified suspicious IP addresses," INTERPOL said in a statement. "Participating countries reported the seizure of 41 servers and over 100 GB of data, as well as the arrest of 32 suspects linked to illegal cyber activities." Vietnamese authorities arrested 18 suspects, and confiscated devices, SIM cards, business registration documents, and money worth $11,500. Further house raids have led to the arrest of another 12 people in Sri Lanka and two individuals in Nauru. The Hong Kong Police, per INTERPOL, iden...

Microsoft has released patches to fix 67 security flaws , including one zero-day bug in Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) that it said has come under active exploitation in the wild. Of the 67 vulnerabilities, 11 are rated Critical and 56 are rated Important in severity. This includes 26 remote code execution flaws, 17 information disclosure flaws, and 14 privilege escalation flaws. The patches are in addition to 13 shortcomings addressed by the company in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of last month's Patch Tuesday update . The vulnerability that has been weaponized in real-world attacks concerns a remote code execution in WebDAV ( CVE-2025-33053 , CVSS score: 8.8) that can be triggered by deceiving users into clicking on a specially crafted URL. The tech giant credited Check Point researchers Alexandra Gofman and David Driker for discovering and reporting the bug. It's worth mentioning that CVE-2025-33053 is the first zero-day vulnerab...

The financially motivated threat actor known as FIN6 has been observed leveraging fake resumes hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure to deliver a malware family called More_eggs. "By posing as job seekers and initiating conversations through platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed, the group builds rapport with recruiters before delivering phishing messages that lead to malware," the DomainTools Investigations (DTI) team said in a report shared with The Hacker News. More_eggs is the work of another cybercrime group called Golden Chickens (aka Venom Spider), which was most recently attributed to new malware families like TerraStealerV2 and TerraLogger. A JavaScript-based backdoor, it's capable of enabling credential theft, system access, and follow-on attacks, including ransomware. One of the malware's known customers is FIN6 (aka Camouflage Tempest, Gold Franklin, ITG08, Skeleton Spider, and TA4557), an e-crime crew that originally targeted point-of-s...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a previously undocumented Rust-based information stealer called Myth Stealer that's being propagated via fraudulent gaming websites. "Upon execution, the malware displays a fake window to appear legitimate while simultaneously decrypting and executing malicious code in the background," Trellix security researchers Niranjan Hegde, Vasantha Lakshmanan Ambasankar, and Adarsh S said in an analysis. The stealer, initially marketed on Telegram for free under beta in late December 2024, has since transitioned to a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model. It's equipped to steal passwords, cookies, and autofill information from both Chromium- and Gecko-based browsers, such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, and Mozilla Firefox. The operators of the malware have been found maintaining a number of Telegram channels to advertise the sale of compromised accounts as well as provide testimonials of their service. The...

The threat actor known as Rare Werewolf (formerly Rare Wolf) has been linked to a series of cyber attacks targeting Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries. "A distinctive feature of this threat is that the attackers favor using legitimate third-party software over developing their own malicious binaries," Kaspersky said . "The malicious functionality of the campaign described in this article is implemented through command files and PowerShell scripts." The intent of the attacks is to establish remote access to compromised hosts, and siphon credentials, and deploy the XMRig cryptocurrency miner. The activity impacted hundreds of Russian users spanning industrial enterprises and engineering schools, with a smaller number of infections also recorded in Belarus and Kazakhstan. Rare Werewolf , also known by the names Librarian Ghouls and Rezet, is the moniker assigned to an advanced persistent threat (APT) group that has a track record of...

A now-patched critical security flaw in the Wazur Server is being exploited by threat actors to drop two different Mirai botnet variants and use them to conduct distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Akamai, which first discovered the exploitation efforts in late March 2025, said the malicious campaign targets CVE-2025-24016 (CVSS score: 9.9), an unsafe deserialization vulnerability that allows for remote code execution on Wazuh servers. The security defect , which affects all versions of the server software including and above 4.4.0, was addressed in February 2025 with the release of 4.9.1. A proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit was publicly disclosed around the same time the patches were released. The problem is rooted in the Wazuh API, where parameters in the DistributedAPI are serialized as JSON and deserialized using "as_wazuh_object" in the framework/wazuh/core/cluster/common.py file. A threat actor could weaponize the vulnerability by injecting malicious JSON...