Malware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A Chinese national has been arrested in Milan, Italy, for his alleged links to a state-sponsored hacking group known as Silk Typhoon and for carrying out cyber attacks against American organizations and government agencies. The 33-year-old, Xu Zewei , has been charged with nine counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to cause damage to and obtain information by unauthorized access to protected computers, as well as committing aggravated identity theft. Details of the arrest were first reported by Italian media. Xu is alleged to have been involved in the U.S. computer intrusions between February 2020 and June 2021, including a mass attack spree that leveraged then-zero-day flaws in Microsoft Exchange Server, a cluster of activity the Windows maker designed as Hafnium . The suspect is also accused of participating in China's espionage efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic, attempting to gain access to vaccine research at various U.S. universities, including the University of Texas....

In yet another instance of threat actors repurposing legitimate tools for malicious purposes, it has been discovered that hackers are exploiting a popular red teaming tool called Shellter to distribute stealer malware. The company behind the software said a company that had recently purchased Shellter Elite licenses leaked their copy, prompting malicious actors to weaponize the tool for infostealer campaigns. An update has since been released to plug the issue. "Despite our rigorous vetting process – which has successfully prevented such incidents since the launch of Shellter Pro Plus in February 2023 – we now find ourselves addressing this unfortunate situation," the Shellter Project Team said in a statement. The response comes shortly after Elastic Security Labs released a report about how the commercial evasion framework is being abused in the wild since April 2025 to propagate Lumma Stealer, Rhadamanthys Stealer, and SectopRAT (aka ArechClient2). Shellter is a pot...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an Android banking malware campaign that has leveraged a trojan named Anatsa to target users in North America using malicious apps published on Google's official app marketplace. The malware, disguised as a "PDF Update" to a document viewer app, has been caught serving a deceptive overlay when users attempt to access their banking application, claiming the service has been temporarily suspended as part of scheduled maintenance. "This marks at least the third instance of Anatsa focusing its operations on mobile banking customers in the United States and Canada," Dutch mobile security company ThreatFabric said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "As with previous campaigns, Anatsa is being distributed via the official Google Play Store." Anatsa, also referred to as TeaBot and Toddler, has been known to be active since at least 2020, typically delivered to victims via dropper apps. Early last year, An...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a supply chain attack targeting a Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension called Ethcode that has been installed a little over 6,000 times. The compromise, per ReversingLabs , occurred via a GitHub pull request that was opened by a user named Airez299 on June 17, 2025. First released by 7finney in 2022, Ethcode is a VS Code extension that's used to deploy and execute solidity smart contracts in Ethereum Virtual Machine ( EVM )-based blockchains. An EVM is a decentralized computation engine that's designed to run smart contracts on the Ethereum network. According to the supply chain security company, the GitHub project received its last non-malicious update on September 6, 2024. That changed last month when Airez299 opened a pull request with the message "Modernize codebase with viem integration and testing framework." The user claimed to have added a new testing framework with Mocha integration and contract testin...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a malware campaign that's targeting security flaws in TBK digital video recorders (DVRs) and Four-Faith routers to rope the devices into a new botnet called RondoDox . The vulnerabilities in question include CVE-2024-3721 , a medium-severity command injection vulnerability affecting TBK DVR-4104 and DVR-4216 DVRs, and CVE-2024-12856 , an operating system (OS) command injection bug affecting Four-Faith router models F3x24 and F3x36. Many of these devices are installed in critical environments like retail stores, warehouses, and small offices, where they often go unmonitored for years. That makes them ideal targets—easy to exploit, hard to detect, and usually exposed directly to the internet through outdated firmware or misconfigured ports. It's worth noting that all three security defects have been repeatedly weaponized by threat actors to deploy different Mirai botnet variants in recent months. "Both [the security f...

Russian organizations have been targeted as part of an ongoing campaign that delivers a previously undocumented Windows spyware called Batavia. The activity, per cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky, has been active since July 2024. "The targeted attack begins with bait emails containing malicious links, sent under the pretext of signing a contract," the Russian company said . "The main goal of the attack is to infect organizations with the previously unknown Batavia spyware, which then proceeds to steal internal documents." The email messages are sent from the domain "oblast-ru[.]com," which is said to be owned by the attackers themselves. The links embedded within the digital missives lead to the download of an archive file containing a Visual Basic Encoded script (.VBE) file. When executed, the script profiles the compromised host and exfiltrates the system information to the remote server. This is followed by the retrieval of a next-stage payload from t...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a malicious campaign that leverages search engine optimization ( SEO ) poisoning techniques to deliver a known malware loader called Oyster (aka Broomstick or CleanUpLoader). The malvertising activity, per Arctic Wolf, promotes fake websites hosting trojanized versions of legitimate tools like PuTTY and WinSCP, aiming to trick software professionals searching for these programs into installing them instead. "Upon execution, a backdoor known as Oyster/Broomstick is installed," the company said in a brief published last week. "Persistence is established by creating a scheduled task that runs every three minutes, executing a malicious DLL (twain_96.dll) via rundll32.exe using the DllRegisterServer export, indicating the use of DLL registration as part of the persistence mechanism." The names of some of the bogus websites are listed below - updaterputty[.]com zephyrhype[.]com putty[.]run putty[.]bet, and puttyy[.]org...

Everything feels secure—until one small thing slips through. Even strong systems can break if a simple check is missed or a trusted tool is misused. Most threats don't start with alarms—they sneak in through the little things we overlook. A tiny bug, a reused password, a quiet connection—that's all it takes. Staying safe isn't just about reacting fast. It's about catching these early signs before they blow up into real problems. That's why this week's updates matter. From stealthy tactics to unexpected entry points, the stories ahead reveal how quickly risk can spread—and what smart teams are doing to stay ahead. Dive in. ⚡ Threat of the Week U.S. Disrupts N. Korea IT Worker Scheme — Prosecutors said they uncovered the North Korean IT staff working at over 100 U.S. companies using fictitious or stolen identities and not only drawing salaries, but also stealing secret data and plundering virtual currency more than $900,000 in one incident targeting an unnamed blockchain company in ...

A hacking group with ties other than Pakistan has been found targeting Indian government organizations with a modified variant of a remote access trojan (RAT) called DRAT. The activity has been attributed by Recorded Future's Insikt Group to a threat actor tracked as TAG-140, which it said overlaps with SideCopy , an adversarial collective assessed to be an operational sub-cluster within Transparent Tribe (aka APT-C-56, APT36, Datebug, Earth Karkaddan, Mythic Leopard, Operation C-Major, and ProjectM). "TAG-140 has consistently demonstrated iterative advancement and variety in its malware arsenal and delivery techniques," the Mastercard-owned company said in an analysis published last month. "This latest campaign, which spoofed the Indian Ministry of Defence via a cloned press release portal, marks a slight but notable shift in both malware architecture and command-and-control (C2) functionality." The updated version of DRAT, called DRAT V2, is the latest a...

Threat actors are weaponizing exposed Java Debug Wire Protocol ( JDWP ) interfaces to obtain code execution capabilities and deploy cryptocurrency miners on compromised hosts. "The attacker used a modified version of XMRig with a hard-"coded configuration, allowing them to avoid suspicious command-line arguments that are often flagged by defenders," Wiz researchers Yaara Shriki and Gili Tikochinski said in a report published this week. "The payload used mining pool proxies to hide their cryptocurrency wallet address, thereby preventing investigators from pivoting on it." The cloud security firm, which is being acquired by Google Cloud, said it observed the activity against its honeypot servers running TeamCity, a popular continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tool. JDWP is a communication protocol used in Java for debugging purposes. With JDWP, users can leverage a debugger to work in a different process, a Java application, on the same com...

A mobile ad fraud operation dubbed IconAds that consisted of 352 Android apps has been disrupted, according to a new report from HUMAN. The identified apps were designed to load out-of-context ads on a user's screen and hide their icons from the device home screen launcher, making it harder for victims to remove them, per the company's Satori Threat Intelligence and Research Team. The apps have since been removed from the Play Store by Google. The ad fraud scheme accounted for 1.2 billion bid requests a day, at the height of its activity. The vast majority of IconAds-associated traffic originated from Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. It's worth noting that IconAds is a variant of a threat that's also tracked by other cybersecurity vendors under the names HiddenAds and Vapor , with the malicious apps repeatedly slipping past the Google Play Store since at least 2019 . Some of the common characteristics of these apps include the use of obfuscation to conceal...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered over 40 malicious browser extensions for Mozilla Firefox that are designed to steal cryptocurrency wallet secrets, putting users' digital assets at risk. "These extensions impersonate legitimate wallet tools from widely-used platforms such as Coinbase, MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Phantom, Exodus, OKX, Keplr, MyMonero, Bitget, Leap, Ethereum Wallet, and Filfox," Koi Security researcher Yuval Ronen said . The large-scale campaign is said to have been ongoing since at least April 2025, with new extensions uploaded to the Firefox Add-ons store as recently as last week. The identified extensions have been found to artificially inflate their popularity, adding hundreds of 5-star reviews that go far beyond the total number of active installations. This strategy is employed to give them an illusion of authenticity, making it seem like they are widely adopted and tricking unsuspecting users into installing them. Another tactic adopted by ...

The French cybersecurity agency on Tuesday revealed that a number of entities spanning governmental, telecommunications, media, finance, and transport sectors in the country were impacted by a malicious campaign undertaken by a Chinese hacking group by weaponizing several zero-day vulnerabilities in Ivanti Cloud Services Appliance (CSA) devices. The campaign, detected at the beginning of September 2024, has been attributed to a distinct intrusion set codenamed Houken , which is assessed to share some level overlaps with a threat cluster tracked by Google Mandiant under the moniker UNC5174 (aka Uteus or Uetus). "While its operators use zero-day vulnerabilities and a sophisticated rootkit, they also leverage a wide number of open-source tools mostly crafted by Chinese-speaking developers," the French National Agency for the Security of Information Systems (ANSSI) said . "Houken's attack infrastructure is made up of diverse elements -- including commercial VPNs and d...

Threat actors with ties to North Korea have been observed targeting Web3 and cryptocurrency-related businesses with malware written in the Nim programming language, underscoring a constant evolution of their tactics. "Unusually for macOS malware, the threat actors employ a process injection technique and remote communications via wss, the TLS-encrypted version of the WebSocket protocol," SentinelOne researchers Phil Stokes and Raffaele Sabato said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "A novel persistence mechanism takes advantage of SIGINT/SIGTERM signal handlers to install persistence when the malware is terminated or the system rebooted." The cybersecurity company is tracking the malware components collectively under the name NimDoor. It's worth noting that some aspects of the campaign were previously documented by Huntabil.IT and later by Huntress and Validin , but with differences in the payloads deployed. The attack chains involve social enginee...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to phishing campaigns that impersonate popular brands and trick targets into calling phone numbers operated by threat actors. "A significant portion of email threats with PDF payloads persuade victims to call adversary-controlled phone numbers, displaying another popular social engineering technique known as Telephone-Oriented Attack Delivery (TOAD), also known as callback phishing," Cisco Talos researcher Omid Mirzaei said in a report shared with The Hacker News. An analysis of phishing emails with PDF attachments between May 5 and June 5, 2025, has revealed Microsoft and Docusign to be the most impersonated brands. NortonLifeLock, PayPal, and Geek Squad are among the most impersonated brands in TOAD emails with PDF attachments. The activity is part of wider phishing attacks that attempt to leverage the trust people have with popular brands to initiate malicious actions. These messages typically incorporate PDF attachments...

The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has levied sanctions against Russia-based bulletproof hosting (BPH) service provider Aeza Group for assisting threat actors in their malicious activities and targeting victims in the country and across the world. The sanctions also extend to its subsidiaries Aeza International Ltd., the U.K. branch of Aeza Group, as well as Aeza Logistic LLC, Cloud Solutions LLC, and four individuals linked to the company - Arsenii Aleksandrovich Penzev, CEO and 33% owner of Aeza Group Yurii Meruzhanovich Bozoyan, general director and 33% owner of Aeza Group Vladimir Vyacheslavovich Gast, technical director who works closely with Penzev and Bozoyan Igor Anatolyevich Knyazev, 33% owner of Aeza Group who manages the operations in the absence of Penzev and Bozoyan It's worth noting that Penzev was arrested in early April 2025 on charges of leading a criminal organization and enabling large-scale drug traffick...

Unknown threat actors have been observed weaponizing v0 , a generative artificial intelligence (AI) tool from Vercel, to design fake sign-in pages that impersonate their legitimate counterparts. "This observation signals a new evolution in the weaponization of Generative AI by threat actors who have demonstrated an ability to generate a functional phishing site from simple text prompts," Okta Threat Intelligence researchers Houssem Eddine Bordjiba and Paula De la Hoz said . v0 is an AI-powered offering from Vercel that allows users to create basic landing pages and full-stack apps using natural language prompts. The identity services provider said it has observed scammers using the technology to develop convincing replicas of login pages associated with multiple brands, including an unnamed customer of its own. Following responsible disclosure, Vercel has blocked access to these phishing sites. The threat actors behind the campaign have also been found to host other ...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged the tactical similarities between the threat actors behind the RomCom RAT and a cluster that has been observed delivering a loader dubbed TransferLoader . Enterprise security firm Proofpoint is tracking the activity associated with TransferLoader to a group dubbed UNK_GreenSec and the RomCom RAT actors under the moniker TA829 . The latter is also known by the names CIGAR, Nebulous Mantis, Storm-0978, Tropical Scorpius, UAC-0180, UAT-5647, UNC2596, and Void Rabisu. The company said it discovered UNK_GreenSec as part of its investigation into TA829, describing it as using an "unusual amount of similar infrastructure, delivery tactics, landing pages, and email lure themes." TA829 is something of an unusual hacking group in the threat landscape given its ability to conduct both espionage as well as financially motivated attacks. The Russia-aligned hybrid group has also been linked to the zero-day exploitation of security flaws in Mozil...