Nation-State | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Companies are used to thinking about attackers as outsiders trying to break in. North Korean IT workers flip that model. They apply for jobs, pass interviews, receive legitimate credentials, and can end up inside the same systems companies spend millions trying to protect. That risk is no longer theoretical. The FBI is now investigating a North Korean remote IT worker who reportedly worked for a U.S. federal agency. For CISOs, the priority is clear: spot the warning signs before a fraudulent hire becomes trusted access. When the Threat Gets Hired A recent joint investigation by Mauro Eldritch ( BCA LTD ), Heiner García ( NorthScan ), and ANY.RUN showed what this looks like from inside the operation. Researchers deliberately hired suspected DPRK developers linked to Lazarus Group and gave them what looked like ordinary virtual desktops. In reality, they were controlled ANY.RUN Sandboxes, capturing their activity in real time. The operation exposed forged identities, re...

The North Korean threat actor known as Lazarus Group has been attributed to the zero-day exploitation of a newly patched security flaw impacting Microsoft Windows to deliver a never-before-seen backdoor targeting defense and aerospace companies across France, Germany, Brazil, and India. The activity, per Check Point Research, is part of Operation Dream Job , a long-running cyber espionage and social engineering campaign orchestrated by Pyongyang-backed hackers to target professionals worldwide with fake-but-compelling job offers at firms like Lockheed Martin and Enveil to steal sensitive data and install malware by approaching them on platforms like LinkedIn, pretending to be recruiters in an attempt to build trust. The attacks have been found to exploit CVE-2026-68820 (CVSS score: 7.0), a privilege escalation flaw affecting Windows Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock ("AFD.sys") that was patched by Microsoft as part of its Patch Tuesday updates for August 2026. C...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has disclosed details of a new social engineering campaign orchestrated by Russian nation-state threat actors targeting IT workers in the country by masquerading as recruiters to trick them into installing malware. CERT-UA pinned the activity on a threat cluster it tracks as UAC-0145 , which is a subgroup within Sandworm (aka APT44, Seashell Blizzard, and UAC-0002), a sophisticated hacking group affiliated with the GRU. The campaign is assessed to be ongoing since May 2026. "Specifically, on job search websites, after reviewing a candidate's resume, the attackers contact a potential victim – typically a system administrator or IT specialist – on behalf of an IT company (such as ATLAS Business Group)," CERT-UA said .  Although initial communications take place via built-in online chat, the conversation subsequently shifts to messaging apps like Telegram, where a preliminary chat takes place with a purported H...

Security researchers invented a cryptocurrency startup, advertised developer jobs, and hired three people they believe were North Korean operatives. Every virtual machine the company issued was recording. The onboarding paperwork is the part hiring teams can use. The first hire claimed to live in Pasadena, Texas, then sent a California driver's license and a New York bank account. The researchers said the image metadata showed it had been processed with Google Gemini. They also reported a SynthID watermark, the invisible marker Google embeds in images its AI tools create or edit. The second supplied a Texas license, a valid Social Security number, and a bank account in Kansas City. The third sent a New York license belonging to someone else, a genuine iPhone 15 photograph with the GPS coordinates stripped. A successful placement gives the operative a real employee account and real access to source code and internal systems. The July 31 joint alert says North Korean IT work...

A fake browser update served over hijacked hotel Wi-Fi has been used to deliver CornFlake , a remote access trojan (RAT) that can capture webcam images, microphone audio, and keystrokes, Microsoft said in its latest report. Researchers track the operation as CaptiveCrunch and attribute it to Storm-2945 . It assesses Storm-2945 to be an operational sub-cluster of Midnight Blizzard , also known as APT29 and Cozy Bear. The U.S. and U.K. governments attribute the broader actor to Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). On the compromised networks ReliaQuest investigated, the captive portal gateway also served as the DNS resolver assigned to connected devices. Administrative control of that gateway let the attackers forge Domain Name System (DNS) answers and redirect the resulting traffic. They could then redirect a laptop's automatic connectivity check to a fake browser or operating system update. Some pages use ClickFix instructions that tell victims to open a termina...

The North Korean threat actors behind the ClickFix-style campaigns that employ typosquatted Zoom and Microsoft Teams domains have been found to operate an active phishing kit to impersonate the videoconferencing platforms in social engineering campaigns designed to deliver malware. " BlueNoroff has operationalised trust abuse by combining compromised industry contacts, social engineering, wallet reconnaissance and malware delivery into a repeatable victim acquisition pipeline," JUMPSEC said in a detailed report shared with The Hacker News. "The platform profiles victims' cryptocurrency wallets before malware delivery, enabling selective targeting of high-value victims." Describing the campaign as an operator-driven victim acquisition platform, the cybersecurity company noted that the activity involves using compromised trusted contacts as the initial access vector to create a self-propagating attack chain via Telegram. Details of the activity have been...

Russian state-sponsored threat actors have been observed leveraging the infamous ClickFix strategy to trick Ukrainian targets into infecting their own machines with data-stealing malware. According to the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA), the activity has been attributed to UAC-0145 , a sub-cluster within Sandworm , an advanced hacking unit affiliated with GRU, Russia's primary foreign military intelligence agency. In these attacks, threat actors have been found to leverage fake CAPTCHA checks on compromised websites that instruct prospective targets to execute a PowerShell command in the terminal. "The mentioned command, as an example, could be intended for downloading and saving a VBS file in the Startup autorun directory; one of the variants of such a program was called GHETTOVIBE," CERT-UA said in an alert. The attacks also involve the use of SCOUTCURL, a PowerShell script that performs basic reconnaissance by harvesting details about t...

North Korean threat actors linked to the Contagious Interview campaign have been observed employing steganography in SVG image files to conceal malicious payloads as part of a campaign using fake job postings and coding challenges. "Any user who ran the project ended up with a four-stage payload aligned with OtterCookie: a browser credential and crypto wallet stealer, a file stealer, a Socket.IO-based remote access trojan (RAT), and a clipboard stealer," Elastic Security Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The findings once again highlight the continued targeting of software developers by state-sponsored hackers aligned with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) with an aim to steal sensitive data and plunder cryptocurrency wallets. The activity is being tracked under the moniker REF9403. The cybersecurity arm of the Dutch enterprise search and observability platform said it discovered the campaign after the threat actors targeted membe...

An advanced malware previously attributed to a China-linked threat actor has resurfaced after more than four years within a Taiwan manufacturing firm, along with a previously unreported backdoor dubbed Stupig . Daxin ("srt64.sys"), as the kernel-mode rootkit is referred to, was first documented by Broadcom-owned Symantec in March 2022, with evidence indicating its use in targeted attacks aimed at governments and other critical infrastructure targets since 2013. The latest findings from the Symantec and Carbon Black Threat Hunter Team show that Daxin is still operational, after it was found running on a compromised host in Taiwan in 2026. The same machine, belonging to a Taiwan-based subsidiary of a multinational high-tech manufacturer, is also said to have been infected with Stupig ("a.dll" or "kbdus1.dll"). The file name is an attempt to masquerade as "kbdus.dll," a legitimate Microsoft DLL associated with the U.S. English keyboard layout...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of sustained cyber espionage activity against several Pakistani law enforcement organizations undertaken by suspected China- and India-aligned threat actors between February 2024 and April 2026. "At Balochistan Police, the compromised assets included servers hosting web applications that manage police and citizen data, such as criminal and biometric records," Aleksandar Milenkoski, principal threat researcher at SentinelOne SentinelLABS, said in a report published this week. The activity targeted network appliances and servers hosting web applications that manage biometric records, hotel and tenant registrations linked to national identity records, criminal case files, and personnel records. The China-nexus threat actor is also said to have compromised one of these web applications to deploy a custom implant masquerading as a portal update. The application in question, named Complaint Management System (CMS), serves pol...