Phishing | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The comfort zone in cybersecurity is gone. Attackers are scaling down, focusing tighter, and squeezing more value from fewer, high-impact targets. At the same time, defenders face growing blind spots — from spoofed messages to large-scale social engineering. This week's findings show how that shrinking margin of safety is redrawing the threat landscape. Here's what's making headlines. Hijack Loader expands its reach in Latin America LATAM Targeted by PureHVNC Phishing emails containing SVG file attachments targeting Colombian, Spanish-speaking individuals with themes relating to the Attorney General's office of Colombia have been used to deliver PureHVNC RAT . "The emails entice the user to download an 'official document' from the judicial information system, which starts the infection chain of executing a Hijack Loader executable that leads to the PureHVNC Remote Access Trojan (RAT)," IBM X-Force said . The activity ...

Threat actors tied to North Korea have been observed targeting the Web3 and blockchain sectors as part of twin campaigns tracked as GhostCall and GhostHire . According to Kaspersky, the campaigns are part of a broader operation called SnatchCrypto that has been underway since at least 2017. The activity is attributed to a Lazarus Group sub-cluster called BlueNoroff , which is also known as APT38, CageyChameleon, CryptoCore, Genie Spider, Nickel Gladstone, Sapphire Sleet (formerly Copernicium), and Stardust Chollima. Victims of the GhostCall campaign span several infected macOS hosts located in Japan, Italy, France, Singapore, Turkey, Spain, Sweden, India, and Hong Kong, whereas Japan and Australia have been identified as the major hunting grounds for the GhostHire campaign. "GhostCall heavily targets the macOS devices of executives at tech companies and in the venture capital sector by directly approaching targets via platforms like Telegram, and inviting potential victims t...

The New Reality for Lean Security Teams If you're the first security or IT hire at a fast-growing startup, you've likely inherited a mandate that's both simple and maddeningly complex: secure the business without slowing it down. Most organizations using Google Workspace start with an environment built for collaboration, not resilience. Shared drives, permissive settings, and constant integrations make life easy for employees—and equally easy for attackers. The good news is that Google Workspace provides an excellent security foundation. The challenge lies in properly configuring it, maintaining visibility, and closing the blind spots that Google's native controls leave open. This article breaks down the key practices every security team—especially small, lean ones—should follow to harden Google Workspace and defend against modern cloud threats. 1. Lock Down the Basics Enforce Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) MFA is the single most effective way to stop account compromise. In ...

A European embassy located in the Indian capital of New Delhi, as well as multiple organizations in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, have emerged as the target of a new campaign orchestrated by a threat actor known as SideWinder in September 2025. The activity "reveals a notable evolution in SideWinder's TTPs, particularly the adoption of a novel PDF and ClickOnce -based infection chain, in addition to their previously documented Microsoft Word exploit vectors," Trellix researchers Ernesto Fernández Provecho and Pham Duy Phuc said in a report published last week. The attacks, which involved sending spear-phishing emails in four waves from March through September 2025, are designed to drop malware families such as ModuleInstaller and StealerBot to gather sensitive information from compromised hosts. While ModuleInstaller serves as a downloader for next-stage payloads, including StealerBot, the latter is a .NET implant that can launch a reverse shell, deliver addi...

The newly released OpenAI ChatGPT Atlas web browser has been found to be susceptible to a prompt injection attack where its omnibox can be jailbroken by disguising a malicious prompt as a seemingly harmless URL to visit. "The omnibox (combined address/search bar) interprets input either as a URL to navigate to, or as a natural-language command to the agent," NeuralTrust said in a report published Friday. "We've identified a prompt injection technique that disguises malicious instructions to look like a URL, but that Atlas treats as high-trust 'user intent' text, enabling harmful actions." Last week, OpenAI launched Atlas as a web browser with built-in ChatGPT capabilities to assist users with web page summarization, inline text editing, and agentic functions. In the attack outlined by the artificial intelligence (AI) security company, an attacker can take advantage of the browser's lack of strict boundaries between trusted user input and untru...

The threat actors behind a large-scale, ongoing smishing campaign have been attributed to more than 194,000 malicious domains since January 1, 2024, targeting a broad range of services across the world, according to new findings from Palo Alto Networks Unit 42. "Although these domains are registered through a Hong Kong-based registrar and use Chinese nameservers, the attack infrastructure is primarily hosted on popular U.S. cloud services," security researchers Reethika Ramesh, Zhanhao Chen, Daiping Liu, Chi-Wei Liu, Shehroze Farooqi, and Moe Ghasemisharif said . The activity has been attributed to a China-linked group known as the Smishing Triad , which is known to flood mobile devices with fraudulent toll violation and package misdelivery notices to trick users into taking immediate action and providing sensitive information. These campaigns have proven to be lucrative, allowing the threat actors to make more than $1 billion over the last three years, according to a re...

A Pakistan-nexus threat actor has been observed targeting Indian government entities as part of spear-phishing attacks designed to deliver a Golang-based malware known as DeskRAT . The activity, observed in August and September 2025 by Sekoia, has been attributed to Transparent Tribe (aka APT36), a state-sponsored hacking group known to be active since at least 2013. It also builds upon a prior campaign disclosed by CYFIRMA in August 2025. The attack chains involve sending phishing emails containing a ZIP file attachment, or in some cases, a link pointing to an archive hosted on legitimate cloud services like Google Drive. Present within the ZIP file is a malicious Desktop file embedding commands to display a decoy PDF ("CDS_Directive_Armed_Forces.pdf") using Mozilla Firefox while simultaneously executing the main payload. Both the artifacts are pulled from an external server "modgovindia[.]com" and executed. Like before, the campaign is designed to target BO...

Criminals don't need to be clever all the time; they just follow the easiest path in: trick users, exploit stale components, or abuse trusted systems like OAuth and package registries. If your stack or habits make any of those easy, you're already a target. This week's ThreatsDay highlights show exactly how those weak points are being exploited — from overlooked misconfigurations to sophisticated new attack chains that turn ordinary tools into powerful entry points. Lumma Stealer Stumbles After Doxxing Drama Decline in Lumma Stealer Activity After Doxxing Campaign The activity of the Lumma Stealer (aka Water Kurita) information stealer has witnessed a "sudden drop" since last months after the identities of five alleged core group members were exposed as part of what's said to be an aggressive underground exposure campaign dubbed Lumma Rats since late August 2025. The targeted individuals are affiliated with the malware's development and administ...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a cybercriminal group called Jingle Thief that has been observed targeting cloud environments associated with organizations in the retail and consumer services sectors for gift card fraud. "Jingle Thief attackers use phishing and smishing to steal credentials, to compromise organizations that issue gift cards," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers Stav Setty and Shachar Roitman said in a Wednesday analysis. "Once they gain access to an organization, they pursue the type and level of access needed to issue unauthorized gift cards." The end goal of these efforts is to leverage the issued gift cards for monetary gain by likely reselling them on gray markets. Gift cards make for a lucrative choice as they can be easily redeemed with minimal personal information and are difficult to trace, making it harder for defenders to investigate the fraud. The name Jingle Thief is a nod to the threat actor's pattern of conduc...

The Iranian nation-state group known as MuddyWater has been attributed to a new campaign that has leveraged a compromised email account to distribute a backdoor called Phoenix to various organizations across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, including over 100 government entities. The end goal of the campaign is to infiltrate high-value targets and facilitate intelligence gathering, Singaporean cybersecurity company Group-IB said in a technical report published today. More than three-fourths of the campaign's targets include embassies, diplomatic missions, foreign affairs ministries, and consulates, followed by international organizations and telecommunications firms. "MuddyWater accessed the compromised mailbox through NordVPN (a legitimate service abused by the threat actor), and used it to send phishing emails that appeared to be authentic correspondence," said security researchers Mahmoud Zohdy and Mansour Alhmoud. "By exploiting the trust a...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a coordinated spear-phishing campaign dubbed PhantomCaptcha targeting organizations associated with Ukraine's war relief efforts to deliver a remote access trojan that uses a WebSocket for command-and-control (C2). The activity, which took place on October 8, 2025, targeted individual members of the International Red Cross, Norwegian Refugee Council, United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) Ukraine office, Norwegian Refugee Council, Council of Europe's Register of Damage for Ukraine, and Ukrainian regional government administrations in the Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, and Mikolaevsk regions, SentinelOne said in a new report published today. The phishing emails have been found to impersonate the Ukrainian President's Office, carrying a booby-trapped PDF document that contains an embedded link, which, when clicked, redirects victims to a fake Zoom site ("zoomconference[.]app") and tricks them into runn...

ClickFix, FileFix, fake CAPTCHA — whatever you call it, attacks where users interact with malicious scripts in their web browser are a fast-growing source of security breaches.  ClickFix attacks prompt the user to solve some kind of problem or challenge in the browser — most commonly a CAPTCHA, but also things like fixing an error on a webpage.  The name is a little misleading, though — the key factor in the attack is that they trick users into running malicious commands on their device by copying malicious code from the page clipboard and running it locally. Examples of ClickFix lures used by attackers in the wild. ClickFix is known to be regularly used by the Interlock ransomware group and other prolific threat actors, including state-sponsored APTs. A number of recent public data breaches have been linked to ClickFix-style TTPs, such as Kettering Health, DaVita, City of St. Paul, Minnesota, and the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Centers (with many more breaches ...

Europol on Friday announced the disruption of a sophisticated cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) platform that operated a SIM farm and enabled its customers to carry out a broad spectrum of crimes ranging from phishing to investment fraud. The coordinated law enforcement effort, dubbed Operation SIMCARTEL , saw 26 searches carried out, resulting in the arrest of seven suspects and the seizure of 1,200 SIM box devices , which contained 40,000 active SIM cards. Five of those detained are Latvian nationals. In addition, five servers were dismantled and two websites (gogetsms[.]com and apisim[.]com) advertising the service was taken over on October 10, 2025, to display a seizure banner. Separately, four luxury vehicles were confiscated, and €431,000 ($502,000) in suspects' bank accounts and €266,000 ($310,000) in their cryptocurrency accounts were frozen. The countries that participated in the operation comprised authorities from Austria, Estonia, Finland, and Latvia, in collaboration...