Phishing | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A lot of security problems still begin with someone doing a completely normal thing. Cloning a repo. Answering a call. Leaving a box exposed. Trusting the default. That pretty much covers the mood this week. Old bugs are back, supply chains are getting stranger, and some exploit paths are so short you wonder what was supposed to stop them in the first place. That’s only part of it. Here’s everything else that made the Monday recap. ⚡ Threat of the Week Anthropic's Model Attempts to Poison Open-Source Project — A new evaluation conducted by the U.K. AI Security Institute (AISI) found that AI models with access to the internet reached out into the real world to target individuals and organizations autonomously across 10 of the total of 122 runs. Of 19 such actions recorded, 17 originated from Anthropic's Mythos 5 and the remaining two involved OpenAI's GPT-5.6-Sol with cyber classifiers. In the most serious case, Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 spent 34 hours trying...

North Korea's state hackers are no longer content to type prompts into public chatbots. One of the country's main espionage groups has begun running artificial intelligence (AI) offline on its own servers, connecting document-search tools to files in its possession, and collecting the software parts needed to build AI into its malware. South Korean security firm Genians says it uncovered the setup after months of tracking and log analysis on infrastructure tied to Kimsuky, a hacking unit under North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau. Genians found no evidence that the group had trained an AI model of its own, and the firm does not offer that as reassurance. It describes an actor in a "research and knowledge acquisition" stage, assembling and testing existing tools rather than making new models, with the apparent aim of folding AI through the operation, from writing malware to analyzing data. For an intelligence unit that has spent years phishing governm...

New research shows content inside an email can escape its message boundary and interfere with the webmail interface. Across attack chains spanning Outlook, Gmail, Fastmail, Proton Mail, Yahoo Mail, and AOL Mail, the techniques can capture passwords, take over third-party accounts, leak tokens, hijack trusted UI actions, and manipulate AI tools that read email. PortSwigger researcher Gareth Heyes presented the work at Black Hat USA 2026. One Outlook/Firefox chain spoofs a Microsoft sign-in screen and captures the password a recipient types. A Yahoo/AOL paste race can expose a Medium email-login token and let an attacker sign in as the victim. A Gmail/Cowork chain can exfiltrate a Slack token after prompt injection and user interaction. The paper presents proof-of-concept research and does not report malicious exploitation. Public PoCs remain available as of August 8. The researcher said Fastmail fixed two CSS mutation bugs and a Proton Mail proxy bypass stopped working when he re...

A recent wave of cyber attacks targeting financial services, private equity, and professional services has been attributed to a data extortion group known as UNC6671 . "UNC6671 continues to rely on voice phishing (vishing) to target enterprise employees, posing as IT help desk staff facilitating mandatory, urgent security migrations. Significantly, the threat actor often contacts employees via their personal mobile devices," Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) and Mandiant said in a report. These calls are designed to trick victims into spoofed login portals where adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) infrastructure intercepts credentials and multi-factor authentication (MFA) tokens. The threat actors then leverage the captured data to establish session persistence and deploy automated Python and PowerShell scripts for data exfiltration from enterprise cloud environments and SaaS applications, including Microsoft 365 and Okta. According to the tech giant, UNC6671 has d...

Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to an active "widespread email-driven phishing campaign" that employs adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) techniques to take control of Microsoft 365 accounts with an aim to identify key personnel involved in financial workflows and gather related email. "The campaign uses residential proxies to disguise malicious sign-ins as ordinary consumer traffic," Arctic Wolf Labs said . "Automated activity maintains compromised sessions at approximately eight-hour intervals." The activity is assessed to impact organizations across healthcare, education, manufacturing, government, and professional services sectors located in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. It shares tactical overlaps with Payroll Pirate attacks tracked by Microsoft under the moniker Storm-2755 . Payroll Pirates is the designation assigned to a broader financially motivated threat cluster that involves hijacking the accounts of employees to reroute sal...

Kali365 is turning a legitimate Microsoft login into a gateway to corporate data. The phishing kit targets US organizations with attacker-controlled device codes that victims approve on Microsoft's real authentication page. Once access and refresh tokens are issued, attackers may retain access to email, documents, and cloud resources, creating a direct path to data exposure, financial fraud, operational disruption, and costly incident response. How Kali365 Targets US Organizations Kali365 is a device code phishing kit built to abuse legitimate Microsoft authentication. ANY.RUN telemetry records more than 80 public sessions linked to the campaign each week, with the United States emerging as its main geographic target. One of these sandbox sessions shows a SharePoint-themed lure used to draw the victim into the authentication flow. View the analysis session and gather IOCs SharePoint-themed Kali365 lure analyzed inside ANY.RUN’s Interactive Sandbox Based on the resear...

The commercial phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) toolkit known as Greatness has become the latest crimeware solution to add support for device code phishing, a rapidly growing cyber threat that abuses the legitimate OAuth 2.0 Device Authorization Grant to bypass Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and seize control of user accounts. "Greatness supports AiTM [adversary-in-the-middle] credential and token theft, device code phishing, and OAuth consent abuse, all from the same operator panel and shared backend infrastructure," ZeroBEC said in a report shared with The Hacker News detailing the PhaaS kit's latest capabilities. "The platform now supports AiTM token theft, device code phishing, OAuth consent abuse, and multiple target platforms, including iCloud, Yahoo, and Google Workspace. This evolution reflects the broader trend of PhaaS platforms expanding from simple credential harvesting to integrated attack ecosystems." The phishing platform was first pu...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an active, multi-wave campaign that employs social engineering lures themed around Adobe and Zoom software updates, business document reviews, and system maintenance utilities to stealthily deploy Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) programs like ConnectWise ScreenConnect. The campaign has been codenamed SMOKE#SCREEN by Securonix Threat Research. "The campaign relies on a toolkit of VBScript droppers, batch file loaders, compiled .NET executables and an HTML phishing page, all ultimately pointing to a live WsgiDAV-based staging server at 207.174.0[.]143:8080," researchers Shikha Sangwan, Akshay Gaikwad, and Aaron Beardslee said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Successful attacks culminate with a ScreenConnect agent installed and beaconing to one of three attacker-controlled relay servers, providing the attackers with persistent remote access to compromised systems. The activity has not been attributed to ...

A new Russian loader-as-a-service (LaaS) codenamed DOUBLECUP has been using ClickFix lures as a way to stage malware-laced PNG images in victims' browser cache and ultimately deliver CountLoader and a previously undocumented remote access trojan called DeviceManager . "The first stage drops a steganographic PNG image into the browser's cache, retrieves its hidden content, and executes the second stage," SOCRadar said in a technical report. "This second stage decrypts the final payload in memory via a custom SHA-256 stream cipher in Counter (CTR) mode along with bitwise XOR using the victim's public IP address as the cryptographic key." Payloads delivered via the loader service include CountLoader , with variants for both Windows and macOS, and DeviceManager, which utilizes EtherHiding to resolve its command-and-control (C2) infrastructure and communicate with the server over HTTP or DNS tunneling. The service is assessed to be active since ea...

This week kept coming back to permission. A model crossed a boundary. A wallet trusted bad randomness. Webmail kept an intruder around. Public systems, package feeds, hotel networks, and login flows all gave away more than intended. Some of it was clever. Most of it was just access left lying around: old bugs, exposed gear, poisoned dependencies, weak defaults, and tooling that moved from forum chatter to real targets. The full weekly recap report follows. ⚡ Threat of the Week Anthropic Disclosed its Models Targeted 3 Organizations - Anthropic revealed that three of its models, including Claude Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an unnamed research model, breached three unnamed organizations during cybersecurity testing without its knowledge. The AI firm said the earliest incidents date back to April 2026, adding it made the discoveries after launching a "large-scale retrospective review" in response to the recent Hugging Face incident. "After reviewing 141,006 evaluatio...

An unknown Chinese-speaking threat actor has been observed running a campaign targeting Apple iOS devices by leveraging a publicly leaked version of the DarkSword exploit kit. Attack surface management platform Censys said it identified the threat actor running more than 100 web properties, most of which are fake Amazon Web Services (AWS) sign-in pages on a domain that also hosts the exploit toolkit. "The hosting concentrates in Hong Kong but reaches into Japan, the United States, and Europe," Censys researcher Aidan Holland said in an analysis published on July 31, 2026. DarkSword, discovered and detailed earlier this year by Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), iVerify, and Lookout, refers to a full-chain exploit kit that is believed to have been used by commercial surveillance vendors and suspected state-sponsored actors in disparate campaigns targeting Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Malaysia, and Ukraine since at least November 2025. The kit, which specifically tar...

The Police National Legal Database (PNLD) has confirmed that police, government and customer contact information was compromised and published on the dark web. The data included names, organisations and work email addresses belonging to police officers, police staff, criminal justice professionals, government partners and customers. The incident, identified on July 26, also exposed some names and email addresses belonging to people who had submitted questions through Ask the Police. That exposure could make phishing messages targeting named officers appear more convincing, according to UK government guidance . PNLD said, "There is no evidence to suggest that passwords or other security credentials have been compromised." The service provides legal information, products and services to UK police forces and criminal justice organisations. It is not the Police National Computer or the Police National Database, is not a crime-recording system, and does not hold confidentia...

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...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a previously undocumented Go-based loader framework called HollowFrame and a Rust-based malware family tracked as Matryoshka . According to Blackpoint Cyber, the intrusion sequence begins with a spear-phishing message containing a link to an encrypted archive, which holds a Windows Shortcut (LNK). Executing the file triggers a multi-stage chain that involves privilege escalation, weakening Microsoft Defender protections, and downloading additional payloads. While HollowFrame is launched via a DLL side-loading pair comprising the legitimate Python binary ("python.exe") and a rogue DLL ("python311.dll"), Matryoshka comes in two variants, one which supports HTTP-based communication and command execution, and another that uses GitHub for command-and-control (C2), including beaconing, tasking, reconnaissance, file transfer, and secondary payload delivery. "Together, HollowFrame and Matryoshka gave the actor a pers...

Device code phishing - the abuse of the OAuth 2.0 device authorization grant to steal access tokens - has evolved from a niche red-team technique to an industrial-scale threat in under six months. Designed for input-constrained devices like smart TVs, printers, and so on, the device authorization login flow has been adopted by a wide range of apps and use-cases that it wasn't originally intended for - most commonly CLI logins. Researchers first described the attack vector in 2020, but it took until 2024 before nation-state actors like Storm-2372 started using it in the wild. By 2025, ShinyHunters was using device code phishing against Salesforce tenants at scale, then in February 2026, the EvilTokens kit arrived and criminal adoption skyrocketed. By April, Microsoft was reporting 10 to 15 entirely new campaigns every 24 hours . Barracuda counted 7 million attacks in four weeks . The FBI issued a standalone advisory on Kali365 , the first US federal agency PSA about a specif...

The Chinese cybercrime group known as Silver Fox has been observed using new drivers as part of bring your own vulnerable driver (BYOVD) attacks targeting a Japanese organization in the industrial manufacturing sector to ultimately deliver ValleyRAT (aka Winos 4.0) for persistent remote access. "In this campaign, the group combines new vulnerable-driver abuse, newly observed abuse of legitimate applications for DLL sideloading, defense evasion, and layered recovery mechanisms to keep ValleyRAT running," Cato Networks researchers Shani Kurtzberg, Tomer Pugach, Dr. Guy Waizel, Zohar Buber, Idan Tarab, and Shani Kurtzberg said in an analysis. The attack chain begins with an invoice-themed phishing lure that uses attacker-controlled content hosted on legitimate QQ and Tencent Cloud services to trigger a DLL side-loading chain via a ZIP archive that paves the way for the deployment of ValleyRAT, but not before leveraging the BYOVD technique to obtain kernel access and impai...

The Russian threat actors recently linked to the exploitation of a now-patched vulnerability in Zimbra have been observed exploiting another vulnerability, this time in Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA), to target U.S. and European government entities, as well as the telecommunications, financial, hospitality, and aerospace sectors. The activity, which began on July 22, 2026, involves the weaponization of CVE-2026-42897 (CVSS score: 8.1), a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in OWA. It was flagged by Microsoft as having been exploited in attacks as far back as May 2026. Enterprise security company Proofpoint has attributed the activity to Laundry Bear (aka CL-STA-1114, TA488, UNK_PitStop, and Void Blizzard), which was recently attributed to the zero-day exploitation of CVE-2025-66376, an XSS flaw in Zimbra's Classic UI, since at least July 2025 before it was patched four months later. In these attacks, the threat actors sent out messages from adversary-controlled P...

Amazon has tied the September 2025 hijack of the npm packages debug and chalk to North Korea. For ten months, the incident sat in the public record as crypto theft: a maintainer phished through a lookalike npm domain and a wallet-draining script pushed into at least 18 packages carrying more than 2 billion weekly downloads between them. The original Aikido and Wiz reports did not attribute the incident to North Korea. In research published July 29, Amazon Threat Intelligence assesses with medium confidence that the group behind the March 2026 axios compromise was behind it. The same group planted a trojanized file in a small package called typo-crypto in March 2025, according to Amazon, a full year before it reached axios. Analysts found it while chasing a domain registered in 2025 that surfaced during the axios investigation. Downloads were low, but the tradecraft "aligns with what we later observed in attacks on more popular packages," Amazon wrote, and the compa...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a large-scale fraud campaign that involves creating lookalike websites of major Russian companies with an aim to siphon funds from international firms for more than nine years. According to Russian cybersecurity vendor F6 , the threat actors have set up clone websites of Russian companies across fertilizer manufacturers, petrochemical companies, metallurgical plants, logistics operators, and banks. The operation has been ongoing since 2017. "Most of the content on these fraudulent websites was copied from the legitimate company websites. Some also used lookalike domain names," the cybersecurity company said in an exclusive report shared with The Hacker News. "These fake websites, available in English, French, Arabic, and Russian, were used to target international customers and steal advance payments for goods that did not exist." Analysis indicates that the phony prepayment scheme has primarily singled out o...

The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) on Wednesday said it charged Telegram founder Pavel Durov for allegedly facilitating terrorist activities and for failing to remove prohibited information in violation of Russian law. The principal security agency said the instant messaging platform "failed to remove numerous channels, chats, and bots on the platform that are actively used by Ukrainian special services and by terrorist and extremist organizations to plan and coordinate acts of sabotage and terrorism, mass killings, and cyber-fraud operations within the Russian Federation." These actions have resulted in numerous casualties, including among women and children, as well as significant damage amounting to billions, it added. Durov has been charged in connection with an ongoing criminal investigation under Part 1.1 of Article 205.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation for aiding terrorist activity. He has also been placed on the inte...