Phishing | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A sprawling operation undertaken by global law enforcement agencies and a consortium of private sector firms has disrupted the online infrastructure associated with a commodity information stealer known as Lumma (aka LummaC or LummaC2), seizing 2,300 domains that acted as the command-and-control (C2) backbone to commandeer infected Windows systems. "Malware like LummaC2 is deployed to steal sensitive information such as user login credentials from millions of victims in order to facilitate a host of crimes, including fraudulent bank transfers and cryptocurrency theft," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a statement. The confiscated infrastructure has been used to target millions across the world through affiliates and other cyber criminals. Lumma Stealer, active since late 2022, is estimated to have been used in at least 1.7 million instances to steal information, such as browser data, autofill information, login credentials, and cryptocurrency seed phrases. Th...

Russian cyber threat actors have been attributed to a state-sponsored campaign targeting Western logistics entities and technology companies since 2022. The activity has been assessed to be orchestrated by APT28 (aka BlueDelta, Fancy Bear, or Forest Blizzard), which is linked to the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) 85th Main Special Service Center, Military Unit 26165. Targets of the campaign include companies involved in the coordination, transport, and delivery of foreign assistance to Ukraine, according to a joint advisory released by agencies from Australia, Canada, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. "This cyber espionage-oriented campaign targeting logistics entities and technology companies uses a mix of previously disclosed TTPs and is likely connected to these actors' wide scale targeting of IP cameras in Ukraine and bordering NATO nations," the bulletin said...

Russian organizations have become the target of a phishing campaign that distributes malware called PureRAT, according to new findings from Kaspersky. "The campaign aimed at Russian business began back in March 2023, but in the first third of 2025 the number of attacks quadrupled compared to the same period in 2024," the cybersecurity vendor said . The attack chains, which have not been attributed to any specific threat actor, commence with a phishing email that contains a RAR file attachment or a link to the archive that masquerades as a Microsoft Word or a PDF document by making use of double extensions ("doc_054_[redacted].pdf.rar"). Present within the archive file is an executable that, when launched, copies itself to the "%AppData%" location of the compromised Windows machine under the name "task.exe" and creates a Visual Basic Script called "Task.vbs" in the Startup VBS folder. The executable then proceeds to unpack another ...

It takes just one email to compromise an entire system. A single well-crafted message can bypass filters, trick employees, and give attackers the access they need. Left undetected, these threats can lead to credential theft, unauthorized access, and even full-scale breaches. As phishing techniques become more evasive, they can no longer be reliably caught by automated solutions alone. Let's take a closer look at how SOC teams can ensure fast, accurate detection of even the most evasive phishing attacks, using the example of Tycoon2FA, the number one phishing threat in the corporate environment today. Step 1: Upload a suspicious file or URL to the sandbox Let's consider a typical situation: a suspicious email gets flagged by your detection system, but it's unclear whether it's indeed malicious. The fastest way to check it is to run a quick analysis inside a malware sandbox. A sandbox is an isolated virtual machine where you can safely open files, click links, and observe behavior ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new campaign that employs malicious JavaScript injections to redirect site visitors on mobile devices to a Chinese adult-content Progressive Web App (PWA) scam. "While the payload itself is nothing new (yet another adult gambling scam), the delivery method stands out," c/side researcher Himanshu Anand said in a Tuesday analysis. "The malicious landing page is a full-blown Progressive Web App ( PWA ), likely aiming to retain users longer and bypass basic browser protections." The campaign is designed to explicitly filter out desktop users, primarily focusing on mobile users. The activity has been described as a client-side attack that uses third-party JavaScript and only triggers on mobile devices. The use of PWAs, a type of application built using web technologies that provide a user experience similar to that of a native app built for a specific platform like Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, or iOS, is seen as an at...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new malware campaign that makes use of a PowerShell-based shellcode loader to deploy a remote access trojan called Remcos RAT. "Threat actors delivered malicious LNK files embedded within ZIP archives, often disguised as Office documents," Qualys security researcher Akshay Thorve said in a technical report. "The attack chain leverages mshta.exe for proxy execution during the initial stage." The latest wave of attacks, as detailed by Qualys, employs tax-related lures to entice users into opening a malicious ZIP archive containing a Windows shortcut (LNK) file, which, in turn, makes use of mshta.exe, a legitimate Microsoft tool used to run HTML Applications (HTA). The binary is used to execute an obfuscated HTA file named "xlab22.hta" hosted on a remote server, which incorporates Visual Basic Script code to download a PowerShell script, a decoy PDF, and another HTA file similar to xlab22.hta called "3...

A new global phishing threat called " Meta Mirage " has been uncovered, targeting businesses using Meta's Business Suite. This campaign specifically aims at hijacking high-value accounts, including those managing advertising and official brand pages. Cybersecurity researchers at CTM360 revealed that attackers behind Meta Mirage impersonate official Meta communications, tricking users into handing over sensitive details like passwords and security codes (OTP). The scale of this operation is alarming. Researchers have already identified over 14,000 malicious URLs , a concerning majority of which —nearly 78%— were not blocked by browsers at the time the report was published. Cybercriminals cleverly hosted fake pages leveraging trusted cloud platforms like GitHub, Firebase, and Vercel, making it harder to spot the scams. This method aligns closely with recent findings from Microsoft, which highlighted similar abuse of cloud hosting services to compromise Kubernetes appli...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new phishing campaign that's being used to distribute malware called Horabot targeting Windows users in Latin American countries like Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Argentina. The campaign is "using crafted emails that impersonate invoices or financial documents to trick victims into opening malicious attachments and can steal email credentials, harvest contact lists, and install banking trojans," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin said . The activity, observed by the network security company in April 2025, has primarily singled out Spanish-speaking users. The attacks have also been found to send phishing messages from victims' mailboxes using Outlook COM automation, effectively propagating the malware laterally within corporate or personal networks. In addition, the threat actors behind the campaign execute various VBScript, AutoIt, and PowerShell scripts to conduct system reconnaissance, stea...

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as Konni APT has been attributed to a phishing campaign targeting government entities in Ukraine, indicating the threat actor's targeting beyond Russia . Enterprise security firm Proofpoint said the end goal of the campaign is to collect intelligence on the "trajectory of the Russian invasion." "The group's interest in Ukraine follows historical targeting of government entities in Russia for strategic intelligence gathering purposes," security researchers Greg Lesnewich, Saher Naumaan, and Mark Kelly said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Konni APT , also known as Opal Sleet, Osmium, TA406, and Vedalia , is a cyber espionage group that has a history of targeting entities in South Korea, the United States, and Russia. It's operational since at least 2014. Attack chains mounted by the threat actor often involve the use of phishing emails to distribute malware called Konni RAT (aka UpDog) and redirect r...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning of a new campaign that's targeting Portuguese-speaking users in Brazil with trial versions of commercial remote monitoring and management (RMM) software since January 2025. "The spam message uses the Brazilian electronic invoice system, NF-e, as a lure to entice users into clicking hyperlinks and accessing malicious content hosted in Dropbox," Cisco Talos researcher Guilherme Venere said in a Thursday report. The attack chains begin with specially crafted spam emails that claim to originate from financial institutions or cell phone carriers, warning of overdue bills or outstanding payments in order to trick users into clicking on bogus Dropbox links that point to a binary installer for the RMM tool. Two notable RMM tools observed are N-able RMM Remote Access and PDQ Connect , granting attackers the ability to read and write files to the remote file system. In some cases, the threat actors then use the remote capabilities of th...

Cybersecurity researchers have exposed what they say is an "industrial-scale, global cryptocurrency phishing operation" engineered to steal digital assets from cryptocurrency wallets for several years. The campaign has been codenamed FreeDrain by threat intelligence firms SentinelOne and Validin . "FreeDrain uses SEO manipulation, free-tier web services (like gitbook.io, webflow.io, and github.io), and layered redirection techniques to target cryptocurrency wallets," security researchers Kenneth Kinion, Sreekar Madabushi, and Tom Hegel said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "Victims search for wallet-related queries, click on high-ranking malicious results, land on lure pages, and are redirected to phishing pages that steal their seed phrases." The scale of the campaign is reflected in the fact that over 38,000 distinct FreeDrain sub-domains hosting lure pages have been identified. These pages are hosted on cloud infrastructure lik...