RAT | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A new campaign has been observed leveraging fake websites advertising popular software such as WPS Office, Sogou, and DeepSeek to deliver Sainbox RAT and the open-source Hidden rootkit. The activity has been attributed with medium confidence to a Chinese hacking group called Silver Fox (aka Void Arachne), citing similarities in tradecraft with previous campaigns attributed to the threat actor. The phishing websites ("wpsice[.]com") have been found to distribute malicious MSI installers in the Chinese language, indicating that the targets of the campaign are Chinese speakers. "The malware payloads include the Sainbox RAT, a variant of Gh0st RAT, and a variant of the open-source Hidden rootkit," Netskope Threat Labs researcher Leandro Fróes said . This is not the first time the threat actor has resorted to this modus operandi. In July 2024, eSentire detailed a campaign that targeted Chinese-speaking Windows users with fake Google Chrome sites to deliver Gh0st...

A new campaign is making use of Cloudflare Tunnel subdomains to host malicious payloads and deliver them via malicious attachments embedded in phishing emails. The ongoing campaign has been codenamed SERPENTINE#CLOUD by Securonix. It leverages "the Cloudflare Tunnel infrastructure and Python-based loaders to deliver memory-injected payloads through a chain of shortcut files and obfuscated scripts," security researcher Tim Peck said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The attack starts with sending payment- or invoice-themed phishing emails bearing a link to a zipped document that contains a Windows shortcut (LNK) file. These shortcuts are disguised as documents to trick victims into opening them, effectively activating the infection sequence. The elaborate multi-step process culminates in the execution of a Python-based shellcode loader that executes payloads packed with the open-source Donut loader entirely in memory. Securonix said the campaign has targeted the...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) is warning of a new campaign that targets the defense sectors with Dark Crystal RAT (aka DCRat ). The campaign, detected earlier this month, has been found to target both employees of enterprises of the defense-industrial complex and individual representatives of the Defense Forces of Ukraine. The activity involves distributing malicious messages via the Signal messaging app that contain supposed meeting minutes. Some of these messages are sent from previously compromised Signal accounts so as to increase the likelihood of success of the attacks. The reports are shared in the form of archive files, which contain a decoy PDF and an executable, a .NET-based evasive crypter named DarkTortilla that decrypts and launches the DCRat malware. DCRat, a well-documented remote access trojan (RAT), facilitates the execution of arbitrary commands, steals valuable information, and establishes remote control over infected devices. CE...

I had the honor of hosting the first episode of the Xposure Podcast live from Xposure Summit 2025. And I couldn't have asked for a better kickoff panel: three cybersecurity leaders who don't just talk security, they live it. Let me introduce them. Alex Delay , CISO at IDB Bank, knows what it means to defend a highly regulated environment. Ben Mead , Director of Cybersecurity at Avidity Biosciences, brings a forward-thinking security perspective that reflects the innovation behind Avidity's targeted RNA therapeutics. Last but not least, Michael Francess , Director of Cybersecurity Advanced Threat at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, leads the charge in protecting the franchise. Each brought a unique vantage point to a common challenge: applying Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) to complex production environments. Gartner made waves in 2023 with a bold prediction: organizations that prioritize CTEM will be three times less likely to be breached by 2026. But here's the kicker -...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new Android remote access trojan (RAT) called BingoMod that not only performs fraudulent money transfers from the compromised devices but also wipes them in an attempt to erase traces of the malware. Italian cybersecurity firm Cleafy, which discovered the RAT towards the end of May 2024, said the malware is under active development. It attributed the Android trojan to a likely Romanian-speaking threat actor owing to the presence of Romanian language comments in the source code associated with early versions. "BingoMod belongs to the modern RAT generation of mobile malware, as its remote access capabilities allow threat actors (TAs) to conduct Account Takeover (ATO) directly from the infected device, thus exploiting the on-device fraud (ODF) technique," researchers Alessandro Strino and Simone Mattia said . It's worth mentioning here that this technique has been observed in other Android banking trojans, such as Medusa (aka...

A new JavaScript-based remote access Trojan (RAT) propagated via a social engineering campaign has been observed employing sneaky "fileless" techniques as part of its detection-evasion methods to elude discovery and analysis. Dubbed DarkWatchman by researchers from Prevailion's Adversarial Counterintelligence Team (PACT), the malware uses a resilient domain generation algorithm ( DGA ) to identify its command-and-control (C2) infrastructure and utilizes the Windows Registry for all of its storage operations, thereby enabling it to bypass antimalware engines. The RAT "utilizes novel methods for fileless persistence, on-system activity, and dynamic run-time capabilities like self-updating and recompilation," researchers Matt Stafford and Sherman Smith  said , adding it "represents an evolution in fileless malware techniques, as it uses the registry for nearly all temporary and permanent storage and therefore never writes anything to disk, allowing it to o...