Remote Access Trojan | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Threat actors have been observed leveraging fake artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools as a lure to entice users into downloading an information stealer malware dubbed Noodlophile . "Instead of relying on traditional phishing or cracked software sites, they build convincing AI-themed platforms – often advertised via legitimate-looking Facebook groups and viral social media campaigns," Morphisec researcher Shmuel Uzan said in a report published last week. Posts shared on these pages have been found to attract over 62,000 views on a single post, indicating that users looking for AI tools for video and image editing are the target of this campaign. Some of the fake social media pages identified include Luma Dreammachine Al, Luma Dreammachine, and gratistuslibros. Users who land on the social media posts are urged to click on links that advertise AI-powered content creation services, including videos, logos, images, and even websites. One of the bogus websites masquerad...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged three malicious npm packages that are designed to target the Apple macOS version of Cursor, a popular artificial intelligence (AI)-powered source code editor. "Disguised as developer tools offering 'the cheapest Cursor API,' these packages steal user credentials, fetch an encrypted payload from threat actor-controlled infrastructure, overwrite Cursor's main.js file, and disable auto-updates to maintain persistence," Socket researcher Kirill Boychenko said . The packages in question are listed below - sw-cur (2,771 downloads) sw-cur1 (307 downloads), and aiide-cur (163 downloads) All three packages continue to be available for download from the npm registry. "Aiide-cur" was first published on February 14, 2025. It was uploaded by a user named "aiide." The npm library is described as a "command-line tool for configuring the macOS version of the Cursor editor." The other two packages, ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malicious package on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that masquerades as a seemingly harmless Discord-related utility but incorporates a remote access trojan. The package in question is discordpydebug , which was uploaded to PyPI on March 21, 2022. It has been downloaded 11,574 times and continues to be available on the open-source registry. Interestingly, the package has not received any update since then. "At first glance, it appeared to be a simple utility aimed at developers working on Discord bots using the Discord.py library," the Socket Research Team said . "However, the package concealed a fully functional remote access trojan (RAT)." The package, once installed, contacts an external server ("backstabprotection.jamesx123.repl[.]co"), and includes features to read and write arbitrary files based on commands, readfile or writefile, received from the server. The RAT also supports the ability...

An Iranian state-sponsored threat group has been attributed to a long-term cyber intrusion aimed at a critical national infrastructure (CNI) in the Middle East that lasted nearly two years. The activity, which lasted from at least May 2023 to February 2025, entailed "extensive espionage operations and suspected network prepositioning – a tactic often used to maintain persistent access for future strategic advantage," the FortiGuard Incident Response (FGIR) team said in a report. The network security company noted that the attack exhibits tradecraft overlaps with a known Iranian nation-state threat actor called Lemon Sandstorm (formerly Rubidium), which is also tracked as Parisite, Pioneer Kitten, and UNC757. It's been assessed to be active since at least 2017, striking aerospace, oil and gas, water, and electric sectors across the United States, the Middle East, Europe, and Australia. According to industrial cybersecurity company Dragos, the adversary has leveraged ...

The malware loader known as MintsLoader has been used to deliver a PowerShell-based remote access trojan called GhostWeaver. "MintsLoader operates through a multi-stage infection chain involving obfuscated JavaScript and PowerShell scripts," Recorded Future's Insikt Group said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The malware employs sandbox and virtual machine evasion techniques, a domain generation algorithm (DGA), and HTTP-based command-and-control (C2) communications." Phishing and drive-by download campaigns distributing MintsLoader have been detected in the wild since early 2023, per Orange Cyberdefense . The loader has been observed delivering various follow-on payloads like StealC and a modified version of the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) client. The malware has also been put to use by threat actors operating e-crime services like SocGholish (aka FakeUpdates) and LandUpdate808 (aka TAG-124), distributing via p...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new campaign targeting WordPress sites that disguises the malware as a security plugin. The plugin, which goes by the name "WP-antymalwary-bot.php," comes with a variety of features to maintain access, hide itself from the admin dashboard, and execute remote code. "Pinging functionality that can report back to a command-and-control (C&C) server is also included, as is code that helps spread malware into other directories and inject malicious JavaScript responsible for serving ads," Wordfence's Marco Wotschka said in a report. First discovered during a site cleanup effort in late January 2025, the malware has since been detected in the wild with new variants. Some of the other names used for the plugin are listed below - addons.php wpconsole.php wp-performance-booster.php scr.php Once installed and activated, it provides threat actors administrator access to the dashboard and makes use of the REST API...

Russian companies have been targeted as part of a large-scale phishing campaign that's designed to deliver a known malware called DarkWatchman . Targets of the attacks include entities in the media, tourism, finance and insurance, manufacturing, retail, energy, telecom, transport, and biotechnology sectors, Russian cybersecurity company F6 said . The activity is assessed to be the work of a financially motivated group called Hive0117, which has been attributed by IBM X-Force to attacks aimed at users in Lithuania, Estonia, and Russia spanning telecom, electronic, and industrial sectors. Then in September 2023, the DarkWatchman malware was once again used in a phishing campaign targeting energy, finance, transport, and software security industries based in Russia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Estonia. Russian banks, retailers and marketplaces, telecom operators, agro-industrial enterprises, fuel and energy companies, logistics businesses, and IT firms were singled out again in No...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a Russian-speaking cyber espionage group called Nebulous Mantis that has deployed a remote access trojan called RomCom RAT since mid-2022. RomCom "employs advanced evasion techniques, including living-off-the-land (LOTL) tactics and encrypted command and control (C2) communications, while continuously evolving its infrastructure – leveraging bulletproof hosting to maintain persistence and evade detection," Swiss cybersecurity company PRODAFT said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Nebulous Mantis, also tracked by the cybersecurity community under the names CIGAR , Cuba , Storm-0978, Tropical Scorpius, UAC-0180, UNC2596 , and Void Rabisu , is known to target critical infrastructure, government agencies, political leaders, and NATO-related defense organizations. Attack chains mounted by the group typically involve the use of spear-phishing emails with weaponized document links to distribute RomCom RAT. The domains and com...

Cybersecurity researchers have revealed that Russian military personnel are the target of a new malicious campaign that distributes Android spyware under the guise of the Alpine Quest mapping software. "The attackers hide this trojan inside modified Alpine Quest mapping software and distribute it in various ways, including through one of the Russian Android app catalogs," Doctor Web said in an analysis. The trojan has been found embedded in older versions of the software and propagated as a freely available variant of Alpine Quest Pro , a paid offering that removes advertising and analytics features. The Russian cybersecurity vendor said it also observed the malware, dubbed Android.Spy.1292.origin, being distributed in the form of an APK file via a fake Telegram channel. While the threat actors initially provided a link for downloading the app in one of the Russian app catalogs through the Telegram channel, the trojanized version was later distributed directly as an A...

Multiple state-sponsored hacking groups from Iran, North Korea, and Russia have been found leveraging the increasingly popular ClickFix social engineering tactic to deploy malware over a three-month period from late 2024 through the beginning of 2025. The phishing campaigns adopting the strategy have been attributed to clusters tracked as TA427 (aka Kimsuky), TA450 (aka MuddyWater), UNK_RemoteRogue, and TA422 (aka APT28). ClickFix has been an initial access technique primarily affiliated with cybercrime groups, although the effectiveness of the approach has led to it also being adopted by nation-state groups. "The incorporation of ClickFix is not revolutionizing the campaigns carried out by TA427, TA450, UNK_RemoteRogue, and TA422 but instead is replacing the installation and execution stages in existing infection chains," enterprise security firm Proofpoint said in a report published today. ClickFix , in a nutshell, refers to a sneaky technique that tricks users int...

The China-linked threat actor known as UNC5174 has been attributed to a new campaign that leverages a variant of a known malware dubbed SNOWLIGHT and a new open-source tool called VShell to infect Linux systems. "Threat actors are increasingly using open source tools in their arsenals for cost-effectiveness and obfuscation to save money and, in this case, plausibly blend in with the pool of non-state-sponsored and often less technical adversaries (e.g., script kiddies), thereby making attribution even more difficult," Sysdig researcher Alessandra Rizzo said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This seems to hold especially true for this particular threat actor , who has been under the radar for the last year since being affiliated with the Chinese government." UNC5174, also referred to as Uteus (or Uetus), was previously documented by Google-owned Mandiant as exploiting security flaws in Connectwise ScreenConnect and F5 BIG-IP software to deliver a C-base...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new, sophisticated remote access trojan called ResolverRAT that has been observed in attacks targeting healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors. "The threat actor leverages fear-based lures delivered via phishing emails, designed to pressure recipients into clicking a malicious link," Morphisec Labs researcher Nadav Lorber said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Once accessed, the link directs the user to download and open a file that triggers the ResolverRAT execution chain." The activity, observed as recently as March 10, 2025, shares infrastructure and delivery mechanism overlap with phishing campaigns that have distributed information stealer malware such as Lumma and Rhadamanthys, as documented by Cisco Talos and Check Point last year. A notable aspect of the campaign is the use of localized phishing lures, with the emails crafted in the languages predominantly spoken in the targeted countries. This includ...

Attackers aren't waiting for patches anymore — they are breaking in before defenses are ready. Trusted security tools are being hijacked to deliver malware. Even after a breach is detected and patched, some attackers stay hidden. This week's events show a hard truth: it's not enough to react after an attack. You have to assume that any system you trust today could fail tomorrow. In a world where AI tools can be used against you and ransomware hits faster than ever, real protection means planning for things to go wrong — and still staying in control. Check out this week's update to find important threat news, helpful webinars, useful tools, and tips you can start using right away. ⚡ Threat of the Week Windows 0-Day Exploited for Ransomware Attacks — A security affecting the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) was exploited as a zero-day in ransomware attacks aimed at a small number of targets, Microsoft revealed. The flaw, CVE-2025-29824, is a privilege escalation vulnerabilit...

A threat actor with ties to Pakistan has been observed targeting various sectors in India with various remote access trojans like Xeno RAT, Spark RAT, and a previously undocumented malware family called CurlBack RAT . The activity, detected by SEQRITE in December 2024, targeted Indian entities under railway, oil and gas, and external affairs ministries, marking an expansion of the hacking crew's targeting footprint beyond government, defence, maritime sectors, and universities. "One notable shift in recent campaigns is the transition from using HTML Application (HTA) files to adopting Microsoft Installer (MSI) packages as a primary staging mechanism," security researcher Sathwik Ram Prakki said . SideCopy is suspected to be a sub-cluster within Transparent Tribe (aka APT36) that's active since at least 2019. It's so named for mimicking the attack chains associated with another threat actor called SideWinder to deliver its own payloads. In June 2024, SEQR...