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Threat actors are abusing ChatGPT Custom GPTs to disguise them as legitimate product offerings and direct unsuspecting victims to malicious sites that employ ClickFix lures to deliver malware. Huntress, which observed the activity in late September 2026, said it marks the abuse of yet another feature in trusted artificial intelligence (AI) platforms. Prior campaigns have weaponized shared conversations with AI chatbots and malicious Claude Artifacts to distribute stealer malware and remote access trojans (RATs). Custom GPTs refer to a personalized version of ChatGPT that, as the name implies, allows users to define custom instructions, upload reference files, and enable specific skills to handle unique tasks without any coding. They are hosted on the legitimate ChatGPT website with the Custom GPT name at the top. "In the incidents we saw, victims interacted with an attacker-created Custom GPT, which was programmed to respond to their prompts with a message that includ...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new version of PamStealer that ensures that the main payload can only be recovered using a server-side decryption chain. The latest artifacts, per Jamf Threat Labs, continue to rely on the same JavaScript for Automation (JXA) dropper mechanism, but modify the lure and the delivery method. "Where earlier variants embedded their payload key material directly in the JXA source, it now fetches a purpose-built decryption utility and completes a key exchange with the server before the payload can be unwrapped," security researcher Thijs Xhaflaire said in an analysis. "Without the server's cooperation, the payload cannot be recovered statically." A second major change is the choice of the decoy itself. While previous versions observed in July and August 2026 were observed using fake websites masquerading as Maccy, Scoppr, and Nancy Clipboard, victims are now lured through a bogus website ("wavel[.]app") advert...

An active ClickFix campaign has been observed compromising legitimate Ukrainian business websites to inject bogus Cloudflare verification pages and trick victims into downloading a previously undocumented information stealer called Psychedelic . "When a visitor interacts with the page, the lure copies a Windows Installer command to the clipboard and instructs the visitor to paste it into the Windows Run dialog," Arctic Wolf Labs said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The ClickFix chain uses an "msiexec.exe" command to fetch a Windows MSI installer that's used to deliver the stealer malware. The malicious tool is designed to harvest browser passwords, account tokens, and cryptocurrency-wallet data, set up scheduled-task persistence, and contact a command-and-control (C2) server for additional tasking. Some of the compromised websites include a hair-treatment clinic, a scale-model manufacturer, a specialist bookseller and publisher, a psy...

ClickFix has become the most common way attackers get into enterprise networks, and it does it without an exploit, an attachment, or a file on disk. Our new global threat report traces the technique from a novelty in late 2023 to a subscription product with on-chain infrastructure and a state-sponsored user base, and explains why blocking malicious domains is no longer a useful defense. Read the full report here:   https://www.ctm360.com/reports/clickfix-beyond A particular kind of security problem no patch will close. ClickFix is one of them. The attack begins with a page that presents a problem the user believes is theirs to solve. A human verification check that will not complete. A browser that cannot render the page. A document that will not open. A Mac that is running low on storage. The page offers a remedy in the form of instructions, quietly writes the "fix" to the clipboard, and asks the user to open a system interface they already trust, paste, and press Ent...

The North Korean threat actors behind the Contagious Interview campaign have compromised at least 30,000 devices located in more than 100 countries and siphoned funds or account credentials from over 7,000 cryptocurrency wallets, according to a new joint cybersecurity advisory . The primary targets of the campaign are individual web designers, engineers, and specialists in cryptocurrency, blockchain, and Web3 technologies. In all, the threat actors are estimated to have plundered at least $10.71 million worth of cryptocurrency from victims. The alert comes courtesy of cybersecurity and intelligence agencies from Japan, the U.S., Australia, and Germany. The activity is tracked by the broader cybersecurity community under the monikers CL-STA-0240, DeceptiveDevelopment, DEV#POPPER, Famous Chollima, Gwisin Gang, PurpleBravo, Tenacious Pungsan, UNC5342, Void Dokkaebi, and WaterPlum. The cyber threat group "conducts cyber attacks by infiltrating unsuspecting job seekers' com...

Threat actors are leveraging ClickFix-like lures to deliver a previously undocumented remote access trojan (RAT) called ChainScript . "ChainScript has appeared under multiple build names, including ComponentTask33, UpdateDigital, HostShared, and OrchidViolet66, while presenting itself as Spotify, Zoom Workplace, and Microsoft Teams software," Blackpoint Adversary Pursuit Group (APG) researchers Sam Decker, Andi Ursry, and Nevan Beal said . Like many malware families observed in recent months, ChainScript employs an EtherHiding -style command-and-control (C2) discovery technique that makes use of a Polygon smart contract to locate its active WebSocket infrastructure. ChainScript is a full-featured RAT that provides extensive remote access to the operator, including interactive CMD and PowerShell, file operations, screenshot capture, payload deployment, cryptocurrency wallet enumeration (both desktop apps and browser extensions), and remote JavaScript execution. The...

The North Korean threat actor known as Jade Sleet has been attributed to the compromise of an India-based "much smaller organization" in the information technology (IT) services industry, once again highlighting how the adversary continues to target developers to breach target networks. Cybersecurity company SentinelOne, which disclosed details of the activity, said it involved the use of Apple macOS backdoors tracked as FLATROOF (aka Gaslight ) and ROOFDECK, both of which were previously observed in the March-April 2026 attack on KelpDAO's LayerZero bridge . Jade Sleet, also tracked under the monikers PUKCHONG, Slow Pisces, TraderTraitor, and UNC4899, has a history of targeting the Web3 sector for cryptocurrency heists. In early 2025, the hacking group was tied to the theft of about $1.5 billion from Bybit's cold wallet infrastructure following a supply chain compromise of Safe{Wallet}'s developer environment. "Jade Sleet mostly targets users as...

In July 2025, someone registered a domain that used to belong to a content delivery network.  The CDN had been wound down years earlier, and the domain it served assets from was allowed to expire. What it had not lost were its callers. Thousands of websites, code repositories, and documentation pages still carry hard-coded references to hostnames beneath it.  The new owner holds wildcard DNS across the entire domain, and any hostname under it now resolves to infrastructure that person controls. Today the apex serves an ad-heavy media downloader page, which is unremarkable. The remarkable part is that the decision about what those thousands of pages load next belongs to a stranger, and nobody involved has been notified, because from the outside nothing broke.  This pattern is not hypothetical, and it's not unheard of either. In June 2024, the polyfill.io domain (a JavaScript shim embedded in more than 110,000 sites) changed ownership and began serving conditional redi...

The Iran-linked "hacktivist" persona known as Handala Hack has been attributed to a Telegram-based surveillance backdoor called HEAVYGRAM and a Delphi-based utility known as CRUDEEXCLUDE . "HEAVYGRAM offers builtin commands supporting remote command execution, system, network and process information discovery, data and Telegram session files exfiltration, screenshot capture, DLL sideloading, file cleanup, and persistence via Windows autorun registry keys," Group-IB said . On the other hand, CRUDEEXCLUDE is a Delphi-based Windows utility employed to prepare environments for the deployment of subsequent stages such as HEAVYGRAM. First observed in late July 2024, the malware is often disguised as a legitimate application with a graphical user interface (GUI), and configures Microsoft Defender exclusion paths for defense evasion. The findings build upon an alert the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) first issued in March 2026 and again earlier this wee...

Introduction Security teams have gotten pretty good at testing against what can hurt them. Can this EDR agent catch this payload? Will my organization fail the phishing simulation? Does this SIEM rule fire on this particular technique? And, in more mature organizations, this testing happens continuously rather than as a one-off exercise. But no matter how much you validate against these exposures, it doesn't fix the main problem the industry is facing: these are isolated, disconnected testing.  And real attackers, increasingly AI Powered ones, don't test techniques one at a time. They chain them. A phishing email leads to a credential harvest. That harvest leads to an initial foothold. The foothold leads to privilege escalation, then lateral movement, then data staging, then exfiltration… until the damage is irreversibly done.  Any one of those individual steps might be something a security control is theoretically capable of catching - but there's just too many po...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of worm-like activity that abuses ConnectWise ScreenConnect to distribute a malicious Visual Basic Script (VBScript) payload to newly connected systems. According to Huntress , three unrelated incidents have been found to use diverse initial access methods, namely a Quick Assist tech-support scam, a phishing-delivered MSI installer, and a fake Geek Squad refund form lure, to activate a four-stage VBScript chain that leads to rogue ScreenConnect installations. However, once the ScreenConnect instances were installed, the cybersecurity company said it observed the clients repeatedly spawning "wscript.exe" to execute VBScripts named 1.vbs, 2.vbs, 3.vbs, and 4.vbs. The incidents were observed in August 2026. The details of the three attacks are below - A social engineering attack that persuaded a user into executing Quick Assist as part of a tech support scam, after which a rogue ScreenConnect remote access client was d...

Elastic Security Labs has documented four previously unreported programs associated with REVSTEALER, an emerging Windows information stealer, that remain on an infected machine after the stealer deletes itself. One of them switches off Windows Update and Microsoft Defender before running a cryptocurrency miner. The company named the four programs ProManager , WinUpdate , SoftManager , and LockAppHost and  published the findings on September 2 , along with a  technical white paper . REVSTEALER has been sold as a commercial infostealer since at least February 2026, when the earliest sample was first detected on VirusTotal. The core stealer exfiltrates browser passwords and cookies, cryptocurrency wallets, gaming accounts, messaging data, and files, then reports "complete" to its server, deletes itself, and leaves no persistence. The four newly documented programs work differently. Each installs itself into the user's profile and stays there. Elastic recovered the ...

Microsoft is alerting of a "high-volume phishing campaign" that's using invisible Unicode tag characters to bypass email filters. "Instead of using these characters to hide instructions from people while exposing them to AI models, the attacker used them to split financial lure words such as 'funding' to prevent email filters from parsing them," the Microsoft Security Research team said . The Windows maker said the findings show AI-era evasion techniques can be adapted by threat actors in traditional phishing and spam campaigns. Attacks exploiting this approach are said to have first emerged in early February 2026. ASCII Smuggling refers to a technique where invisible or non-rendering Unicode characters are used to conceal messages or instructions inside seemingly-harmless text. As a result, human user interfaces do not render them, making the text appear completely normal to the user. However, such content can be ingested by email filters or AI...

An RMM phishing campaign initially associated with Canadian targeting due to its use of Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) tax forms as lures has turned out to be part of a broader campaign spanning 46 countries. Around 45% of observed activity was associated with the United States , making it the campaign's top geographic target. ANY.RUN research connected 601 cases to the wider operation, which uses fake documents to trick victims into installing legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) software. The attackers adapt their lures to different targets, using shipping and UPS communications, Adobe PDFs, tax notices, US Social Security Administration themes, invoices, and other documents. Rapidly rotated, disposable Vercel infrastructure makes the campaign harder to track and detect. US-First Threat with Daily Infrastructure Rotation Threat overview by ANY.RUN The campaign’s infrastructure changes significantly faster than its attack pattern. ANY.RUN researchers identifi...

Threat actors are leveraging the trusted Node.js JavaScript runtime in multiple cyber attacks as a way to deploy malicious payloads. According to a new report published by the Symantec Threat Hunter Team today, the attack method has been put to use in attacks targeting government departments, technology companies, and hotels since February 2026. "The technique's appeal is that node.exe (the binary that runs Node.js) is a legitimate, signed developer tool," the Broadcom-owned cybersecurity division said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The attacker's malicious code lives in interpreted scripts rather than in a binary, making it less likely to trigger signature-based detection, while a registry Run key entry can relaunch the payload at every login." In one intrusion observed between March 23 and July 25, 2026, targeting an unspecified Asian technology company, attackers downloaded the official Node.js installer from nodejs[.]org and used the t...

An active malware campaign is using bogus software-download websites to impersonate trusted vendors and distribute malicious installers. "The campaign has targeted users looking to download popular software and has resulted in compromises across multiple organizations and industries, primarily affecting China-based operations of multinational organizations and Chinese-speaking users," Microsoft said . The installers, once launched, deploy malware that's capable of setting up persistence, weakening security protections, and communicating with attacker-controlled infrastructure. The activity has resulted in victims spanning healthcare, manufacturing, gaming, technology, logistics, government, and education sectors. The Windows maker has assessed with moderate confidence that the campaign is consistent with a Chinese threat cluster dubbed Silver Fox (aka Yinhu), which has a track record of using spoofed vendor download pages to distribute Gh0st RAT and ValleyRAT (a...

Brazilian financial services, retail, and e-commerce organizations have become the target of a financially motivated threat actor dubbed Breeze Comet (formerly UNC5669) since 2024. Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) and Mandiant teams described the threat actor as "specializing in manipulating payment systems and banking software in Brazil to conduct fraudulent transfers." The adversary is said to have successfully carried out at least one heist of assets worth tens of thousands of U.S. dollars. The activity overlaps with threat activity clusters tracked by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, CrowdStrike and Trend Micro under the monikers CL-CRI-1163, Plump Spider and SHADOW-AETHER-064 . According to CrowdStrike, the e-crime group is operating out of Brazil and has been active since September 2023, monetizing their intrusions by gaining unauthorized access to internal payment systems and carrying out fraudulent transactions. Initial access to financial entities and com...

The Iranian Nimbus Manticore hacking group has been attributed to two previously undocumented malware families that highlight the continued evolution of its toolset and likely expand its targeting footprint to infect Linux and Apple macOS systems using cross-platform remote access trojans (RATs) developed using Node.js and JavaScript. Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky is tracking the malware strains under the names NodeRabbit and PollCat. The first sample of NodeRabbit was discovered on a system in Afghanistan, with subsequent sightings on two distinct machines located in Egypt and Ethiopia. "Its operators deliver [NodeRabbit] through spear-phishing messages on LinkedIn and other job search platforms that contain trojanized coding challenge archives," Kaspersky security researcher Omar Amin said . "Like NodeRabbit, PollCat is a cross-platform RAT, but it is written in obfuscated JavaScript also distributed through trojanized coding challenge archives."...

The most common way into a company last year was to ask. A web page tells the visitor to prove they are not a robot. While they read the instructions, it quietly places a command on their clipboard. Then it talks them through opening a terminal and pasting it in. The technique is called ClickFix, and it was the most common initial access method Microsoft’s team observed last year , accounting for 47% of the attacks in their notifications. Nothing arrives as an attachment, so there is nothing to scan. No vulnerability is used, so there is nothing to patch. What happens next is just as ordinary. When Bitdefender analyzed 700,000 security incidents , 84% of the high-severity ones involved binaries that were already on the machine - the same administrative tools your IT team uses every day. Nothing malicious was installed, because nothing malicious was needed. Neither technique is clever, but both are winning. And the reason is not that attackers have run out of ideas. It is that th...

Threat actors with ties to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (aka DPRK or North Korea) have been observed seeking job opportunities beyond the information technology (IT) sector, with recent investigations identifying suspected workers employed in sales and marketing and the medical profession. The ongoing insider threat is part of what has been described as the IT worker scheme , where North Korea leverages its network of skilled IT workers, both within and outside the country, to fraudulently land jobs in Fortune 500 companies and private sector firms across the world and remotely earn income to further Pyongyang's unlawful nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. This entails relying on stolen or forged identity documents, VPNs, and proxy services to mask their true identity and location. The yearslong campaign is also tracked under the monikers Famous Chollima, Jasper Sleet, Nickel Tapestry, PurpleDelta (formerly TAG-121), UNC5267, and Wagemole. ...