Supply Chain | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a sophisticated social engineering campaign that's targeting supply chain-critical manufacturing companies with an in-memory malware dubbed MixShell. The activity has been codenamed ZipLine by Check Point Research. "Instead of sending unsolicited phishing emails, attackers initiate contact through a company's public 'Contact Us' form, tricking employees into starting the conversation," the company said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "What follows are weeks of professional, credible exchanges, often sealed with fake NDAs, before delivering a weaponized ZIP file carrying MixShell, a stealthy in-memory malware." The attacks have cast a wide net, spanning multiple organizations across sectors and geographic locations, but with an emphasis on U.S.-based entities. Primary targets include companies in industrial manufacturing, such as machinery, metalwork, component production, and engine...

Cybersecurity today moves at the pace of global politics. A single breach can ripple across supply chains, turn a software flaw into leverage, or shift who holds the upper hand. For leaders, this means defense isn't just a matter of firewalls and patches—it's about strategy. The strongest organizations aren't the ones with the most tools, but the ones that see how cyber risks connect to business, trust, and power. This week's stories highlight how technical gaps become real-world pressure points—and why security decisions now matter far beyond IT. ⚡ Threat of the Week Popular Password Managers Affected by Clickjacking — Popular password manager plugins for web browsers have been found susceptible to clickjacking security vulnerabilities that could be exploited to steal account credentials, two-factor authentication (2FA) codes, and credit card details under certain conditions. The technique has been dubbed Document Object Model (DOM)-based extension clickjacking by independent sec...

Power doesn't just disappear in one big breach. It slips away in the small stuff—a patch that's missed, a setting that's wrong, a system no one is watching. Security usually doesn't fail all at once; it breaks slowly, then suddenly. Staying safe isn't about knowing everything—it's about acting fast and clear before problems pile up. Clarity keeps control. Hesitation creates risk. Here are this week's signals—each one pointing to where action matters most. ⚡ Threat of the Week Ghost Tap NFC-Based Mobile Fraud Takes Off — A new Android trojan called PhantomCard has become the latest malware to abuse near-field communication (NFC) to conduct relay attacks for facilitating fraudulent transactions in attacks targeting banking customers in Brazil. In these attacks, users who end up installing the malicious apps are instructed to place their credit/debit card on the back of the phone to begin the verification process, only for the card data to be sent to an attacker-controlled NFC relay...

This week, cyber attackers are moving quickly, and businesses need to stay alert. They're finding new weaknesses in popular software and coming up with clever ways to get around security. Even one unpatched flaw could let attackers in, leading to data theft or even taking control of your systems. The clock is ticking—if defenses aren't updated regularly, it could lead to serious damage. The message is clear: don't wait for an attack to happen. Take action now to protect your business. Here's a look at some of the biggest stories in cybersecurity this week: from new flaws in WinRAR and NVIDIA Triton to advanced attack techniques you should know about. Let's get into the details. ⚡ Threat of the Week Trend Micro Warns of Actively Exploited 0-Day — Trend Micro has released temporary mitigations to address critical security flaws in on-premise versions of Apex One Management Console that it said have been exploited in the wild. The vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-54948 and CVE-2025-54987),...

Malware isn't just trying to hide anymore—it's trying to belong. We're seeing code that talks like us, logs like us, even documents itself like a helpful teammate. Some threats now look more like developer tools than exploits. Others borrow trust from open-source platforms, or quietly build themselves out of AI-written snippets. It's not just about being malicious—it's about being believable. In this week's cybersecurity recap, we explore how today's threats are becoming more social, more automated, and far too sophisticated for yesterday's instincts to catch. ⚡ Threat of the Week Secret Blizzard Conduct ISP-Level AitM Attacks to Deploy ApolloShadow — Russian cyberspies are abusing local internet service providers' networks to target foreign embassies in Moscow and likely collect intelligence from diplomats' devices. The activity has been attributed to the Russian advanced persistent threat (APT) known as Secret Blizzard (aka Turla). It likely involves using an adversary-...

Some risks don't breach the perimeter—they arrive through signed software, clean resumes, or sanctioned vendors still hiding in plain sight. This week, the clearest threats weren't the loudest—they were the most legitimate-looking. In an environment where identity, trust, and tooling are all interlinked, the strongest attack path is often the one that looks like it belongs. Security teams are now challenged to defend systems not just from intrusions—but from trust itself being turned into a weapon. ⚡ Threat of the Week Microsoft SharePoint Attacks Traced to China — The fallout from an attack spree targeting defects in on-premises Microsoft SharePoint servers continues to spread a week after the discovery of the zero-day exploits, with more than 400 organizations globally compromised. The attacks have been attributed to two known Chinese hacking groups tracked as Linen Typhoon (aka APT27), Violet Typhoon (aka APT31), and a suspected China-based threat actor codenamed Storm-2603 t...

Introduction Cyber threats targeting supply chains have become a growing concern for businesses across industries. As companies continue to expand their reliance on third-party vendors, cloud-based services, and global logistics networks, cybercriminals are exploiting vulnerabilities within these interconnected systems to launch attacks. By first infiltrating a third-party vendor with undetected security gaps, attackers can establish a foothold, leveraging these weaknesses to penetrate the primary business partners' network. From there, they move laterally through critical systems, ultimately gaining access to sensitive data, financial assets, intellectual property, or even operational controls. Recent high-profile breaches like the 2024 ransomware attack that hit Change Healthcare, one of the world's largest health payment processing companies, demonstrate how attackers disrupted supply chain operations stealing up to 6TB of millions of patients' protected health information (PHI)....

A quiet tweak in a popular open-source tool opened the door to a supply chain breach—what started as a targeted attack quickly spiraled, exposing secrets across countless projects. That wasn't the only stealth move. A new all-in-one malware is silently stealing passwords, crypto, and control—while hiding in plain sight. And over 300 Android apps joined the chaos, running ad fraud at scale behind innocent-looking icons. Meanwhile, ransomware gangs are getting smarter—using stolen drivers to shut down defenses—and threat groups are quietly shifting from activism to profit. Even browser extensions are changing hands, turning trusted tools into silent threats. AI is adding fuel to the fire—used by both attackers and defenders—while critical bugs, cloud loopholes, and privacy shakeups are keeping teams on edge. Let's dive into the threats making noise behind the scenes. ⚡ Threat of the Week Coinbase the Initial Target of GitHub Action Supply Chain Breach — The supply chain compromise...

The supply chain attack involving the GitHub Action "tj-actions/changed-files" started as a highly-targeted attack against one of Coinbase's open-source projects, before evolving into something more widespread in scope. "The payload was focused on exploiting the public CI/CD flow of one of their open source projects – agentkit, probably with the purpose of leveraging it for further compromises," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said in a report. "However, the attacker was not able to use Coinbase secrets or publish packages." The incident came to light on March 14, 2025, when it was found that "tj-actions/changed-files" was compromised to inject code that leaked sensitive secrets from repositories that ran the workflow. It has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2025-30066 (CVSS score: 8.6). According to Endor Labs, 218 GitHub repositories are estimated to have exposed their secrets due to the supply chain attack, and a majority of the leak...

Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to a software supply chain attack targeting the Go ecosystem that involves a malicious package capable of granting the adversary remote access to infected systems. The package, named github.com/boltdb-go/bolt , is a typosquat of the legitimate BoltDB database module ( github.com/boltdb/bolt ), per Socket. The malicious version (1.3.1) was published to GitHub in November 2021, following which it was cached indefinitely by the Go Module Mirror service. "Once installed, the backdoored package grants the threat actor remote access to the infected system, allowing them to execute arbitrary commands," security researcher Kirill Boychenko said in an analysis. Socket said the development marks one of the earliest instances of a malicious actor abusing the Go Module Mirror's indefinite caching of modules to trick users into downloading the package. Subsequently, the attacker is said to have modified the Git tags in the source r...

The North Korean threat actors behind the Contagious Interview campaign have been observed delivering a collection of Apple macOS malware strains dubbed FERRET as part of a supposed job interview process. "Targets are typically asked to communicate with an interviewer through a link that throws an error message and a request to install or update some required piece of software such as VCam or CameraAccess for virtual meetings," SentinelOne researchers Phil Stokes and Tom Hegel said in a new report. Contagious Interview, first uncovered in late 2023, is a persistent effort undertaken by the hacking crew to deliver malware to prospective targets through bogus npm packages and native apps masquerading as videoconferencing software. It's also tracked as DeceptiveDevelopment and DEV#POPPER. These attack chains are designed to drop a JavaScript-based malware known as BeaverTail, which, besides harvesting sensitive data from web browsers and crypto wallets, is capable of d...

Germany's Federal Office of Information Security (BSI) has announced that it has disrupted a malware operation called BADBOX that came preloaded on at least 30,000 internet-connected devices sold across the country. In a statement published earlier this week, authorities said they severed the communications between the devices and their command-and-control (C2) servers by sinkholing the domains in question. Impacted devices include digital picture frames, media players, and streamers, and likely phones and tablets. "What all of these devices have in common is that they have outdated Android versions and were delivered with pre-installed malware," the BSI said in a press release. BADBOX was first documented by HUMAN's Satori Threat Intelligence and Research team in October 2023, describing it as a "complex threat actor scheme" that involves deploying the Triada Android malware on low-cost, off-brand Android devices by exploiting weak supply chain links...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning that thousands of servers hosting the Prometheus monitoring and alerting toolkit are at risk of information leakage and exposure to denial-of-service (DoS) as well as remote code execution (RCE) attacks. "Prometheus servers or exporters , often lacking proper authentication, allowed attackers to easily gather sensitive information, such as credentials and API keys," Aqua security researchers Yakir Kadkoda and Assaf Morag said in a new report shared with The Hacker News. The cloud security firm also said that the exposure of the "/debug/pprof" endpoints used for determining heap memory usage, CPU usage, and others, could serve as a vector for DoS attacks, rendering the servers inoperable. As many as 296,000 Prometheus Node Exporter instances and 40,300 Prometheus servers have been estimated to be publicly accessible over the internet, making them a huge attack surface that could put data and services at risk. The fact th...

A suspected China-nexus cyber espionage group has been attributed to an attacks targeting large business-to-business IT service providers in Southern Europe as part of a campaign codenamed Operation Digital Eye . The intrusions took place from late June to mid-July 2024, cybersecurity companies SentinelOne SentinelLabs and Tinexta Cyber said in a joint report shared with The Hacker News, adding the activities were detected and neutralized before they could progress to the data exfiltration phase. "The intrusions could have enabled the adversaries to establish strategic footholds and compromise downstream entities," security researchers Aleksandar Milenkoski and Luigi Martire said . "The threat actors abused Visual Studio Code and Microsoft Azure infrastructure for C2 [command-and-control] purposes, attempting to evade detection by making malicious activities appear legitimate." It's currently not known which China-linked hacking group is behind the attacks,...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a software supply chain attack that has remained active for over a year on the npm package registry by starting off as an innocuous library and later adding malicious code to steal sensitive data and mine cryptocurrency on infected systems. The package, named @0xengine/xmlrpc , was originally published on October 2, 2023 as a JavaScript-based XML-RPC server and client for Node.js. It has been downloaded 1,790 times to date and remains available for download from the repository. Checkmarx , which discovered the package, said the malicious code was strategically introduced in version 1.3.4 a day later, harboring functionality to harvest valuable information such as SSH keys, bash history, system metadata, and environment variables every 12 hours, and exfiltrate it via services like Dropbox and file.io. "The attack achieved distribution through multiple vectors: direct npm installation and as a hidden dependency in a legitimate-looking ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two malicious packages uploaded to the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that impersonated popular artificial intelligence (AI) models like OpenAI ChatGPT and Anthropic Claude to deliver an information stealer called JarkaStealer. The packages, named gptplus and claudeai-eng , were uploaded by a user named " Xeroline " in November 2023, attracting 1,748 and 1,826 downloads, respectively. Both libraries are no longer available for download from PyPI. "The malicious packages were uploaded to the repository by one author and, in fact, differed from each other only in name and description," Kaspersky said in a post. The packages purported to offer a way to access GPT-4 Turbo API and Claude AI API, but harbored malicious code that initiated the deployment of the malware upon installation. Specifically, the "__init__.py" file in these packages contained Base64-encoded data that incorporated code to download ...

A new campaign has targeted the npm package repository with malicious JavaScript libraries that are designed to infect Roblox users with open-source stealer malware such as Skuld and Blank-Grabber . "This incident highlights the alarming ease with which threat actors can launch supply chain attacks by exploiting trust and human error within the open source ecosystem, and using readily available commodity malware, public platforms like GitHub for hosting malicious executables, and communication channels like Discord and Telegram for C2 operations to bypass traditional security measures," Socket security researcher Kirill Boychenko said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The list of malicious packages is as follows - node-dlls (77 downloads) ro.dll (74 downloads) autoadv (66 downloads) rolimons-api (107 downloads) It's worth pointing out that "node-dlls" is an attempt on part of the threat actor to masquerade as the legitimate node-dll packa...

An ongoing campaign is targeting npm developers with hundreds of typosquat versions of their legitimate counterparts in an attempt to trick them into running cross-platform malware. The attack is notable for utilizing Ethereum smart contracts for command-and-control (C2) server address distribution, according to independent findings from Checkmarx , Phylum , and Socket published over the past few days. The activity was first flagged on October 31, 2024, although it's said to have been underway at least a week prior. No less than 287 typosquat packages have been published to the npm package registry. "As this campaign began to unfold in earnest, it became clear that this attacker was in the early stages of a typosquat campaign targeting developers intending to use the popular Puppeteer, Bignum.js, and various cryptocurrency libraries," Phylum said. The packages contain obfuscated JavaScript that's executed during (or post) the installation process, ultimately le...