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Cryptocurrency users are the target of an ongoing social engineering campaign that employs fake startup companies to trick users into downloading malware that can drain digital assets from both Windows and macOS systems. "These malicious operations impersonate AI, gaming, and Web3 firms using spoofed social media accounts and project documentation hosted on legitimate platforms like Notion and GitHub," Darktrace researcher Tara Gould said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The elaborate social media scam has been for sometime now, with a previous iteration in December 2024 leveraging bogus videoconferencing platforms to dupe victims into joining a meeting under the pretext of discussing an investment opportunity after approaching them on messaging apps like Telegram. Users who ended up downloading the purported meeting software were stealthily infected by stealer malware such as Realst. The campaign was codenamed Meeten by Cado Security (which was acquired by Dark...

A mobile ad fraud operation dubbed IconAds that consisted of 352 Android apps has been disrupted, according to a new report from HUMAN. The identified apps were designed to load out-of-context ads on a user's screen and hide their icons from the device home screen launcher, making it harder for victims to remove them, per the company's Satori Threat Intelligence and Research Team. The apps have since been removed from the Play Store by Google. The ad fraud scheme accounted for 1.2 billion bid requests a day, at the height of its activity. The vast majority of IconAds-associated traffic originated from Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. It's worth noting that IconAds is a variant of a threat that's also tracked by other cybersecurity vendors under the names HiddenAds and Vapor , with the malicious apps repeatedly slipping past the Google Play Store since at least 2019 . Some of the common characteristics of these apps include the use of obfuscation to conceal...

The North Korea-aligned threat actor known as BlueNoroff has been observed targeting an employee in the Web3 sector with deceptive Zoom calls featuring deepfaked company executives to trick them into installing malware on their Apple macOS devices. Huntress, which revealed details of the cyber intrusion, said the attack targeted an unnamed cryptocurrency foundation employee, who received a message from an external contact on Telegram. "The message requested time to speak to the employee, and the attacker sent a Calendly link to set up meeting time," security researchers Alden Schmidt, Stuart Ashenbrenner, and Jonathan Semon said . "The Calendly link was for a Google Meet event, but when clicked, the URL redirects the end user to a fake Zoom domain controlled by the threat actor." After several weeks, the employee is said to have joined a group Zoom meeting that included several deepfakes of known members of the senior leadership of their company, along with oth...

A newly released report by cybersecurity firm CTM360 reveals a large-scale scam operation utilizing fake news websites—known as Baiting News Sites (BNS)—to deceive users into online investment fraud across 50 countries. These BNS pages are made to look like real news outlets: CNN, BBC, CNBC, or regional media. They publish fake stories that feature public figures, central banks, or financial brands, all claiming to back new ways to earn passive income. The goal? Build trust quickly and steer readers toward professional-looking scam platforms like Trap10, Solara Vynex, or Eclipse Earn. Scammers use sponsored ads on Google, Meta, and blog networks to push traffic to these sites. Ads often carry clickbait headlines—"You won't believe what a prominent public figure just revealed"—paired with official photos or national flags to make them feel legit. Clicking the ad directs users to a fake article, which then redirects them to a fraudulent trading platform. Many of these scams follow a...

A new multi-stage malware campaign is targeting Minecraft users with a Java-based malware that employs a distribution-as-service (DaaS) offering called Stargazers Ghost Network . "The campaigns resulted in a multi-stage attack chain targeting Minecraft users specifically," Check Point researchers Jaromír Hořejší and Antonis Terefos said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The malware was impersonating Oringo and Taunahi, which are 'Scripts and macros tools' (aka cheats). Both the first and second stages are developed in Java and can only be executed if the Minecraft runtime is installed on the host machine." The end goal of the attack is to trick players into downloading a Minecraft mod from GitHub and deliver a .NET information stealer with comprehensive data theft capabilities. The campaign was first detected by the cybersecurity company in March 2025. What makes the activity notable is its use of an illicit offering called the Stargazers Ghost...

A former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst has been sentenced to little more than three years in prison for unlawfully retaining and transmitting top secret National Defense Information (NDI) to people who were not entitled to receive them and for attempting to cover up the malicious activity. Asif William Rahman, 34, of Vienna, has been sentenced today to 37 months on charges of stealing and divulging classified information. He was an employee of the CIA since 2016 and had Top Secret security clearance to access Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) until he was terminated from his job after he was arrested last November in Cambodia. Earlier this January, Rahman pleaded guilty to two counts of willful retention and transmission of classified information related to the national defense. As previously reported by The Hacker News, Rahman retained multiple Secret and Top Secret documents without authorization on October 17, 2024, took them to his place of residence...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a previously undocumented Rust-based information stealer called Myth Stealer that's being propagated via fraudulent gaming websites. "Upon execution, the malware displays a fake window to appear legitimate while simultaneously decrypting and executing malicious code in the background," Trellix security researchers Niranjan Hegde, Vasantha Lakshmanan Ambasankar, and Adarsh S said in an analysis. The stealer, initially marketed on Telegram for free under beta in late December 2024, has since transitioned to a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model. It's equipped to steal passwords, cookies, and autofill information from both Chromium- and Gecko-based browsers, such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, and Mozilla Firefox. The operators of the malware have been found maintaining a number of Telegram channels to advertise the sale of compromised accounts as well as provide testimonials of their service. The...

Several malicious packages have been uncovered across the npm, Python, and Ruby package repositories that drain funds from cryptocurrency wallets, erase entire codebases after installation, and exfiltrate Telegram API tokens, once again demonstrating the variety of supply chain threats lurking in open-source ecosystems. The findings come from multiple reports published by Checkmarx, ReversingLabs, Safety, and Socket in recent weeks. The list of identified packages across these platforms are listed below - Socket noted that the two malicious gems were published by a threat actor under the aliases Bùi nam, buidanhnam, and si_mobile merely days after Vietnam ordered a nationwide ban on the Telegram messaging app late last month for allegedly not cooperating with the government to tackle illicit activities related to fraud, drug trafficking, and terrorism. "These gems silently exfiltrate all data sent to the Telegram API by redirecting traffic through a command-and-control (C2...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered malicious packages uploaded to the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that act as checker tools to validate stolen email addresses against TikTok and Instagram APIs. All three packages are no longer available on PyPI. The names of the Python packages are below - checker-SaGaF (2,605 downloads) steinlurks (1,049 downloads) sinnercore (3,300 downloads) "True to its name, checker-SaGaF checks if an email is associated with a TikTok account and an Instagram account," Socket researcher Olivia Brown said in an analysis published last week. Specifically, the package is designed to send HTTP POST requests to TikTok's password recovery API and Instagram's account login endpoints to determine if an email address passed as input is valid, meaning there exists an account holder corresponding to that email address. "Once threat actors have this information, just from an email address, they can threaten to dox or spam, c...

A Chinese-language, Telegram-based marketplace called Xinbi Guarantee has facilitated no less than $8.4 billion in transactions since 2022, making it the second major black market to be exposed after HuiOne Guarantee . According to a report published by blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, merchants on the marketplace have been found to peddle technology, personal data, and money laundering services. "The USDT stablecoin is the primary payment method, with the market having received $8.4 billion in transactions to date," the company said . "Some transactions can be linked to funds stolen by North Korea." Xinbi, like HuiOne, has offered its services to scammers in Southeast Asia, including those responsible for so-called romance baiting schemes (formerly referred to as "pig butchering"), which has become one of the most lucrative forms of cybercrime in recent years. What's notable about these criminal bazaars is that they are entirely run on Tele...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered three malicious packages in the npm registry that masquerade as a popular Telegram bot library but harbor SSH backdoors and data exfiltration capabilities. The packages in question are listed below - node-telegram-utils (132 downloads) node-telegram-bots-api (82 downloads) node-telegram-util (73 downloads) According to supply chain security firm Socket, the packages are designed to mimic node-telegram-bot-api , a popular Node.js Telegram Bot API with over 100,000 weekly downloads. The three libraries are still available for download. "While that number may sound modest, it only takes a single compromised environment to pave the way for wide-scale infiltration or unauthorized data access," security researcher Kush Pandya said . "Supply chain security incidents repeatedly show that even a handful of installs can have catastrophic repercussions, especially when attackers gain direct access to developer systems or produc...

Cheap Android smartphones manufactured by Chinese companies have been observed pre-installed with trojanized apps masquerading as WhatsApp and Telegram that contain cryptocurrency clipper functionality as part of a campaign since June 2024. While using malware-laced apps to steal financial information is not a new phenomenon, the new findings from Russian antivirus vendor Doctor Web point to significant escalation where threat actors are directly targeting the supply chain of various Chinese manufacturers to preload brand new devices with malicious apps. "Fraudulent applications were detected directly in the software pre-installed on the phone," the company said . "In this case, the malicious code was added to the WhatsApp messenger." A majority of the compromised devices are said to be low-end phones that mimic well-known premium models from Samsung and Huawei with names like S23 Ultra, S24 Ultra, Note 13 Pro, and P70 Ultra. At least four of the affected mod...

The Middle East and North Africa have become the target of a new campaign that delivers a modified version of a known malware called AsyncRAT since September 2024. "The campaign, which leverages social media to distribute malware, is tied to the region's current geopolitical climate," Positive Technologies researchers Klimentiy Galkin and Stanislav Pyzhov said in an analysis published last week. "The attackers host malware in legitimate online file-sharing accounts or Telegram channels set up specially for this purpose." The campaign is estimated to have claimed approximately 900 victims since the fall 2024, the Russian cybersecurity company added, indicating its widespread nature. A majority of the victims are located in Libya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Tunisia. The activity, attributed to a threat actor dubbed Desert Dexter , was discovered in February 2025. It chiefly involves creating temporary accounts and news ...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new Golang-based backdoor that uses Telegram as a mechanism for command-and-control (C2) communications. Netskope Threat Labs, which detailed the functions of the malware, described it as possibly of Russian origin. "The malware is compiled in Golang and once executed it acts like a backdoor," security researcher Leandro Fróes said in an analysis published last week. "Although the malware seems to still be under development it is completely functional." Once launched, the backdoor is designed to check if it's running under a specific location and using a specific name – "C:\Windows\Temp\svchost.exe" – and if not, it reads its own contents, writes them to that location, and creates a new process to launch the copied version and terminate itself. A notable aspect of the malware is that it uses an open-source library that offers Golang bindings for the Telegram Bot API for C2 purposes. This involves...