Threat Intelligence | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The danger isn't that AI agents have bad days — it's that they never do. They execute faithfully, even when what they're executing is a mistake. A single misstep in logic or access can turn flawless automation into a flawless catastrophe. This isn't some dystopian fantasy—it's Tuesday at the office now. We've entered a new phase where autonomous AI agents act with serious system privileges. They execute code, handle complex tasks, and access sensitive data with unprecedented autonomy. They don't sleep, don't ask questions, and don't always wait for permission. That's powerful. That's also risky. Because today's enterprise threats go way beyond your garden-variety phishing scams and malware. The modern security perimeter? It's all about identity management. Here's the million-dollar question every CISO should be asking: Who or what has access to your critical systems, can you secure and govern that access, and can you actually prove it? Ho...

Microsoft on Thursday disclosed that it revoked more than 200 certificates used by a threat actor it tracks as Vanilla Tempest to fraudulently sign malicious binaries in ransomware attacks. The certificates were "used in fake Teams setup files to deliver the Oyster backdoor and ultimately deploy Rhysida ransomware," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a post shared on X. The tech giant said it disrupted the activity earlier this month after it was detected in late September 2025. In addition to revoking the certificates, its security solutions have been updated to flag the signatures associated with the fake setup files, Oyster backdoor, and Rhysida ransomware. Vanilla Tempest (formerly Storm-0832) is the name given to a financially motivated threat actor also called Vice Society and Vice Spider that's assessed to be active since at least July 2022, delivering various ransomware strains such as BlackCat, Quantum Locker, Zeppelin, and Rhysida over the year...

A financially motivated threat actor codenamed UNC5142 has been observed abusing blockchain smart contracts as a way to facilitate the distribution of information stealers, such as Atomic (AMOS), Lumma, Rhadamanthys (aka RADTHIEF), and Vidar, targeting both Windows and Apple macOS systems. "UNC5142 is characterized by its use of compromised WordPress websites and 'EtherHiding,' a technique used to obscure malicious code or data by placing it on a public blockchain, such as the BNB Smart Chain," Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said in a report shared with The Hacker News. As of June 2025, Google said it flagged about 14,000 web pages containing injected JavaScript that exhibit behavior associated with an UNC5142, indicating indiscriminate targeting of vulnerable WordPress sites. However, the tech giant noted that it has not spotted any UNC5142 activity since July 23, 2025, either signaling a pause or an operational pivot. EtherHiding was first documented ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added a critical security flaw impacting Adobe Experience Manager to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-54253 (CVSS score: 10.0), a maximum-severity misconfiguration bug that could result in arbitrary code execution. According to Adobe, the shortcoming impacts Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) Forms on JEE versions 6.5.23.0 and earlier. It was addressed in version 6.5.0-0108 released early August 2025, alongside CVE-2025-54254 (CVSS score: 8.6). Details of the two vulnerabilities were disclosed by Searchlight Cyber researchers Adam Kues and Shubham Shah in July 2025, describing CVE-2025-54253 as an "authentication bypass to [remote code execution] chain via Struts2 devmode" and CVE-2025-54254 as an XML external entity (XXE) injection within AEM Forms web services. The flaw results from the dan...

A threat actor with ties to China has been attributed to a five-month-long intrusion targeting a Russian IT service provider, marking the hacking group's expansion to the country beyond Southeast Asia and South America. The activity, which took place from January to May 2025, has been attributed by Broadcom-owned Symantec to a threat actor it tracks as Jewelbug , which it said overlaps with clusters known as CL-STA-0049 (Palo Alto Networks Unit 42), Earth Alux (Trend Micro), and REF7707 (Elastic Security Labs). The findings suggest Russia is not off-limits for Chinese cyber espionage operations despite increased "military, economic, and diplomatic" relations between Moscow and Beijing over the years. "Attackers had access to code repositories and software build systems that they could potentially leverage to carry out supply chain attacks targeting the company's customers in Russia," the Symantec Threat Hunter Team said in a report shared with The ...

U.S. cybersecurity company F5 on Wednesday disclosed that unidentified threat actors broke into its systems and stole files containing some of BIG-IP's source code and information related to undisclosed vulnerabilities in the product. It attributed the activity to a "highly sophisticated nation-state threat actor," adding the adversary maintained long-term, persistent access to its network. The company said it learned of the breach on August 9, 2025, per a Form 8-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). F5 said it delayed the public disclosure at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ). "We have taken extensive actions to contain the threat actor," it noted . "Since beginning these activities, we have not seen any new unauthorized activity, and we believe our containment efforts have been successful." F5 did not say for how long the threat actors had access to its BIG-IP product development environment, but em...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed that a critical security flaw impacting ICTBroadcast, an autodialer software from ICT Innovations, has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2025-2611 (CVSS score: 9.3), relates to improper input validation that can result in unauthenticated remote code execution due to the fact that the call center application unsafely passes session cookie data to shell processing. This, in turn, allows an attacker to inject shell commands into a session cookie that can get executed in the vulnerable server. The security flaw affects ICTBroadcast versions 7.4 and below. "Attackers are leveraging the unauthenticated command injection in ICTBroadcast via the BROADCAST cookie to gain remote code execution," VulnCheck's Jacob Baines said in a Tuesday alert. "Approximately 200 online instances are exposed." The cybersecurity firm said that it detected in-the-wild exploitation o...

Before an attacker ever sends a payload, they've already done the work of understanding how your environment is built. They look at your login flows, your JavaScript files, your error messages, your API documentation, your GitHub repos. These are all clues that help them understand how your systems behave. AI is significantly accelerating reconnaissance and enabling attackers to map your environment with greater speed and precision. While the narrative often paints AI as running the show, we're not seeing AI take over offensive operations end to end. AI is not autonomously writing exploits, chaining attacks, and breaching systems without the human in the loop. What it is doing is speeding up the early and middle stages of the attacker workflow: gathering information, enriching it, and generating plausible paths to execution.  Think of it like AI-generated writing; AI can produce a draft quickly given the right parameters, but someone still needs to review, refine, and tune it f...

Malware campaigns distributing the RondoDox botnet have expanded their targeting focus to exploit more than 50 vulnerabilities across over 30 vendors. The activity, described as akin to an "exploit shotgun" approach, has singled out a wide range of internet-exposed infrastructure, including routers, digital video recorders (DVRs), network video recorders (NVRs), CCTV systems, web servers, and various other network devices, according to Trend Micro. The cybersecurity company said it detected a RondoDox intrusion attempt on June 15, 2025, when the attackers exploited CVE-2023-1389 , a security flaw in TP-Link Archer routers that has come under active exploitation repeatedly since it was first disclosed in late 2022. RondoDox was first documented by Fortinet FortiGuard Labs back in July 2025, detailing attacks aimed at TBK digital video recorders (DVRs) and Four-Faith routers to enlist them in a botnet for carrying out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks agains...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new campaign that delivers the Astaroth banking trojan that employs GitHub as a backbone for its operations to stay resilient in the face of infrastructure takedowns. "Instead of relying solely on traditional command-and-control (C2) servers that can be taken down, these attackers are leveraging GitHub repositories to host malware configurations," McAfee Labs researchers Harshil Patel and Prabudh Chakravorty said in a report. "When law enforcement or security researchers shut down their C2 infrastructure, Astaroth simply pulls fresh configurations from GitHub and keeps running." The activity, per the cybersecurity company, is primarily focused on Brazil, although the banking malware is known to target various countries in Latin America, including Mexico, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, and Panama. This is not the first time Astaroth campaigns have trained t...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new Rust-based backdoor called ChaosBot that can allow operators to conduct reconnaissance and execute arbitrary commands on compromised hosts. "Threat actors leveraged compromised credentials that mapped to both Cisco VPN and an over-privileged Active Directory account named, 'serviceaccount,'" eSentire said in a technical report published last week. "Using the compromised account, they leveraged WMI to execute remote commands across systems in the network, facilitating the deployment and execution of ChaosBot." The Canadian cybersecurity company said it first detected the malware in late September 2025 within a financial services customer's environment. ChaosBot is noteworthy for its abuse of Discord for command-and-control (C2). It gets its name from a Discord profile maintained by the threat actor behind it, who goes by the online moniker "chaos_00019" and is responsible for issuin...

Oracle on Saturday issued a security alert warning of a fresh security flaw impacting its E-Business Suite that it said could allow unauthorized access to sensitive data. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-61884 , carries a CVSS score of 7.5, indicating high severity. It affects versions from 12.2.3 through 12.2.14. "Easily exploitable vulnerability allows an unauthenticated attacker with network access via HTTP to compromise Oracle Configurator," according to a description of the flaw in the NIST's National Vulnerability Database (NVD). "Successful attacks of this vulnerability can result in unauthorized access to critical data or complete access to all Oracle Configurator accessible data." In a standalone alert, Oracle said the flaw is remotely exploitable without requiring any authentication, making it crucial that users apply the update as soon as possible. The company, however, makes no mention of it being exploited in the wild. Oracle's Chi...

Cybersecurity company Huntress on Friday warned of "widespread compromise" of SonicWall SSL VPN devices to access multiple customer environments. "Threat actors are authenticating into multiple accounts rapidly across compromised devices," it said . "The speed and scale of these attacks imply that the attackers appear to control valid credentials rather than brute-forcing." A significant chunk of the activity is said to have commenced on October 4, 2025, with more than 100 SonicWall SSL VPN accounts across 16 customer accounts having been impacted. In the cases investigated by Huntress, authentications on the SonicWall devices originated from the IP address 202.155.8[.]73. The company noted that in some instances, the threat actors did not engage in further adversarial actions in the network and disconnected after a short period of time. However, in other cases, the attackers have been found conducting network scanning activity and attempting to access...

Threat actors are abusing Velociraptor, an open-source digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) tool, in connection with ransomware attacks likely orchestrated by Storm-2603 (aka CL-CRI-1040 or Gold Salem), which is known for deploying the Warlock and LockBit ransomware. The threat actor's use of the security utility was documented by Sophos last month. It's assessed that the attackers weaponized the on-premises SharePoint vulnerabilities known as ToolShell to obtain initial access and deliver an outdated version of Velociraptor (version 0.73.4.0) that's susceptible to a privilege escalation vulnerability ( CVE-2025-6264 ) to enable arbitrary command execution and endpoint takeover, per Cisco Talos . In the attack in mid-August 2025, the threat actors are said to have made attempts to escalate privileges by creating domain admin accounts and moving laterally within the compromised environment, as well as leveraging the access to run tools like Smbexec to remotely...

A threat actor known as Storm-2657 has been observed hijacking employee accounts with the end goal of diverting salary payments to attacker-controlled accounts. "Storm-2657 is actively targeting a range of U.S.-based organizations, particularly employees in sectors like higher education, to gain access to third-party human resources (HR) software as a service (SaaS) platforms like Workday," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a report. However, the tech giant cautioned that any software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform storing HR or payment and bank account information could be a target of such financially motivated campaigns. Some aspects of the campaign, codenamed Payroll Pirates , were previously highlighted by Silent Push, Malwarebytes, and Hunt.io. What makes the attacks notable is that they don't exploit any security flaw in the services themselves. Rather, they leverage social engineering tactics and a lack of multi-factor authentication (MFA) protect...

Fortra on Thursday revealed the results of its investigation into CVE-2025-10035 , a critical security flaw in GoAnywhere Managed File Transfer (MFT) that's assessed to have come under active exploitation since at least September 11, 2025. The company said it began its investigation on September 11 following a "potential vulnerability" reported by a customer, uncovering "potentially suspicious activity" related to the flaw.  That same day, Fortra said it contacted on-premises customers who were identified as having their GoAnywhere admin console accessible to the public internet and that it notified law enforcement authorities about the incident. A hotfix for versions 7.6.x, 7.7.x, and 7.8.x of the software was made available the next day, with full releases incorporating the patch – versions 7.6.3 and 7.8.4 – made available on September 15. Three days later, a CVE for the vulnerability was formally published, it added. "The scope of the risk of this...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new set of 175 malicious packages on the npm registry that have been used to facilitate credential harvesting attacks as part of an unusual campaign. The packages have been collectively downloaded 26,000 times, acting as an infrastructure for a widespread phishing campaign codenamed Beamglea targeting more than 135 industrial, technology, and energy companies across the world, according to Socket. "While the packages' randomized names make accidental developer installation unlikely, the download counts likely include security researchers, automated scanners, and CDN infrastructure analyzing the packages after disclosure," security researcher Kush Pandya said . The packages have been found to use npm's public registry and unpkg.com's CDN to host redirect scripts that route victims to credential harvesting pages. Some aspects of the campaign were first flagged by Safety's Paul McCarty late last month. Specificall...

Cybersecurity company Huntress said it has observed active in-the-wild exploitation of an unpatched security flaw impacting Gladinet CentreStack and TrioFox products. The zero-day vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-11371 (CVSS score: 6.1), is an unauthenticated local file inclusion bug that allows unintended disclosure of system files. It impacts all versions of the software prior to and including 16.7.10368.56560. Huntress said it first detected the activity on September 27, 2025, uncovering that three of its customers have been impacted so far. It's worth noting that both applications were previously affected by CVE-2025-30406 (CVSS score: 9.0), a case of hard-coded machine key that could allow a threat actor to perform remote code execution via a ViewState deserialization vulnerability. The vulnerability has since come under active exploitation. CVE-2025-11371, per Huntress, "allowed a threat actor to retrieve the machine key from the application Web.config fil...

Dozens of organizations may have been impacted following the zero-day exploitation of a security flaw in Oracle's E-Business Suite (EBS) software since August 9, 2025 , Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) and Mandiant said in a new report released Thursday. "We're still assessing the scope of this incident , but we believe it affected dozens of organizations," John Hultquist, chief analyst of GTIG at Google Cloud, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "Some historic Cl0p data extortion campaigns have had hundreds of victims. Unfortunately, large-scale zero-day campaigns like this are becoming a regular feature of cybercrime." The activity, which bears some hallmarks associated with the Cl0p ransomware crew, is assessed to have fashioned together multiple distinct vulnerabilities, including a zero-day flaw tracked as CVE-2025-61882 (CVSS score: 9.8), to breach target networks and exfiltrate sensitive data. Google said it found evidence of ...