Threat Intelligence | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A threat actor known as UNC6426 leveraged keys stolen following the supply chain compromise of the nx npm package last year to completely breach a victim's cloud environment within a span of 72 hours. The attack started with the theft of a developer's GitHub token, which the threat actor then used to gain unauthorized access to the cloud and steal data. "The threat actor, UNC6426, then used this access to abuse the GitHub-to-AWS OpenID Connect (OIDC) trust and create a new administrator role in the cloud environment," Google said in its Cloud Threat Horizons Report for H1 2026. "They abused this role to exfiltrate files from the client's Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets and performed data destruction in their production cloud environments." The supply chain attack targeting the nx npm package took place in August 2025, when unknown threat actors exploited a vulnerable pull_request_target workflow – an attack type ...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new campaign where threat actors are abusing FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) appliances as entry points to breach victim networks.  The activity involves the exploitation of recently disclosed security vulnerabilities or weak credentials to extract configuration files containing service account credentials and network topology information, SentinelOne said in a report published today. The security outfit said the campaign has singled out environments tied to healthcare, government, and managed service providers. "FortiGate network appliances have considerable access to the environments they were installed to protect," security researchers Alex Delamotte, Stephen Bromfield, Mary Braden Murphy, and Amey Patne said . "In many configurations, this includes service accounts which are connected to the authentication infrastructure, such as Active Directory (AD) and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)....

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new malware called KadNap that's primarily targeting Asus routers to enlist them into a botnet for proxying malicious traffic. The malware, first detected in the wild in August 2025, has expanded to over 14,000 infected devices, with more than 60% of victims located in the U.S., according to the Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen. A lesser number of infections have been detected in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Russia, the U.K., Australia, Brazil, France, Italy, and Spain. "KadNap employs a custom version of the Kademlia Distributed Hash Table ( DHT ) protocol, which is used to conceal the IP address of their infrastructure within a peer-to-peer system to evade traditional network monitoring," the cybersecurity company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Compromised nodes in the network leverage the DHT protocol to locate and connect with a command-and-control (C2) server, thereby making it resilient to detection and disrupt...

The Russian state-sponsored hacking group tracked as APT28 has been observed using a pair of implants dubbed BEARDSHELL and COVENANT to facilitate long‑term surveillance of Ukrainian military personnel. The two malware families have been put to use since April 2024, ESET said in a new report shared with The Hacker News. APT28, also tracked as Blue Athena, BlueDelta, Fancy Bear, Fighting Ursa, Forest Blizzard (formerly Strontium), FROZENLAKE, Iron Twilight, ITG05, Pawn Storm, Sednit, Sofacy, and TA422, is a nation-state actor affiliated with Unit 26165 of the Russian Federation's military intelligence agency GRU. The threat actor's malware arsenal consists of tools like BEARDSHELL and COVENANT, along with another program codenamed SLIMAGENT that's capable of logging keystrokes, capturing screenshots, and collecting clipboard data. SLIMAGENT was first publicly documented by the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) in June 2025. SLIMAGENT, per the Slo...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added three security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability list is as follows - CVE-2021-22054 (CVSS score: 7.5) - A server-side request forgery ( SSRF ) vulnerability in Omnissa Workspace One UEM (formerly VMware Workspace One UEM) that could allow a malicious actor with network access to UEM to send requests without authentication and to gain access to sensitive information. CVE-2025-26399 (CVSS score: 9.8) - A deserialization of untrusted data vulnerability in the AjaxProxy component of SolarWinds Web Help Desk that could allow an attacker to run commands on the host machine. CVE-2026-1603 (CVSS score: 8.6) - An authentication bypass using an alternate path or channel vulnerability in Ivanti Endpoint Manager that could allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to leak specific stored credential data. The addition o...

The North Korean threat actor known as UNC4899 is suspected to be behind a sophisticated cloud compromise campaign targeting a cryptocurrency organization in 2025 to steal millions of dollars in cryptocurrency. The activity has been attributed with moderate confidence to the state-sponsored adversary, which is also tracked under the cryptonyms Jade Sleet, PUKCHONG, Slow Pisces, and TraderTraitor.  "This incident is notable for its blend of social engineering, exploitation of personal-to-corporate device peer-to-peer data (P2P) transfer mechanisms, workflows, and eventual pivot to the cloud to employ living-off-the-cloud (LOTC) techniques," the tech giant noted in its H1 2026 Cloud Threat Horizons Report shared with The Hacker News. Upon gaining access to the cloud environment, the attackers are said to have abused legitimate DevOps workflows to harvest credentials, break out of the confines of containers, and tamper with Cloud SQL databases to facilitate the cryptocu...

Two Google Chrome extensions have turned malicious after what appears to be a case of ownership transfer , offering attackers a way to push malware to downstream customers, inject arbitrary code, and harvest sensitive data. The extensions in question, both originally associated with a developer named "akshayanuonline@gmail.com" (BuildMelon), are listed below - QuickLens - Search Screen with Google Lens (ID: kdenlnncndfnhkognokgfpabgkgehodd) - 7,000 users ShotBird - Scrolling Screenshots, Tweet Images & Editor (ID: gengfhhkjekmlejbhmmopegofnoifnjp) - 800 users While QuickLens is no longer available for download from the Chrome Web Store, ShotBird remains accessible as of writing. ShotBird was originally launched in November 2024, with its developer, Akshay Anu S (@AkshayAnuOnline), claiming on X that the extension is suitable for "creating professional, studio-like visuals," and that all processing happens locally. According to research published by mo...

High-value organizations located in South, Southeast, and East Asia have been targeted by a Chinese threat actor as part of a years-long campaign. The activity, which has targeted aviation, energy, government, law enforcement, pharmaceutical, technology, and telecommunications sectors, has been attributed by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 to a previously undocumented threat activity group dubbed CL-UNK-1068 , where "CL" refers to "cluster" and "UNK" stands for unknown motivation. However, the security vendor has assessed with "moderate-to-high confidence" that the primary objective of the campaign is cyber espionage. "Our analysis reveals a multi-faceted tool set that includes custom malware, modified open-source utilities, and living-off-the-land binaries (LOLBINs)," security researcher Tom Fakterman said . "These provide a simple, effective way for the attackers to maintain a persistent presence within targeted environments....

Anthropic on Friday said it discovered 22 new security vulnerabilities in the Firefox web browser as part of a security partnership with Mozilla. Of these, 14 have been classified as high, seven have been classified as moderate, and one has been rated low in severity. The issues were addressed in Firefox 148 , released late last month. The vulnerabilities were identified over a two-week period in January 2026. The artificial intelligence (AI) company said the number of high-severity bugs identified by its Claude Opus 4.6 large language model (LLM) represents "almost a fifth" of all high-severity vulnerabilities that were patched in Firefox in 2025. Anthropic said the LLM detected a use-after-free bug in the browser's JavaScript after "just" 20 minutes of exploration, which was then validated by a human researcher in a virtualized environment to rule out the possibility of a false positive. "By the end of this effort, we had scanned nearly 6,000 C++ ...

The Pakistan-aligned threat actor known as Transparent Tribe has become the latest hacking group to embrace artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding tools to strike targets with various implants. The activity is designed to produce a "high-volume, mediocre mass of implants" that are developed using lesser-known programming languages like Nim, Zig, and Crystal and rely on trusted services like Slack, Discord, Supabase, and Google Sheets to fly under the radar, according to new findings from Bitdefender. "Rather than a breakthrough in technical sophistication, we are seeing a transition toward AI-assisted malware industrialization that allows the actor to flood target environments with disposable, polyglot binaries," security researchers Radu Tudorica, Adrian Schipor, Victor Vrabie, Marius Baciu, and Martin Zugec said in a technical breakdown of the campaign. The transition towards vibe-coded malware, aka vibeware , as a means to complicate detection has been...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a multi-stage malware campaign that uses batch scripts as a pathway to deliver various encrypted remote access trojan (RATs) payloads that correspond to XWorm , AsyncRAT , and Xeno RAT . The stealthy attack chain has been codenamed VOID#GEIST by Securonix Threat Research. At a high level, the obfuscated batch script is used to deploy a second batch script, stage a legitimate embedded Python runtime, and decrypt encrypted shellcode blobs, which are executed directly in memory by injecting them into separate instances of "explorer.exe" using a technique called Early Bird Asynchronous Procedure Call (APC) injection . "Modern malware campaigns increasingly shift from standalone executables toward complex, script-based delivery frameworks that closely mimic legitimate user activity," researchers Akshay Gaikwad, Shikha Sangwan, and Aaron Beardslee said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "Rath...

New research from Broadcom's Symantec and Carbon Black Threat Hunter Team has discovered evidence of an Iranian hacking group embedding itself in several U.S. companies' networks, including banks, airports, non-profit, and the Israeli arm of a software company. The activity has been attributed to a state-sponsored hacking group called MuddyWater (aka Seedworm). It's affiliated with the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). The campaign is assessed to have begun in early February, with recent activity detected following U.S. and Israeli military strikes on Iran . "The software company is a supplier to the defense and aerospace industries, among others, and has a presence in Israel, with the company's Israel operation seeming to be the target in this activity," the security vendor said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The attacks targeting the software company, as well as a U.S. bank and a Canadian non-profit, have been found to p...

A China-linked advanced persistent threat (APT) actor has been targeting critical telecommunications infrastructure in South America since 2024, targeting Windows and Linux systems and edge devices with three different implants. The activity is being tracked by Cisco Talos under the moniker UAT-9244 , describing it as closely associated with another cluster known as FamousSparrow . It's worth noting that FamousSparrow is assessed to share tactical overlaps with Salt Typhoon , a China-nexus espionage group known for its targeting of telecommunication service providers. Despite the similar targeting footprint between UAT-9244 and Salt Typhoon, there is no conclusive evidence that ties the two clusters together. In the campaign analyzed by the cybersecurity company, the attack chains have been found to distribute three previously undocumented implants: TernDoor targeting Windows, PeerTime (aka angrypeer) targeting Linux, and BruteEntry, which is installed on network edge device...

Microsoft on Thursday disclosed details of a new widespread ClickFix social engineering campaign that has leveraged the Windows Terminal app as a way to activate a sophisticated attack chain and deploy the Lumma Stealer malware. The activity, observed in February 2026, makes use of the terminal emulator program instead of instructing users to launch the Windows Run dialog and paste a command into it. "This campaign instructs targets to use the Windows + X → I shortcut to launch Windows Terminal (wt.exe) directly, guiding users into a privileged command execution environment that blends into legitimate administrative workflows and appears more trustworthy to users," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a series of posts on X. What makes the latest variant notable is that it bypasses detections specifically designed to flag Run dialog abuse, not to mention take advantage of the legitimacy of Windows Terminal to trick unsuspecting users into running malicious ...

A suspected Iran-nexus threat actor has been attributed to a campaign targeting government officials in Iraq by impersonating the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs to deliver a set of never-before-seen malware. Zscaler ThreatLabz, which observed the activity in January 2026, is tracking the cluster under the name Dust Specter . The attacks, which manifest in the form of two different infection chains, culminate in the deployment of malware dubbed SPLITDROP, TWINTASK, TWINTALK, and GHOSTFORM. "Dust Specter used randomly generated URI paths for command-and-control (C2) communication with checksum values appended to the URI paths to ensure that these requests originated from an actual infected system," security researcher Sudeep Singh said . "The C2 server also utilized geofencing techniques and User-Agent verification." A notable aspect of the campaign is the compromise of the Iraqi government-related infrastructure to stage malicious payloads, not to me...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new Russian cyber campaign that has targeted Ukrainian entities with two previously undocumented malware families named BadPaw and MeowMeow . "The attack chain initiates with a phishing email containing a link to a ZIP archive. Once extracted, an initial HTA file displays a lure document written in Ukrainian concerning border crossing appeals to deceive the victim," ClearSky said in a report published this week. In parallel, the attack chain leads to the deployment of a .NET-based loader called BadPaw, which then establishes communication with a remote server to fetch and deploy a sophisticated backdoor called MeowMeow. The campaign has been attributed with moderate confidence to the Russian state-sponsored threat actor known as APT28 , based on the targeting footprint, the geopolitical nature of the lures used, and overlaps with techniques observed in previous Russian cyber operations. 

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of a surge in retaliatory hacktivist activity following the U.S.-Israel coordinated military campaign against Iran , codenamed Epic Fury and Roaring Lion. "The hacktivist threat in the Middle East is highly lopsided, with two groups, Keymous+ and DieNet, driving nearly 70% of all attack activity between February 28 and March 2," Radware said in a Tuesday report. The first distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack was launched by Hider Nex (aka Tunisian Maskers Cyber Force) on February 28, 2026. According to details shared by Orange Cyberdefense, Hider Nex is a shadowy Tunisian hacktivist group that supports pro-Palestinian causes. It leverages a hack-and-leak strategy combining DDoS attacks with data breaches to leak sensitive data and advance its geopolitical agenda. The group emerged in mid-2025. In all, a total of 149 hacktivist DDoS claims were recorded targeting 110 distinct organizations across 16 countries. The attacks were...

Google said it identified a "new and powerful" exploit kit dubbed Coruna (aka CryptoWaters) targeting Apple iPhone models running iOS versions between 13.0 and 17.2.1. The exploit kit featured five full iOS exploit chains and a total of 23 exploits, Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said. It's not effective against the latest version of iOS. The findings were first reported by WIRED. "The core technical value of this exploit kit lies in its comprehensive collection of iOS exploits, with the most advanced ones using non-public exploitation techniques and mitigation bypasses," according to GTIG. "The framework surrounding the exploit kit is extremely well engineered; the exploit pieces are all connected naturally and combined together using common utility and exploitation frameworks." The kit is said to have circulated among multiple threat actors since February 2025, moving from a commercial surveillance operation to a government-backed att...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged malicious Packagist PHP packages masquerading as Laravel utilities that act as a conduit for a cross-platform remote access trojan (RAT) that's functional on Windows, macOS, and Linux systems. The names of the packages are listed below - nhattuanbl/lara-helper (37 Downloads) nhattuanbl/simple-queue (29 Downloads) nhattuanbl/lara-swagger (49 Downloads) According to Socket, the package "nhattuanbl/lara-swagger" does not directly embed malicious code, lists "nhattuanbl/lara-helper" as a Composer dependency , causing it to install the RAT. The packages are still available for download from the PHP package registry. Both lara-helper and simple-queue have been found to contain a PHP file named "src/helper.php," which employs a number of tricks to complicate static analysis by making use of techniques like control flow obfuscation, encoding domain names, command names, and file paths, and randomized identifie...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an advanced persistent threat (APT) group dubbed Silver Dragon that has been linked to cyber attacks targeting entities in Europe and Southeast Asia since at least mid-2024. "Silver Dragon gains its initial access by exploiting public-facing internet servers and by delivering phishing emails that contain malicious attachments," Check Point said in a technical report. "To maintain persistence, the group hijacks legitimate Windows services, which allows the malware processes to blend into normal system activity." Silver Dragon is assessed to be operating within the APT41 umbrella . APT41 is the cryptonym assigned to a prolific Chinese hacking group known for its targeting of healthcare, telecoms, high-tech, education, travel services, and media sectors for cyber espionage as early as 2012. It's also believed to engage in financially motivated activity potentially outside of state control. Attacks mounted by...