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The North Korean threat actors behind the Contagious Interview campaign have once again tweaked their tactics by using JSON storage services to stage malicious payloads. "The threat actors have recently resorted to utilizing JSON storage services like JSON Keeper, JSONsilo, and npoint.io to host and deliver malware from trojanized code projects, with the lure," NVISO researchers Bart Parys, Stef Collart, and Efstratios Lontzetidis said in a Thursday report. The campaign essentially involves approaching prospective targets on professional networking sites like LinkedIn, either under the pretext of conducting a job assessment or collaborating on a project, as part of which they are instructed to download a demo project hosted on platforms like GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket. In one such project spotted by NVISO, it has been found that a file named "server/config/.config.env" contains a Base64-encoded value that masquerades as an API key, but, in reality, is a URL ...

The Iranian state-sponsored threat actor known as APT42 has been observed targeting individuals and organizations that are of interest to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as part of a new espionage-focused campaign. The activity, detected in early September 2025 and assessed to be ongoing, has been codenamed  SpearSpecter by the Israel National Digital Agency (INDA). "The campaign has systematically targeted high-value senior defense and government officials using personalized social engineering tactics," INDA researchers Shimi Cohen, Adi Pick, Idan Beit-Yosef, Hila David, and Yaniv Goldman said. "These include inviting targets to prestigious conferences or arranging significant meetings." What's notable about the effort is that it also extends to the targets' family members, creating a broader attack surface that exerts more pressure on the primary targets. APT42 was first publicly documented in late 2022 by Google Mandiant, detailing its...

Key Takeaways: 85 active ransomware and extortion groups observed in Q3 2025, reflecting the most decentralized ransomware ecosystem to date. 1,590 victims disclosed across 85 leak sites, showing high, sustained activity despite law-enforcement pressure. 14 new ransomware brands launched this quarter, proving how quickly affiliates reconstitute after takedowns. LockBit's reappearance with version 5.0 signals potential re-centralization after months of fragmentation. In Q3 2025, Check Point Research recorded a record 85 active ransomware and extortion groups , the highest ever observed. What was once a concentrated market dominated by a few ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) giants has splintered into dozens of smaller, short-lived operations. This proliferation of leak sites represents a fundamental structural shift. The same enforcement and market pressures that disrupted large RaaS groups have fueled a wave of opportunistic, decentralized actors, many run by former affiliat...

State-sponsored threat actors from China used artificial intelligence (AI) technology developed by Anthropic to orchestrate automated cyber attacks as part of a "highly sophisticated espionage campaign" in mid-September 2025. "The attackers used AI's 'agentic' capabilities to an unprecedented degree – using AI not just as an advisor, but to execute the cyber attacks themselves," the AI upstart said . The activity is assessed to have manipulated Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding tool, to attempt to break into about 30 global targets spanning large tech companies, financial institutions, chemical manufacturing companies, and government agencies. A subset of these intrusions succeeded. Anthropic has since banned the relevant accounts and enforced defensive mechanisms to flag such attacks. The campaign, GTG-1002, marks the first time a threat actor has leveraged AI to conduct a "large-scale cyber attack" without major human intervention an...

Cybersecurity researchers are sounding the alert about an authentication bypass vulnerability in Fortinet Fortiweb WAF that could allow an attacker to take over admin accounts and completely compromise a device. "The watchTowr team is seeing active, indiscriminate in-the-wild exploitation of what appears to be a silently patched vulnerability in Fortinet's FortiWeb product," Benjamin Harris, watchTowr CEO and founder, said in a statement. "Patched in version 8.0.2 , the vulnerability allows attackers to perform actions as a privileged user - with in-the-wild exploitation focusing on adding a new administrator account as a basic persistence mechanism for the attackers." The cybersecurity company said it was able to successfully reproduce the vulnerability and create a working proof-of-concept (Poc). It has also released an artifact generator tool for the authentication bypass to help identify susceptible devices. According to details shared by Defused a...

A Russian-speaking threat behind an ongoing, mass phishing campaign has registered more than 4,300 domain names since the start of the year. The activity , per Netcraft security researcher Andrew Brandt, is designed to target customers of the hospitality industry, specifically hotel guests who may have travel reservations with spam emails. The campaign is said to have begun in earnest around February 2025. Of the 4,344 domains tied to the attack, 685 domains contain the name "Booking", followed by 18 with "Expedia," 13 with "Agoda," and 12 with "Airbnb," indicating an attempt to target all popular booking and rental platforms. "The ongoing campaign employs a sophisticated phishing kit that customizes the page presented to the site visitor depending on a unique string in the URL path when the target first visits the website," Brandt said. "The customizations use the logos from major online travel industry brands, including Airb...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a malicious Chrome extension that poses as a legitimate Ethereum wallet but harbors functionality to exfiltrate users' seed phrases. The name of the extension is "Safery: Ethereum Wallet," with the threat actor describing it as a "secure wallet for managing Ethereum cryptocurrency with flexible settings." It was uploaded to the Chrome Web Store on September 29, 2025, and was updated as recently as November 12. It's still available for download as of writing. "Marketed as a simple, secure Ethereum (ETH) wallet, it contains a backdoor that exfiltrates seed phrases by encoding them into Sui addresses and broadcasting microtransactions from a threat actor-controlled Sui wallet," Socket security researcher Kirill Boychenko said . Specifically, the malware present within the browser add-on is designed to steal wallet mnemonic phrases by encoding them as fake Sui wallet addresses and then using micro-transact...

The Race for Every New CVE Based on multiple 2025 industry reports: roughly 50 to 61 percent of newly disclosed vulnerabilities saw exploit code weaponized within 48 hours. Using the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog as a reference, hundreds of software flaws are now confirmed as actively targeted within days of public disclosure. Each new announcement now triggers a global race between attackers and defenders. Both sides monitor the same feeds, but one moves at machine speed while the other moves at human speed. Major threat actors have fully industrialized their response. The moment a new vulnerability appears in public databases, automated scripts scrape, parse, and assess it for exploitation potential, and now these efforts are getting ever more streamlined through the use of AI. Meanwhile, IT and security teams often enter triage mode, reading advisories, classifying severity, and queuing updates for the next patch cycle. That delay is precisely the gap the adversar...

Malware families like Rhadamanthys Stealer , Venom RAT , and the Elysium botnet have been disrupted as part of a coordinated law enforcement operation led by Europol and Eurojust. The activity, which is taking place between November 10 and 13, 2025, marks the latest phase of Operation Endgame , an ongoing operation designed to take down criminal infrastructures and combat ransomware enablers worldwide. Besides dismantling the "three large cybercrime enablers," authorities have also arrested the main suspect behind Venom RAT in Greece on November 3, more than 1,025 servers have been taken down, and 20 domains have been seized. "The dismantled malware infrastructure consisted of hundreds of thousands of infected computers containing several million stolen credentials," Europol said in a statement. "Many of the victims were not aware of the infection of their systems." It's worth noting that the Elysium botnet neutralized by authorities is the sam...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added a critical security flaw impacting WatchGuard Fireware to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-9242 (CVSS score: 9.3), an out-of-bounds write vulnerability affecting Fireware OS 11.10.2 up to and including 11.12.4_Update1, 12.0 up to and including 12.11.3 and 2025.1. It was patched by WatchGuard in September. "WatchGuard Firebox contains an out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the OS iked process that may allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code," CISA said in an advisory. Details of the vulnerability were shared by watchTowr Labs last month, with the cybersecurity company stating that the issue stems from a missing length check on an identification buffer used during the IKE handshake process. "The server does attempt certificate validation, but that valid...

Amazon's threat intelligence team on Wednesday disclosed that it observed an advanced threat actor exploiting two then-zero-day security flaws in Cisco Identity Service Engine (ISE) and Citrix NetScaler ADC products as part of attacks designed to deliver custom malware. "This discovery highlights the trend of threat actors focusing on critical identity and network access control infrastructure – the systems enterprises rely on to enforce security policies and manage authentication across their networks," CJ Moses, CISO of Amazon Integrated Security, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The attacks were flagged by its MadPot honeypot network, with the activity weaponizing the following two vulnerabilities - CVE-2025-5777 or Citrix Bleed 2 (CVSS score: 9.3) - An insufficient input validation vulnerability in Citrix NetScaler ADC and Gateway that could be exploited by an attacker to bypass authentication. (Fixed by Citrix in June 2025 ) CVE-2025-20337 (CV...

Threat hunters have uncovered similarities between a banking malware called Coyote and a newly disclosed malicious program dubbed Maverick that has been propagated via WhatsApp. According to a report from CyberProof, both malware strains are written in .NET, target Brazilian users and banks, and feature identical functionality to decrypt, targeting banking URLs and monitor banking applications. More importantly, both include the ability to spread through WhatsApp Web . Maverick was first documented by Trend Micro early last month, attributing it to a threat actor dubbed Water Saci . The campaign involves two components: A self-propagating malware referred to as SORVEPOTEL that's spread via the desktop web version of WhatsApp and is used to deliver a ZIP archive containing the Maverick payload. The malware is designed to monitor active browser window tabs for URLs that match a hard-coded list of financial institutions in Latin America. Should the URLs match, it establishes con...

AI-enabled supply chain attacks jumped 156% last year. Discover why traditional defenses are failing and what CISOs must do now to protect their organizations. Download the full CISO's expert guide to AI Supply chain attacks here .  TL;DR AI-enabled supply chain attacks are exploding in scale and sophistication - Malicious package uploads to open-source repositories jumped 156% in the past year . AI-generated malware has game-changing characteristics - It's polymorphic by default, context-aware, semantically camouflaged, and temporally evasive. Real attacks are already happening - From the 3CX breach affecting 600,000 companies to NullBulge attacks weaponizing Hugging Face and GitHub repositories. Detection times have dramatically increased - IBM's 2025 report shows breaches take an average of 276 days to identify, with AI-assisted attacks potentially extending this window. Traditional security tools are struggling - Static analysis and signature-based detec...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malicious npm package named "@acitons/artifact" that typosquats the legitimate " @actions/artifact " package with the intent to target GitHub-owned repositories. "We think the intent was to have this script execute during a build of a GitHub-owned repository, exfiltrate the tokens available to the build environment, and then use those tokens to publish new malicious artifacts as GitHub," Veracode said in an analysis. The cybersecurity company said it observed six versions of the package – from 4.0.12 to 4.0.17 – that incorporated a post-install hook to download and run malware. That said, the latest version available for download from npm is 4.0.10, indicating that the threat actor behind the package, blakesdev , has removed all the offending versions. The package was first uploaded on October 29, 2025, and has since accrued 31,398 weekly downloads. In total, it has been downloaded 47,405 times , according...

Google's Mandiant Threat Defense on Monday said it discovered n-day exploitation of a now-patched security flaw in Gladinet's Triofox file-sharing and remote access platform. The critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-12480 (CVSS score: 9.1), allows an attacker to bypass authentication and access the configuration pages, resulting in the upload and execution of arbitrary payloads.  The tech giant said it observed a threat cluster tracked as UNC6485 weaponizing the flaw as far back as August 24, 2025, nearly a month after Gladinet released patches for the flaw in version 16.7.10368.56560 . It's worth noting that CVE-2025-12480 is the third flaw in Triofox that has come under active exploitation this year alone, after CVE-2025-30406 and CVE-2025-11371 . "Added protection for the initial configuration pages," according to release notes for the software. "These pages can no longer be accessed after Triofox has been set up." Mandiant said the th...

The North Korea-affiliated threat actor known as Konni (aka Earth Imp, Opal Sleet, Osmium, TA406, and Vedalia) has been attributed to a new set of attacks targeting both Android and Windows devices for data theft and remote control. "Attackers impersonated psychological counselors and North Korean human rights activists, distributing malware disguised as stress-relief programs," the Genians Security Center (GSC) said in a technical report. What's notable about the attacks targeting Android devices is also the destructive ability of the threat actors to exploit Google's asset tracking services Find Hub (formerly Find My Device) to remotely reset victim devices, thereby leading to the unauthorized deletion of personal data. The activity was detected in early September 2025. The development marks the first time the hacking group has weaponized legitimate management functions to remotely reset mobile devices. The activity is also preceded by an attack chain in whic...

Cyber threats didn't slow down last week—and attackers are getting smarter. We're seeing malware hidden in virtual machines, side-channel leaks exposing AI chats, and spyware quietly targeting Android devices in the wild. But that's just the surface. From sleeper logic bombs to a fresh alliance between major threat groups, this week's roundup highlights a clear shift: cybercrime is evolving fast, and the lines between technical stealth and strategic coordination are blurring. It's worth your time. Every story here is about real risks that your team needs to know about right now. Read the whole recap. ⚡ Threat of the Week Curly COMrades Abuses Hyper-V to Hide Malware in Linux VMs — Curly COMrades, a threat actor supporting Russia's geopolitical interests, has been observed abusing Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor in compromised Windows machines to create a hidden Alpine Linux-based virtual machine and deploy malicious payloads. This method allows the malware to run completel...

Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to a massive phishing campaign targeting the hospitality industry that lures hotel managers to ClickFix-style pages and harvest their credentials by deploying malware like PureRAT . "The attacker's modus operandi involved using a compromised email account to send malicious messages to multiple hotel establishments," Sekoia said . "This campaign leverages spear-phishing emails that impersonate Booking.com to redirect victims to malicious websites, employing the ClickFix social engineering tactic to deploy PureRAT." The end goal of the campaign is to steal credentials from compromised systems that grant threat actors unauthorized access to booking platforms like Booking.com or Expedia, which are then either sold on cybercrime forums or used to send fraudulent emails to hotel customers to conduct fraud. The activity is assessed to be active since at least April 2025 and operational as of early October 2025. It...