Threat Intelligence | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

SmarterTools confirmed last week that the Warlock (aka Storm-2603) ransomware gang breached its network by exploiting an unpatched SmarterMail instance. The incident took place on January 29, 2026, when a mail server that was not updated to the latest version was compromised, the company's Chief Commercial Officer, Derek Curtis, said. "Prior to the breach, we had approximately 30 servers/VMs with SmarterMail installed throughout our network," Curtis explained . "Unfortunately, we were unaware of one VM, set up by an employee, that was not being updated. As a result, that mail server was compromised, which led to the breach." However, SmarterTools emphasized that the breach did not affect its website, shopping cart, My Account portal, and several other services, and that no business applications or account data were affected or compromised. About 12 Windows servers on the company's office network, as well as a secondary data center used for quality cont...

Fortinet has released security updates to address a critical flaw impacting FortiClientEMS that could lead to the execution of arbitrary code on susceptible systems. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-21643 , has a CVSS rating of 9.1 out of a maximum of 10.0. "An improper neutralization of special elements used in an SQL Command ('SQL Injection') vulnerability [CWE-89] in FortiClientEMS may allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute unauthorized code or commands via specifically crafted HTTP requests," Fortinet said in an advisory. The shortcoming affects the following versions - FortiClientEMS 7.2 (Not affected) FortiClientEMS 7.4.4 (Upgrade to 7.4.5 or above) FortiClientEMS 8.0 (Not affected) Gwendal Guégniaud of the Fortinet Product Security team has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. While Fortinet makes no mention of the vulnerability being exploited in the wild, it's essential that users move quickly to apply the fixes...

The Cyber Security Agency (CSA) of Singapore on Monday revealed that the China-nexus cyber espionage group known as UNC3886 targeted its telecommunications sector. "UNC3886 had launched a deliberate, targeted, and well-planned campaign against Singapore's telecommunications sector," CSA said . "All four of Singapore's major telecommunications operators ('telcos') – M1, SIMBA Telecom, Singtel, and StarHub – have been the target of attacks." The development comes more than six months after Singapore's Coordinating Minister for National Security, K. Shanmugam, accused UNC3886 of striking high-value strategic threat targets. UNC3886 is assessed to be active since at least 2022, targeting edge devices and virtualization technologies to obtain initial access. In July 2025, Sygnia disclosed details of a long-term cyber espionage campaign attributed to a threat cluster it tracks as Fire Ant and which shares tooling and targeting overlaps with UNC...

Microsoft has revealed that it observed a multi‑stage intrusion that involved the threat actors exploiting internet‑exposed SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD) instances to obtain initial access and move laterally across the organization's network to other high-value assets. That said, the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team said it's not clear whether the activity weaponized recently disclosed flaws (CVE-2025-40551, CVSS score: 9.8, and CVE-2025-40536, CVSS score: 8.1), or a previously patched vulnerability (CVE-2025-26399, CVSS score: 9.8). "Since the attacks occurred in December 2025 and on machines vulnerable to both the old and new set of CVEs at the same time, we cannot reliably confirm the exact CVE used to gain an initial foothold," the company said in a report published last week. While CVE-2025-40536 is a security control bypass vulnerability that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to gain access to certain restricted functionality, CVE-2025-...

The threat actor known as Bloody Wolf has been linked to a campaign targeting Uzbekistan and Russia to infect systems with a remote access trojan known as NetSupport RAT . Cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky is tracking the activity under the moniker Stan Ghouls . The threat actor is known to be active since at least 2023, orchestrating spear-phishing attacks against manufacturing, finance, and IT sectors in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. The campaign is estimated to have claimed about 50 victims in Uzbekistan, with 10 devices in Russia also impacted. Other infections have been identified to a lesser degree in Kazakhstan, Turkey, Serbia, and Belarus. Infection attempts have also been recorded on devices within government organizations, logistics companies, medical facilities, and educational institutions. "Given Stan Ghouls' targeting of financial institutions, we believe their primary motive is financial gain," Kaspersky noted. "That said, their hea...

Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to a "massive campaign" that has systematically targeted cloud native environments to set up malicious infrastructure for follow-on exploitation. The activity, observed around December 25, 2025, and described as "worm-driven," leveraged exposed Docker APIs, Kubernetes clusters, Ray dashboards, and Redis servers, along with the recently disclosed React2Shell (CVE-2025-55182, CVSS score: 10.0) vulnerability. The campaign has been attributed to a threat cluster known as TeamPCP (aka DeadCatx3, PCPcat, PersyPCP, and ShellForce). TeamPCP is known to be active since at least November 2025, with the first instance of Telegram activity dating back to July 30, 2025. The TeamPCP Telegram channel currently has over 700 members, where the group publishes stolen data from diverse victims across Canada, Serbia, South Korea, the U.A.E., and the U.S. Details of the threat actor were first documented by Beelzebub in December 2025...

BeyondTrust has released updates to address a critical security flaw impacting Remote Support (RS) and Privileged Remote Access (PRA) products that, if successfully exploited, could result in remote code execution. "BeyondTrust Remote Support (RS) and certain older versions of Privileged Remote Access (PRA) contain a critical pre-authentication remote code execution vulnerability," the company said in an advisory released February 6, 2026. "By sending specially crafted requests, an unauthenticated remote attacker may be able to execute operating system commands in the context of the site user." The vulnerability, categorized as an operating system command injection , has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2026-1731 . It's rated 9.9 on the CVSS scoring system. BeyondTrust said successful exploitation of the shortcoming could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to execute operating system commands in the context of the site user, resulting in unautho...

OpenClaw (formerly Moltbot and Clawdbot) has announced that it's partnering with Google-owned VirusTotal to scan skills that are being uploaded to ClawHub, its skill marketplace, as part of broader efforts to bolster the security of the agentic ecosystem. "All skills published to ClawHub are now scanned using VirusTotal's threat intelligence, including their new Code Insight capability," OpenClaw's founder Peter Steinberger, along with Jamieson O'Reilly and Bernardo Quintero said. "This provides an additional layer of security for the OpenClaw community." The process essentially entails creating a unique SHA-256 hash for every skill and cross checking it against VirusTotal's database for a match. If it's not found, the skill bundle is uploaded to the malware scanning tool for further analysis using VirusTotal Code Insight . Skills that have a "benign" Code Insight verdict are automatically approved by ClawHub, while those marke...

Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (aka Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz or BfV) and Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) have issued a joint advisory warning of a malicious cyber campaign undertaken by a likely state-sponsored threat actor that involves carrying out phishing attacks over the Signal messaging app. "The focus is on high-ranking targets in politics, the military, and diplomacy, as well as investigative journalists in Germany and Europe," the agencies said . "Unauthorized access to messenger accounts not only allows access to confidential private communications but also potentially compromises entire networks." A noteworthy aspect of the campaign is that it does not involve the distribution of malware or the exploitation of any security vulnerability in the privacy-focused messaging platform. Rather, the end goal is to weaponize its legitimate features to obtain covert access to a victim's chats, along wi...

Cybersecurity researchers have taken the wraps off a gateway-monitoring and adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) framework dubbed DKnife that's operated by China-nexus threat actors since at least 2019. The framework comprises seven Linux-based implants that are designed to perform deep packet inspection, manipulate traffic, and deliver malware via routers and edge devices. Its primary targets seem to be Chinese-speaking users, an assessment based on the presence of credential harvesting phishing pages for Chinese email services, exfiltration modules for popular Chinese mobile applications like WeChat, and code references to Chinese media domains. "DKnife's attacks target a wide range of devices, including PCs, mobile devices, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices," Cisco Talos researcher Ashley Shen noted in a Thursday report. "It delivers and interacts with the ShadowPad and DarkNimbus backdoors by hijacking binary downloads and Android application updates....

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has ordered Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to strengthen asset lifecycle management for edge network devices and remove those that no longer receive security updates from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) over the next 12 to 18 months. The agency said the move is to drive down technical debt and minimize the risk of compromise, as state-sponsored threat actors turn such devices as a preferred access pathway for breaking into target networks. Edge devices is an umbrella term that encompasses load balancers, firewalls, routers, switches, wireless access points, network security appliances, Internet of Things (IoT) edge devices, software-defined networks, and other physical or virtual networking components that route network traffic and hold privileged access. "Persistent cyber threat actors are increasingly exploiting unsupported edge devices -- hardware and software that no longer receiv...

A previously undocumented cyber espionage group operating from Asia broke into the networks of at least 70 government and critical infrastructure organizations across 37 countries over the past year, according to new findings from Palo Alto Networks Unit 42. In addition, the hacking crew has been observed conducting active reconnaissance against government infrastructure associated with 155 countries between November and December 2025. Some of the entities that have been successfully compromised include five national-level law enforcement/border control entities, three ministries of finance and other government ministries, and departments that align with economic, trade, natural resources, and diplomatic functions. The activity is being tracked by the cybersecurity company under the moniker TGR-STA-1030 , where "TGR" stands for temporary threat group and "STA" refers to state-backed motivation. Evidence shows that the threat actor has been active since January ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new supply chain attack in which legitimate packages on npm and the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository have been compromised to push malicious versions to facilitate wallet credential theft and remote code execution. The compromised versions of the two packages are listed below - @dydxprotocol/v4-client-js (npm) - 3.4.1, 1.22.1, 1.15.2, 1.0.31  dydx-v4-client (PyPI) - 1.1.5post1 "The @dydxprotocol/v4-client-js (npm) and dydx-v4-client (PyPI) packages provide developers with tools to interact with the dYdX v4 protocol, including transaction signing, order placement, and wallet management," Socket security researcher Kush Pandya noted. "Applications using these packages handle sensitive cryptocurrency operations." dYdX is a non-custodial, decentralized cryptocurrency exchange for trading margin and perpetual swaps, while allowing users to retain full control over their assets. On its website, the DeFi exchang...

The distributed denial-of-service ( DDoS ) botnet known as AISURU/Kimwolf has been attributed to a record-setting attack that peaked at 31.4 Terabits per second (Tbps) and lasted only 35 seconds. Cloudflare, which automatically detected and mitigated the activity, said it's part of a growing number of hyper-volumetric HTTP DDoS attacks mounted by the botnet in the fourth quarter of 2025. The attack took place in November 2025. AISURU/Kimwolf has also been linked to another DDoS campaign codenamed The Night Before Christmas that commenced on December 19, 2025. Per Cloudflare, the average size of the hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks during the campaign was 3 billion packets per second (Bpps), 4 Tbps, and 54 requests per second (Mrps), with the maximum rates touching 9 Bpps, 24 Tbps, and 205 Mrps. "DDoS attacks surged by 121% in 2025, reaching an average of 5,376 attacks automatically mitigated every hour," Cloudflare's Omer Yoachimik and Jorge Pacheco said. "In...

The elusive Iranian threat group known as Infy (aka Prince of Persia) has evolved its tactics as part of efforts to hide its tracks, even as it readied new command-and-control (C2) infrastructure coinciding with the end of the widespread internet blackout the regime imposed at the start of January 2026. "The threat actor stopped maintaining its C2 servers on January 8 for the first time since we began monitoring their activities," Tomer Bar, vice president of security research at SafeBreach, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This was the same day a country-wide internet shutdown was imposed by Iranian authorities in response to recent protests, which likely suggests that even government-affiliated cyber units did not have the ability or motivation to carry out malicious activities within Iran." The cybersecurity company said it observed renewed activity on January 26, 2026, as the hacking crew set up new C2 servers, one day before the Iranian gov...

A new, critical security vulnerability has been disclosed in the n8n workflow automation platform that, if successfully exploited, could result in the execution of arbitrary system commands. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-25049 (CVSS score: 9.4), is the result of inadequate sanitization that bypasses safeguards put in place to address CVE-2025-68613 (CVSS score: 9.9), another critical defect that was patched by n8n in December 2025. "Additional exploits in the expression evaluation of n8n have been identified and patched following CVE-2025-68613," n8n's maintainers said in an advisory released Wednesday. "An authenticated user with permission to create or modify workflows could abuse crafted expressions in workflow parameters to trigger unintended system command execution on the host running n8n." The issue affects the following versions - <1.123.17 (Fixed in 1.123.17) <2.5.2 (Fixed in 2.5.2)

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an active web traffic hijacking campaign that has targeted NGINX installations and management panels like Baota (BT) in an attempt to route it through the attacker's infrastructure. Datadog Security Labs said it observed threat actors associated with the recent React2Shell ( CVE-2025-55182 , CVSS score: 10.0) exploitation using malicious NGINX configurations to pull off the attack. "The malicious configuration intercepts legitimate web traffic between users and websites and routes it through attacker-controlled backend servers," security researcher Ryan Simon said. "The campaign targets Asian TLDs (.in, .id, .pe, .bd, .th), Chinese hosting infrastructure (Baota Panel), and government and educational TLDs (.edu, .gov)." The activity involves the use of shell scripts to inject malicious configurations into NGINX, an open-source reverse proxy and load balancer for web traffic management. These "locatio...

Threat hunters have disclosed details of a new, stealthy malware campaign dubbed DEAD#VAX that employs a mix of "disciplined tradecraft and clever abuse of legitimate system features" to bypass traditional detection mechanisms and deploy a remote access trojan (RAT) known as AsyncRAT . "The attack leverages IPFS-hosted VHD files, extreme script obfuscation, runtime decryption, and in-memory shellcode injection into trusted Windows processes, never dropping a decrypted binary to disk," Securonix researchers Akshay Gaikwad, Shikha Sangwan, and Aaron Beardslee said in a report shared with The Hacker News. AsyncRAT is an open-source malware that provides attackers with extensive control over compromised endpoints, enabling surveillance and data collection through keylogging, screen and webcam capture, clipboard monitoring, file system access, remote command execution, and persistence across reboots. The starting point of the infection sequence is a phishing email...

Threat actors affiliated with China have been attributed to a fresh set of cyber espionage campaigns targeting government and law enforcement agencies across Southeast Asia throughout 2025. Check Point Research is tracking the previously undocumented activity cluster under the moniker Amaranth-Dragon , which it said shares links to the APT 41 ecosystem. Targeted countries include Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines. "Many of the campaigns were timed to coincide with sensitive local political developments, official government decisions, or regional security events," the cybersecurity company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "By anchoring malicious activity in familiar, timely contexts, the attackers significantly increased the likelihood that targets would engage with the content." The Israeli firm added that the attacks were "narrowly focused" and "tightly scoped," indicating efforts on the part o...

Microsoft has warned that information-stealing attacks are "rapidly expanding" beyond Windows to target Apple macOS environments by leveraging cross-platform languages like Python and abusing trusted platforms for distribution at scale. The tech giant's Defender Security Research Team said it observed macOS-targeted infostealer campaigns using social engineering techniques such as ClickFix since late 2025 to distribute disk image (DMG) installers that deploy stealer malware families like Atomic macOS Stealer ( AMOS ), MacSync , and DigitStealer . The campaigns have been found to use techniques like fileless execution, native macOS utilities, and AppleScript automation to facilitate data theft. This includes details like web browser credentials and session data, iCloud Keychain, and developer secrets. The starting point of these attacks is often a malicious ad, often served through Google Ads, that redirects users searching for tools like DynamicLake and artificial i...