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Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a malicious Google Chrome extension that's capable of stealing API keys associated with MEXC, a centralized cryptocurrency exchange (CEX) available in over 170 countries , while masquerading as a tool to automate trading on the platform. The extension, named MEXC API Automator (ID: pppdfgkfdemgfknfnhpkibbkabhghhfh), has 29 downloads and is still available on the Chrome Web Store as of writing. It was first published on September 1, 2025, by a developer named "jorjortan142." "The extension programmatically creates new MEXC API keys, enables withdrawal permissions, hides that permission in the user interface (UI), and exfiltrates the resulting API key and secret to a hardcoded Telegram bot controlled by the threat actor," Socket security researcher Kirill Boychenko said in an analysis. According to the Chrome Web Store listing, the web browser add-on is described as an extension that "simplifies connecti...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a previously undocumented and feature-rich malware framework codenamed VoidLink that's specifically designed for long-term, stealthy access to Linux-based cloud environments According to a new report from Check Point Research, the cloud-native Linux malware framework comprises an array of custom loaders, implants, rootkits, and modular plugins that enable its operators to augment or change its capabilities over time, as well as pivot when objectives change. It was first discovered in December 2025. "The framework includes multiple cloud-focused capabilities and modules, and is engineered to operate reliably in cloud and container environments over extended periods," the cybersecurity company said in an analysis published today. "VoidLink's architecture is extremely flexible and highly modular, centered around a custom Plugin API that appears to be inspired by Cobalt Strike's Beacon Object Files (BOF) appr...

Old Playbook, New Scale: While defenders are chasing trends, attackers are optimizing the basics The security industry loves talking about "new" threats. AI-powered attacks. Quantum-resistant encryption. Zero-trust architectures. But looking around, it seems like the most effective attacks in 2025 are pretty much the same as they were in 2015. Attackers are exploiting the same entry points that worked - they're just doing it better. Supply Chain: Still Cascading Downstream As the Shai Hulud NPM campaign showed us, supply chain remains a major issue. A single compromised package can cascade through an entire dependency tree, affecting thousands of downstream projects. The attack vector hasn't changed. What's changed is how efficiently attackers can identify and exploit opportunities. AI has collapsed the barrier to entry. Just as AI has enabled one-person software projects to build sophisticated applications, the same is true in cybercrime. What used to requi...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has warned of active exploitation of a high-severity security flaw impacting Gogs by adding it to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-8110 (CVSS score: 8.7), relates to a case of path traversal in the repository file editor that could result in code execution. "Gogs Path Traversal Vulnerability: Gogs contains a path traversal vulnerability affecting improper Symbolic link handling in the PutContents API that could allow for code execution," CISA said in an advisory. Details of the shortcoming came to light last month when Wiz said it discovered it being exploited in zero-day attacks. The vulnerability essentially bypasses protections put in place for CVE-2024-55947 to achieve code execution by creating a git repository, committing a symbolic link pointing to a sensitive target, and using the PutContents API to write data to the symlink. This, in t...

A new wave of GoBruteforcer attacks has targeted databases of cryptocurrency and blockchain projects to co-opt them into a botnet that's capable of brute-forcing user passwords for services such as FTP, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and phpMyAdmin on Linux servers. "The current wave of campaigns is driven by two factors: the mass reuse of AI-generated server deployment examples that propagate common usernames and weak defaults, and the persistence of legacy web stacks such as XAMPP that expose FTP and admin interfaces with minimal hardening," Check Point Research said in an analysis published last week. GoBruteforcer, also called GoBrut, was first documented by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 in March 2023, documenting its ability to target Unix-like platforms running x86, x64, and ARM architectures to deploy an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) bot and a web shell for remote access, along with fetching a brute-force module to scan for vulnerable systems and expand the botnet's reach. ...

The Iranian threat actor known as MuddyWater has been attributed to a spear-phishing campaign targeting diplomatic, maritime, financial, and telecom entities in the Middle East with a Rust-based implant codenamed RustyWater . "The campaign uses icon spoofing and malicious Word documents to deliver Rust based implants capable of asynchronous C2, anti-analysis, registry persistence, and modular post-compromise capability expansion," CloudSEK resetter Prajwal Awasthi said in a report published this week. The latest development reflects continued evolution of MuddyWater's tradecraft, which has gradually-but-steadily reduced its reliance on legitimate remote access software as a post-exploitation tool in favor of a diverse custom malware arsenal comprising tools like Phoenix, UDPGangster , BugSleep (aka MuddyRot), and MuddyViper . Also tracked as Mango Sandstorm, Static Kitten, and TA450, the hacking group is assessed to be affiliated with Iran's Ministry of Intelli...

Chinese-speaking threat actors are suspected to have leveraged a compromised SonicWall VPN appliance as an initial access vector to deploy a VMware ESXi exploit that may have been developed as far back as February 2024. Cybersecurity firm Huntress, which observed the activity in December 2025 and stopped it before it could progress to the final stage, said it may have resulted in a ransomware attack. Most notably, the attack is believed to have exploited three VMware vulnerabilities that were disclosed as zero-days by Broadcom in March 2025: CVE-2025-22224 (CVSS score: 9.3), CVE-2025-22225 (CVSS score: 8.2), and CVE-2025-22226 (CVSS score: 7.1). Successful exploitation of the issue could permit a malicious actor with admin privileges to leak memory from the Virtual Machine Executable (VMX) process or execute code as the VMX process. That same month, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added the flaws to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) ca...

Russian state-sponsored threat actors have been linked to a fresh set of credential harvesting attacks targeting individuals associated with a Turkish energy and nuclear research agency, as well as staff affiliated with a European think tank and organizations in North Macedonia and Uzbekistan. The activity has been attributed to APT28 (aka BlueDelta), which was tied to a "sustained" credential-harvesting campaign targeting users of UKR[.]net last month. APT28 is associated with the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU). "The use of Turkish-language and regionally targeted lure material suggests that BlueDelta tailored its content to increase credibility among specific professional and geographic audiences," Recorded Future's Insikt Group said . "These selections reflect a continued interest in organizations connected to energy research, defense cooperation, and government communication networks relevan...

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Thursday released an advisory warning of North Korean state-sponsored threat actors leveraging malicious QR codes in spear-phishing campaigns targeting entities in the country. "As of 2025, Kimsuky actors have targeted think tanks, academic institutions, and both U.S. and foreign government entities with embedded malicious Quick Response (QR) codes in spear-phishing campaigns," the FBI said in the flash alert. "This type of spear-phishing attack is referred to as quishing." The use of QR codes for phishing is a tactic that forces victims to shift from a machine that's secured by enterprise policies to a mobile device that may not offer the same level of protection, effectively allowing threat actors to bypass traditional defenses. Kimsuky, also tracked as APT43, Black Banshee, Emerald Sleet, Springtail, TA427, and Velvet Chollima, is a threat group that's assessed to be affiliated with North Korea's...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new campaign that uses WhatsApp as a distribution vector for a Windows banking trojan called Astaroth in attacks targeting Brazil. The campaign has been codenamed Boto Cor-de-Rosa by Acronis Threat Research Unit. "The malware retrieves the victim's WhatsApp contact list and automatically sends malicious messages to each contact to further spread the infection," the cybersecurity company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "While the core Astaroth payload remains written in Delphi and its installer relies on Visual Basic script, the newly added WhatsApp-based worm module is implemented entirely in Python, highlighting the threat actors' growing use of multi-language modular components." Astaroth, also called Guildma, is a banking malware that has been detected in the wild since 2015, primarily targeting users in Latin America, notably Brazil, to facilitate data theft. In 2024, two diffe...

A China-nexus threat actor known as UAT-7290 has been attributed to espionage-focused intrusions against entities in South Asia and Southeastern Europe. The activity cluster, which has been active since at least 2022, primarily focuses on extensive technical reconnaissance of target organizations before initiating attacks, ultimately leading to the deployment of malware families such as RushDrop, DriveSwitch, and SilentRaid, according to a Cisco Talos report published today. "In addition to conducting espionage-focused attacks where UAT-7290 burrows deep inside a victim enterprise's network infrastructure, their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and tooling suggest that this actor also establishes Operational Relay Box (ORBs) nodes," researchers Asheer Malhotra, Vitor Ventura, and Brandon White said . "The ORB infrastructure may then be used by other China-nexus actors in their malicious operations, signifying UAT-7290's dual role as an espionage-motiva...

A cybercrime gang known as Black Cat has been attributed to a search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning campaign that employs fraudulent sites advertising popular software to trick users into downloading a backdoor capable of stealing sensitive data. According to a report published by the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center of China (CNCERT/CC) and Beijing Weibu Online (aka ThreatBook), the activity is designed to strategically push bogus sites to the top of search results on search engines like Microsoft Bing, specifically targeting users looking for programs like Google Chrome, Notepad++, QQ International, and iTools. "After visiting these high-ranking phishing pages, users are lured by carefully constructed download pages, attempting to download software installation packages bundled with malicious programs," CNCERT/CC and ThreatBook said. "Once installed, the program implants a backdoor Trojan without the user's k...

Threat actors engaging in phishing attacks are exploiting routing scenarios and misconfigured spoof protections to impersonate organizations' domains and distribute emails that appear as if they have been sent internally. "Threat actors have leveraged this vector to deliver a wide variety of phishing messages related to various phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platforms such as Tycoon 2FA ," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a Tuesday report. "These include messages with lures themed around voicemails, shared documents, communications from human resources (HR) departments, password resets or expirations, and others, leading to credential phishing." While the attack vector is not necessarily new , the tech giant said it has witnessed a surge in the use of the tactic since May 2025 as part of opportunistic campaigns targeting a wide variety of organizations across multiple industries and verticals. This includes a campaign that has employed spoofed e...

A newly discovered critical security flaw in legacy D-Link DSL gateway routers has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-0625 (CVSS score: 9.3), concerns a case of command injection in the "dnscfg.cgi" endpoint that arises as a result of improper sanitization of user-supplied DNS configuration parameters. "An unauthenticated remote attacker can inject and execute arbitrary shell commands, resulting in remote code execution," VulnCheck noted in an advisory. "The affected endpoint is also associated with unauthenticated DNS modification ('DNSChanger') behavior documented by D-Link , which reported active exploitation campaigns targeting firmware variants of the DSL-2740R, DSL-2640B, DSL-2780B, and DSL-526B models from 2016 through 2019." The cybersecurity company also noted that exploitation attempts targeting CVE-2026-0625 were recorded by the Shadowserver Foundation on November 27, 2025. Some of ...

Source: Securonix Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new campaign dubbed PHALT#BLYX that has leveraged ClickFix -style lures to display fixes for fake blue screen of death ( BSoD ) errors in attacks targeting the European hospitality sector. The end goal of the multi-stage campaign is to deliver a remote access trojan known as DCRat , according to cybersecurity company Securonix. The activity was detected in late December 2025. "For initial access, the threat actors utilize a fake Booking.com reservation cancellation lure to trick victims into executing malicious PowerShell commands, which silently fetch and execute remote code," researchers Shikha Sangwan, Akshay Gaikwad, and Aaron Beardslee said . The starting point of the attack chain is a phishing email impersonating Booking.com that contains a link to a fake website (e.g., "low-house[.]com"). The messages warn recipients of unexpected reservation cancellations, urging them to click the ...

Popular artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) forks such as Cursor, Windsurf, Google Antigravity, and Trae have been found to recommend extensions that are non-existent in the Open VSX registry, potentially opening the door to supply chain risks when bad actors publish malicious packages under those names. The problem, according to Koi , is that these integrated development environments (IDEs) inherit the list of officially recommended extensions from Microsoft's extensions marketplace. These extensions don't exist in Open VSX. The VS Code extension recommendations can take two different forms: file-based, which are displayed as toast notifications when users open a file in specific formats, or software-based, which are suggested when certain programs are already installed on the host. "The problem: these recommended extensions didn't exist on Open VSX," Koi security researcher Oren Yomtov said. "The namespaces were u...

The Russia-aligned threat actor known as UAC-0184 has been observed targeting Ukrainian military and government entities by leveraging the Viber messaging platform to deliver malicious ZIP archives. "This organization has continued to conduct high-intensity intelligence gathering activities against Ukrainian military and government departments in 2025," the 360 Threat Intelligence Center said in a technical report. Also tracked as Hive0156, the hacking group is primarily known for leveraging war-themed lures in phishing emails to deliver Hijack Loader in attacks targeting Ukrainian entities. The malware loader subsequently acts as a pathway for Remcos RAT infections. The threat actor was first documented by CERT-UA in early January 2024. Subsequent attack campaigns have been found to leverage messaging apps like Signal and Telegram as a delivery vehicle for malware. The latest findings from the Chinese security vendor points to a further evolution of this tactic. ...

Featuring: Cybersecurity is being reshaped by forces that extend beyond individual threats or tools. As organizations operate across cloud infrastructure, distributed endpoints, and complex supply chains, security has shifted from a collection of point solutions to a question of architecture, trust, and execution speed. This report examines how core areas of cybersecurity are evolving in response to that shift. Across authentication, endpoint security, software supply chain protection, network visibility, and human risk, it explores how defenders are adapting to adversaries that move faster, blend technical and social techniques, and exploit gaps between systems rather than weaknesses in any single control. Download the Full Report Here: https://papryon.live/article Authentication — Yubico Authentication is evolving from password-based verification to cryptographic proof of possession. As phishing and AI-driven impersonation scale, identity has become the primary control point...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new Python-based information stealer called VVS Stealer (also styled as VVS $tealer) that's capable of harvesting Discord credentials and tokens. The stealer is said to have been on sale on Telegram as far back as April 2025, according to a report from Palo Alto Networks Unit 42. "VVS stealer's code is obfuscated by Pyarmor," researchers Pranay Kumar Chhaparwal and Lee Wei Yeong said . "This tool is used to obfuscate Python scripts to hinder static analysis and signature-based detection. Pyarmor can be used for legitimate purposes and also leveraged to build stealthy malware." Advertised on Telegram as the "ultimate stealer," it's available for €10 ($11.69) for a weekly subscription. It can also be purchased at different pricing tiers: €20 ($23) for a month, €40 ($47) for three months, €90 ($105) for a year, and €199 ($232) for a lifetime license, making it one of the cheapest stealers ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a phishing campaign that involves the attackers impersonating legitimate Google-generated messages by abusing Google Cloud's Application Integration service to distribute emails. The activity, Check Point said, takes advantage of the trust associated with Google Cloud infrastructure to send the messages from a legitimate email address ("noreply-application-integration@google[.]com") so that they can bypass traditional email security filters and have a better chance of landing in users' inboxes. "The emails mimic routine enterprise notifications such as voicemail alerts and file access or permission requests, making them appear normal and trustworthy to recipients," the cybersecurity company said . Attackers have been observed sending 9,394 phishing emails targeting approximately 3,200 customers over a 14-day period observed in December 2025, with the affected organizations located in the U.S., Asia-Pac...