Threat Intelligence | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Threat hunters are alerting to a new campaign that employs deceptive websites to trick unsuspecting users into executing malicious PowerShell scripts on their machines and infect them with the NetSupport RAT malware. The DomainTools Investigations (DTI) team said it identified "malicious multi-stage downloader Powershell scripts" hosted on lure websites that masquerade as Gitcode and DocuSign. "These sites attempt to deceive users into copying and running an initial PowerShell script on their Windows Run command," the company said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "Upon doing so, the powershell script downloads another downloader script and executes on the system, which in turn retrieves additional payloads and executes them eventually installing NetSupport RAT on the infected machines." It's believed that these counterfeit sites may be propagated via social engineering attempts over email and/or social media platforms. The Po...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a critical security flaw in the Roundcube webmail software that has gone unnoticed for a decade and could be exploited to take over susceptible systems and execute arbitrary code. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-49113 , carries a CVSS score of 9.9 out of 10.0. It has been described as a case of post-authenticated remote code execution via PHP object deserialization. "Roundcube Webmail before 1.5.10 and 1.6.x before 1.6.11 allows remote code execution by authenticated users because the _from parameter in a URL is not validated in program/actions/settings/upload.php, leading to PHP Object Deserialization," reads the description of the flaw in the NIST's National Vulnerability Database (NVD). The shortcoming, which affects all versions of the software before and including 1.6.10, has been addressed in 1.6.11 and 1.5.10 LTS . Kirill Firsov, founder and CEO of FearsOff, has been credited with discovering and repor...

A growing number of malicious campaigns have leveraged a recently discovered Android banking trojan called Crocodilus to target users in Europe and South America. The malware, according to a new report published by ThreatFabric, has also adopted improved obfuscation techniques to hinder analysis and detection, and includes the ability to create new contacts in the victim's contacts list. "Recent activity reveals multiple campaigns now targeting European countries while continuing Turkish campaigns and expanding globally to South America," the Dutch security company said . Crocodilus was first publicly documented in March 2025 as targeting Android device users in Spain and Turkey by masquerading as legitimate apps like Google Chrome. The malware comes fitted with capabilities to launch overlay attacks against a list of financial apps retrieved from an external server to harvest credentials. It also abuses accessibility services permissions to capture seed phrases as...

Microsoft and CrowdStrike have announced that they are teaming up to align their individual threat actor taxonomies by publishing a new joint threat actor mapping. "By mapping where our knowledge of these actors align, we will provide security professionals with the ability to connect insights faster and make decisions with greater confidence," Vasu Jakkal, corporate vice president at Microsoft Security, said . The initiative is seen as a way to untangle the menagerie of nicknames that private cybersecurity vendors assign to various hacking groups that are broadly categorized as a nation-state, financially motivated, influence operations, private sector offensive actors, and emerging clusters. For example, the Russian state-sponsored threat actor tracked by Microsoft as Midnight Blizzard (formerly Nobelium) is also known as APT29, BlueBravo, Cloaked Ursa, Cozy Bear, Iron Hemlock, and The Dukes. Likewise, Forest Blizzard (previously Strontium) goes by other monikers such...

Google on Monday released out-of-band fixes to address three security issues in its Chrome browser, including one that it said has come under active exploitation in the wild. The high-severity flaw is being tracked as CVE-2025-5419 (CVSS score: 8.8), and has been flagged as an out-of-bounds read and write vulnerability in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine. "Out-of-bounds read and write in V8 in Google Chrome prior to 137.0.7151.68 allowed a remote attacker to potentially exploit heap corruption via a crafted HTML page," reads the description of the bug on the NIST's National Vulnerability Database (NVD). Google credited Clement Lecigne and Benoît Sevens of Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) with discovering and reporting the flaw on May 27, 2025. It also noted that the issue was addressed the next day by pushing out a configuration change to the Stable version of the browser across all platforms. As is customary, the advisory is light on details regarding t...

Three security vulnerabilities have been disclosed in preloaded Android applications on smartphones from Ulefone and Krüger&Matz that could enable any app installed on the device to perform a factory reset and encrypt an application. A brief description of the three flaws is as follows - CVE-2024-13915 (CVSS score: 6.9) - A pre-installed "com.pri.factorytest" application on Ulefone and Krüger&Matz smartphones exposes a "com.pri.factorytest.emmc.FactoryResetService" service that allows any installed application to perform a factory reset of the device. CVE-2024-13916 (CVSS score: 6.9) - A pre-installed "com.pri.applock" application on Kruger&Matz smartphones allows a user to encrypt any application using user-provided PIN code or by using biometric data. The app also exposes a "com.android.providers.settings.fingerprint.PriFpShareProvider" content provider's "query()" method that permits any malicious app already ...

If this had been a security drill, someone would've said it went too far. But it wasn't a drill—it was real. The access? Everything looked normal. The tools? Easy to find. The detection? Came too late. This is how attacks happen now—quiet, convincing, and fast. Defenders aren't just chasing hackers anymore—they're struggling to trust what their systems are telling them. The problem isn't too few alerts. It's too many, with no clear meaning. One thing is clear: if your defense still waits for obvious signs, you're not protecting anything. You're just watching it happen. This recap highlights the moments that mattered—and why they're worth your attention. ⚡ Threat of the Week APT41 Exploits Google Calendar for Command-and-Control — The Chinese state-sponsored threat actor known as APT41 deployed a malware called TOUGHPROGRESS that uses Google Calendar for command-and-control (C2). Google said it observed the spear-phishing attacks in October 2024 and that the malware was hosted on...

The China-linked threat actor behind the recent in-the-wild exploitation of a critical security flaw in SAP NetWeaver has been attributed to a broader set of attacks targeting organizations in Brazil, India, and Southeast Asia since 2023. "The threat actor mainly targets the SQL injection vulnerabilities discovered on web applications to access the SQL servers of targeted organizations," Trend Micro security researcher Joseph C Chen said in an analysis published this week. "The actor also takes advantage of various known vulnerabilities to exploit public-facing servers." Some of the other prominent targets of the adversarial collective include Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. The cybersecurity company is tracking the activity under the moniker Earth Lamia , stating the activity shares some degree of overlap with threat clusters documented by Elastic Security Labs as REF0657 , Sophos as STAC6451 , and Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 as CL-...

ConnectWise, the developer of remote access and support software ScreenConnect, has disclosed that it was the victim of a cyber attack that it said was likely perpetrated by a nation-state threat actor. "ConnectWise recently learned of suspicious activity within our environment that we believe was tied to a sophisticated nation-state actor, which affected a very small number of ScreenConnect customers," the company said in a brief advisory on May 28, 2025. The company said it has engaged the services of Google Mandiant to conduct a forensic probe into the incident and that it has notified all affected customers. The incident was first reported by CRN. However, it did not reveal the exact number of customers who were impacted by the hack, when it happened, or the identity of the threat actor behind it. It's worth noting that the company, in late April 2025, patched CVE-2025-3935 (CVSS score: 8.1), a high-severity vulnerability in ScreenConnect versions 25.2.3 and ea...

Cybersecurity researchers have taken the wraps off an unusual cyber attack that leveraged malware with corrupted DOS and PE headers, according to new findings from Fortinet. The DOS (Disk Operating System) and PE (Portable Executable) headers are essential parts of a Windows PE file , providing information about the executable. While the DOS header makes the executable file backward compatible with MS-DOS and allows it to be recognized as a valid executable by the operating system, the PE header contains the metadata and information necessary for Windows to load and execute the program. "We discovered malware that had been running on a compromised machine for several weeks," researchers Xiaopeng Zhang and John Simmons from the FortiGuard Incident Response Team said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The threat actor had executed a batch of scripts and PowerShell to run the malware in a Windows process." Fortinet said while it was unable to extract th...

Google on Wednesday disclosed that the Chinese state-sponsored threat actor known as APT41 leveraged a malware called TOUGHPROGRESS that uses Google Calendar for command-and-control (C2). The tech giant, which discovered the activity in late October 2024, said the malware was hosted on a compromised government website and was used to target multiple other government entities. "Misuse of cloud services for C2 is a technique that many threat actors leverage in order to blend in with legitimate activity," Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) researcher Patrick Whitsell said . APT41, also tracked as Axiom, Blackfly, Brass Typhoon (formerly Barium), Bronze Atlas, Earth Baku, HOODOO, RedGolf, Red Kelpie, TA415, Wicked Panda, and Winnti, is the name assigned to a prolific nation-state group known for its targeting of governments and organizations within the global shipping and logistics, media and entertainment, technology, and automotive sectors. In July 2024, Google reve...

Stealer malware no longer just steals passwords. In 2025, it steals live sessions—and attackers are moving faster and more efficiently than ever. While many associate account takeovers with personal services, the real threat is unfolding in the enterprise. Flare's latest research, The Account and Session Takeover Economy , analyzed over 20 million stealer logs and tracked attacker activity across Telegram channels and dark web marketplaces. The findings expose how cybercriminals weaponize infected employee endpoints to hijack enterprise sessions—often in less than 24 hours. Here's the real timeline of a modern session hijacking attack. Infection and Data Theft in Under an Hour Once a victim runs a malicious payload—typically disguised as cracked software, fake updates, or phishing attachments—commodity stealers like Redline (44% of logs), Raccoon (25%), and LummaC2 (18%) take over. These malware kits: Extract browser cookies, saved credentials, session tokens, and crypto walle...

A financially motivated threat actor has been observed exploiting a recently disclosed remote code execution flaw affecting the Craft Content Management System (CMS) to deploy multiple payloads, including a cryptocurrency miner, a loader dubbed Mimo Loader, and residential proxyware. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-32432 , a maximum severity flaw in Craft CMS that was patched in versions 3.9.15, 4.14.15, and 5.6.17. The existence of the security defect was first disclosed in April 2025 by Orange Cyberdefense SensePost after it was observed in attacks earlier this February. According to a new report published by Sekoia, the threat actors behind the campaign weaponized CVE-2025-32432 to obtain unauthorized access to the target systems and then deploy a web shell to enable persistent remote access. The web shell is then used to download and execute a shell script ("4l4md4r.sh") from a remote server using curl, wget, or the Python library urllib2. "Regarding ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a coordinated cloud-based scanning activity that targeted 75 distinct "exposure points" earlier this month. The activity, observed by GreyNoise on May 8, 2025, involved as many as 251 malicious IP addresses that are all geolocated to Japan and hosted by Amazon. "These IPs triggered 75 distinct behaviors, including CVE exploits, misconfiguration probes, and recon activity," the threat intelligence firm said . "All IPs were silent before and after the surge, indicating temporary infrastructure rental for a single operation." The scanning efforts have been found to have targeted a wide array of technologies from Adobe ColdFusion, Apache Struts, Apache Tomcat, Drupal, Elasticsearch, and Oracle WebLogic, among others. The opportunistic operation ranged from exploitation attempts for known CVEs to probes for misconfigurations and other weak points in web infrastructure, indicating that the threat actors ...

Misconfigured Docker API instances have become the target of a new malware campaign that transforms them into a cryptocurrency mining botnet. The attacks, designed to mine for Dero currency, is notable for its worm-like capabilities to propagate the malware to other exposed Docker instances and rope them into an ever-growing horde of mining bots. Kaspersky said it observed an unidentified threat actor gaining initial access to a running containerized infrastructure by exploiting an insecurely published Docker API, and then weaponizing that access to create the illicit cryptojacking network. "This led to the running containers being compromised and new ones being created not only to hijack the victim's resources for cryptocurrency mining but also to launch external attacks to propagate to other networks," security researcher Amged Wageh said . The attack chain is realized through two components: A propagation malware "nginx" that scans the internet for expos...

The Russia-aligned threat actor known as TAG-110 has been observed conducting a spear-phishing campaign targeting Tajikistan using macro-enabled Word templates as an initial payload. The attack chain is a departure from the threat actor's previously documented use of an HTML Application (.HTA) loader dubbed HATVIBE, Recorded Future's Insikt Group said in an analysis. "Given TAG-110's historical targeting of public sector entities in Central Asia, this campaign is likely targeting government, educational, and research institutions within Tajikistan," the cybersecurity company noted . "These cyber espionage operations likely aim to gather intelligence for influencing regional politics or security, particularly during sensitive events like elections or geopolitical tensions." TAG-110, also called UAC-0063, is the name assigned to a threat activity group that's known for its targeting of European embassies, as well as other organizations in Cent...

Cyber threats don't show up one at a time anymore. They're layered, planned, and often stay hidden until it's too late. For cybersecurity teams, the key isn't just reacting to alerts—it's spotting early signs of trouble before they become real threats. This update is designed to deliver clear, accurate insights based on real patterns and changes we can verify. With today's complex systems, we need focused analysis—not noise. What you'll see here isn't just a list of incidents, but a clear look at where control is being gained, lost, or quietly tested. ⚡ Threat of the Week Lumma Stealer, DanaBot Operations Disrupted — A coalition of private sector companies and law enforcement agencies have taken down the infrastructure associated with Lumma Stealer and DanaBot . Charges have also been unsealed against 16 individuals for their alleged involvement in the development and deployment of DanaBot. The malware is equipped to siphon data from victim computers, hijack banking session...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a malware campaign that uses fake software installers masquerading as popular tools like LetsVPN and QQ Browser to deliver the Winos 4.0 framework. The campaign, first detected by Rapid7 in February 2025, involves the use of a multi-stage, memory-resident loader called Catena. "Catena uses embedded shellcode and configuration switching logic to stage payloads like Winos 4.0 entirely in memory, evading traditional antivirus tools," security researchers Anna Širokova and Ivan Feigl said . "Once installed, it quietly connects to attacker-controlled servers – mostly hosted in Hong Kong – to receive follow-up instructions or additional malware." The attacks, like those that have deployed Winos 4.0 in the past, appear to focus specifically on Chinese-speaking environments, with the cybersecurity company calling out the "careful, long-term planning" by a very capable threat actor. Winos 4.0 (aka ValleyRAT) was first ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed that a threat actor codenamed ViciousTrap has compromised nearly 5,300 unique network edge devices across 84 countries and turned them into a honeypot-like network. The threat actor has been observed exploiting a critical security flaw impacting Cisco Small Business RV016, RV042, RV042G, RV082, RV320, and RV325 Routers (CVE-2023-20118) to corral them into a set of honeypots en masse. A majority of the infections are located in Macau, with 850 compromised devices.

As part of the latest "season" of Operation Endgame , a coalition of law enforcement agencies have taken down about 300 servers worldwide, neutralized 650 domains, and issued arrest warrants against 20 targets. Operation Endgame, first launched in May 2024, is an ongoing law enforcement operation targeting services and infrastructures assisting in or directly providing initial or consolidating access for ransomware. The previous edition focused on dismantling the initial access malware families that have been used to deliver ransomware. The latest iteration, per Europol, targeted new malware variants and successor groups that re-emerged after last year's takedowns such as Bumblebee, Lactrodectus, QakBot, HijackLoader, DanaBot, TrickBot, and WARMCOOKIE . The interaction action was carried out between May 19 and 22, 2025. "In addition, €3.5 million in cryptocurrency was seized during the action week, bringing the total amount seized during the Operation Endgame to...