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Various generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) services have been found vulnerable to two types of jailbreak attacks that make it possible to produce illicit or dangerous content. The first of the two techniques, codenamed Inception, instructs an AI tool to imagine a fictitious scenario, which can then be adapted into a second scenario within the first one where there exists no safety guardrails . "Continued prompting to the AI within the second scenarios context can result in bypass of safety guardrails and allow the generation of malicious content," the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) said in an advisory released last week. The second jailbreak is realized by prompting the AI for information on how not to reply to a specific request.  "The AI can then be further prompted with requests to respond as normal, and the attacker can then pivot back and forth between illicit questions that bypass safety guardrails and normal prompts," CERT/CC added. Success...

Cybersecurity company SentinelOne has revealed that a China-nexus threat cluster dubbed PurpleHaze conducted reconnaissance attempts against its infrastructure and some of its high-value customers. "We first became aware of this threat cluster during a 2024 intrusion conducted against an organization previously providing hardware logistics services for SentinelOne employees," security researchers Tom Hegel, Aleksandar Milenkoski, and Jim Walter said in an analysis published Monday. PurpleHaze is assessed to be a hacking crew with loose ties to another state-sponsored group known as APT15 , which is also tracked as Flea, Nylon Typhoon (formerly Nickel), Playful Taurus, Royal APT, and Vixen Panda. The adversarial collective has also been observed targeting an unnamed South Asian government-supporting entity in October 2024, employing an operational relay box (ORB) network and a Windows backdoor dubbed GoReShell. The implant, written in the Go programming language, repurp...

Google has revealed that it observed 75 zero-day vulnerabilities exploited in the wild in 2024, down from 98 in 2023 but an increase from 63 the year before. Of the 75 zero-days, 44% of them targeted enterprise products. As many as 20 flaws were identified in security software and appliances. "Zero-day exploitation of browsers and mobile devices fell drastically, decreasing by about a third for browsers and by about half for mobile devices compared to what we observed last year," the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said in a report shared with The Hacker news. "Exploit chains made up of multiple zero-day vulnerabilities continue to be almost exclusively (~90%) used to target mobile devices." While Microsoft Windows accounted for 22 of the zero-day flaws exploited in 2024, Apple's Safari had three, iOS had two, Android had seven, Chrome had seven, and Mozilla Firefox had one flaw that were abused during the same period. Three of the seven zero-days ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added two high-severity security flaws impacting Broadcom Brocade Fabric OS and Commvault Web Server to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerabilities in question are listed below - CVE-2025-1976 (CVSS score: 8.6) - A code injection flaw affecting Broadcom Brocade Fabric OS that allows a local user with administrative privileges to execute arbitrary code with full root privileges CVE-2025-3928 (CVSS score: 8.7) - An unspecified flaw in the Commvault Web Server that allows a remote, authenticated attacker to create and execute web shells "Exploiting this vulnerability requires a bad actor to have authenticated user credentials within the Commvault Software environment," Commvault said in an advisory released in February 2025. "Unauthenticated access is not exploitable. For software customers, this means your ...

Microsoft has revealed that a threat actor it tracks as Storm-1977 has conducted password spraying attacks against cloud tenants in the education sector over the past year. "The attack involves the use of AzureChecker.exe, a Command Line Interface (CLI) tool that is being used by a wide range of threat actors," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in an analysis. The tech giant noted that it observed the binary to connect to an external server named "sac-auth.nodefunction[.]vip" to retrieve an AES-encrypted data that contains a list of password spray targets.  The tool also accepts as input a text file called "accounts.txt" that includes the username and password combinations to be used to carry out the password spray attack. "The threat actor then used the information from both files and posted the credentials to the target tenants for validation," Microsoft said. In one successful instance of account compromise observed by Redm...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning about a new malware called DslogdRAT that's installed following the exploitation of a now-patched security flaw in Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS). The malware, along with a web shell, were "installed by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability at that time, CVE-2025-0282, during attacks against organizations in Japan around December 2024," JPCERT/CC researcher Yuma Masubuchi said in a report published Thursday. CVE-2025-0282 refers to a critical security flaw in ICS that could allow unauthenticated remote code execution. It was addressed by Ivanti in early January 2025. However, the shortcoming has been exploited as a zero-day by a China-nexus cyber espionage group dubbed UNC5337 to deliver the SPAWN ecosystem of malware, as well as other tools like DRYHOOK and PHASEJAM. The deployment of the latter two malware strains has not been attributed to any known threat actor. Since then, both JPCERT/CC and the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastr...

At least six organizations in South Korea have been targeted by the prolific North Korea-linked Lazarus Group as part of a campaign dubbed Operation SyncHole . The activity targeted South Korea's software, IT, financial, semiconductor manufacturing, and telecommunications industries, according to a report from Kaspersky published today. The earliest evidence of compromise was first detected in November 2024. The campaign involved a "sophisticated combination of a watering hole strategy and vulnerability exploitation within South Korean software," security researchers Sojun Ryu and Vasily Berdnikov said . "A one-day vulnerability in Innorix Agent was also used for lateral movement." The attacks have been observed paving the way for variants of known Lazarus tools such as ThreatNeedle , AGAMEMNON , wAgent , SIGNBT , and COPPERHEDGE . What makes these intrusions particularly effective is the likely exploitation of a security vulnerability in Cross EX, a legi...

As many as 159 CVE identifiers have been flagged as exploited in the wild in the first quarter of 2025, up from 151 in Q4 2024. "We continue to see vulnerabilities being exploited at a fast pace with 28.3% of vulnerabilities being exploited within 1-day of their CVE disclosure," VulnCheck said in a report shared with The Hacker News. This translates to 45 security flaws that have been weaponized in real-world attacks within a day of disclosure. Fourteen other flaws have been exploited within a month, while another 45 flaws were abused within the span of a year.  The cybersecurity company said a majority of the exploited vulnerabilities have been identified in content management systems (CMSes), followed by network edge devices, operating systems, open-source software, and server software. The breakdown is as follows - Content Management Systems (CMS) (35) Network Edge Devices (29) Operating Systems (24) Open Source Software (14) Server Software (14) The leading...

The threat actors behind the Darcula phishing-as-a-service ( PhaaS ) platform have released new updates to their cybercrime suite with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) capabilities. "This addition lowers the technical barrier for creating phishing pages, enabling less tech-savvy criminals to deploy customized scams in minutes," Netcraft said in a fresh report shared with The Hacker News. "The new AI-assisted features amplify Darcula's threat potential by simplifying the process to build tailored phishing pages with multi-language support and form generation — all without any programming knowledge." Darcula was first documented by the cybersecurity company in March 2024 as a toolkit that leveraged Apple iMessage and RCS to send smishing messages to trick recipients into clicking on bogus links under the guise of postal services like USPS. Earlier this year, the operators of Darcula PhaaS began testing a major update that enabled customers to c...

The Iran-nexus threat actor known as UNC2428 has been observed delivering a backdoor known as MURKYTOUR as part of a job-themed social engineering campaign aimed at Israel in October 2024. Google-owned Mandiant described UNC2428 as a threat actor aligned with Iran that engages in cyber espionage-related operations. The intrusion set is said to have distributed the malware through a "complex chain of deception techniques." "UNC2428's social engineering campaign targeted individuals while posing as a recruitment opportunity from Israeli defense contractor, Rafael," the company said in its annual M-Trends report for 2025. Individuals who expressed interest were redirected to a site that impersonated Rafael, from where they were asked to download a tool to assist with applying for the job. The tool ("RafaelConnect.exe") was an installer dubbed LONEFLEET that, once launched, presented a graphical user interface (GUI) to the victim in order to enter th...

Phishing attacks remain a huge challenge for organizations in 2025. In fact, with attackers increasingly leveraging identity-based techniques over software exploits, phishing arguably poses a bigger threat than ever before.  Attackers are increasingly leveraging identity-based techniques over software exploits, with phishing and stolen credentials (a byproduct of phishing) now the primary cause of breaches. Source: Verizon DBIR Attackers are increasingly leveraging identity-based techniques over software exploits, with phishing and stolen credentials (a byproduct of phishing) now the primary cause of breaches. Source: Verizon DBIR Attackers are turning to identity attacks like phishing because they can achieve all of the same objectives as they would in a traditional endpoint or network attack, simply by logging into a victim’s account. And with organizations now using hundreds of internet apps across their workforce, the scope of accounts that can be phished or targeted with s...

Multiple suspected Russia-linked threat actors are "aggressively" targeting individuals and organizations with ties to Ukraine and human rights with an aim to gain unauthorized access to Microsoft 365 accounts since early March 2025. The highly targeted social engineering operations, per Volexity, are a shift from previously documented attacks that leveraged a technique known as device code phishing to achieve the same goals, indicating that indicating that the Russian adversaries behind these campaigns are actively refining their tradecraft to fly under the radar. "These recently observed attacks rely heavily on one-on-one interaction with a target, as the threat actor must both convince them to click a link and send back a Microsoft-generated code," security researchers Charlie Gardner, Josh Duke, Matthew Meltzer, Sean Koessel, Steven Adair, and Tom Lancaster said in an exhaustive analysis. At least two different threat clusters tracked as UTA0352 and UTA03...