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A suspected China-based cyber espionage operation has targeted Southeast Asian military organizations as part of a state-sponsored campaign that dates back to at least 2020. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 is tracking the threat activity under the moniker CL-STA-1087 , where CL refers to cluster, and STA stands for state-backed motivation. "The activity demonstrated strategic operational patience and a focus on highly targeted intelligence collection, rather than bulk data theft," security researchers Lior Rochberger and Yoav Zemah said. "The attackers behind this cluster actively searched for and collected highly specific files concerning military capabilities, organizational structures, and collaborative efforts with Western armed forces." The campaign exhibits hallmarks commonly associated with advanced persistent threat (APT) operations, including carefully crafted delivery methods, defense evasion strategies, highly stable operational infrastructure, and custom ...

Microsoft has disclosed details of a credential theft campaign that employs fake virtual private network (VPN) clients distributed through search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning techniques. "The campaign redirects users searching for legitimate enterprise software to malicious ZIP files on attacker-controlled websites to deploy digitally signed trojans that masquerade as trusted VPN clients while harvesting VPN credentials," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence and Microsoft Defender Experts teams said . The Windows maker, which observed the activity in mid-January 2026, has attributed it to Storm-2561 , a threat activity cluster known for propagating malware through SEO poisoning and impersonating popular software vendors since May 2025. The threat actor's campaigns were first documented by Cyjax, highlighting the use of SEO poisoning to redirect users searching for software programs from companies like SonicWall, Hanwha Vision, and Pulse Secure (now Ivanti Secure...

Disclaimer : This report has been prepared by the Threat Research Center to enhance cybersecurity awareness and support the strengthening of defense capabilities. It is based on independent research and observations of the current threat landscape available at the time of publication. The content is intended for informational and preparedness purposes only. Read more blogs around threat intelligence and adversary research: https://atos.net/en/lp/cybershield  Summary Atos Researchers identified a new variant of the popular ClickFix technique, where attackers convince the user to execute a malicious command on their own device through the Win + R shortcut. In this variation, a “net use” command is used to map a network drive from an external server, after which a “.cmd” batch file hosted on that drive is executed. Script downloads a ZIP archive, unpacks it, and executes the legitimate WorkFlowy application with modified, malicious logic hidden inside “.asar” archive. This acts as...

A court-authorized international law enforcement operation has dismantled a criminal proxy service named SocksEscort that enslaved thousands of residential routers worldwide into a botnet for committing large-scale fraud. "SocksEscort infected home and small business internet routers with malware," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said . "The malware allowed SocksEscort to direct internet traffic through the infected routers. SocksEscort sold this access to its customers." SocksEscort ("socksescort[.]com") is said to have offered to sell access to about 369,000 different IP addresses in 163 countries since the summer of 2020, with the service listing nearly 8,000 infected routers as of February 2026. Of these, 2,500 were located in the U.S. As of December 2025, SocksEscort's website claimed to offer "static residential IPs with unlimited bandwidth" and that they can bypass spam blocklists. It advertised over 35,900 proxies from 102 c...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new banking malware targeting Brazilian users that's written in Rust, marking a significant departure from other known Delphi-based malware families associated with the Latin American cybercrime ecosystem. The malware, which is designed to infect Windows systems and was first discovered last month, has been codenamed VENON by Brazilian cybersecurity company ZenoX. What makes VENON notable is that it shares behaviors that are consistent with established banking trojans targeting the region, such as Grandoreiro, Mekotio, and Coyote, specifically when it comes to features like banking overlay logic, active window monitoring, and a shortcut (LNK) hijacking mechanism. The malware has not been attributed to any previously documented group or campaign. However, an earlier version of the artifact, dating back to January 2026, has been found to expose full paths from the malware author's development environment. The paths repea...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a suspected artificial intelligence (AI)-generated malware codenamed Slopoly put to use by a financially motivated threat actor named Hive0163 . "Although still relatively unspectacular, AI-generated malware such as Slopoly shows how easily threat actors can weaponize AI to develop new malware frameworks in a fraction of the time it used to take," IBM X-Force researcher Golo Mühr said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Hive0163's operations are driven by extortion through large-scale data exfiltration and ransomware. The e-crime group is primarily associated with a wide range of malicious tools, including NodeSnake, Interlock RAT, JunkFiction loader, and Interlock ransomware. In one ransomware attack observed by the company in early 2026, the threat actor was observed deploying Slopoly during the post-exploitation phase so as to maintain persistent access to the compromised server for more than a week. Slo...

Phishing has quietly turned into one of the hardest enterprise threats to expose early. Instead of crude lures and obvious payloads, modern campaigns rely on trusted infrastructure, legitimate-looking authentication flows, and encrypted traffic that conceals malicious behavior from traditional detection layers. For CISOs, the priority is now clear: scale phishing detection in a way that helps the SOC uncover real risk before it becomes credential theft, business interruption, and board-level fallout. Why Scaling Phishing Detection Has Become a Priority for Modern SOCs For many security teams, phishing is no longer a single alert to investigate — it is a continuous stream of suspicious links, login attempts, and user-reported messages that must be validated quickly. The problem is that most SOC workflows were never designed to handle this volume. Each investigation still requires time, context gathering, and manual validation, while attackers operate at machine speed. When phishing ...

The most dangerous phishing campaigns aren’t just designed to fool employees. Many are designed to exhaust the analysts investigating them. When a phishing investigation takes 12 hours instead of five minutes, the outcome can shift from a contained incident to a breach. For years, the cybersecurity industry has focused on the front door of phishing defense: employee training, email gateways that filter known threats, and reporting programs that encourage users to flag suspicious messages. Far less attention has been paid to what happens after a report is filed, and how attackers exploit the investigation process that follows.  Alert fatigue in Security Operations Centers isn't just an operational inconvenience . It can become an attack surface. SOC teams increasingly report phishing campaigns that appear designed not only to compromise targets but also to overwhelm the analysts responsible for investigating them.  This shifts how organizations should think about phishing d...

Apple on Wednesday backported fixes for a security flaw in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS Sonoma to older versions after it was found to be used as part of the Coruna exploit kit . The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-43010 , relates to an unspecified vulnerability in WebKit that could result in memory corruption when processing maliciously crafted web content. The iPhone maker said the issue was addressed with improved handling.  "This fix associated with the Coruna exploit kit was shipped in iOS 17.2 on December 11th, 2023," Apple said in an advisory. "This update brings that fix to devices that cannot update to the latest iOS version." Fixes for CVE-2023-43010 were originally released by Apple in the following versions - iOS 17.2 and iPadOS 17.2 macOS Sonoma 14.2 Safari 17.2 The latest round of fixes brings it to older versions of iOS and iPadOS - iOS 15.8.7 and iPadOS 15.8.7 - iPhone 6s (all models), iPhone 7 (all models), iPhone SE (1st generation), iPa...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered half-a-dozen new Android malware families that come with capabilities to steal data from compromised devices and conduct financial fraud. The Android malware range from traditional banking trojans like PixRevolution , TaxiSpy RAT , BeatBanker , Mirax , and Oblivion RAT to full-fledged remote administration tools such as SURXRAT . PixRevolution, according to Zimperium, targets Brazil's Pix instant payment platform , hijacking victims' money transfers in real-time to route them to the threat actors instead of the intended payee. "This new strain of malware operates stealthily within the device until the moment the victim initiates a Pix transfer," security researcher Aazim Yaswant said . "What distinguishes this threat from conventional banking trojans is its fundamental design: a human or AI agent operator is actively engaged on the remote end, observing the victim's phone screen instantaneously, poised to act at ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added a critical security flaw impacting n8n to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-68613 (CVSS score: 9.9), concerns a case of expression injection that leads to remote code execution. The security shortcoming was patched by n8n in December 2025 in versions 1.120.4, 1.121.1, and 1.122.0. CVE-2025-68613 is the first n8n vulnerability to be placed in the KEV catalog. "N8n contains an improper control of dynamically managed code resources vulnerability in its workflow expression evaluation system that allows for remote code execution," CISA said. According to the maintainers of the workflow automation platform, the vulnerability could be weaponized by an authenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the n8n process. Successful exploitation of the flaw could result in a c...

A threat actor known as UNC6426 leveraged keys stolen following the supply chain compromise of the nx npm package last year to completely breach a victim's cloud environment within a span of 72 hours. The attack started with the theft of a developer's GitHub token, which the threat actor then used to gain unauthorized access to the cloud and steal data. "The threat actor, UNC6426, then used this access to abuse the GitHub-to-AWS OpenID Connect (OIDC) trust and create a new administrator role in the cloud environment," Google said in its Cloud Threat Horizons Report for H1 2026. "They abused this role to exfiltrate files from the client's Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets and performed data destruction in their production cloud environments." The supply chain attack targeting the nx npm package took place in August 2025, when unknown threat actors exploited a vulnerable pull_request_target workflow – an attack type ...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new campaign where threat actors are abusing FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) appliances as entry points to breach victim networks.  The activity involves the exploitation of recently disclosed security vulnerabilities or weak credentials to extract configuration files containing service account credentials and network topology information, SentinelOne said in a report published today. The security outfit said the campaign has singled out environments tied to healthcare, government, and managed service providers. "FortiGate network appliances have considerable access to the environments they were installed to protect," security researchers Alex Delamotte, Stephen Bromfield, Mary Braden Murphy, and Amey Patne said . "In many configurations, this includes service accounts which are connected to the authentication infrastructure, such as Active Directory (AD) and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)....

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new malware called KadNap that's primarily targeting Asus routers to enlist them into a botnet for proxying malicious traffic. The malware, first detected in the wild in August 2025, has expanded to over 14,000 infected devices, with more than 60% of victims located in the U.S., according to the Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen. A lesser number of infections have been detected in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Russia, the U.K., Australia, Brazil, France, Italy, and Spain. "KadNap employs a custom version of the Kademlia Distributed Hash Table ( DHT ) protocol, which is used to conceal the IP address of their infrastructure within a peer-to-peer system to evade traditional network monitoring," the cybersecurity company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Compromised nodes in the network leverage the DHT protocol to locate and connect with a command-and-control (C2) server, thereby making it resilient to detection and disrupt...

The Russian state-sponsored hacking group tracked as APT28 has been observed using a pair of implants dubbed BEARDSHELL and COVENANT to facilitate long‑term surveillance of Ukrainian military personnel. The two malware families have been put to use since April 2024, ESET said in a new report shared with The Hacker News. APT28, also tracked as Blue Athena, BlueDelta, Fancy Bear, Fighting Ursa, Forest Blizzard (formerly Strontium), FROZENLAKE, Iron Twilight, ITG05, Pawn Storm, Sednit, Sofacy, and TA422, is a nation-state actor affiliated with Unit 26165 of the Russian Federation's military intelligence agency GRU. The threat actor's malware arsenal consists of tools like BEARDSHELL and COVENANT, along with another program codenamed SLIMAGENT that's capable of logging keystrokes, capturing screenshots, and collecting clipboard data. SLIMAGENT was first publicly documented by the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) in June 2025. SLIMAGENT, per the Slo...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added three security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability list is as follows - CVE-2021-22054 (CVSS score: 7.5) - A server-side request forgery ( SSRF ) vulnerability in Omnissa Workspace One UEM (formerly VMware Workspace One UEM) that could allow a malicious actor with network access to UEM to send requests without authentication and to gain access to sensitive information. CVE-2025-26399 (CVSS score: 9.8) - A deserialization of untrusted data vulnerability in the AjaxProxy component of SolarWinds Web Help Desk that could allow an attacker to run commands on the host machine. CVE-2026-1603 (CVSS score: 8.6) - An authentication bypass using an alternate path or channel vulnerability in Ivanti Endpoint Manager that could allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to leak specific stored credential data. The addition o...

The North Korean threat actor known as UNC4899 is suspected to be behind a sophisticated cloud compromise campaign targeting a cryptocurrency organization in 2025 to steal millions of dollars in cryptocurrency. The activity has been attributed with moderate confidence to the state-sponsored adversary, which is also tracked under the cryptonyms Jade Sleet, PUKCHONG, Slow Pisces, and TraderTraitor.  "This incident is notable for its blend of social engineering, exploitation of personal-to-corporate device peer-to-peer data (P2P) transfer mechanisms, workflows, and eventual pivot to the cloud to employ living-off-the-cloud (LOTC) techniques," the tech giant noted in its H1 2026 Cloud Threat Horizons Report shared with The Hacker News. Upon gaining access to the cloud environment, the attackers are said to have abused legitimate DevOps workflows to harvest credentials, break out of the confines of containers, and tamper with Cloud SQL databases to facilitate the cryptocu...

Two Google Chrome extensions have turned malicious after what appears to be a case of ownership transfer , offering attackers a way to push malware to downstream customers, inject arbitrary code, and harvest sensitive data. The extensions in question, both originally associated with a developer named "akshayanuonline@gmail.com" (BuildMelon), are listed below - QuickLens - Search Screen with Google Lens (ID: kdenlnncndfnhkognokgfpabgkgehodd) - 7,000 users ShotBird - Scrolling Screenshots, Tweet Images & Editor (ID: gengfhhkjekmlejbhmmopegofnoifnjp) - 800 users While QuickLens is no longer available for download from the Chrome Web Store, ShotBird remains accessible as of writing. ShotBird was originally launched in November 2024, with its developer, Akshay Anu S (@AkshayAnuOnline), claiming on X that the extension is suitable for "creating professional, studio-like visuals," and that all processing happens locally. According to research published by mo...