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Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new Windows infostealer malware called VOLTA-AUTODOXER (aka VOLTA) that makes use of a large language model (LLM) to rank a victim's stolen data by their monetization value. Like other typical stealer families, VOLTA is equipped to harvest passwords and cookies from Chromium-based web browsers; data from Outlook profiles and Slack workspaces; payment cards; cryptocurrency wallet seed phrases; Discord, Telegram, Steam, and Roblox sessions; Microsoft OAuth tokens; SSH and cloud-provider keys; Wi-Fi profiles; and screenshots. "VOLTA builds a structured evidence bundle about the person behind the machine," Cisco Talos researcher Ryan Fetterman said . "This bundle contains geolocation and home address, employer and employer domain, inferred birth year, card last-4 digits, Slack workspaces, document authorship metadata, iPhone backup indicators, and a live Roblox account valuation." To make this information more va...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of what has been described as a "highly sophisticated infection chain" targeting government organizations in Asia. The activity, detailed by Kaspersky this week, targeted a custom Windows 10 build used exclusively by government entities in Asia and involves the deployment of a previously undocumented .NET assembly-loading framework codenamed NetamLoader . The attack has not been attributed to any known threat actor or group. Nor is it clear if the intrusion compromised more than one system and allowed the hackers to steal any sensitive information. The Russian cybersecurity company said the artifact was detected in the first half of 2026, packaged inside a Windows cabinet archive (CAB) file placed in a directory that stores Windows operating system update packages. It's suspected the operation involved a supply chain attack , in which bad actors compromised a trusted third-party vendor to gain access to downstrea...

A chain of logic flaws, with no memory corruption, can turn a malicious web page into code running on a Windows computer outside Microsoft Edge's sandbox, a security researcher has shown. Orange Tsai of DEVCORE published the full method on October 28, five months after the chain won $175,000 at the  Pwn2Own Berlin contest  in May. Microsoft fixed the Edge bugs the day after the contest, so an up-to-date browser is not at risk. A browser sandbox is the wall that keeps a web page's code inside the browser and off the rest of the computer. Breaking out of it, and then running a program, is what turns a web bug into full control of the machine. Browser escapes like this almost always rely on memory corruption. This one used none. In his  write-up , Tsai describes a chain built solely from logic errors in how Edge and Windows handle ordinary features, and he says the whole exploit is under 100 lines of code. The result is a universal cross-site scripting (UXSS) primit...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malicious npm package that's part of a recently disclosed software supply chain attack campaign dubbed MALFEX . The package, named " imgdecode ," was uploaded to the package registry on September 30, 2026, by a user named "malfexteste8." It has been downloaded 979 times as of writing and is still available on npm as of writing. The latest version of the package is 1.0.3. "The npm package imgdecode hides a malicious loader in a compiled Node.js addon," SafeDep said . "Its nine-line JavaScript file loads a Windows dynamic-link library (DLL). When a Node.js program calls require('imgdecode') from a Windows console, the DLL attempts to download encrypted shellcode from GitHub. It decrypts the response and injects the result into a new dllhost.exe process." First documented by both Checkmarx and CloudSEK, MALFEX is the name assigned to a long-running campaign in which an unknown threat...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a long-running npm supply chain malware campaign that pushes information stealers and remote access trojans (RAT) to compromised hosts. The campaign has been codenamed MALFEX by CloudSEK and Checkmarx . The activity is assessed to be the work of a lone threat actor who appears to have published 12 packages since August 2023, eight of which have been flagged as malicious. The attack is designed to infect Windows systems through three separate pathways - A loader for Overlord , an open-source RAT written in Go that uses Solana transactions to extract the command-and-control (C2) address A chain that installs movinlike, a Node.js stealer targeting Discord, browsers, Telegram, and cryptocurrency wallets, and A downloader The list of identified malicious packages is below - tlxbnhd tldriver mxdriver img-to-native native-runner function-flag (Still live) function-color (Still live) cdn-img-fetch (S...

Threat actors are abusing ChatGPT Custom GPTs to disguise them as legitimate product offerings and direct unsuspecting victims to malicious sites that employ ClickFix lures to deliver malware. Huntress, which observed the activity in late September 2026, said it marks the abuse of yet another feature in trusted artificial intelligence (AI) platforms. Prior campaigns have weaponized shared conversations with AI chatbots and malicious Claude Artifacts to distribute stealer malware and remote access trojans (RATs). Custom GPTs refer to a personalized version of ChatGPT that, as the name implies, allows users to define custom instructions, upload reference files, and enable specific skills to handle unique tasks without any coding. They are hosted on the legitimate ChatGPT website with the Custom GPT name at the top. "In the incidents we saw, victims interacted with an attacker-created Custom GPT, which was programmed to respond to their prompts with a message that includ...

Hackers have used a malware family called NeedyMantis to maintain long-term access to networks they had already breached, Microsoft said in a technical analysis. The malware has been seen in a small number of targeted intrusions at telecommunications organizations, universities, medical nonprofits, intergovernmental organizations, and government contractors. Its use goes back to at least October 2025. Microsoft found NeedyMantis while following up on indicators from Kaspersky's investigation into the  supply chain attack on DAEMON Tools . In that attack, official, signed installers for the DAEMON Tools Lite disk image program carried malicious code from April 8, 2026. The developer replaced them with a clean version on May 5. Microsoft tracks the activity tied to that attack as Storm-3069. It says Storm-3069 is one group that uses NeedyMantis, though it has not seen the malware itself spread through a supply chain attack. Defenders can check their networks using the fi...

The threat actor known as SideCopy has been observed using spear-phishing lures to target academic institutions in India, expanding their strategic focus beyond government entities. "SideCopy campaign operations typically initiate through spear-phishing campaigns that leverage the abuse of mshta.exe to execute malicious scripts and circumvent standard security protocols," Trellix researchers Boggavarapu R S S Srinivas Gupta and Ravishankar N C said in a technical report. "This delivery mechanism facilitates the deployment of a remote access trojan (RAT), which serves as the central pillar of their offensive infrastructure." Active since at least 2019, SideCopy (aka TAG-140) is an advanced persistent threat (APT) group that originates from Pakistan, and shares overlaps with the Transparent Tribe cluster. Historically, the threat actor has primarily targeted Indian defense forces and government officials. In a report published in June 2026, Seqrite Labs a...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added a now-patched security flaw impacting Zyxel GS1900 series switches to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-7273 (CVSS score: 8.8), is a stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability that could result in arbitrary operating system (OS) command execution. "A stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability in the CGI program of the Zyxel GS1900 series switch firmware could allow a LAN-based, unauthenticated attacker to exploit the flaw and potentially execute OS commands via a crafted HTTP request," Zyxel said in an advisory released in June 2026.  The issue has been addressed in the following versions -

Threat actors are leveraging ClickFix-like lures to deliver a previously undocumented remote access trojan (RAT) called ChainScript . "ChainScript has appeared under multiple build names, including ComponentTask33, UpdateDigital, HostShared, and OrchidViolet66, while presenting itself as Spotify, Zoom Workplace, and Microsoft Teams software," Blackpoint Adversary Pursuit Group (APG) researchers Sam Decker, Andi Ursry, and Nevan Beal said . Like many malware families observed in recent months, ChainScript employs an EtherHiding -style command-and-control (C2) discovery technique that makes use of a Polygon smart contract to locate its active WebSocket infrastructure. ChainScript is a full-featured RAT that provides extensive remote access to the operator, including interactive CMD and PowerShell, file operations, screenshot capture, payload deployment, cryptocurrency wallet enumeration (both desktop apps and browser extensions), and remote JavaScript execution. The...

The Pakistan-aligned threat group tracked as Transparent Tribe (aka APT36 and Earth Karkaddan) has been attributed to a fresh set of cyber attacks targeting government and defense entities in India and Afghanistan. The attacks, per Zscaler ThreatLabz, involve the use of previously undocumented tools called RUSTYSHADE, RUSTYMOVE, PSNATCH, and BASHNATCH. The activity has been codenamed Operation RapidRust . "APT36 has maintained a high operational tempo and updated their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) in continued attacks targeting government and defense organizations in India and Afghanistan," Sudeep Singh , senior manager of APT Research at Zscaler ThreatLabz, said in a technical report published this week. The discovery comes a little over a month after  Acronis Threat Research Unit (TRU) tied the long-running persistent threat group to another campaign aimed at Afghan telecom providers and South Asian critical infrastructure organizations using a backdo...

The Iran-linked "hacktivist" persona known as Handala Hack has been attributed to a Telegram-based surveillance backdoor called HEAVYGRAM and a Delphi-based utility known as CRUDEEXCLUDE . "HEAVYGRAM offers builtin commands supporting remote command execution, system, network and process information discovery, data and Telegram session files exfiltration, screenshot capture, DLL sideloading, file cleanup, and persistence via Windows autorun registry keys," Group-IB said . On the other hand, CRUDEEXCLUDE is a Delphi-based Windows utility employed to prepare environments for the deployment of subsequent stages such as HEAVYGRAM. First observed in late July 2024, the malware is often disguised as a legitimate application with a graphical user interface (GUI), and configures Microsoft Defender exclusion paths for defense evasion. The findings build upon an alert the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) first issued in March 2026 and again earlier this wee...

The China-aligned state-sponsored threat actor known as FamousSparrow has been observed deploying a previously unreported backdoor called SparroWocky in attacks targeting multiple countries in Latin America since at least August 2025. "SparroWocky is a modular, C++ backdoor," ESET security researchers Alexandre Côté Cyr and Romain Dumont said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News ahead of publication. "Its architecture and the techniques used by its authors indicate strong knowledge of anti-analysis tricks and Windows internals." SparroWocky is so named for the fact that early iterations of the malware have been found to contain the first stanza of Jabberwocky , a famous nonsense poem written by the English author, poet, and mathematician Lewis Carroll in around 1855. The latest findings from ESET indicate that the cyber espionage group , which shares some level of overlap with Earth Estries and Salt Typhoon, has replaced SparrowDoor with Spar...

A China-linked hacking group exploited a flaw in Sogou Input Method , one of the most widely used tools for typing Chinese characters on Windows, to install a backdoor on victims' computers, security company Gen Digital said in  research published Thursday . The attack started with a crafted link and ended with the attacker able to do anything the logged-in user could do. Tencent, which owns and develops Sogou, fixed the flaw in April 2026. Gen found the flaw while investigating a live intrusion by UNC3569 , a group that  Google Threat Intelligence ties to China  and places in the country's hacker-for-hire scene. Google has tracked the group since 2021 and says it has targeted government, education, technology, and finance sectors, mostly in East and Southeast Asia. The backdoor it installed is GRAYRABBIT , a small program the group has used for years and that Google describes as its first step onto a machine. It gives an attacker a remote command shell, allows fil...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a sophisticated Python-based Windows malware framework called BraZetsu that fuels an underground marketplace commercializing access to compromised hosts. "Unlike the standard infostealer model, BraZetsu is a comprehensive master toolkit that empowers Initial Access Brokers (IABs) by turning compromised systems into highly valuable commercial assets," Group-IB malware analysts Julio Guapo Menezes and Miguel Salazar said in a technical report. "The framework exhibits high operational maturity, utilizing a modular architecture and stealth techniques that allowed some samples to remain fully undetectable on VirusTotal at the time of analysis." BraZetsu is a portmanteau of "Brazil" and "Zetsu," a fictional character from the Japanese Manga series Naruto who is known to operate as a threat from the shadows. The naming is inspired by the fact that the initial access tool stealthily infiltrat...

The security researcher known as Chaotic Eclipse (aka INFINITE NIGHTMARE, MSNightmare, and Nightmare-Eclipse) has dropped a new zero-day dubbed FalconFlank , a proof-of-concept (PoC) for a privilege escalation flaw impacting Crowdstrike Falcon. "FalconFlank is a 0-day privilege escalation that abuses the office malicious macros remediation in CrowdStrike Falcon Sensor," the researcher said in a GitHub README file, adding the cybersecurity company may already have detections for the flaw by now. "So if you want to test, you either have to add it to the exclusions or obfuscate the PoC and change the DLL load technique." The PoC, the researcher added, works in a fully updated Windows 11 25H2 machine or Windows Server 2025 with CrowdStrike Falcon. In a statement shared with The Hacker News, a CrowdStrike spokesperson said they are currently investigating the report. "We are actively investigating these claims and advise customers to disable the Microsof...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Tuesday announced the takedown of a long-standing peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet known as Sality as part of a coordinated law enforcement operation. The effort was undertaken on August 31, 2026, by authorities from the U.S., Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania, in collaboration with private industry partners CrowdStrike and the Shadowserver Foundation. To that end, a peer-to-peer sinkhole operation was carried out to eliminate the threat. In tandem, Sality-linked domains have been seized in the U.S. and Europe. "Cybercriminals, botnets, and malware are a clear and present danger to our nation's security and economy," said First Assistant United States Attorney Bill Essayli. "This successful effort to take down the Sality botnet shows that by working together, the public and private sectors can be a powerful force for good." Sality has been documented in the wild since 2003, featuring capabilities to infect and modify Wi...

The threat actor known as Silver Fox has been observed distributing the ValleyRAT backdoor disguised as a signed Chinese adware application, running the malware under a trusted process to slip past users who add such software to their antivirus exclusions. Russian cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky said the attackers built the disguise around QN Wallpaper , a genuine Chinese desktop-wallpaper tool that in its unmodified form is adware, bundling partner apps and displaying ad banners. Once installed, ValleyRAT (also tracked as Winos 4.0) hands the operator full control of the compromised machine. Kaspersky said the attack's geography and payload point to Silver Fox as the likely group behind it, and urged users to avoid software of questionable reputation and to keep it away from security-tool exclusions. "This case is a clear example of how adware and affiliate networks can turn out to be far more dangerous than they appear. ValleyRAT is a sophisticated backdoor capable of...

Threat actors associated with Aurora (aka Aur0ra) ransomware have been observed using SpaceX's artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistant Cursor to break into target networks, according to findings from CloudSEK and Gambit Security . The two independent analyses are based on exposed infrastructure associated with the Russian-speaking cybercrime group, leading to the discovery of its toolkit, shell history, and encryptor. CloudSEK said the exposed open directory leaked "months of activity" that was active against more than 20 organizations across nine countries between April and July 2026. Four of those victims have since been listed on its data leak site. "The operator used Cursor, an agentic coding assistant, to plan attacks in Russian, while excluding CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] ranges and CIS-country domains, without exception," CloudSEK noted. Details about Aurora first emerged in late May 2026, with CYFIRMA highlighting atta...

Microsoft has disclosed details of a new ClickFix variant, dubbed TerminalFix , that aims to trick users into running a malicious command in Windows Terminal or PowerShell. "While traditional ClickFix campaigns direct victims to the Windows Run dialog, TerminalFix campaigns apply the same technique but direct users to Windows Terminal or PowerShell instead, increasing the likelihood that complex, multi-line scripts execute successfully," Microsoft security researchers Sagar Patil, Suriyaraj Natarajan, and Parasharan Raghavan said in an analysis published this week. The campaign, targeting organizations across multiple sectors, leverages compromised websites as a starting point to serve fake Cloudflare CAPTCHA verifications that prompt unsuspecting site visitors to copy and execute a malicious PowerShell command. The attack chain, per the Windows maker, is a sophisticated multi-stage process that leverages DLL sideloading, steganographic payload extraction, extensive ...