botnet | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new botnet malware called Carbonato that's targeting exposed Docker daemons to deploy an open-source artificial intelligence (AI) agent framework called Hermes Agent . "The implant installs the framework unchanged, then overwrites its SOUL.md persona file," ThreatDown said . "The 39-line prompt directs it to execute tasks received through Telegram, maintain persistence, and collect credentials." At a high level, the botnet breaks into Docker daemons exposed without authentication on port 2375 and scans neighboring networks every five minutes to propagate further. On each host, it installs Hermes Agent with instructions to follow operators' Telegram commands. The cybersecurity company said it found the operation through an unauthenticated Docker registry that's been publicly accessible since May 2026. The staged data has been found to include details of the botnet and a separate campaign that d...

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 U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Friday corrected a previously issued press statement that several of its agencies were victims of attacks carried out by Chinese threat actors, instead now pointing out that they were among those targeted. Last week, the DoJ said the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Federal Reserve, Department of Energy, Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Senate were some of the victims of "computer intrusion activity" orchestrated by QTFY , a state-sponsored group affiliated with the People's Republic of China (PRC). In the newly updated statement, the aforementioned agencies have been listed as "among the targets of QTFY." The update was reported by Reuters over the weekend.  "Edits have been made to ensure this press release accurately reflects the government's allegations in the affidavit in support of the domain seizures," t...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new malware family that's specifically designed to infect Android-based vehicle head unit firmware developed by DoFun. Kaspersky, which discovered the threat in June 2026, said the end goal of the malware is to serve a multi-stage downloader to enable ad fraud and creation of a proxy botnet. "The malware spread through the built-in updaters of Android-based automotive head unit firmware," security researcher Dmitry Kalinin said. "This is the first documented case of malware found on a car head unit with an infection chain specific to that type of device." The activity has been attributed with high confidence to the MoYu Group , which was outed by the HUMAN Satori Threat Intelligence and Research team last year as part of a broader ad fraud and residential proxy scheme dubbed BADBOX. In July 2025, Google filed a lawsuit against 25 unnamed individuals or entities in China for allegedly operating the BADBOX botnet a...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a global cybercrime operation that abuses thousands of hacked WordPress websites as infrastructure to disseminate malware, commandeer infected hosts, store stolen documents, screenshots, and activity logs created to track the status of the activity. "The operation doesn't rely on a single piece of malware, but on a whole toolkit of criminal software working together – some components encrypt files, others silently steal documents or lock the screen, and another acts as a live chat between the attackers and their victims," Check Point Research's Jaromír Hořejší said . The large-scale campaign is being tracked by the cybersecurity company under the moniker StopAndProtect after discovering a ransomware family of the same name in mid-May 2026. The infection chain begins with a ClickFix social engineering attack, resulting in the execution of a PowerShell command that leads to the deployment of additional .NET downloaders and l...