botnet | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new malware family that has been observed targeting exposed artificial intelligence (AI) and large language model (LLM) infrastructure with an aim to deploy cryptocurrency miners and further expand the scale of the botnet. The financially motivated campaign, dubbed Canto Incognito , has been found to install cryptocurrency miners, including XMRig and Iron, and connects victims to Kryptex, a Russian cryptocurrency mining service. "Compromised hosts are reused to expand the botnet," Lumen Black Lotus Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Infected servers are turned into scanners and exploit servers, allowing the actor to find and compromise additional vulnerable systems." The malware distributed as part of the campaign has been codenamed PoeLLM owing to what has been described as a "creative" technique that hides the command-and-control (C2) address within a poem the threat actors wr...

Threat actors have been observed attempting to exploit a now-patched critical security flaw impacting the Realtek Jungle software development kit (SDK) to deploy a botnet malware called Cling . "Cling is notable not because it introduces a new propagation technique, but because it repurposes ordinary STUN behavior into a practical command-and-control channel," Nozomi Networks said in a report published last week. "The result is a botnet whose traffic can resemble legitimate NAT-traversal activity while still supporting propagation, proxying, tunneling and denial-of-service commands." The operational technology (OT) security company said it observed a spike in attempts to exploit CVE-2021-35394 (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical remote code execution (RCE) flaw in Realtek Jungle SDK starting around September 5, 2026, with a subset of the activity delivering Cling. An analysis of the malware sample has found it to embed exploit logic for various command injectio...

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...