botnet | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a variant of a recently disclosed campaign that abuses the TOR network for cryptojacking attacks targeting exposed Docker APIs. Akamai, which discovered the latest activity last month, said it's designed to block other actors from accessing the Docker API from the internet. The findings build on a prior report from Trend Micro in late June 2025, which uncovered a malicious campaign that targeted exposed Docker instances to stealthily drop an XMRig cryptocurrency miner using a TOR domain for anonymity. "This new strain seems to use similar tooling to the original, but may have a different end goal – including possibly setting up the foundation of a complex botnet," security researcher Yonatan Gilvarg said . The attack chain essentially involves breaking into misconfigured Docker APIs to execute a new container based on the Alpine Docker image and mount the host file system into it. This is followed by the threat actors runnin...

The threat actor behind the malware-as-a-service (MaaS) framework and loader called CastleLoader has also developed a remote access trojan known as CastleRAT . "Available in both Python and C variants, CastleRAT's core functionality consists of collecting system information, downloading and executing additional payloads, and executing commands via CMD and PowerShell," Recorded Future Insikt Group said . The cybersecurity company is tracking the threat actor behind the malware families as TAG-150. Believed to be active since at least March 2025, CastleLoader et al are seen as initial access vectors for a wide range of secondary payloads, including remote access trojans, information stealers, and even other loaders. CastleLoader (aka CastleBot) was first documented by Swiss cybersecurity company PRODAFT in July 2025, as having been put to use in various campaigns distributing DeerStealer, RedLine, StealC, NetSupport RAT, SectopRAT, and Hijack Loader. A subsequent anal...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added two security flaws impacting TP-Link wireless routers to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, noting that there is evidence of them being exploited in the wild. The vulnerabilities in question are listed below - CVE-2023-50224 (CVSS score: 6.5) - An authentication bypass by spoofing vulnerability within the httpd service of TP-Link TL-WR841N, which listens on TCP port 80 by default, leading to the disclosure of stored credentials in "/tmp/dropbear/dropbearpwd" CVE-2025-9377 (CVSS score: 8.6) - An operating system command injection vulnerability in TP-Link Archer C7(EU) V2 and TL-WR841N/ND(MS) V9 that could lead to remote code execution According to information listed on the company's website, the following router models have reached end-of-life (EoL) status - TL-WR841N (versions 10.0 and 11.0) TL-WR841ND (version 10.0) Archer C7 (versions 2.0 and 3.0) Howe...

Cloudflare on Tuesday said it automatically mitigated a record-setting volumetric distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 11.5 terabits per second (Tbps). "Over the past few weeks, we've autonomously blocked hundreds of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks, with the largest reaching peaks of 5.1 Bpps and 11.5 Tbps," the web infrastructure and security company said in a post on X. "The 11.5 Tbps attack was a UDP flood that mainly came from Google Cloud." The entire attack lasted only about 35 seconds, with the company stating its "defenses have been working overtime." Volumetric DDoS attacks are designed to overwhelm a target with a tsunami of traffic, causing the server to slow down or even fail. These attacks typically result in network congestion, packet loss, and service disruptions. Such attacks are often conducted by sending the requests from botnets that are already under the control of the threat actors after having infected t...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a Ukrainian IP network for engaging in massive brute-force and password spraying campaigns targeting SSL VPN and RDP devices between June and July 2025. The activity originated from a Ukraine-based autonomous system FDN3 ( AS211736 ), per French cybersecurity company Intrinsec. "We believe with a high level of confidence that FDN3 is part of a wider abusive infrastructure composed of two other Ukrainian networks, VAIZ-AS ( AS61432 ) and ERISHENNYA-ASN ( AS210950 ), and a Seychelles-based autonomous system named TK-NET ( AS210848 )," according to a report published last week. "Those were all allocated in August 2021 and often exchange IPv4 prefixes with one another to evade blocklisting and continue hosting abusive activities." AS61432 currently announces a single prefix 185.156.72[.]0/24, while AS210950 has announced two prefixes 45.143.201[.]0/24 and 185.193.89[.]0/24. The two autonomous systems were allocated in May an...