botnet | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new version of the Kimwolf/AISURU Android and Internet of Things (IoT) botnet that comes with significant improvements to improve its operational resilience and conduct distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The new version, tracked as Kimwolf v7, was discovered by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 in February 2026. "Kimwolf v7 adds an HTTP/2-based DDoS flood that constructs complete browser fingerprints," researchers Asher Davila, Chris Navarrete, and Doel Santos said. "This makes attack traffic more difficult to distinguish from legitimate browsing." The botnet also aims to make its command-and-control (C2) infrastructure more resistant to takedown efforts by using a tiered mechanism that employs Ethereum Name Service (ENS) to obtain the C2 address, a hard-coded Tor .onion hidden service, and a local proxy for routing between clearnet and Tor, while removing all scanning, exploitation, and brute-force functional...

A new analysis has uncovered that the threat actor tracked as TeamPCP has been active on the cybercrime scene as far back as 2020, indicating the group has been compromising internet-facing infrastructure for years before training their sights on the software supply chain. "The connection is supported by overlapping domains, malware deployment paths, staging techniques, backend infrastructure, and operational tradecraft," Oligo Security researchers Avi Lumelsky and Gal Elbaz said . This includes two campaigns observed in the second half of 2025: ShadowRay 2.0 (aka IronErn), which involved hijacking artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure into a self-propagating botnet, and TA-NATALSTATUS , which targeted exposed Redis servers to deliver cryptocurrency miners. TA-NATALSTATUS is assessed to be an evolution of a prior campaign that was detailed by Trend Micro in April 2020 that involved targeting Redis servers to deploy malware. This suggests that the threat actor h...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered more than half-a-dozen services advertisements for illegal access to artificial intelligence (AI) models on underground cybercrime forums and messaging platforms. One such service, Poison Claude, claims to offer access to Anthropic's large language models (LLMs), including Opus 4.8, Opus 4.7, Opus 4.6, and Sonnet 4.6. "Advertisements for Poison Claude explain how the service can offer the cheap tokens: by taking advantage of free bonus credits, such as the US$100 bonus credit on AWS for Bedrock accounts," Okta researchers Jeremy Kirk and Mathew Woodyard said in an analysis published Tuesday. "The service plainly states on its website that: 'We add those accounts to our pool, your request is routed to a specific account under the hood (you don't see this), and you get charged 5-15% of the official per-token price depending on the model.'" Poison Claude accepts payments in cryptocurrencies. Once a cus...

Bitsight says some cheap Android TV boxes have shipped with apps that rewrite their hardware identity to mimic Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, or Vivo phones, then click ads on websites run by the same operators. Researchers named the operation Fuyao and attributed it to Zhejiang Fengwo IoT Technology Co., Ltd., a mainland China company founded in 2019. The same apps have a second job. When a box detects an HDMI signal, it usually switches to relaying other people's traffic through the owner's broadband line as a SOCKS5 exit node. With HDMI off, it goes back to waiting for ad-fraud tasks. Bitsight found the operation by registering an expired domain used as a factory backdoor and telemetry collector. Most identifiable devices reported the model name H96_MAX_V11, though Bitsight said its sinkhole view was skewed toward older models from one brand and did not establish a complete affected-model list. In one day, after filtering for devices carrying the Fuyao apps, the sinkhol...

A new Mirai-derived botnet called Tengu can use a compromised Linux device's hardware watchdog to trigger a reboot when defenders kill its main process. If that happens, Tengu's other persistence mechanisms get another chance to relaunch it. Nozomi Networks Labs observed the dropper reaching its honeypots through Telnet credential brute force. Tengu supports 25 distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) methods. It can also run a SOCKS5 proxy, execute shell commands, and collect system and network data. The malware can update itself and retrieve additional Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) or Android package (APK) payloads. Nozomi listed architecture-specific samples for i386, amd64, MIPS, ARM, PowerPC, and m68k. The report identifies no specific vendor or device model. It also names no operator, infection count, or real-world DDoS victims. It shows what Tengu can do, not how far it has spread. Defenders should start by removing internet exposure for Telnet and other unne...