botnet | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Threat actors are launching about 8,226 network-layer distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks per hour, Cloudflare revealed Thursday. The web infrastructure and security company said it autonomously mitigated 18.2 million network-layer (L3) DDoS attacks and 14.4 trillion HTTP DDoS requests in the third quarter of 2026. That amounts to 197,400 attacks per day, or one attack every 0.44 seconds. In comparison, a total of 13.2 million and 10.0 million L3 DDoS attacks were recorded in Q2 and Q1 2026, respectively. The increase has been linked to DDoS-for-hire booter or stresser services that are responsible for hundreds of thousands of attacks.  "Short-burst, low-bandwidth attacks lasting under 10 minutes and 1 Gbps surged by 208%," the Cloudforce One threat intelligence team said in its quarterly DDoS Threat Report shared with The Hacker News. An interesting trend is the decline of hyper-volumetric attacks exceeding 1 Tbps by 69% from the previous quarter – going ...

Threat actors have been observed unsuccessfully attempting to exploit the newly disclosed PHP2Shell vulnerabilities to rope infected systems into a Mirai botnet variant called Potassium , as it emerges that weaponizing the flaws may be harder than previously thought. The attacks aim to exploit CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619 (CVSS scores: 9.2), which can result in unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) via specially crafted HTTP requests. The vulnerabilities have been patched in PHP versions 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36, and 8.2.35. "However, analysis of the sample revealed that it is an updated and significantly expanded version of the Mirai-derived botnet variant identified in early 2026," Sophos said . "The sample displays downloader and network disruption functionality." ⚡ WARNING — PHP Warns of Another Unpatched RCE Flaw CVE-2026-115560 Specifically, it resolves a hard-coded, encrypted command-and-control (C2) address, establishes a TCP connec...

Small artificial intelligence (AI) models may be months away from developing capabilities to self-replicate on IoT devices like smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes, according to a warning from Anthropic. The frontier AI lab said small AI models could form autonomous, self-propagating worm botnets that are "challenging to shut down," since "there's no centralized point to shut off." Prior work has demonstrated that AI agents can act like one by scanning their network, executing an exploit, and copying model weights to a target machine across a GPU cluster with an aim to generate tailored attack strategies and use compromised machines as a botnet to run large language models (LLMs) in order to sustain its reasoning and expand in scale. "Such an 'AI worm' could carry its model weights with it as it reproduces (or re-download them from a public hub), and then run inference directly on compromised hardware," Anthropic said . "Eff...

Low-cost Android smartphones have been shipped with malicious software baked into the device firmware, allowing bad actors to covertly install apps, conduct ad fraud, and turn devices into residential proxies. The activity, which targets Android devices built on MediaTek platforms across several brands, is being tracked by Bitdefender under the moniker Midnight Mimosa . The preinstalled malware ("com.android.system.lite") runs with system-level privileges, which make it possible to install or uninstall a rotating set of at least 32 disguised apps, grant itself additional permissions to accessibility services, notifications, and SMS, and load arbitrary code supplied remotely by the operators. Specifically, it fetches a remote configuration from an external server and then downloads and executes additional payloads designed to conduct ad fraud and silent installation or removal of partner apps. These apps incorporate proxyware, ad fraud, and code execution features. It...

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Justice (DoJ) have announced the disruption of malicious tools used by a China-linked advanced persistent threat group known as Flax Typhoon. To that end, the agencies seized several domains and blocked access to platforms that were used to scan, and in some cases infiltrate, U.S. critical infrastructure. The list of seized domains is as follows - c0cc[.]cc 98aiblog[.]com 98aicai[.]com 98aicode[.]com outlook3650[.]com youtubecard[.]com linkedinns[.]net Flax Typhoon , also tracked as Ethereal Panda and RedJuliett, is associated with Integrity Technology Group, a Beijing-based company that contracts with the Chinese government. It was previously attributed to a botnet called Raptor Train that comprised thousands of compromised small office/home office (SOHO) and IoT devices. It was taken down following a U.S. court-authorized operation in September 2024. "These state-sponsored hackers co...