botnet | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A solo Russian-speaking threat actor known as " bandcampro " outsourced a chunk of their operations to Google's open-source Gemini CLI artificial intelligence (AI) and commandeered a live botnet. The findings come from an analysis of 200 Gemini CLI session logs between March 19 and April 21, 2026, which found the threat actor using AI, among other things, to crack passwords, set up a residential proxy, compromise WordPress merchants, and plan a phone-based cryptocurrency fraud scheme aimed at elderly people in the U.S. and Canada. "The logs documented how the threat actor used an AI agent to migrate a command-and-control (C&C) server, and to control a small-scale botnet, among other hacking activities," Trend Micro researchers Joseph C Chen, Philippe Lin, Lucas Silva, Vladimir Kropotov, and Fyodor Yarochkin said . "The entire C&C operation fits in three plaintext files totaling roughly 5 KB, making it highly replicable and effectively disposa...

A Go botnet called NadMesh turned up in early July hunting exposed AI services, and the operator's own dashboard claims 3,811 unique AWS keys. A Shodan harvester keeps the scan queue stocked with ComfyUI, Ollama , n8n , Open WebUI , Langflow , and Gradio: the image generators, local model runners, and workflow builders that teams stand up fast and firewall late. The intel feed behind that counter shows 47 credential hauls and 41 model inventories in its last 100 records. Those inventories carry DeepSeek, GLM, and Kimi identifiers tagged :cloud, which suggests that what the bots catalogue reaches past the box itself. QiAnXin's XLab published a report on Friday, named the malware after the "n4d mesh controller" string in its source, and screenshotted the panel. The figures on it are the operator's own, captured July 10, and they do not agree with each other. A counter reading 17,700 total deploys sits above a funnel claiming 95,700 in the past 24 hours. On...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a previously unreported Internet-of-Things (IoT) botnet framework dubbed TuxBot v3 Evolution that shows signs of being developed with assistance from a large language model (LLM), albeit with not so successful results. "While the AI complied with their request to generate botnet code, it included a safety disclaimer that the developer failed to remove before shipping," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said . "Although the LLM clearly aided in constructing the botnet, several functions in the analyzed samples failed to work correctly." The cybersecurity company said a manual code review would have resolved these errors and that it's possible more polished iterations of the malware exist out there in the wild. The botnet framework consists of multiple components: a C-based bot agent that cross-compiles for multiple architectures (e.g., ARM, MIPS, MIPSEL, MIPS64, x86_64, PowerPC, and RISC-V), a Go-based command-...

Four compromised npm packages in the @asyncapi namespace have been observed distributing a multi-stage botnet loader, according to findings from OX Security , SafeDep , Socket , and StepSecurity . The affected packages are listed below - @asyncapi/generator-helpers@1.1.1 @asyncapi/generator-components@0.7.1 @asyncapi/generator@3.3.1 @asyncapi/specs(v6.11.2, v6.11.2-alpha.1) "The compromised packages deploy an obfuscated first-stage payload that downloads an encrypted second-stage payload, identified as Miasma, from IPFS," Socket said. The poisoned packages ship a hidden JavaScript implant, with each of them containing an injected source file that decodes to the same second-stage downloader. Unlike previous iterations that leveraged install hooks to trigger the execution of a JavaScript payload, the malicious code in this case is run when the infected module is loaded by Node.js, after which it launches a detached background node that downloads and execute...

A campaign of 148 npm packages disguised as student web proxies turned visitors' browsers into a distributed denial-of-service botnet for roughly two weeks in May, according to new research from JFrog. The packages did not go after the developers who might install them. The operators used the registry as free hosting for a booby-trapped proxy site and let the students who came to dodge school web filters supply the attack traffic. The packages shipped under names like charlie-kirk, ilovefemboys, and miguelphonk, each carrying a proxy app branded "Lucide" and dressed as a tutoring landing page called Riverbend Tutoring or Northstar Tutoring. On the surface, the proxy worked, letting students slip past content filters to reach games and blocked sites. Underneath, it loaded a remote code loader whose payload the operators could swap at will, plus a WebSocket flood generator built to speak the Wisp proxy protocol. Anyone who opened a page joined the swarm without ...