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The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday announced the seizure of cryptocurrency funds and about 145 clearnet and dark web domains associated with an illicit carding marketplace called BidenCash. "The operators of the BidenCash marketplace use the platform to simplify the process of buying and selling stolen credit cards and associated personal information," the DoJ said . "BidenCash administrators charged a fee for every transaction conducted on the website." BidenCash launched in March 2022 to fill the void left by the shutdown of Joker's Stash a year earlier and several other carding forums like UniCC . Since the time it went operational, the illegal bazaar ("bidencash[.]asia," "bidencash[.]bd," and "bidencash[.]ws") is estimated to have supported more than 117,000 customers, facilitated the trafficking of over 15 million payment card numbers and personally identifiable information, and generated no less than $17 mi...

Threat hunters are calling attention to a new variant of a remote access trojan (RAT) called Chaos RAT that has been used in recent attacks targeting Windows and Linux systems. According to findings from Acronis, the malware artifact may have been distributed by tricking victims into downloading a network troubleshooting utility for Linux environments. "Chaos RAT is an open-source RAT written in Golang, offering cross-platform support for both Windows and Linux systems," security researchers Santiago Pontiroli, Gabor Molnar, and Kirill Antonenko said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Inspired by popular frameworks such as Cobalt Strike and Sliver, Chaos RAT provides an administrative panel where users can build payloads, establish sessions, and control compromised machines." While work on the "remote administration tool" started way back in 2017, it did not attract attention until December 2022 , when it was put to use in a malicious campaig...

Several malicious packages have been uncovered across the npm, Python, and Ruby package repositories that drain funds from cryptocurrency wallets, erase entire codebases after installation, and exfiltrate Telegram API tokens, once again demonstrating the variety of supply chain threats lurking in open-source ecosystems. The findings come from multiple reports published by Checkmarx, ReversingLabs, Safety, and Socket in recent weeks. The list of identified packages across these platforms are listed below - Socket noted that the two malicious gems were published by a threat actor under the aliases Bùi nam, buidanhnam, and si_mobile merely days after Vietnam ordered a nationwide ban on the Telegram messaging app late last month for allegedly not cooperating with the government to tackle illicit activities related to fraud, drug trafficking, and terrorism. "These gems silently exfiltrate all data sent to the Telegram API by redirecting traffic through a command-and-control (C2...

A growing number of malicious campaigns have leveraged a recently discovered Android banking trojan called Crocodilus to target users in Europe and South America. The malware, according to a new report published by ThreatFabric, has also adopted improved obfuscation techniques to hinder analysis and detection, and includes the ability to create new contacts in the victim's contacts list. "Recent activity reveals multiple campaigns now targeting European countries while continuing Turkish campaigns and expanding globally to South America," the Dutch security company said . Crocodilus was first publicly documented in March 2025 as targeting Android device users in Spain and Turkey by masquerading as legitimate apps like Google Chrome. The malware comes fitted with capabilities to launch overlay attacks against a list of financial apps retrieved from an external server to harvest credentials. It also abuses accessibility services permissions to capture seed phrases as...

The U.S. Department of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has levied sanctions against a Philippines-based company named Funnull Technology Inc. and its administrator Liu Lizhi for providing infrastructure to conduct romance baiting scams that led to massive cryptocurrency losses. The Treasury accused the Taguig-headquartered company of enabling thousands of websites involved in virtual currency investment scams that caused Americans to lose billions of dollars annually. "Funnull has directly facilitated several of these schemes, resulting in over $200 million in U.S. victim-reported losses," the agency said in a press release. The average loss is estimated to be over $150,000 per individual. Funnull, also called Fang Neng CDN (funnull[.]io, funnull[.]com, funnull[.]app, and funnull[.]buzz), first attracted the attention of the cybersecurity community in June 2024 after it was implicated in the supply chain attack of the widely-used Polyfill[.]io J...

An Iranian national has pleaded guilty in the U.S. over his involvement in an international ransomware and extortion scheme involving the Robbinhood ransomware. Sina Gholinejad (aka Sina Ghaaf), 37, and his co-conspirators are said to have breached the computer networks of various organizations in the United States and encrypted files with Robbinhood ransomware to demand Bitcoin ransom payments. Gholinejad, who was arrested in North Carolina in early January, pleaded guilty to one count of computer fraud and abuse and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He faces a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison. He is scheduled for sentencing in August 2025. "These cyber attacks caused significant disruptions and tens of millions in losses, including to the City of Greenville, North Carolina, and the City of Baltimore, Maryland," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said . "Baltimore lost more than $19 million from the damage caused to their computer networks and t...

Embedded Linux-based Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become the target of a new botnet dubbed PumaBot . Written in Go, the botnet is designed to conduct brute-force attacks against SSH instances to expand in size and scale and deliver additional malware to the infected hosts. "Rather than scanning the internet, the malware retrieves a list of targets from a command-and-control (C2) server and attempts to brute force SSH credentials," Darktrace said in an analysis shared with The Hacker News. "Upon gaining access, it receives remote commands and establishes persistence using system service files." The botnet malware is designed to obtain initial access via successfully brute-forcing SSH credentials across a list of harvested IP addresses with open SSH ports. The list of IP addresses to target is retrieved from an external server ("ssh.ddos-cc[.]org"). As part of its brute-force attempts, the malware also performs various checks to determine if...

The malware known as Latrodectus has become the latest to embrace the widely-used social engineering technique called ClickFix as a distribution vector. "The ClickFix technique is particularly risky because it allows the malware to execute in memory rather than being written to disk," Expel said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This removes many opportunities for browsers or security tools to detect or block the malware." Latrodectus, believed to be a successor to IcedID, is the name given to a malware that acts as a downloader for other payloads, such as ransomware. It was first documented by Proofpoint and Team Cymru in April 2024.

As part of the latest "season" of Operation Endgame , a coalition of law enforcement agencies have taken down about 300 servers worldwide, neutralized 650 domains, and issued arrest warrants against 20 targets. Operation Endgame, first launched in May 2024, is an ongoing law enforcement operation targeting services and infrastructures assisting in or directly providing initial or consolidating access for ransomware. The previous edition focused on dismantling the initial access malware families that have been used to deliver ransomware. The latest iteration, per Europol, targeted new malware variants and successor groups that re-emerged after last year's takedowns such as Bumblebee, Lactrodectus, QakBot, HijackLoader, DanaBot, TrickBot, and WARMCOOKIE . The interaction action was carried out between May 19 and 22, 2025. "In addition, €3.5 million in cryptocurrency was seized during the action week, bringing the total amount seized during the Operation Endgame to...

Counterfeit Facebook pages and sponsored ads on the social media platform are being employed to direct users to fake websites masquerading as Kling AI with the goal of tricking victims into downloading malware. Kling AI is an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered platform to synthesize images and videos from text and image prompts. Launched in June 2024, it's developed by Kuaishou Technology, which is headquartered in Beijing, China. As of April 2025, the service has a user base of more than 22 million, per data from the company. "The attack used fake Facebook pages and ads to distribute a malicious file which ultimately led to the execution of a remote access Trojan (RAT), granting attackers remote control of the victim's system and the ability to steal sensitive data," Check Point said . First detected in early 2025, the campaign leads unsuspecting users to a spoofed website such as klingaimedia[.]com or klingaistudio[.]com, where they are asked to create AI-genera...

The official site for RVTools has been hacked to serve a compromised installer for the popular VMware environment reporting utility. "Robware.net and RVTools.com are currently offline. We are working expeditiously to restore service and appreciate your patience," the company said in a statement posted on its website. "Robware.net and RVTools.com are the only authorized and supported websites for RVTools software. Do not search for or download purported RVTools software from any other websites or sources." The development comes after security researcher Aidan Leon revealed that an infected version of the installer downloaded from the website was being used to sideload a malicious DLL that turned out to be a known malware loader called Bumblebee . It's currently not known how long the trojanized version of RVTools had been available for download and how many had installed it before the site was taken offline. In the interim, users are recommended to veri...

Cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has disclosed that unknown cyber actors broke into its systems and stole account data for a small subset of its customers. "Criminals targeted our customer support agents overseas," the company said in a statement. "They used cash offers to convince a small group of insiders to copy data in our customer support tools for less than 1% of Coinbase monthly transacting users." The end goal of the campaign was to put together a list of customers who they contacted by masquerading as Coinbase and deceiving them into handing over their cryptocurrency assets. Coinbase said the threat actors then unsuccessfully attempted to extort the company for $20 million on May 11, 2025, by claiming to have information about certain customer accounts as well as internal documents. In a statement shared with Fortune, Coinbase said the compromised customer agents worked in India and have all been fired.  "No passwords, private keys, or funds w...

A Chinese-language, Telegram-based marketplace called Xinbi Guarantee has facilitated no less than $8.4 billion in transactions since 2022, making it the second major black market to be exposed after HuiOne Guarantee . According to a report published by blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, merchants on the marketplace have been found to peddle technology, personal data, and money laundering services. "The USDT stablecoin is the primary payment method, with the market having received $8.4 billion in transactions to date," the company said . "Some transactions can be linked to funds stolen by North Korea." Xinbi, like HuiOne, has offered its services to scammers in Southeast Asia, including those responsible for so-called romance baiting schemes (formerly referred to as "pig butchering"), which has become one of the most lucrative forms of cybercrime in recent years. What's notable about these criminal bazaars is that they are entirely run on Tele...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malicious package on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that purports to be an application related to the Solana blockchain, but contains malicious functionality to steal source code and developer secrets. The package, named solana-token, is no longer available for download from PyPI, but not before it was downloaded 761 times . It was first published to PyPI in early April 2024, albeit with an entirely different version numbering scheme. "When installed, the malicious package attempts to exfiltrate source code and developer secrets from the developer's machine to a hard-coded IP address," ReversingLabs researcher Karlo Zanki said in a report shared with The Hacker News. In particular, the package is designed to copy and exfiltrate the source code contained in all the files in the Python execution stack under the guise of a blockchain function named "register_node()." This unusual behavior suggests that...

Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (aka Bundeskriminalamt or BKA) has seized the online infrastructure and shutdown linked to the eXch cryptocurrency exchange over allegations of money laundering and operating a criminal trading platform. The operation was carried out on April 30, 2025, authorities said, adding they also confiscated 8 terabytes worth of data and cryptocurrency assets worth €34 million ($38.25 million) in Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin, and Dash. According to the BKA, eXch[.]cx, existed since 2014 and offered cryptocurrency swapping services, allowing its users to exchange digital assets. It was available both on the clearnet and the dark web. eXch "specifically advertised on platforms of the criminal underground economy (UE) that it did not implement any anti-money laundering measures," the BKA said in a statement. "Users were neither required to identify themselves to the service, nor was user data stored there. Crypto swapping via eXch was...

The North Korean threat actors behind the Contagious Interview campaign have been observed using updated versions of a cross-platform malware called OtterCookie with capabilities to steal credentials from web browsers and other files. NTT Security Holdings, which detailed the new findings, said the attackers have "actively and continuously" updated the malware, introducing versions v3 and v4 in February and April 2025, respectively. The Japanese cybersecurity company is tracking the cluster under the name WaterPlum , which is also known as CL-STA-0240, DeceptiveDevelopment, DEV#POPPER, Famous Chollima, PurpleBravo, and Tenacious Pungsan. OtterCookie was first documented by NTT last year after having observed it in attacks since September 2024. Delivered by means of a JavaScript payload via a malicious npm package, trojanized GitHub or Bitbucket repository, or a bogus videoconferencing app, it's designed to contact an external server to execute commands on compromis...