cyber espionage | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Germany's Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (aka Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz or BfV) and Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) have issued a joint advisory warning of a malicious cyber campaign undertaken by a likely state-sponsored threat actor that involves carrying out phishing attacks over the Signal messaging app. "The focus is on high-ranking targets in politics, the military, and diplomacy, as well as investigative journalists in Germany and Europe," the agencies said . "Unauthorized access to messenger accounts not only allows access to confidential private communications but also potentially compromises entire networks." A noteworthy aspect of the campaign is that it does not involve the distribution of malware or the exploitation of any security vulnerability in the privacy-focused messaging platform. Rather, the end goal is to weaponize its legitimate features to obtain covert access to a victim's chats, along wi...

Cybersecurity researchers have taken the wraps off a gateway-monitoring and adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) framework dubbed DKnife that's operated by China-nexus threat actors since at least 2019. The framework comprises seven Linux-based implants that are designed to perform deep packet inspection, manipulate traffic, and deliver malware via routers and edge devices. Its primary targets seem to be Chinese-speaking users, an assessment based on the presence of credential harvesting phishing pages for Chinese email services, exfiltration modules for popular Chinese mobile applications like WeChat, and code references to Chinese media domains. "DKnife's attacks target a wide range of devices, including PCs, mobile devices, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices," Cisco Talos researcher Ashley Shen noted in a Thursday report. "It delivers and interacts with the ShadowPad and DarkNimbus backdoors by hijacking binary downloads and Android application updates....

A previously undocumented cyber espionage group operating from Asia broke into the networks of at least 70 government and critical infrastructure organizations across 37 countries over the past year, according to new findings from Palo Alto Networks Unit 42. In addition, the hacking crew has been observed conducting active reconnaissance against government infrastructure associated with 155 countries between November and December 2025. Some of the entities that have been successfully compromised include five national-level law enforcement/border control entities, three ministries of finance and other government ministries, and departments that align with economic, trade, natural resources, and diplomatic functions. The activity is being tracked by the cybersecurity company under the moniker TGR-STA-1030 , where "TGR" stands for temporary threat group and "STA" refers to state-backed motivation. Evidence shows that the threat actor has been active since January ...

The elusive Iranian threat group known as Infy (aka Prince of Persia) has evolved its tactics as part of efforts to hide its tracks, even as it readied new command-and-control (C2) infrastructure coinciding with the end of the widespread internet blackout the regime imposed at the start of January 2026. "The threat actor stopped maintaining its C2 servers on January 8 for the first time since we began monitoring their activities," Tomer Bar, vice president of security research at SafeBreach, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This was the same day a country-wide internet shutdown was imposed by Iranian authorities in response to recent protests, which likely suggests that even government-affiliated cyber units did not have the ability or motivation to carry out malicious activities within Iran." The cybersecurity company said it observed renewed activity on January 26, 2026, as the hacking crew set up new C2 servers, one day before the Iranian gov...

Threat actors affiliated with China have been attributed to a fresh set of cyber espionage campaigns targeting government and law enforcement agencies across Southeast Asia throughout 2025. Check Point Research is tracking the previously undocumented activity cluster under the moniker Amaranth-Dragon , which it said shares links to the APT 41 ecosystem. Targeted countries include Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines. "Many of the campaigns were timed to coincide with sensitive local political developments, official government decisions, or regional security events," the cybersecurity company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "By anchoring malicious activity in familiar, timely contexts, the attackers significantly increased the likelihood that targets would engage with the content." The Israeli firm added that the attacks were "narrowly focused" and "tightly scoped," indicating efforts on the part o...

A Farsi-speaking threat actor aligned with Iranian state interests is suspected to be behind a new campaign targeting non-governmental organizations and individuals involved in documenting recent human rights abuses. The activity , observed by HarfangLab in January 2026, has been codenamed RedKitten . It's said to coincide with the nationwide unrest in Iran that began towards the end of 2025, protesting soaring inflation, rising food prices, and currency depreciation. The ensuing crackdown has resulted in mass casualties and an internet blackout . "The malware relies on GitHub and Google Drive for configuration and modular payload retrieval, and uses Telegram for command-and-control," the French cybersecurity company said. What makes the campaign noteworthy is the threat actor's likely reliance on large language models (LLMs) to build and orchestrate the necessary tooling. The starting point of the attack is a 7-Zip archive with a Farsi filename that contains...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new campaign attributed to a China-linked threat actor known as UAT-8099 that took place between late 2025 and early 2026. The activity, discovered by Cisco Talos, has targeted vulnerable Internet Information Services (IIS) servers located across Asia, but with a specific focus on targets in Thailand and Vietnam. The scale of the campaign is currently unknown. "UAT-8099 uses web shells and PowerShell to execute scripts and deploy the GotoHTTP tool, granting the threat actor remote access to vulnerable IIS servers," security researcher Joey Chen said in a Thursday breakdown of the campaign. UAT-8099 was first documented by the cybersecurity company in October 2025, detailing the threat actor's exploitation of IIS servers in India, Thailand, Vietnam, Canada, and Brazil to facilitate search engine optimization (SEO) fraud. The attacks involve infecting the servers with a known malware referred to as BadIIS. The hacking gro...

Behind the scenes of law enforcement in cyber: what do we know about caught cybercriminals? What brought them in, where do they come from and what was their function in the crimescape? Introduction: One view on the scattered fight against cybercrime The growing sophistication and diversification of cybercrime have compelled law enforcement agencies worldwide to respond through increasingly coordinated and publicized actions. Yet, despite the visibility of these operations, there remains no comprehensive overview, to our knowledge, on how law enforcement is addressing cybercrime globally. Publicly available information is dispersed across agencies, jurisdictions, case-specific reporting (e.g., “Operation Endgame”) [1] , and reporting formats, offering fragmented insights rather than a cohesive understanding of what types of crime are being targeted, what actions are taken, and who the offenders are. This results in isolated glimpses rather than a consistent global picture. Therefor...

Threat actors with ties to China have been observed using an updated version of a backdoor called COOLCLIENT in cyber espionage attacks in 2025 to facilitate comprehensive data theft from infected endpoints. The activity has been attributed to Mustang Panda (aka Earth Preta, Fireant, HoneyMyte, Polaris, and Twill Typhoon) with the intrusions primarily directed against government entities located across campaigns across Myanmar, Mongolia, Malaysia, and Russia. Kaspersky, which disclosed details of the updated malware, said it's deployed as a secondary backdoor along with PlugX and LuminousMoth infections. "COOLCLIENT was typically delivered alongside encrypted loader files containing encrypted configuration data, shellcode, and in-memory next-stage DLL modules," the Russian cybersecurity company said . "These modules relied on DLL side-loading as their primary execution method, which required a legitimate signed executable to load a malicious DLL." Betwe...

Indian government entities have been targeted in two campaigns undertaken by a threat actor that operates in Pakistan using previously undocumented tradecraft. The campaigns have been codenamed Gopher Strike and Sheet Attack by Zscaler ThreatLabz, which identified them in September 2025. "While these campaigns share some similarities with the Pakistan-linked Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group, APT36 , we assess with medium confidence that the activity identified during this analysis might originate from a new subgroup or another Pakistan-linked group operating in parallel," researchers Sudeep Singh and Yin Hong Chang said . Sheet Attack gets its name from the use of legitimate services like Google Sheets, Firebase, and email for command-and-control (C2). On the other hand, Gopher Strike is assessed to have leveraged phishing emails as a starting point to deliver PDF documents containing a blurred image that's superimposed by a seemingly harmless pop-up instructi...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an ongoing campaign that's targeting Indian users with a multi-stage backdoor as part of a suspected cyber espionage campaign. The activity , per the eSentire Threat Response Unit (TRU), involves using phishing emails impersonating the Income Tax Department of India to trick victims into downloading a malicious archive, ultimately granting the threat actors persistent access to their machines for continuous monitoring and data exfiltration. The end goal of the sophisticated attack is to deploy a variant of a known banking trojan called Blackmoon (aka KRBanker) and a legitimate enterprise tool called SyncFuture TSM (Terminal Security Management) that's developed by Nanjing Zhongke Huasai Technology Co., Ltd , a Chinese company. The campaign has not been attributed to any known threat actor or group. "While marketed as a legitimate enterprise tool, it is repurposed in this campaign as a powerful, all-in-one espionage framework,...

The Russian nation-state hacking group known as Sandworm has been attributed to what has been described as the "largest cyber attack" targeting Poland's power system in the last week of December 2025. The attack was unsuccessful, the country's energy minister, Milosz Motyka, said last week. "The command of the cyberspace forces has diagnosed in the last days of the year the strongest attack on the energy infrastructure in years," Motyka was quoted as saying. According to a new report by ESET, the attack was the work of Sandworm, which deployed a previously undocumented wiper malware codenamed DynoWiper (aka Win32/KillFiles.NMO). The links to Sandworm are based on overlaps with prior wiper activity associated with the adversary, particularly in the aftermath of Russia's military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Slovakian cybersecurity company, which identified the use of the wiper as part of the attempted disruptive attack aimed at the...

As many as 3,136 individual IP addresses linked to likely targets of the Contagious Interview activity have been identified, with the campaign claiming 20 potential victim organizations spanning artificial intelligence (AI), cryptocurrency, financial services, IT services, marketing, and software development sectors in Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, and Central America. The new findings come from Recorded Future's Insikt Group, which is tracking the North Korean threat activity cluster under the moniker PurpleBravo . First documented in late 2023, the campaign is also known as CL-STA-0240, DeceptiveDevelopment, DEV#POPPER, Famous Chollima, Gwisin Gang, Tenacious Pungsan, UNC5342, Void Dokkaebi, and WaterPlum. The 3,136 individual IP addresses, primarily concentrated around South Asia and North America, are assessed to have been targeted by the adversary from August 2024 to September 2025. The 20 victim companies are said to be based in Belgium, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, In...

The North Korean threat actors associated with the long-running Contagious Interview campaign have been observed using malicious Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) projects as lures to deliver a backdoor on compromised endpoints. The latest finding demonstrates continued evolution of the new tactic that was first discovered in December 2025, Jamf Threat Labs said. "This activity involved the deployment of a backdoor implant that provides remote code execution capabilities on the victim system," security researcher Thijs Xhaflaire said in a report shared with The Hacker News. First disclosed by OpenSourceMalware last month, the attack essentially involves instructing prospective targets to clone a repository on GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket, and launch the project in VS Code as part of a supposed job assessment. The end goal of these efforts is to abuse VS Code task configuration files to execute malicious payloads staged on Vercel domains, depending on the oper...

In cybersecurity, the line between a normal update and a serious incident keeps getting thinner. Systems that once felt reliable are now under pressure from constant change. New AI tools, connected devices, and automated systems quietly create more ways in, often faster than security teams can react. This week’s stories show how easily a small mistake or hidden service can turn into a real break-in. Behind the headlines, the pattern is clear. Automation is being used against the people who built it. Attackers reuse existing systems instead of building new ones. They move faster than most organizations can patch or respond. From quiet code flaws to malware that changes while it runs, attacks are focusing less on speed and more on staying hidden and in control. If you’re protecting anything connected—developer tools, cloud systems, or internal networks—this edition shows where attacks are going next, not where they used to be. ⚡ Threat of the Week Critical Fortinet Flaw Comes Under...

Security experts have disclosed details of a new campaign that has targeted U.S. government and policy entities using politically themed lures to deliver a backdoor known as LOTUSLITE . The targeted malware campaign leverages decoys related to the recent geopolitical developments between the U.S. and Venezuela to distribute a ZIP archive ("US now deciding what's next for Venezuela.zip") containing a malicious DLL that's launched using DLL side-loading techniques. It's not known if the campaign managed to successfully compromise any of the targets. The activity has been attributed with moderate confidence to a Chinese state-sponsored group known as Mustang Panda (aka Earth Preta, HoneyMyte, and Twill Typhoon), citing tactical and infrastructure patterns. It's worth noting that the threat actor is known for extensively relying on DLL side-loading to launch its backdoors, including TONESHELL. "This campaign reflects a continued trend of targeted spear...

A threat actor likely aligned with China has been observed targeting critical infrastructure sectors in North America since at least last year. Cisco Talos, which is tracking the activity under the name UAT-8837 , assessed it to be a China-nexus advanced persistent threat (APT) actor with medium confidence based on tactical overlaps with other campaigns mounted by threat actors from the region. The cybersecurity company noted that the threat actor is "primarily tasked with obtaining initial access to high-value organizations," based on the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and post-compromise activity observed. "After obtaining initial access — either by successful exploitation of vulnerable servers or by using compromised credentials — UAT-8837 predominantly deploys open-source tools to harvest sensitive information such as credentials, security configurations, and domain and Active Directory (AD) information to create multiple channels of access to their v...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has disclosed details of new cyber attacks targeting its defense forces with malware known as PLUGGYAPE between October and December 2025. The activity has been attributed with medium confidence to a Russian hacking group tracked as Void Blizzard (aka Laundry Bear or UAC-0190). The threat actor is believed to be active since at least April 2024. Attack chains distributing the malware leverage instant messaging Signal and WhatsApp as vectors, with the threat actors masquerading as charity organizations to convince targets into clicking on a seemingly-harmless link ("harthulp-ua[.]com" or "solidarity-help[.]org") impersonating the foundation and download a password-protected archive.

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a previously undocumented and feature-rich malware framework codenamed VoidLink that's specifically designed for long-term, stealthy access to Linux-based cloud environments According to a new report from Check Point Research, the cloud-native Linux malware framework comprises an array of custom loaders, implants, rootkits, and modular plugins that enable its operators to augment or change its capabilities over time, as well as pivot when objectives change. It was first discovered in December 2025. "The framework includes multiple cloud-focused capabilities and modules, and is engineered to operate reliably in cloud and container environments over extended periods," the cybersecurity company said in an analysis published today. "VoidLink's architecture is extremely flexible and highly modular, centered around a custom Plugin API that appears to be inspired by Cobalt Strike’s Beacon Object Files (BOF) appr...

This week made one thing clear: small oversights can spiral fast. Tools meant to save time and reduce friction turned into easy entry points once basic safeguards were ignored. Attackers didn’t need novel tricks. They used what was already exposed and moved in without resistance. Scale amplified the damage. A single weak configuration rippled out to millions. A repeatable flaw worked again and again. Phishing crept into apps people rely on daily, while malware blended into routine system behavior. Different victims, same playbook: look normal, move quickly, spread before alarms go off. For defenders, the pressure keeps rising. Vulnerabilities are exploited almost as soon as they surface. Claims and counterclaims appear before the facts settle. Criminal groups adapt faster each cycle. The stories that follow show where things failed—and why those failures matter going forward. ⚡ Threat of the Week Maximum Severity Security Flaw Disclosed in n8n — A maximum-severity vulnerability ...