cyber espionage | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of a new campaign that involves the use of a malicious program that's dressed up as a Notepad++ plugin to compromise Windows systems. The activity has been attributed by the agency to a threat cluster it tracks as UAC-0099 , a Russia-aligned group that has previously observed weaponizing security flaws in WinRAR software to deliver a malware strain called LONEPAGE. Other cyber attacks mounted by the adversary have employed phishing emails as an initial access method to deploy MATCHBOIL, MATCHWOK, and DRAGSTARE. It's known to be active since at least mid-2022. The latest set of attacks begins, observed earlier this summer, with a phishing email containing an image attachment, which, when clicked, opens a URL that's concealed using a link shortener from where the request is sent to a file-sharing service like EasySend[.]co to retrieve a ZIP archive. The ZIP file contains a Visual Basic Script (VBSc...

A Russian state-supported espionage group spent months reading Western mailboxes through a then-unknown flaw in Zimbra's webmail client. The payload goes after the last 90 days of email, the organization's entire email directory, the password saved in the browser and the codes kept for two-factor recovery. Opening the message was enough to start it. The NSA , CISA and partner agencies published a joint advisory on the campaign Thursday, alongside research from Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 and Proofpoint. The advisory calls the technique "a view-based exploit that only requires a user to view a malicious email" in a vulnerable client. It says the actors have been targeting and compromising Western government and commercial organizations through Zimbra since at least July 2025. The flaw, CVE-2025-66376 , is a stored cross-site scripting vulnerability in Zimbra's Classic UI. A crafted HTML email abuses CSS @import handling to execute JavaScript inside a...

A newly discovered espionage implant has been using a hijacked Microsoft 365 calendar as its command channel, planting operator instructions and smuggling out stolen files as attachments on calendar events dated to the year 2050. Group-IB , which named the malware HollowGraph , says the approach moves tasking and stolen data through legitimate Microsoft Graph API traffic, so the activity looks like ordinary Microsoft 365 chatter and network controls keyed to attacker-owned destinations have nothing to flag. The implant is a .NET DLL that supports just two commands, get and send , and it never reaches out to an attacker-owned server for payloads. Instead, it treats the compromised mailbox's calendar as a two-way dead drop. To pull tasking, it queries the calendar for an event the operator has planted, buried at 2050-05-13 , so the mailbox owner is unlikely to ever scroll to it, and reads its instructions from an attached file. To exfiltrate, it does the reverse: encrypts th...

At least one Russian intelligence service is systematically hijacking internet-connected security cameras across Europe and Ukraine, using the feeds to watch military transport routes, weapons shipments bound for Kyiv , and the locations of Ukrainian troops. That is the finding of a cybersecurity advisory published July 10 by the AIVD and MIVD, the Netherlands' civilian and military intelligence services, which describe the operation as ongoing. In Ukraine, the surveillance has not stayed passive. Camera access there has been "used in attempts to neutralise Ukrainian military personnel" and destroy their equipment, the services say, turning an exposed roadside or business camera into a targeting aid. Across EU and NATO states, the services add, the same camera access is also collecting military intelligence that has nothing to do with the war. Getting in is rarely the hard part. The operators scan the internet for exposed devices, fingerprint IP cameras by bran...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a previously undocumented malware called GoSerpent that has been put to use in cyber attacks targeting entities in Southeast Asia since late 2025 with a focus on long-term access and intelligence gathering. Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky, which uncovered the activity in February 2026, said it was aimed at government and diplomatic entities in the region. GoSerpent is designed to contact an external server and deploy secondary payloads on sensitive data collection and credential dumping on the system. "Monitoring the activities of this threat actor revealed that in May 2026 they came back with an evolved set of malicious tools: new Stowaway RAT and proxy tool which resembled the initial malware as well as an additional stealthy tool to exfiltrate sensitive data collected for the previous few months through network share," security researcher Noushin Shabab said . The end goal of these efforts is to harvest sensitive fi...