cyber espionage | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday disclosed that ransomware actors are targeting unpatched SimpleHelp Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) instances to compromise customers of an unnamed utility billing software provider. "This incident reflects a broader pattern of ransomware actors targeting organizations through unpatched versions of SimpleHelp RMM since January 2025," the agency said in an advisory. Earlier this year, SimpleHelp disclosed a set of flaws (CVE-2024-57727, CVE-2024-57728, and CVE-2024-57726) that could result in information disclosure, privilege escalation, and remote code execution. The vulnerabilities have since come under repeated exploitation in the wild, including by ransomware groups like DragonForce, to breach targets of interest. Last month, Sophos revealed that a Managed Service Provider's SimpleHelp deployed was accessed by the threat actor using these flaws, and then leveraged it to pivot t...

The reconnaissance activity targeting American cybersecurity company SentinelOne was part of a broader set of partially-related intrusions into several targets between July 2024 and March 2025. "The victimology includes a South Asian government entity, a European media organization, and more than 70 organizations across a wide range of sectors," SentinelOne security researchers Aleksandar Milenkoski and Tom Hegel said in a report published today. Some of the targeted sectors include manufacturing, government, finance, telecommunications, and research. Also present among the victims was an IT services and logistics company that was managing hardware logistics for SentinelOne employees at the time of the breach in early 2025. The malicious activity has been attributed with high confidence to China-nexus threat actors, with some of the attacks tied to a threat cluster dubbed PurpleHaze , which, in turn, overlaps with Chinese cyber espionage groups publicly reported as APT15...

The threat actor known as Bitter has been assessed to be a state-backed hacking group that's tasked with gathering intelligence that aligns with the interests of the Indian government. That's according to new findings jointly published by Proofpoint and Threatray in an exhaustive two-part analysis. "Their diverse toolset shows consistent coding patterns across malware families, particularly in system information gathering and string obfuscation," researchers Abdallah Elshinbary, Jonas Wagner, Nick Attfield, and Konstantin Klinger said. Bitter, also known as APT-C-08, APT-Q-37, Hazy Tiger, Orange Yali, T-APT-17, and TA397, has a history of focusing primarily on South Asian entities , with select intrusions also targeting China, Saudi Arabia, and South America. In December 2024, evidence emerged of the threat actor's targeting of Turkey using malware families such as WmRAT and MiyaRAT, indicating a gradual geographical expansion. Stating that Bitter fr...

The Czech Republic on Wednesday formally accused a threat actor associated with the People's Republic of China (PRC) of targeting its Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In a public statement, the government said it identified China as the culprit behind a malicious campaign targeting one of the unclassified networks of the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The extent of the breach is presently not known. "The malicious activity [...] lasted from 2022 and affected an institution designated as Czech critical infrastructure," it added . The attack has been attributed to a state-sponsored threat actor tracked as APT31 , which also overlaps with threat clusters known as Altaire, Bronze Vinewood, Judgement Panda, PerplexedGoblin, RedBravo, Red Keres, and Violet Typhoon (formerly Zirconium). The hacking group, publicly associated with the Ministry of State Security (MSS) and the Hubei State Security Department, is assessed to be active since at least 2010, per the U.S. Departme...

The Russia-aligned threat actor known as TAG-110 has been observed conducting a spear-phishing campaign targeting Tajikistan using macro-enabled Word templates as an initial payload. The attack chain is a departure from the threat actor's previously documented use of an HTML Application (.HTA) loader dubbed HATVIBE, Recorded Future's Insikt Group said in an analysis. "Given TAG-110's historical targeting of public sector entities in Central Asia, this campaign is likely targeting government, educational, and research institutions within Tajikistan," the cybersecurity company noted . "These cyber espionage operations likely aim to gather intelligence for influencing regional politics or security, particularly during sensitive events like elections or geopolitical tensions." TAG-110, also called UAC-0063, is the name assigned to a threat activity group that's known for its targeting of European embassies, as well as other organizations in Cent...