cyber espionage | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A Russian state-sponsored cyber espionage group known as Static Tundra has been observed actively exploiting a seven-year-old security flaw in Cisco IOS and Cisco IOS XE software as a means to establish persistent access to target networks. Cisco Talos, which disclosed details of the activity, said the attacks single out organizations in telecommunications, higher education and manufacturing sectors across North America, Asia, Africa and Europe. Prospective victims are chosen based on their "strategic interest" to Russia, it added, with recent efforts directed against Ukraine and its allies following the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian war in 2022. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2018-0171 (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical flaw in the Smart Install feature of Cisco IOS Software and Cisco IOS XE software that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to trigger a denial-of-service (DoS) condition or execute arbitrary code. It's worth noting that the security ...

North Korean threat actors have been attributed to a coordinated cyber espionage campaign targeting diplomatic missions in their southern counterpart between March and July 2025. The activity manifested in the form of at least 19 spear-phishing emails that impersonated trusted diplomatic contacts with the goal of luring embassy staff and foreign ministry personnel with convincing meeting invites, official letters, and event invitations. "The attackers leveraged GitHub, typically known as a legitimate developer platform, as a covert command-and-control channel," Trellix researchers Pham Duy Phuc and Alex Lanstein said . The infection chains have been observed to rely on trusted cloud storage solutions like Dropbox and Daum Cloud, an online service from South Korean internet conglomerate Kakao Corporation, in order to deliver a variant of an open-source remote access trojan called Xeno RAT that grants the threat actors to take control of compromised systems. The campaign i...

A new exploit combining two critical, now-patched security flaws in SAP NetWeaver has emerged in the wild, putting organizations at risk of system compromise and data theft. The exploit in question chains together CVE-2025-31324 and CVE-2025-42999 to bypass authentication and achieve remote code execution, SAP security company Onapsis said . CVE-2025-31324 (CVSS score: 10.0) - Missing Authorization check in SAP NetWeaver's Visual Composer development server CVE-2025-42999 (CVSS score: 9.1) - Insecure Deserialization in SAP NetWeaver's Visual Composer development server The vulnerabilities were addressed by SAP back in April and May 2025, but not before they were abused by threat actors as zero-days since at least March. Multiple ransomware and data extortion groups, including Qilin, BianLian, and RansomExx, have been observed weaponizing the flaws , not to mention several China-nexus espionage crews who have also put them to use in attacks targeting critical infra...

A previously undocumented threat actor dubbed Curly COMrades has been observed targeting entities in Georgia and Moldova as part of a cyber espionage campaign designed to facilitate long-term access to target networks. "They repeatedly tried to extract the NTDS database from domain controllers -- the primary repository for user password hashes and authentication data in a Windows network," Bitdefender said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Additionally, they attempted to dump LSASS memory from specific systems to recover active user credentials, potentially plain-text passwords, from machines where users were logged on." The activity, tracked by the Romanian cybersecurity company since mid-2024, has singled out judicial and government bodies in Georgia, as well as an energy distribution company in Moldova. "Regarding the timeline, while we have been tracking the campaign since mid-2024, our analysis of the artifacts indicates that activity began e...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of cyber attacks carried out by a threat actor called UAC-0099 targeting government agencies, the defense forces, and enterprises of the defense-industrial complex in the country. The attacks, which leverage phishing emails as an initial compromise vector, are used to deliver malware families like MATCHBOIL, MATCHWOK, and DRAGSTARE. UAC-0099, first publicly documented by the agency in June 2023, has a history of targeting Ukrainian entities for espionage purposes. Prior attacks have been observed leveraging security flaws in WinRAR software (CVE-2023-38831, CVSS score: 7.8) to propagate a malware called LONEPAGE. The latest infection chain involves using email lures related to court summons to entice recipients into clicking on links that are shortened using URL shortening services like Cuttly. These links, which are sent via UKR.NET email addresses, point to a double archive file containing an HTML Application...