cyber espionage | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Diplomatic organizations in Central Asia have been targeted by a sophisticated new Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) bootkit called BlackX . The activity, which singled out diplomatic entities in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan in early 2026, is suspected to be orchestrated by a China-linked state-sponsored hacking group known as APT41 , Kaspersky said in a technical report published this week. The primary objective behind deploying the malware is to undermine Microsoft Windows startup defenses, along with third-party security solutions, while maintaining long-term, covert access to compromised devices. Notably, BlackX is assessed to be an updated version of BlackLotus , a notorious bootkit that was first observed being advertised on cybercrime forums in late 2022, before its existence was officially confirmed by ESET in March 2023. BlackLotus is designed to exploit a now-patched Secure Boot bypass vulnerability tracked as CVE-2022-21894 (CVSS score: 4.4...

The Russian state-sponsored hacking group Sandworm teamed up with another threat actor to carry out a destructive wiping attack targeting a Ukrainian logistics company last year. According to ESET , the attack involved UAC-0099 (aka Earth Sirrush) obtaining initial access to the target on July 16, 2025, via a spear-phishing email bearing a malware-laced attachment that led to the deployment of the MATCHWOK backdoor through a downloader called MATCHBOIL. The activity ultimately culminated with the threat actor handing off access to Sandworm, which then conducted a data-wiping attack on September 17, 2025, more than two months after it obtained a foothold. What makes the attack stand out is UAC-0099's use of a previously undocumented backdoor called MythicRatatoskr that communicates with a command-and-control (C2) server hosted inside the Yggdrasil mesh network. The backdoor was deployed a day after MATCHWOK was executed. There are indications that development on the bac...

Microsoft on Wednesday disclosed that a China state-aligned actor dubbed Storm-0940 was behind the recent supply chain compromise of the ConnectWise Cloud Backup application. During the incident, Storm-0940 used ARTEX , a Go-based agentic AI penetration testing framework that was made closed-source in the wake of its abuse in cyber attacks targeting South Korean financial institutions, to speed up scanning and reconnaissance, password spraying, and OAuth application abuse at downstream victims. The tech giant said the threat actor used the AI tool at "machine speed" to automate attacks targeting hundreds of organizations across the world spanning a broad range of sectors since September 2026. Targets include aerospace and defense, automotive, chemicals, energy, financial services, government, legal, manufacturing, media, military, semiconductor, software, technology, and think tanks and non-profits. "Storm-0940's use of ARTEX accelerated the speed of comprom...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a previously undocumented China-aligned threat cluster known as Bronze Sandcastle that has been observed targeting organizations in Asia and Africa since mid-2025. "The most distinctive technical marker for Bronze Sandcastle is its consistent use of Sandboxie DLL sideloading," Sophos security researcher Gabor Szappanos said in a post published Tuesday. Between August 2025 and August 2026, attacks mounted by the threat actor have resulted in victims in the Philippines, Taiwan, Afghanistan, Namibia, and likely South Korea. Evidence indicates that Bronze Sandcastle is most active in the UTC+8 time zone.  DLL sideloading is a popular adversarial technique that exploits the way Windows loads DLL files, allowing an attacker to trick a legitimate program into loading a malicious DLL . When an application is launched, it needs to load various DLLs in order to function correctly. If the application does not provide the f...

Attackers took control of more than 300 Tor exit relays in early October and used them to redirect SSH connections to servers that stole login passwords, a researcher found. Exit relays are the last hop in a Tor circuit, where traffic leaves the network for its destination. Only a password login to an SSH server made through Tor between October 1 and 5, after accepting the interception server's host key, could have been captured. The Tor Project began flagging relays on October 4, and by October 5, none remained in the consensus, the list of relays that Tor clients use. At the peak on October 4, the relays carrying the attacker's exit policy made up 7.46% of Tor's exit capacity, measured by consensus weight, according to an  analysis of public Tor directory data  posted to the tor-relays mailing list. The researcher, who publishes as kaba,  scanned  all of Tor's roughly 3,000 exits on October 2 and found 333 redirecting SSH to the same 12 interception servers...