cyber espionage | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A Chinese-speaking advanced persistent threat (APT) actor has been linked to a new custom backdoor called TinyRCT as part of cyber attacks aimed at government entities and critical infrastructure in Southeast Asia. The activity, particularly aimed at state-owned enterprises in the energy and government sectors, has been attributed to a threat actor called CL-STA-1062 , which Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said shares overlaps with UAT-7237 , a hacking group that was first flagged by Cisco Talos in August 2025 in relation to a campaign directed against web infrastructure entities in Taiwan. Unit 42 said it also observed CL-STA-1062 campaigns in prior operations targeting strategic sectors in East Asia since March 2022, suggesting a broader but sustained focus in the region. "From a technical standpoint, the attackers behind CL-STA-1062 rely on a hybrid toolkit," Unit 42 said in a technical report. "While they frequently use common open-source tools such as SoftEther ...

The Russian state-sponsored threat actor known as Turla has been attributed to a previously undocumented .NET backdoor called STOCKSTAY that has been deployed against government and military organizations in Ukraine, and entities that have an interest in Italian foreign policy. Describing the Windows backdoor as continually developed by the hacking group, Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said the cyber espionage tool shares significant code and functional overlaps with Kazuar , a staple implant put to use by the adversary since 2017. Suspected development activity of malware dates back to December 2022. "STOCKSTAY is a multi-component backdoor written in .NET, using the Windows Forms framework, which communicates with its command-and-control (C2) via a secure WebSocket connection, utilizing the open-source websocket-sharp library," GTIG said . "STOCKSTAY consists of several distinct components that communicate with one another via an inter-process commu...

Canada's spy service got a judge's permission to reach into infected servers, home routers, and IoT gear sitting on Canadian soil and neutralize two foreign-run botnets. The Federal Court released a public version of the ruling on June 15. It is the first time the Canadian Security Intelligence Service has used its threat reduction warrant powers this way. The warrant let CSIS alter, degrade, and destroy botnet data on the infected machines and cut the devices loose from the networks. The targets were Canada-based servers, small office and home office (SOHO) routers, and Internet of Things devices: Ring doorbells, security cameras, TVs, and other Wi-Fi-enabled appliances. Justice Catherine Kane granted the warrant on May 1, 2024, renewed it that August, and issued the confidential reasons in February 2026. The warrant stayed out of public view for more than two years, until this month's redacted release. CSIS needed the order because the cleanup would likely hav...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged two previously undocumented Windows variants of what was believed to be a Linux-only backdoor called SprySOCKS . "The Windows variants discovered are internally marked as WIN_DRV and WIN_PLUS," ESET said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Both come with a hard-coded C&C [command-and-control] configuration and support communication over TCP, UDP, and WebSocket protocols." Like its Linux counterpart, the Windows versions support more than 30 commands to facilitate system information collection, process enumeration, service management, and file system operations. WIN_DRV has also been found to utilize kernel drivers to conceal the malware's network connections, processes, files, and registry keys. In addition, the variant enables TCP traffic diversion that allows the malware operators to send commands to the backdoor through a random TCP port on the victim's device without exposing the backdoor's act...

A China-linked espionage group hid inside North American medical, academic, and military research networks for more than a year, quietly stealing sensitive research and defense email. The way in was a backdoor on their REDCap research servers that stole login credentials. The exfiltration was the unusual part: the attackers rewired the victims' own Google Workspace rules to copy any message matching their keywords to an inbox they controlled. Google's Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) laid out the campaign in a report published this week and attributes it with high confidence to a cluster it tracks as UNC6508. The actor and its REDCap backdoor are not new names; Google first surfaced both in February , in a wider report on state-backed attacks against the defense sector. It did not name the victims, describing them only as multiple organizations across the US and Canada: clinical providers, academic centers, military health institutions, advocacy groups, and health regul...