cyber espionage | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Three distinct threat activity clusters with shared infrastructure and malware code similarities have been observed targeting telecommunications providers, government organizations, military entities, research institutions, and critical infrastructure across Latin America, Asia, and Europe over the past year. Check Point Research is tracking the clusters under the names SilentDelivery , OceanGate , and DarkWire . Although initially assumed to be independent sets of attacks, each with its own backdoors and post-exploitation tooling, they have all been linked through a malware ecosystem called Sparrow. The entity behind the Sparrow framework has been codenamed CopperDragon , and is assessed to be a digital quartermaster developing tools for China-nexus threat actors, including FamousSparrow , Earth Estries , Tropic Trooper , UAT-9244 , and UAT-8302 . "Each cluster employed a different toolset and different initial access techniques, including compromising internet-facing inf...

The threat actor known as Blind Eagle has resurfaced with a new campaign targeting organizations in Latin America through judicial and administrative-themed phishing lures to deliver a remote access trojan (RAT) that shares its lineage with AsyncRAT and DCRat. "The campaign uses Portuguese and Spanish lures that resemble court notifications, fiscalía notices, tutela proceedings , and administrative documents," Zenox said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Assessed to be a Spanish-speaking group and active since 2018, Blind Eagle (aka APT-C-36) has a track record of using spear-phishing lures to distribute commodity RATs like AsyncRAT, BitRAT, Lime RAT, NjRAT, Quasar RAT, and Remcos RAT. Attack chains begin with phishing emails targeting individuals who handle cases, contracts, judicial, or institutional service requests to trick them into opening a malware-laced attachment. One email containing a Colombian judicial-themed XHTML file has been identified as ...

The Russia-aligned state-sponsored threat actor known as Turla (aka Snake) is wielding a previously undocumented cyber espionage toolset called Cereal that's used to break into victims' Microsoft Exchange servers with an aim to surreptitiously collect emails. According to an ESET report shared with The Hacker News ahead of publication, the sophisticated and modular tool is designed for long-term intelligence gathering and has been observed against two governmental entities in Kazakhstan and Romania in late 2025. "The Cereal toolset is a carefully constructed instrument for long-term, stealthy cyber espionage," the Slovakian cybersecurity company said . "It leaves little on disk, avoids external infrastructure that could be discovered and blocked, and conceals itself within legitimate Exchange processes." "The Cereal toolset demonstrates that, for Turla, Exchange servers are not just mail servers – they are durable collection points, internal e...

An October cyberattack on refrigeration controllers at about 700 French retail sites was carried out by a cyber unit of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the French government said yesterday. The attackers broke into controllers on the night of October 11 and changed their defrost settings to high temperatures. That caused food losses and, in at least 15 cases, fires. The unit is called Shahid Kaveh . It is known mainly through hacktivist personas, such as CyberAveng3rs and Cyber Isnaad Front , that publicly claim some of its attacks, France says. France's Foreign Ministry plans to summon Iran's ambassador and to ask its European partners to adopt new sanctions against Iranian organizations and individuals involved in the attack. The Paris prosecutor's office opened a judicial investigation yesterday against the unit's head, the head's two deputies and anyone else identified. It has asked for international arrest warrants. The offenses u...

The South Asian cyber espionage group known as Bitter (aka APT-C-08, APT-Q-37, Hazy Tiger, Orange Yali, T-APT-17, and TA397) has been observed targeting South Asian organizations with a previously unreported remote access trojan called PapRAT. "PapRAT has both C++ and Rust implementations," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin said . "Its capabilities include command execution, file uploads and downloads, file deletion, directory and drive enumeration, and screenshot capture. The Rust variant adds PowerShell execution and other commands." The campaign is notable for making use of three different infection chains - A Windows Shortcut (LNK) file that abuses the native "ftp.exe" utility to run scripts and create scheduled tasks designed to maintain contact with a command-and-control (C2) server. A VHDX disk image containing a LNK file that launches a lure Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, while running an MSI installer in the background to d...