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Cybersecurity researchers have discovered what they said is the first known malicious Microsoft Outlook add-in detected in the wild. In this unusual supply chain attack detailed by Koi Security, an unknown attacker claimed the domain associated with a now-abandoned legitimate add-in to serve a fake Microsoft login page, stealing over 4,000 credentials in the process. The activity has been codenamed AgreeToSteal by the cybersecurity company. The Outlook add-in in question is AgreeTo , which is advertised by its developer as a way for users to connect different calendars in a single place and share their availability through email. The add-in was last updated in December 2022. Idan Dardikman, co-founder and CTO of Koi, told The Hacker News that the incident represents a broadening of supply chain attack vectors. "This is the same class of attack we've seen in browser extensions, npm packages, and IDE plugins: a trusted distribution channel where the content can change aft...

Indian defense sector and government-aligned organizations have been targeted by multiple campaigns that are designed to compromise Windows and Linux environments with remote access trojans capable of stealing sensitive data and ensuring continued access to infected machines. The campaigns are characterized by the use of malware families like Geta RAT , Ares RAT , and DeskRAT , which are often attributed to Pakistan-aligned threat clusters tracked as SideCopy and APT36 (aka Transparent Tribe). SideCopy, active since at least 2019, is assessed to operate as a subdivision of Transparent Tribe. "Taken together, these campaigns reinforce a familiar but evolving narrative," Aditya K. Sood, vice president of Security Engineering and AI Strategy at Aryaka, said . "Transparent Tribe and SideCopy are not reinventing espionage – they are refining it." "By expanding cross-platform coverage, leaning into memory-resident techniques, and experimenting with new delivery ...

It's Patch Tuesday, which means a number of software vendors have released patches for various security vulnerabilities impacting their products and services. Microsoft issued fixes for 59 flaws, including six actively exploited zero-days in various Windows components that could be abused to bypass security features, escalate privileges, and trigger a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. Elsewhere, Adobe released updates for Audition, After Effects, InDesign Desktop, Substance 3D, Bridge, Lightroom Classic, and DNG SDK. The company said it's not aware of in-the-wild exploitation of any of the shortcomings. SAP shipped fixes for two critical-severity vulnerabilities, including a code injection bug in SAP CRM and SAP S/4HANA (CVE-2026-0488, CVSS score: 9.9) that an authenticated attacker could use to run an arbitrary SQL statement and lead to a full database compromise. The second critical vulnerability is a case of a missing authorization check in SAP NetWeaver Application...

Intentionally vulnerable training applications are widely used for security education, internal testing, and product demonstrations. Tools such as OWASP Juice Shop, DVWA, Hackazon, and bWAPP are designed to be insecure by default, making them useful for learning how common attack techniques work in controlled environments. The issue is not the applications themselves, but how they are often deployed and maintained in real-world cloud environments. Pentera Labs examined how training and demo applications are being used across cloud infrastructures and identified a recurring pattern: applications intended for isolated lab use were frequently found exposed to the public internet, running inside active cloud accounts, and connected to cloud identities with broader access than required. Deployment Patterns Observed in the Research Pentera Labs research found that these applications were often deployed with default configurations, minimal isolation, and overly permissive cloud roles. T...

Microsoft on Tuesday released security updates to address a set of 59 flaws across its software, including six vulnerabilities that it said have been exploited in the wild. Of the 59 flaws, five are rated Critical, 52 are rated Important, and two are rated Moderate in severity. Twenty-five of the patched vulnerabilities have been classified as privilege escalation, followed by remote code execution (12), spoofing (7), information disclosure (6), security feature bypass (5), denial-of-service (3), and cross-site scripting (1). It's worth noting that the patches are in addition to three security flaws that Microsoft has addressed in its Edge browser since the release of the January 2026 Patch Tuesday update , including a Moderate vulnerability impacting the Edge browser for Android ( CVE-2026-0391 , CVSS score: 6.5) that could allow an unauthorized attacker to perform spoofing over a network by taking advantage of a "user interface misrepresentation of critical information....

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new botnet operation called SSHStalker that relies on the Internet Relay Chat ( IRC ) communication protocol for command-and-control (C2) purposes. "The toolset blends stealth helpers with legacy-era Linux exploitation: Alongside log cleaners (utmp/wtmp/lastlog tampering) and rootkit-class artifacts, the actor keeps a large back-catalog of Linux 2.6.x-era exploits (2009–2010 CVEs)," cybersecurity company Flare said . "These are low value against modern stacks, but remain effective against 'forgotten' infrastructure and long-tail legacy environments." SSHStalker combines IRC botnet mechanics with an automated mass-compromise operation that uses an SSH scanner and other readily available scanners to co-opt susceptible systems into a network and enroll them in IRC channels.

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as UNC1069 has been observed targeting the cryptocurrency sector to steal sensitive data from Windows and macOS systems with the ultimate goal of facilitating financial theft. "The intrusion relied on a social engineering scheme involving a compromised Telegram account, a fake Zoom meeting, a ClickFix infection vector, and reported usage of AI-generated video to deceive the victim," Google Mandiant researchers Ross Inman and Adrian Hernandez said . UNC1069, assessed to be active since at least April 2018, has a history of conducting social engineering campaigns for financial gain using fake meeting invites and posing as investors from reputable companies on Telegram. It's also tracked by the broader cybersecurity community under the monikers CryptoCore and MASAN . In a report published last November, Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) pointed out the threat actor's use of generative artificial intelligence (AI) t...

The information technology (IT) workers associated with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) are now applying to remote positions using real LinkedIn accounts of individuals they're impersonating, marking a new escalation of the fraudulent scheme. "These profiles often have verified workplace emails and identity badges, which DPRK operatives hope will make their fraudulent applications appear legitimate," Security Alliance (SEAL) said in a series of posts on X. The IT worker threat is a long-running operation mounted by North Korea in which operatives from the country pose as remote workers to secure jobs in Western companies and elsewhere under stolen or fabricated identities. The threat is also tracked by the broader cybersecurity community as Jasper Sleet, PurpleDelta, and Wagemole. The end goal of these efforts is two-pronged: to generate a steady revenue stream to fund the nation's weapons programs, conduct espionage by stealing sensitive...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an emergent ransomware family dubbed Reynolds that comes embedded with a built-in bring your own vulnerable driver (BYOVD) component for defense evasion purposes within the ransomware payload itself. BYOVD refers to an adversarial technique that abuses legitimate but flawed driver software to escalate privileges and disable Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions so that malicious activities go unnoticed. The strategy has been adopted by many ransomware groups over the years. "Normally, the BYOVD defense evasion component of an attack would involve a distinct tool that would be deployed on the system prior to the ransomware payload in order to disable security software," the Symantec and Carbon Black Threat Hunter Team said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "However, in this attack, the vulnerable driver (an NsecSoft NSecKrnl driver) was bundled with the ransomware itself." Broadcom's ...

Are ransomware and encryption still the defining signals of modern cyberattacks, or has the industry been too fixated on noise while missing a more dangerous shift happening quietly all around them? According to Picus Labs’ new Red Report 2026, which analyzed over 1.1 million malicious files and mapped 15.5 million adversarial actions observed across 2025, attackers are no longer optimizing for disruption. Instead, their goal is now long-term, invisible access. To be clear, ransomware isn’t going anywhere, and adversaries continue to innovate. But the data shows a clear strategic pivot away from loud, destructive attacks toward techniques designed to evade detection, persist inside environments, and quietly exploit identity and trusted infrastructure. Rather than breaking in and burning systems down, today’s attackers increasingly behave like Digital Parasites. They live inside the host, feed on credentials and services, and remain undetected for as long as possible. Public attent...

Fortinet has released security updates to address a critical flaw impacting FortiClientEMS that could lead to the execution of arbitrary code on susceptible systems. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-21643 , has a CVSS rating of 9.1 out of a maximum of 10.0. "An improper neutralization of special elements used in an SQL Command ('SQL Injection') vulnerability [CWE-89] in FortiClientEMS may allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute unauthorized code or commands via specifically crafted HTTP requests," Fortinet said in an advisory. The shortcoming affects the following versions - FortiClientEMS 7.2 (Not affected) FortiClientEMS 7.4.4 (Upgrade to 7.4.5 or above) FortiClientEMS 8.0 (Not affected) Gwendal Guégniaud of the Fortinet Product Security team has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. While Fortinet makes no mention of the vulnerability being exploited in the wild, it's essential that users move quickly to apply the fixes...

January 5, 2026, Seattle, USA — ZAST.AI announced the completion of a $6 million Pre-A funding round. This investment came from the well-known investment firm Hillhouse Capital, bringing ZAST.AI's total funding close to $10 million. This marks a recognition from leading capital markets of a new solution: ending the era of high false positive rates in security tools and making every alert genuinely actionable. In 2025, ZAST.AI discovered hundreds of zero-day vulnerabilities across dozens of popular open-source projects. These findings were submitted through authoritative vulnerability platforms like VulDB, successfully resulting in 119 CVE assignments . These are not laboratory targets, but production-grade code supporting global businesses. Affected well-known projects include widely used components and frameworks such as Microsoft Azure SDK, Apache Struts XWork, Alibaba Nacos, Langfuse, Koa, node-formidable, and others. It was precisely within these widely adopted open-source p...

SmarterTools confirmed last week that the Warlock (aka Storm-2603) ransomware gang breached its network by exploiting an unpatched SmarterMail instance. The incident took place on January 29, 2026, when a mail server that was not updated to the latest version was compromised, the company's Chief Commercial Officer, Derek Curtis, said. "Prior to the breach, we had approximately 30 servers/VMs with SmarterMail installed throughout our network," Curtis explained . "Unfortunately, we were unaware of one VM, set up by an employee, that was not being updated. As a result, that mail server was compromised, which led to the breach." However, SmarterTools emphasized that the breach did not affect its website, shopping cart, My Account portal, and several other services, and that no business applications or account data were affected or compromised. About 12 Windows servers on the company's office network, as well as a secondary data center used for quality cont...

The Netherlands' Dutch Data Protection Authority (AP) and the Council for the Judiciary confirmed both agencies (Rvdr) have disclosed that their systems were impacted by cyber attacks that exploited the recently disclosed security flaws in Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM), according to a notice sent to the country's parliament on Friday. "On January 29, the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) was informed by the supplier of vulnerabilities in EPMM," the Dutch authorities said . "EPMM is used to manage mobile devices, apps, and content, including their security." "It is now known that work-related data of AP employees, such as names, business email addresses, and telephone numbers, have been accessed by unauthorized persons." The development comes as the European Commission also revealed that its central infrastructure managing mobile devices "identified traces" of a cyber attack that may have resulted in access to names and mo...

The Cyber Security Agency (CSA) of Singapore on Monday revealed that the China-nexus cyber espionage group known as UNC3886 targeted its telecommunications sector. "UNC3886 had launched a deliberate, targeted, and well-planned campaign against Singapore's telecommunications sector," CSA said . "All four of Singapore's major telecommunications operators ('telcos') – M1, SIMBA Telecom, Singtel, and StarHub – have been the target of attacks." The development comes more than six months after Singapore's Coordinating Minister for National Security, K. Shanmugam, accused UNC3886 of striking high-value strategic threat targets. UNC3886 is assessed to be active since at least 2022, targeting edge devices and virtualization technologies to obtain initial access. In July 2025, Sygnia disclosed details of a long-term cyber espionage campaign attributed to a threat cluster it tracks as Fire Ant and which shares tooling and targeting overlaps with UNC...

Microsoft has revealed that it observed a multi‑stage intrusion that involved the threat actors exploiting internet‑exposed SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD) instances to obtain initial access and move laterally across the organization's network to other high-value assets. That said, the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team said it's not clear whether the activity weaponized recently disclosed flaws (CVE-2025-40551, CVSS score: 9.8, and CVE-2025-40536, CVSS score: 8.1), or a previously patched vulnerability (CVE-2025-26399, CVSS score: 9.8). "Since the attacks occurred in December 2025 and on machines vulnerable to both the old and new set of CVEs at the same time, we cannot reliably confirm the exact CVE used to gain an initial foothold," the company said in a report published last week. While CVE-2025-40536 is a security control bypass vulnerability that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to gain access to certain restricted functionality, CVE-2025-...

Cyber threats are no longer coming from just malware or exploits. They’re showing up inside the tools, platforms, and ecosystems organizations use every day. As companies connect AI, cloud apps, developer tools, and communication systems, attackers are following those same paths. A clear pattern this week: attackers are abusing trust. Trusted updates, trusted marketplaces, trusted apps, even trusted AI workflows. Instead of breaking security controls head-on, they’re slipping into places that already have access. This recap brings together those signals — showing how modern attacks are blending technology abuse, ecosystem manipulation, and large-scale targeting into a single, expanding threat surface. ⚡ Threat of the Week OpenClaw announces VirusTotal Partnership — OpenClaw has announced a partnership with Google's VirusTotal malware scanning platform to scan skills that are being uploaded to ClawHub as part of a defense-in-depth approach to improve the security of the agen...

Why do SOC teams keep burning out and missing SLAs even after spending big on security tools? Routine triage piles up, senior specialists get dragged into basic validation, and MTTR climbs, while stealthy threats still find room to slip through. Top CISOs have realized the solution isn’t hiring more people or stacking yet another tool onto the workflow, but giving their teams faster, clearer behavior evidence from the start. Here’s how they’re breaking the cycle and speeding up response without extra hiring. Starting with Sandbox-First Investigation to Cut MTTR at the Source The fastest way to reduce MTTR is to remove the delays baked into investigations. Static verdicts and fragmented workflows force analysts to guess, escalate, and re-check the same alerts, which drives burnout and slows containment. That’s why top CISOs are making sandbox execution the first step . With an interactive sandbox like ANY.RUN , teams can detonate suspicious files and links in an isolated environme...

The threat actor known as Bloody Wolf has been linked to a campaign targeting Uzbekistan and Russia to infect systems with a remote access trojan known as NetSupport RAT . Cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky is tracking the activity under the moniker Stan Ghouls . The threat actor is known to be active since at least 2023, orchestrating spear-phishing attacks against manufacturing, finance, and IT sectors in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan. The campaign is estimated to have claimed about 50 victims in Uzbekistan, with 10 devices in Russia also impacted. Other infections have been identified to a lesser degree in Kazakhstan, Turkey, Serbia, and Belarus. Infection attempts have also been recorded on devices within government organizations, logistics companies, medical facilities, and educational institutions. "Given Stan Ghouls' targeting of financial institutions, we believe their primary motive is financial gain," Kaspersky noted. "That said, their hea...

Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to a "massive campaign" that has systematically targeted cloud native environments to set up malicious infrastructure for follow-on exploitation. The activity, observed around December 25, 2025, and described as "worm-driven," leveraged exposed Docker APIs, Kubernetes clusters, Ray dashboards, and Redis servers, along with the recently disclosed React2Shell (CVE-2025-55182, CVSS score: 10.0) vulnerability. The campaign has been attributed to a threat cluster known as TeamPCP (aka DeadCatx3, PCPcat, PersyPCP, and ShellForce). TeamPCP is known to be active since at least November 2025, with the first instance of Telegram activity dating back to July 30, 2025. The TeamPCP Telegram channel currently has over 700 members, where the group publishes stolen data from diverse victims across Canada, Serbia, South Korea, the U.A.E., and the U.S. Details of the threat actor were first documented by Beelzebub in December 2025...