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Meta on Tuesday announced it's adding Strict Account Settings on WhatsApp to secure certain users against advanced cyber attacks because of who they are and what they do. The feature, similar to Lockdown Mode in Apple iOS and Advanced Protection in Android, aims to protect individuals, such as journalists or public-facing figures, from sophisticated spyware by trading some functionality for enhanced security. Once this security mode is enabled, some of the account settings will be locked to the most restrictive options, while simultaneously blocking attachments and media from people not in a user's contacts. "This lockdown-style feature bolsters your security on WhatsApp even further with just a few taps by locking your account to the most restrictive settings like automatically blocking attachments and media from unknown senders, silencing calls from people you don't know, and restricting other settings that may limit how the app works," Meta said . The fe...

Indian government entities have been targeted in two campaigns undertaken by a threat actor that operates in Pakistan using previously undocumented tradecraft. The campaigns have been codenamed Gopher Strike and Sheet Attack by Zscaler ThreatLabz, which identified them in September 2025. "While these campaigns share some similarities with the Pakistan-linked Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group, APT36 , we assess with medium confidence that the activity identified during this analysis might originate from a new subgroup or another Pakistan-linked group operating in parallel," researchers Sudeep Singh and Yin Hong Chang said . Sheet Attack gets its name from the use of legitimate services like Google Sheets, Firebase, and email for command-and-control (C2). On the other hand, Gopher Strike is assessed to have leveraged phishing emails as a starting point to deliver PDF documents containing a blurred image that's superimposed by a seemingly harmless pop-up instructi...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new campaign that combines ClickFix -style fake CAPTCHAs with a signed Microsoft Application Virtualization ( App-V ) script to distribute an information stealer called Amatera . "Instead of launching PowerShell directly, the attacker uses this script to control how execution begins and to avoid more common, easily recognized execution paths," Blackpoint researchers Jack Patrick and Sam Decker said in a report published last week. In doing so, the idea is to transform the App-V script into a living-off-the-land (LotL) binary that proxies the execution of PowerShell through a trusted Microsoft component to conceal the malicious activity. The starting point of the attack is a fake CAPTCHA verification prompt that seeks to trick users into pasting and executing a malicious command on the Windows Run dialog. But here is where the attack diverges from traditional ClickFix attacks. The supplied command, rather than invokin...

Cybersecurity teams increasingly want to move beyond looking at threats and vulnerabilities in isolation. It's not only about what could go wrong (vulnerabilities) or who might attack (threats), but where they intersect in your actual environment to create real, exploitable exposure. Which exposures truly matter? Can attackers exploit them? Are our defenses effective? Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) can provide a useful approach to the cybersecurity teams in their journey towards unified threat/vulnerability or exposure management. What CTEM Really Means CTEM, as defined by Gartner, emphasizes a 'continuous' cycle of identifying, prioritizing, and remediating exploitable exposures across your attack surface, which improves your overall security posture as an outcome. It's not a one-off scan and a result delivered via a tool; it's an operational model built on five steps: Scoping – assess your threats and vulnerabilities and identify what's most important: assets, ...

Microsoft on Monday issued out-of-band security patches for a high-severity Microsoft Office zero-day vulnerability exploited in attacks. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-21509 , carries a CVSS score of 7.8 out of 10.0. It has been described as a security feature bypass in Microsoft Office. "Reliance on untrusted inputs in a security decision in Microsoft Office allows an unauthorized attacker to bypass a security feature locally," the tech giant said in an advisory. "This update addresses a vulnerability that bypasses OLE mitigations in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Office, which protect users from vulnerable COM/OLE controls." Successful exploitation of the flaw relies on an attacker sending a specially crafted Office file and convincing recipients to open it. It also noted that the Preview Pane is not an attack vector. The Windows maker said customers running Office 2021 and later will be automatically protected via a service-side change , but will b...

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in Grist‑Core , an open-source, self-hosted version of the Grist relational spreadsheet-database, that could result in remote code execution. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-24002 (CVSS score: 9.1), has been codenamed Cellbreak by Cyera Research Labs. "One malicious formula can turn a spreadsheet into a Remote Code Execution (RCE) beachhead," security researcher Vladimir Tokarev, who discovered the flaw, said . "This sandbox escape lets a formula author execute OS commands or run host‑runtime JavaScript, collapsing the boundary between 'cell logic' and host execution." Cellbreak is categorized as a case of Pyodide sandbox escape, the same kind of vulnerability that also recently impacted n8n ( CVE-2025-68668 , CVSS score: 9.9, aka N8scape). The vulnerability has been addressed in version 1.7.9, released on January 9, 2026. "A security review identified a vulnerability in the 'pyodide' ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a JScript -based command-and-control (C2) framework called PeckBirdy that has been put to use by China-aligned APT actors since 2023 to target multiple environments. The flexible framework has been put to use against Chinese gambling industries and malicious activities targeting Asian government entities and private organizations, according to Trend Micro. "PeckBirdy is a script-based framework which, while possessing advanced capabilities, is implemented using JScript, an old script language," researchers Ted Lee and Joseph C Chen said . "This is to ensure that the framework could be launched across different execution environments via LOLBins (living-off-the-land binaries)." The cybersecurity company said it identified the PeckBirdy script framework in 2023 after it observed multiple Chinese gambling websites being injected with malicious scripts, which are designed to download and execute the primary payload in order...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an ongoing campaign that's targeting Indian users with a multi-stage backdoor as part of a suspected cyber espionage campaign. The activity , per the eSentire Threat Response Unit (TRU), involves using phishing emails impersonating the Income Tax Department of India to trick victims into downloading a malicious archive, ultimately granting the threat actors persistent access to their machines for continuous monitoring and data exfiltration. The end goal of the sophisticated attack is to deploy a variant of a known banking trojan called Blackmoon (aka KRBanker) and a legitimate enterprise tool called SyncFuture TSM (Terminal Security Management) that's developed by Nanjing Zhongke Huasai Technology Co., Ltd , a Chinese company. The campaign has not been attributed to any known threat actor or group. "While marketed as a legitimate enterprise tool, it is repurposed in this campaign as a powerful, all-in-one espionage framework,...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two malicious Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extensions that are advertised as artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistants, but also harbor covert functionality to siphon developer data to China-based servers. The extensions, which have 1.5 million combined installs and are still available for download from the official Visual Studio Marketplace , are listed below - ChatGPT - 中文版 (ID: whensunset.chatgpt-china) - 1,340,869 installs ChatGPT - ChatMoss（CodeMoss）(ID: zhukunpeng.chat-moss) - 151,751 installs Koi Security said the extensions are functional and work as expected, but they also capture every file being opened and every source code modification to servers located in China without users' knowledge or consent. The campaign has been codenamed MaliciousCorgi. "Both contain identical malicious code -- the same spyware infrastructure running under different publisher names," security researcher Tuval ...

Security failures rarely arrive loudly. They slip in through trusted tools, half-fixed problems, and habits people stop questioning. This week's recap shows that pattern clearly. Attackers are moving faster than defenses, mixing old tricks with new paths. "Patched" no longer means safe, and every day, software keeps becoming the entry point. What follows is a set of small but telling signals. Short updates that, together, show how quickly risk is shifting and why details can't be ignored. ⚡ Threat of the Week Improperly Patched Flaw Exploited Again in Fortinet Firewalls — Fortinet confirmed that it's working to completely plug a FortiCloud SSO authentication bypass vulnerability following reports of fresh exploitation activity on fully-patched firewalls. "We have identified a number of cases where the exploit was to a device that had been fully upgraded to the latest release at the time of the attack, which suggested a new attack path," the company said. The activi...

If there's a constant in cybersecurity, it's that adversaries are always innovating. The rise of offensive AI is transforming attack strategies and making them harder to detect. Google's Threat Intelligence Group , recently reported on adversaries using Large Language Models (LLMs) to both conceal code and generate malicious scripts on the fly, letting malware shape-shift in real-time to evade conventional defenses. A deeper look at these novel attacks reveals both unprecedented sophistication and deception.  In November 2025, Anthropic reported on what it described as the first known "AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign." This operation featured AI integrated throughout the stages of attack, from initial access to exfiltration, which was executed largely autonomously by the AI itself.  Another recent trend concerns ClickFix-related attacks using steganography techniques (hiding malware within image files) that slipped past signature-based scans. Skillfully disguised ...

The North Korean threat actor known as Konni has been observed using PowerShell malware generated using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to target developers and engineering teams in the blockchain sector. The phishing campaign has targeted Japan, Australia, and India, highlighting the adversary's expansion of the targeting scope beyond South Korea , Russia , Ukraine , and European nations , Check Point Research said in a technical report published last week. Active since at least 2014, Konni is primarily known for its targeting of organizations and individuals in South Korea. It's also tracked as Earth Imp, Opal Sleet, Osmium, TA406, and Vedalia. In November 2025, the Genians Security Center (GSC) detailed the hacking group's targeting of Android devices by exploiting Google's asset tracking service, Find Hub, to remotely reset victim devices and erase personal data from them, signaling a new escalation of their tradecraft. As recently as this month, Konni ha...

A new multi-stage phishing campaign has been observed targeting users in Russia with ransomware and a remote access trojan called Amnesia RAT. "The attack begins with social engineering lures delivered via business-themed documents crafted to appear routine and benign," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin said in a technical breakdown published this week. "These documents and accompanying scripts serve as visual distractions, diverting victims to fake tasks or status messages while malicious activity runs silently in the background." The campaign stands out for a couple of reasons. First, it uses multiple public cloud services to distribute different kinds of payloads. While GitHub is mainly used to distribute scripts, binary payloads are staged on Dropbox. This separation complicates takedown efforts, effectively improving resilience. Another "defining characteristic" of the campaign, per Fortinet, is the operational abuse of defendnot to d...

The Russian nation-state hacking group known as Sandworm has been attributed to what has been described as the "largest cyber attack" targeting Poland's power system in the last week of December 2025. The attack was unsuccessful, the country's energy minister, Milosz Motyka, said last week. "The command of the cyberspace forces has diagnosed in the last days of the year the strongest attack on the energy infrastructure in years," Motyka was quoted as saying. According to a new report by ESET, the attack was the work of Sandworm, which deployed a previously undocumented wiper malware codenamed DynoWiper (aka Win32/KillFiles.NMO). The links to Sandworm are based on overlaps with prior wiper activity associated with the adversary, particularly in the aftermath of Russia's military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The Slovakian cybersecurity company, which identified the use of the wiper as part of the attempted disruptive attack aimed at the...

AI agents are accelerating how work gets done. They schedule meetings, access data, trigger workflows, write code, and take action in real time, pushing productivity beyond human speed across the enterprise. Then comes the moment every security team eventually hits: "Wait… who approved this?" Unlike users or applications, AI agents are often deployed quickly, shared broadly, and granted wide access permissions, making ownership, approval, and accountability difficult to trace. What was once a straightforward question is now surprisingly hard to answer. AI Agents Break Traditional Access Models AI agents are not just another type of user. They fundamentally differ from both humans and traditional service accounts, and those differences are what break existing access and approval models. Human access is built around clear intent. Permissions are tied to a role, reviewed periodically, and constrained by time and context. Service accounts, while non-human, are typ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added a critical security flaw affecting Broadcom VMware vCenter Server that was patched in June 2024 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2024-37079 (CVSS score: 9.8), which refers to a heap overflow in the implementation of the DCE/RPC protocol that could allow a bad actor with network access to vCenter Server to achieve remote code execution by sending a specially crafted network packet. It was resolved by Broadcom in June 2024, along with CVE-2024-37080, another heap overflow in the implementation of the DCE/RPC protocol that could lead to remote code execution. Chinese cybersecurity company QiAnXin LegendSec researchers Hao Zheng and Zibo Li were credited with discovering and reporting the issues. In a presentation at the Black Hat Asia security conference in April 2025, the researchers said ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added four security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2025-68645 (CVSS score: 8.8) - A PHP remote file inclusion vulnerability in Synacor Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) that could allow a remote attacker to craft requests to the "/h/rest" endpoint and allow inclusion of arbitrary files from the WebRoot directory without any authentication (Fixed in November 2025 with version 10.1.13 ) CVE-2025-34026 (CVSS score: 9.2) - An authentication bypass in the Versa Concerto SD-WAN orchestration platform that could allow an attacker to access administrative endpoints (Fixed in April 2025 with version 12.2.1 GA ) CVE-2025-31125 (CVSS score: 5.3) - An improper access control vulnerability in Vite Vitejs that could allow contents of arbitrary files to be returned to the bro...

Fortinet has officially confirmed that it's working to completely plug a FortiCloud SSO authentication bypass vulnerability following reports of fresh exploitation activity on fully-patched firewalls. "In the last 24 hours, we have identified a number of cases where the exploit was to a device that had been fully upgraded to the latest release at the time of the attack, which suggested a new attack path," Fortinet Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Carl Windsor said in a Thursday post. The activity essentially mounts to a bypass for patches put in place by the network security vendor to address CVE-2025-59718 and CVE-2025-59719 , which could allow unauthenticated bypass of SSO login authentication via crafted SAML messages if the FortiCloud SSO feature is enabled on affected devices. The issues were originally addressed by Fortinet last month. However, earlier this week, reports emerged of renewed activity in which malicious SSO logins on FortiGate appliances...

TikTok on Friday officially announced that it formed a joint venture that will allow the hugely popular video-sharing application to continue operating in the U.S. The new venture, named TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by U.S. President Donald Trump in September 2025, the platform said. The new deal will see TikTok's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, selling the majority of its stake to a group of majority-American investors, while it will retain a 19.9% stake in the business. The Chinese government hasn't commented publicly on the agreement. "The majority American owned Joint Venture will operate under defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for U.S. users," it added. "It will safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem through robust trust and safety policies and content moderation w...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new dual-vector campaign that leverages stolen credentials to deploy legitimate Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software for persistent remote access to compromised hosts. "Instead of deploying custom viruses, attackers are bypassing security perimeters by weaponizing the necessary IT tools that administrators trust," KnowBe4 Threat Labs researchers Jeewan Singh Jalal, Prabhakaran Ravichandhiran, and Anand Bodke said . "By stealing a 'skeleton key' to the system, they turn legitimate Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software into a persistent backdoor." The attack unfolds in two distinct waves, where the threat actors leverage fake invitation notifications to steal victim credentials, and then leverage those pilfered credentials to deploy RMM tools to establish persistent access. The bogus emails are disguised as an invitation from a legitimate platform called Greenvelope, and aim to tri...