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Welcome to your weekly roundup of cyber news, where every headline gives you a peek into the world of online battles. This week, we look at a huge crypto theft, reveal some sneaky AI scam tricks, and discuss big changes in data protection. Let these stories spark your interest and help you understand the changing threats in our digital world. ⚡ Threat of the Week Lazarus Group Linked to Record-Setting $1.5 Billion Crypto Theft — The North Korean Lazarus Group has been linked to a "sophisticated" attack that led to the theft of over $1.5 billion worth of cryptocurrency from one of Bybit's cold wallets, making it the largest ever single crypto heist in history. Bybit said it detected unauthorized activity within one of our Ethereum (ETH) Cold Wallets during a planned routine transfer process on February 21, 2025, at around 12:30 p.m. UTC. The incident makes it the biggest-ever cryptocurrency heist reported to date, dwarfing that of Ronin Network ($624 million), Poly N...

Cryptocurrency exchange Bybit on Friday revealed that a "sophisticated" attack led to the theft of over $1.5 billion worth of cryptocurrency from one of its Ethereum cold (offline) wallets, making it the largest ever single crypto heist in history. "The incident occurred when our ETH multisig cold wallet executed a transfer to our warm wallet. Unfortunately, this transaction was manipulated through a sophisticated attack that masked the signing interface, displaying the correct address while altering the underlying smart contract logic," Bybit said in a post on X. "As a result, the attacker was able to gain control of the affected ETH cold wallet and transfer its holdings to an unidentified address." In a separate statement posted on the social media platform, Bybit's CEO Ben Zhou emphasized that all other cold wallets are secure. The company further said it has reported the case to the appropriate authorities. While there is no official conf...

Cisco has confirmed that a Chinese threat actor known as Salt Typhoon gained access by likely abusing a known security flaw tracked as CVE-2018-0171 , and by obtaining legitimate victim login credentials as part of a targeted campaign aimed at major U.S. telecommunications companies. "The threat actor then demonstrated their ability to persist in target environments across equipment from multiple vendors for extended periods, maintaining access in one instance for over three years," Cisco Talos said , describing the hackers as highly sophisticated and well-funded. "The long timeline of this campaign suggests a high degree of coordination, planning, and patience — standard hallmarks of advanced persistent threat (APT) and state-sponsored actors." The networking equipment major said it found no evidence that other known security bugs have been weaponized by the hacking crew, contrary to a recent report from Recorded Future that revealed exploitation attempts inv...

A malware campaign distributing the XLoader malware has been observed using the DLL side-loading technique by making use of a legitimate application associated with the Eclipse Foundation. "The legitimate application used in the attack, jarsigner, is a file created during the installation of the IDE package distributed by the Eclipse Foundation," the AhnLab SEcurity Intelligence Center (ASEC) said . "It is a tool for signing JAR (Java Archive) files." The South Korean cybersecurity firm said the malware is propagated in the form of a compressed ZIP archive that includes the legitimate executable as well as the DLLs that are sideloaded to launch the malware - Documents2012.exe, a renamed version of the legitimate jarsigner.exe binary, jli.dll, a DLL file that's modified by the threat actor to decrypt and inject concrt140e.dll, and concrt140e.dll, the XLoader payload The attack chain crosses over to the malicious phase when "Documents2012.exe...

Multiple Russia-aligned threat actors have been observed targeting individuals of interest via the privacy-focused messaging app Signal to gain unauthorized access to their accounts. "The most novel and widely used technique underpinning Russian-aligned attempts to compromise Signal accounts is the abuse of the app's legitimate 'linked devices' feature that enables Signal to be used on multiple devices concurrently," the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said in a report. In the attacks spotted by the tech giant's threat intelligence teams, the threat actors, including one it's tracking as UNC5792, have resorted to malicious QR codes that, when scanned, will link a victim's account to an actor-controlled Signal instance. As a result, future messages get delivered synchronously to both the victim and the threat actor in real-time, thereby granting threat actors a persistent way to eavesdrop on the victim's conversations. Google said UAC-...

A new variant of the Snake Keylogger malware is being used to actively target Windows users located in China, Turkey, Indonesia, Taiwan, and Spain. Fortinet FortiGuard Labs said the new version of the malware has been behind over 280 million blocked infection attempts worldwide since the start of the year. "Typically delivered through phishing emails containing malicious attachments or links, Snake Keylogger is designed to steal sensitive information from popular web browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Firefox by logging keystrokes, capturing credentials, and monitoring the clipboard," security researcher Kevin Su said . Its other features allow it to exfiltrate the stolen information to an attacker-controlled server using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) and Telegram bots, allowing the threat actors to access stolen credentials and other sensitive data." What's notable about the latest set of attacks is that it makes use of the AutoIt scripting language ...

Users who are on the lookout for popular games were lured into downloading trojanized installers that led to the deployment of a cryptocurrency miner on compromised Windows hosts. The large-scale activity has been codenamed StaryDobry by Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky, which first detected it on December 31, 2024. It lasted for a month. Targets of the campaign include individuals and businesses worldwide, with Kaspersky's telemetry finding higher infection concentrations in Russia, Brazil, Germany, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. "This approach helped the threat actors make the most out of the miner implant by targeting powerful gaming machines capable of sustaining mining activity," researchers Tatyana Shishkova and Kirill Korchemny said in an analysis published Tuesday. The XMRig cryptocurrency miner campaign employs popular simulator and physics games like BeamNG.drive, Garry's Mod, Dyson Sphere Program, Universe Sandbox, and Plutocracy as lures to initi...

Microsoft is calling attention to an emerging threat cluster it calls Storm-2372 that has been attributed to a new set of cyber attacks aimed at a variety of sectors since August 2024. The attacks have targeted government, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), information technology (IT) services and technology, defense, telecommunications, health, higher education, and energy/oil and gas sectors in Europe, North America, Africa, and the Middle East.  The threat actor, assessed with medium confidence to be aligned with Russian interests, victimology, and tradecraft, has been observed targeting users via messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and Microsoft Teams by falsely claiming to be a prominent person relevant to the target in an attempt to build trust. "The attacks use a specific phishing technique called 'device code phishing' that tricks users to log into productivity apps while Storm-2372 actors capture the information from the log in (tokens) that they can us...

A subgroup within the infamous Russian state-sponsored hacking group known as Sandworm has been attributed to a multi-year initial access operation dubbed BadPilot that stretched across the globe. "This subgroup has conducted globally diverse compromises of Internet-facing infrastructure to enable Seashell Blizzard to persist on high-value targets and support tailored network operations," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a new report shared with The Hacker News ahead of publication. The geographical spread of the initial access subgroup's targets include the whole of North America, several countries in Europe, as well as others, including Angola, Argentina, Australia, China, Egypt, India, Kazakhstan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkey, and Uzbekistan. The development marks a significant expansion of the hacking group's victimology footprint over the past three years, which is otherwise known to be concentrated around Eastern Europe - 2022: Energy...

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as Kimsuky has been observed using a new tactic that involves deceiving targets into running PowerShell as an administrator and then instructing them to paste and run malicious code provided by them. "To execute this tactic, the threat actor masquerades as a South Korean government official and over time builds rapport with a target before sending a spear-phishing email with an [sic] PDF attachment," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a series of posts shared on X. To read the purported PDF document, victims are persuaded to click a URL containing a list of steps to register their Windows system. The registration link urges them to launch PowerShell as an administrator and copy/paste the displayed code snippet into the terminal, and execute it. Should the victim follow through, the malicious code downloads and installs a browser-based remote desktop tool, along with a certificate file with a hardcoded PIN from a rem...

The North Korea-linked nation-state hacking group known as Kimsuky has been observed conducting spear-phishing attacks to deliver an information stealer malware named forceCopy, according to new findings from the AhnLab Security Intelligence Center (ASEC). The attacks commence with phishing emails containing a Windows shortcut (LNK) file that's disguised as a Microsoft Office or PDF document. Opening this attachment triggers the execution of PowerShell or mshta.exe, a legitimate Microsoft binary designed to run HTML Application (HTA) files, that are responsible for downloading and running next-stage payloads from an external source. The South Korean cybersecurity company said the attacks culminated in the deployment of a known trojan dubbed PEBBLEDASH and a custom version of an open-source Remote Desktop utility named RDP Wrapper . Also delivered as part of the attacks is a proxy malware that allows the threat actors to establish persistent communications with an external ...

Over 57 distinct threat actors with ties to China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia have been observed using artificial intelligence (AI) technology powered by Google to further enable their malicious cyber and information operations. "Threat actors are experimenting with Gemini to enable their operations, finding productivity gains but not yet developing novel capabilities," Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said in a new report. "At present, they primarily use AI for research, troubleshooting code, and creating and localizing content." Government-backed attackers, otherwise known as Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups, have sought to use its tools to bolster multiple phases of the attack cycle, including coding and scripting tasks, payload development, gathering information about potential targets, researching publicly known vulnerabilities, and enabling post-compromise activities, such as defense evasion. Describing Iranian APT actors as the "he...

An international law enforcement operation has dismantled the domains associated with various online platforms linked to cybercrime such as Cracked, Nulled, Sellix, and StarkRDP. The effort, which took place between January 28 and 30, 2025, targeted the following domains - www.cracked.io www.nulled.to www.mysellix.io www.sellix.io www.starkrdp.io Visitors to these websites are now greeted by a seizure banner that says they were confiscated as part of Operation Talent that involved authorities from Australia, France, Greece, Italy, Romania, Spain, and the United States, along with Europol. "This website, as well as the information on the customers and victims of the website, has been seized by international law enforcement partners," the message reads. Operational since at 2015 and 2018, both Nulled and Cracked have been used to peddle various hack tools, such as ScrubCrypt, a malware obfuscation engine that has been observed delivering stealer malware in the pas...

The North Korean threat actor known as the Lazarus Group has been observed leveraging a "web-based administrative platform" to oversee its command-and-control (C2) infrastructure, giving the adversary the ability to centrally supervise all aspects of their campaigns. "Each C2 server hosted a web-based administrative platform, built with a React application and a Node.js API," SecurityScorecard's STRIKE team said in a new report shared with The Hacker News. "This administrative layer was consistent across all the C2 servers analyzed, even as the attackers varied their payloads and obfuscation techniques to evade detection." The hidden framework has been described as a comprehensive system and a hub that allows attackers to organize and manage exfiltrated data, maintain oversight of their compromised hosts, and handle payload delivery. The web-based admin panel has been identified in connection with a supply chain attack campaign dubbed Operation ...