linux | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Telecommunications organizations in Southeast Asia have been targeted by a state-sponsored threat actor known as CL-STA-0969 to facilitate remote control over compromised networks. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said it observed multiple incidents in the region, including one aimed at critical telecommunications infrastructure between February and November 2024. The attacks are characterized by the use of several tools to enable remote access, as well as the deployment of Cordscan, which can collect location data from mobile devices. However, the cybersecurity company said it found no evidence of data exfiltration from the networks and systems it investigated. Nor were any efforts made by the attackers to track or communicate with target devices within mobile networks. "The threat actor behind CL-STA-0969 maintained high operational security (OPSEC) and employed various defense evasion techniques to avoid detection," security researchers Renzon Cruz, Nicolas Bareil, and Nav...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a previously undocumented Linux backdoor dubbed Plague that has managed to evade detection for a year. "The implant is built as a malicious PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module), enabling attackers to silently bypass system authentication and gain persistent SSH access," Nextron Systems researcher Pierre-Henri Pezier said . Pluggable Authentication Modules refers to a suite of shared libraries used to manage user authentication to applications and services in Linux and UNIX-based systems. Given that PAM modules are loaded into privileged authentication processes, a rogue PAM can enable theft of user credentials, bypass authentication checks, and remain undetected by security tools. The cybersecurity company said it uncovered multiple Plague artifacts uploaded to VirusTotal since July 29, 2024, with none of them detected by antimalware engines as malicious. What's more, the presence of several samples signals active developme...

The financially motivated threat actor known as UNC2891 has been observed targeting Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) infrastructure using a 4G-equipped Raspberry Pi as part of a covert attack. The cyber-physical attack involved the adversary leveraging their physical access to install the Raspberry Pi device and have it connected directly to the same network switch as the ATM, effectively placing it within the target bank's network, Group-IB said. It's currently not known how this access was obtained. "The Raspberry Pi was equipped with a 4G modem, allowing remote access over mobile data," security researcher Nam Le Phuong said in a Wednesday report. "Using the TINYSHELL backdoor, the attacker established an outbound command-and-control (C2) channel via a Dynamic DNS domain. This setup enabled continuous external access to the ATM network, completely bypassing perimeter firewalls and traditional network defenses." UNC2891 was first documented by Googl...

Python supply chain attacks are surging in 2025. Join our webinar to learn how to secure your code, dependencies, and runtime with modern tools and strategies.

Threat actors have been observed exploiting a now-patched critical SAP NetWeaver flaw to deliver the Auto-Color backdoor in an attack targeting a U.S.-based chemicals company in April 2025. "Over the course of three days, a threat actor gained access to the customer's network, attempted to download several suspicious files and communicated with malicious infrastructure linked to Auto-Color malware," Darktrace said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-31324 , a severe unauthenticated file upload bug in SAP NetWeaver that enables remote code execution (RCE). It was patched by SAP in April. Auto-Color, first documented by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 earlier this February, functions akin to a remote access trojan, enabling remote access to compromised Linux hosts. It was observed in attacks targeting universities and government organizations in North America and Asia between November and December 2024. The malware has been...

Threat hunters have disclosed two different malware campaigns that have targeted vulnerabilities and misconfigurations across cloud environments to deliver cryptocurrency miners. The threat activity clusters have been codenamed Soco404 and Koske by cloud security firms Wiz and Aqua, respectively. Soco404 "targets both Linux and Windows systems, deploying platform-specific malware," Wiz researchers Maor Dokhanian, Shahar Dorfman, and Avigayil Mechtinger said . "They use process masquerading to disguise malicious activity as legitimate system processes." The activity is a reference to the fact that payloads are embedded in fake 404 HTML pages hosted on websites built using Google Sites. The bogus sites have since been taken down by Google. Wiz posited that the campaign, which has been previously observed going after Apache Tomcat services with weak credentials, as well as susceptible Apache Struts and Atlassian Confluence servers using the Sysrv botnet, is p...

The threat actor behind the exploitation of vulnerable Craft Content Management System (CMS) instances has shifted its tactics to target Magento CMS and misconfigured Docker instances. The activity has been attributed to a threat actor tracked as Mimo (aka Hezb), which has a long history of leveraging N-day security flaws in various web applications to deploy cryptocurrency miners. "Although Mimo's primary motivation remains financial, through cryptocurrency mining and bandwidth monetization, the sophistication of their recent operations suggests potential preparation for more lucrative criminal activities," Datadog Security Labs said in a report published this week. Mimo's exploitation of CVE-2025-32432, a critical security flaw in Craft CMS, for cryptojacking and proxyjacking was documented by Sekoia in May 2025. Newly observed attack chains associated with the threat actor involve the abuse of undetermined PHP-FPM vulnerabilities in Magento e-commerce inst...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a critical vulnerability in the open-source mcp-remote project that could result in the execution of arbitrary operating system (OS) commands. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-6514 , carries a CVSS score of 9.6 out of 10.0. "The vulnerability allows attackers to trigger arbitrary OS command execution on the machine running mcp-remote when it initiates a connection to an untrusted MCP server, posing a significant risk to users – a full system compromise," Or Peles, JFrog Vulnerability Research Team Leader, said . Mcp-remote is a tool that sprang forth following Anthropic's release of Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open-source framework that standardizes the way large language model (LLM) applications integrate and share data with external data sources and services. It acts as a local proxy, enabling MCP clients like Claude Desktop to communicate with remote MCP servers, as opposed to running them locally on the same...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a malware campaign that's targeting security flaws in TBK digital video recorders (DVRs) and Four-Faith routers to rope the devices into a new botnet called RondoDox . The vulnerabilities in question include CVE-2024-3721 , a medium-severity command injection vulnerability affecting TBK DVR-4104 and DVR-4216 DVRs, and CVE-2024-12856 , an operating system (OS) command injection bug affecting Four-Faith router models F3x24 and F3x36. Many of these devices are installed in critical environments like retail stores, warehouses, and small offices, where they often go unmonitored for years. That makes them ideal targets—easy to exploit, hard to detect, and usually exposed directly to the internet through outdated firmware or misconfigured ports. It's worth noting that all three security defects have been repeatedly weaponized by threat actors to deploy different Mirai botnet variants in recent months. "Both [the security f...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed two security flaws in the Sudo command-line utility for Linux and Unix-like operating systems that could enable local attackers to escalate their privileges to root on susceptible machines. A brief description of the vulnerabilities is below - CVE-2025-32462 (CVSS score: 2.8) - Sudo before 1.9.17p1, when used with a sudoers file that specifies a host that is neither the current host nor ALL, allows listed users to execute commands on unintended machines CVE-2025-32463 (CVSS score: 9.3) - Sudo before 1.9.17p1 allows local users to obtain root access because " /etc/nsswitch.conf " from a user-controlled directory is used with the --chroot option Sudo is a command-line tool that allows low-privileged users to run commands as another user, such as the superuser. By executing instructions with sudo, the idea is to enforce the principle of least privilege, permitting users to carry out administrative actions without the need for el...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered two local privilege escalation (LPE) flaws that could be exploited to gain root privileges on machines running major Linux distributions. The vulnerabilities , discovered by Qualys, are listed below - CVE-2025-6018 - LPE from unprivileged to allow_active in SUSE 15's Pluggable Authentication Modules ( PAM ) CVE-2025-6019 - LPE from allow_active to root in libblockdev via the udisks daemon "These modern 'local-to-root' exploits have collapsed the gap between an ordinary logged-in user and a full system takeover," Saeed Abbasi, Senior Manager at Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU), said . "By chaining legitimate services such as udisks loop-mounts and PAM/environment quirks, attackers who own any active GUI or SSH session can vault across polkit's allow_active trust zone and emerge as root in seconds." The cybersecurity company said CVE-2025-6018 is present in the PAM configuration of openSUSE Leap ...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday placed a security flaw impacting the Linux kernel in its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, stating it has been actively exploited in the wild. The vulnerability, CVE-2023-0386 (CVSS score: 7.8), is an improper ownership bug in the Linux kernel that could be exploited to escalate privileges on susceptible systems. It was patched in early 2023. "Linux kernel contains an improper ownership management vulnerability, where unauthorized access to the execution of the setuid file with capabilities was found in the Linux kernel's OverlayFS subsystem in how a user copies a capable file from a nosuid mount into another mount," the agency said. "This uid mapping bug allows a local user to escalate their privileges on the system." It's currently not known how the security flaw is being exploited in the wild. In a report published in May 2023, Datadog said the vulnerability...

Threat hunters are calling attention to a new variant of a remote access trojan (RAT) called Chaos RAT that has been used in recent attacks targeting Windows and Linux systems. According to findings from Acronis, the malware artifact may have been distributed by tricking victims into downloading a network troubleshooting utility for Linux environments. "Chaos RAT is an open-source RAT written in Golang, offering cross-platform support for both Windows and Linux systems," security researchers Santiago Pontiroli, Gabor Molnar, and Kirill Antonenko said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Inspired by popular frameworks such as Cobalt Strike and Sliver, Chaos RAT provides an administrative panel where users can build payloads, establish sessions, and control compromised machines." While work on the "remote administration tool" started way back in 2017, it did not attract attention until December 2022 , when it was put to use in a malicious campaig...

Two information disclosure flaws have been identified in apport and systemd-coredump , the core dump handlers in Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Fedora, according to the Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU). Tracked as CVE-2025-5054 and CVE-2025-4598 , both vulnerabilities are race condition bugs that could enable a local attacker to obtain access to access sensitive information. Tools like Apport and systemd-coredump are designed to handle crash reporting and core dumps in Linux systems. "These race conditions allow a local attacker to exploit a SUID program and gain read access to the resulting core dump," Saeed Abbasi, manager of product at Qualys TRU, said . A brief description of the two flaws is below - CVE-2025-5054 (CVSS score: 4.7) - A race condition in Canonical apport package up to and including 2.32.0 that allows a local attacker to leak sensitive information via PID-reuse by leveraging namespaces CVE-2025-4598 (CVSS score: 4.7) - A race condition i...

Embedded Linux-based Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become the target of a new botnet dubbed PumaBot . Written in Go, the botnet is designed to conduct brute-force attacks against SSH instances to expand in size and scale and deliver additional malware to the infected hosts. "Rather than scanning the internet, the malware retrieves a list of targets from a command-and-control (C2) server and attempts to brute force SSH credentials," Darktrace said in an analysis shared with The Hacker News. "Upon gaining access, it receives remote commands and establishes persistence using system service files." The botnet malware is designed to obtain initial access via successfully brute-forcing SSH credentials across a list of harvested IP addresses with open SSH ports. The list of IP addresses to target is retrieved from an external server ("ssh.ddos-cc[.]org"). As part of its brute-force attempts, the malware also performs various checks to determine if...

Misconfigured Docker API instances have become the target of a new malware campaign that transforms them into a cryptocurrency mining botnet. The attacks, designed to mine for Dero currency, is notable for its worm-like capabilities to propagate the malware to other exposed Docker instances and rope them into an ever-growing horde of mining bots. Kaspersky said it observed an unidentified threat actor gaining initial access to a running containerized infrastructure by exploiting an insecurely published Docker API, and then weaponizing that access to create the illicit cryptojacking network. "This led to the running containers being compromised and new ones being created not only to hijack the victim's resources for cryptocurrency mining but also to launch external attacks to propagate to other networks," security researcher Amged Wageh said . The attack chain is realized through two components: A propagation malware "nginx" that scans the internet for expos...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered three malicious Go modules that include obfuscated code to fetch next-stage payloads that can irrevocably overwrite a Linux system's primary disk and render it unbootable. The names of the packages are listed below - github[.]com/truthfulpharm/prototransform github[.]com/blankloggia/go-mcp github[.]com/steelpoor/tlsproxy "Despite appearing legitimate, these modules contained highly obfuscated code designed to fetch and execute remote payloads," Socket researcher Kush Pandya said . The packages are designed to check if the operating system on which they are being run is Linux, and if so retrieve a next-stage payload from a remote server using wget. The payload is a destructive shell script that overwrites the entire primary disk (" /dev/sda ") with zeroes, effectively preventing the machine from booting up. "This destructive method ensures no data recovery tool or forensic process can restore the data, as...