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Cybersecurity researchers have detailed two novel methods that can be used to disrupt cryptocurrency mining botnets. The methods take advantage of the design of various common mining topologies in order to shut down the mining process , Akamai said in a new report published today. "We developed two techniques by leveraging the mining topologies and pool policies that enable us to reduce a cryptominer botnet's effectiveness to the point of completely shutting it down, which forces the attacker to make radical changes to their infrastructure or even abandon the entire campaign," security researcher Maor Dahan said . The techniques, the web infrastructure company said, hinge on exploiting the Stratum mining protocol such that it causes an attacker's mining proxy or wallet to be banned, effectively disrupting the operation. The first of the two approaches, dubbed bad shares, entails banning the mining proxy from the network, which, in turn, results in the shutdow...

For many organizations, Active Directory (AD) service accounts are quiet afterthoughts, persisting in the background long after their original purpose has been forgotten. To make matters worse, these orphaned service accounts (created for legacy applications, scheduled tasks, automation scripts, or test environments) are often left active with non-expiring or stale passwords. It's no surprise that AD service accounts often evade routine security oversight. Security teams, overwhelmed by daily demands and lingering technical debt, often overlook service accounts (unlinked to individual users and rarely scrutinized) allowing them to quietly fade into the background. However, this obscurity makes them prime targets for attackers seeking stealthy ways into the network. And left unchecked, forgotten service accounts can serve as silent gateways for attack paths and lateral movement across enterprise environments. In this article, we'll examine the risks that forgotten AD service accounts...

Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to a new campaign that's actively exploiting a recently disclosed critical security flaw in Langflow to deliver the Flodrix botnet malware. "Attackers use the vulnerability to execute downloader scripts on compromised Langflow servers, which in turn fetch and install the Flodrix malware," Trend Micro researchers Aliakbar Zahravi, Ahmed Mohamed Ibrahim, Sunil Bharti, and Shubham Singh said in a technical report published today. The activity entails the exploitation of CVE-2025-3248 (CVSS score: 9.8), a missing authentication vulnerability in Langflow , a Python-based "visual framework" for building artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Successful exploitation of the flaw could enable unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code via crafted HTTP requests. It was patched by Langflow in March 2025 with version 1.3.0. Last month, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) flagg...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added a high-severity security flaw in TP-Link wireless routers to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation.  The vulnerability in question is CVE-2023-33538 (CVSS score: 8.8), a command injection bug that could result in the execution of arbitrary system commands when processing the ssid1 parameter in a specially crafted HTTP GET request. "TP-Link TL-WR940N V2/V4, TL-WR841N V8/V10, and TL-WR740N V1/V2 contain a command injection vulnerability via the component /userRpm/WlanNetworkRpm," the agency said. CISA has also warned that there is a possibility that affected products could be end-of-life (EoL) and/or end-of-service (EoS), urging users to discontinue their use if no mitigations are available. There is currently no public information available about how the shortcoming is being exploited in the wild, the scale of the attacks, and who is b...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a "large-scale campaign" that has been observed compromising legitimate websites with malicious JavaScript injections. According to Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, these malicious injects are obfuscated using JSFuck , which refers to an "esoteric and educational programming style" that uses only a limited set of characters to write and execute JavaScript code. The cybersecurity company has given the technique an alternate name JSFireTruck owing to the profanity involved. "Multiple websites have been identified with injected malicious JavaScript that uses JSFireTruck obfuscation, which is composed primarily of the symbols [, ], +, $, {, and }," security researchers Hardik Shah, Brad Duncan, and Pranay Kumar Chhaparwal said . "The code's obfuscation hides its true purpose, hindering analysis." Further analysis has determined that the injected code is designed to check the website referrer (...

Threat intelligence firm GreyNoise has warned of a "coordinated brute-force activity" targeting Apache Tomcat Manager interfaces. The company said it observed a surge in brute-force and login attempts on June 5, 2025, an indication that they could be deliberate efforts to "identify and access exposed Tomcat services at scale." To that end, 295 unique IP addresses have been found to be engaged in brute-force attempts against Tomcat Manager on that date, with all of them classified as malicious. Over the past 24 hours, 188 unique IPs have been recorded, a majority of them located in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, the Netherlands, and Singapore. In a similar vein, 298 unique IPs were observed conducting login attempts against Tomcat Manager instances. Of the 246 IP addresses flagged in the last 24 hours, all of them are categorized as malicious and originate from the same locations. Targets of these attempts include the United States, the Uni...

A now-patched critical security flaw in the Wazur Server is being exploited by threat actors to drop two different Mirai botnet variants and use them to conduct distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. Akamai, which first discovered the exploitation efforts in late March 2025, said the malicious campaign targets CVE-2025-24016 (CVSS score: 9.9), an unsafe deserialization vulnerability that allows for remote code execution on Wazuh servers. The security defect , which affects all versions of the server software including and above 4.4.0, was addressed in February 2025 with the release of 4.9.1. A proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit was publicly disclosed around the same time the patches were released. The problem is rooted in the Wazuh API, where parameters in the DistributedAPI are serialized as JSON and deserialized using "as_wazuh_object" in the framework/wazuh/core/cluster/common.py file. A threat actor could weaponize the vulnerability by injecting malicious JSON...

A critical infrastructure entity within Ukraine was targeted by a previously unseen data wiper malware named PathWiper, according to new findings from Cisco Talos. "The attack was instrumented via a legitimate endpoint administration framework, indicating that the attackers likely had access to the administrative console, that was then used to issue malicious commands and deploy PathWiper across connected endpoints," researchers Jacob Finn, Dmytro Korzhevin, and Asheer Malhotra said in an analysis published Thursday. The attack is assessed to be the work of a Russia-nexus advanced persistent threat (APT) actor based on the tradecraft observed and the overlapping capabilities with destructive malware used in attacks against Ukraine. Talos said the commands issued by the administrative tool's console were received by its client running on the victim endpoints and then executed as a batch (BAT) file. The BAT file, in turn, consisted of a command to run a malicious Visu...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged several popular Google Chrome extensions that have been found to transmit data in HTTP and hard-code secrets in their code, exposing users to privacy and security risks. "Several widely used extensions [...] unintentionally transmit sensitive data over simple HTTP," Yuanjing Guo, a security researcher in the Symantec's Security Technology and Response team, said . "By doing so, they expose browsing domains, machine IDs, operating system details, usage analytics, and even uninstall information, in plaintext." The fact that the network traffic is unencrypted also means that they are susceptible to adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attacks, allowing malicious actors on the same network such as a public Wi-Fi to intercept and, even worse, modify this data, which could lead to far more serious consequences. The list of identified extensions are below - SEMRush Rank (extension ID: idbhoeaiokcojcgappfigpifhpkjgmab) and P...

The threat actor known as Bitter has been assessed to be a state-backed hacking group that's tasked with gathering intelligence that aligns with the interests of the Indian government. That's according to new findings jointly published by Proofpoint and Threatray in an exhaustive two-part analysis. "Their diverse toolset shows consistent coding patterns across malware families, particularly in system information gathering and string obfuscation," researchers Abdallah Elshinbary, Jonas Wagner, Nick Attfield, and Konstantin Klinger said. Bitter, also known as APT-C-08, APT-Q-37, Hazy Tiger, Orange Yali, T-APT-17, and TA397, has a history of focusing primarily on South Asian entities , with select intrusions also targeting China, Saudi Arabia, and South America. In December 2024, evidence emerged of the threat actor's targeting of Turkey using malware families such as WmRAT and MiyaRAT, indicating a gradual geographical expansion. Stating that Bitter fr...

Cisco has released security patches to address a critical security flaw impacting the Identity Services Engine (ISE) that, if successfully exploited, could allow unauthenticated actors to carry out malicious actions on susceptible systems. The security defect, tracked as CVE-2025-20286 , carries a CVSS score of 9.9 out of 10.0. It has been described as a static credential vulnerability. "A vulnerability in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) cloud deployments of Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to access sensitive data, execute limited administrative operations, modify system configurations, or disrupt services within the impacted systems," the company said in an advisory. The networking equipment maker, which credited Kentaro Kawane of GMO Cybersecurity for reporting the flaw, noted it's aware of the existence of a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit. There is no evidence th...

Google has revealed that it will no longer trust digital certificates issued by Chunghwa Telecom and Netlock citing "patterns of concerning behavior observed over the past year." The changes are expected to be introduced in Chrome 139, which is scheduled for public release in early August 2025. The current major version is 137.  The update will affect all Transport Layer Security (TLS) server authentication certificates issued by the two Certificate Authorities (CAs) after July 31, 2025, 11:59:59 p.m. UTC. Certificates issued before that date will not be impacted. Chunghwa Telecom is Taiwan's largest integrated telecom service provider and Netlock is a Hungarian company that offers digital identity, electronic signature, time stamping, and authentication solutions. "Over the past several months and years, we have observed a pattern of compliance failures, unmet improvement commitments, and the absence of tangible, measurable progress in response to publicly di...

The evolution of cyber threats has forced organizations across all industries to rethink their security strategies. As attackers become more sophisticated — leveraging encryption, living-off-the-land techniques, and lateral movement to evade traditional defenses — security teams are finding more threats wreaking havoc before they can be detected. Even after an attack has been identified, it can be hard for security teams to prove to auditors that they have fully mitigated the issues that allowed the attackers in. Security teams worldwide have prioritized endpoint detection and response (EDR), which has become so effective that threat actors have changed their tactics to avoid attack vectors protected by host-based defenses. These advanced threats are particularly vexing for critical infrastructure providers in financial services , energy and utilities , transportation , and government agencies that may have proprietary systems that cannot be protected by traditional endpoint securi...