network security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

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...

For many organizations, identity security appears to be under control. On paper, everything checks out. But new research from Cerby, based on insights from over 500 IT and security leaders, reveals a different reality: too much still depends on people—not systems—to function. In fact, fewer than 4% of security teams have fully automated their core identity workflows . Core workflows, like enrolling in Multi Factor Authentication (MFA), keeping credentials secure and up to date, and revoking access the moment someone leaves—are often manual, inconsistent, and vulnerable to error. And when security execution relies on memory or follow-up, gaps appear fast. Human error remains one of the biggest threats to enterprise security. Verizon's 2025 Data Breach report found that the human element was involved in 60% of breaches. The same manual missteps that led to breaches a decade ago still expose identity systems today. Cerby's 2025 Identity Automation Gap research report shows just how wi...

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...

Breaking Out of the Security Mosh Pit When Jason Elrod, CISO of MultiCare Health System, describes legacy healthcare IT environments, he doesn't mince words: "Healthcare loves to walk backwards into the future. And this is how we got here, because there are a lot of things that we could have prepared for that we didn't, because we were so concentrated on where we were." This chaotic approach has characterized healthcare IT for decades. In a sector where lives depend on technology working flawlessly 24/7/365, security teams have traditionally functioned as gatekeepers—the "Department of No"—focused on protection at the expense of innovation and care delivery. But as healthcare continues its digital transformation journey, this approach is no longer sustainable. With 14 hospitals, hundreds of urgent care clinics, and nearly 30,000 employees serving millions of patients, MultiCare needed a different path forward – one that didn't sacrifice innovation for safety. That...

Cybersecurity researchers have taken the wraps off an unusual cyber attack that leveraged malware with corrupted DOS and PE headers, according to new findings from Fortinet. The DOS (Disk Operating System) and PE (Portable Executable) headers are essential parts of a Windows PE file , providing information about the executable. While the DOS header makes the executable file backward compatible with MS-DOS and allows it to be recognized as a valid executable by the operating system, the PE header contains the metadata and information necessary for Windows to load and execute the program. "We discovered malware that had been running on a compromised machine for several weeks," researchers Xiaopeng Zhang and John Simmons from the FortiGuard Incident Response Team said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The threat actor had executed a batch of scripts and PowerShell to run the malware in a Windows process." Fortinet said while it was unable to extract th...

An Iranian national has pleaded guilty in the U.S. over his involvement in an international ransomware and extortion scheme involving the Robbinhood ransomware. Sina Gholinejad (aka Sina Ghaaf), 37, and his co-conspirators are said to have breached the computer networks of various organizations in the United States and encrypted files with Robbinhood ransomware to demand Bitcoin ransom payments. Gholinejad, who was arrested in North Carolina in early January, pleaded guilty to one count of computer fraud and abuse and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He faces a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison. He is scheduled for sentencing in August 2025. "These cyber attacks caused significant disruptions and tens of millions in losses, including to the City of Greenville, North Carolina, and the City of Baltimore, Maryland," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said . "Baltimore lost more than $19 million from the damage caused to their computer networks and t...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed that a threat actor codenamed ViciousTrap has compromised nearly 5,300 unique network edge devices across 84 countries and turned them into a honeypot-like network. The threat actor has been observed exploiting a critical security flaw impacting Cisco Small Business RV016, RV042, RV042G, RV082, RV320, and RV325 Routers (CVE-2023-20118) to corral them into a set of honeypots en masse. A majority of the infections are located in Macau, with 850 compromised devices.

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered multiple critical security vulnerabilities impacting the Versa Concerto network security and SD-WAN orchestration platform that could be exploited to take control of susceptible instances. It's worth noting that the identified shortcomings remain unpatched despite responsible disclosure on February 13, 2025, prompting a public release of the issues following the end of the 90-day deadline. "These vulnerabilities, when chained together, could allow an attacker to fully compromise both the application and the underlying host system," ProjectDiscovery researchers Harsh Jaiswal, Rahul Maini, and Parth Malhotra said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The security defects are listed below - CVE-2025-34025 (CVSS score: 8.6) - A privilege escalation and Docker container escape vulnerability that's caused by unsafe default mounting of host binary paths and could be exploited to gain code execution on the underlying host m...

Fortinet has patched a critical security flaw that it said has been exploited as a zero-day in attacks targeting FortiVoice enterprise phone systems. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-32756, carries a CVSS score of 9.6 out of 10.0. "A stack-based overflow vulnerability [CWE-121] in FortiVoice, FortiMail, FortiNDR, FortiRecorder, and FortiCamera may allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code or commands via crafted HTTP requests," the company said in an advisory. The company said it observed the flaw being exploited in the wild on FortiVoice systems, but did not disclose the scale of the attacks and the identity of the threat actors behind them. It further noted that the threat actor performed device network scans, erased system crash logs, and enabled fcgi debugging to log credentials from the system or SSH login attempts. The issue affects the following products and versions - FortiCamera 1.1, 2.0 (Migrate to a fixed release) FortiCamer...

A joint law enforcement operation undertaken by Dutch and U.S. authorities has dismantled a criminal proxy network that's powered by thousands of infected Internet of Things (IoT) and end-of-life (EoL) devices, enlisting them into a botnet for providing anonymity to malicious actors. In conjunction with the domain seizure, Russian nationals, Alexey Viktorovich Chertkov, 37, Kirill Vladimirovich Morozov, 41, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Shishkin, 36, and Dmitriy Rubtsov, 38, a Kazakhstani national, have been charged by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) for operating, maintaining, and profiting from the proxy services. The DoJ noted that users paid a monthly subscription fee, ranging from $9.95 to $110 per month, netting the threat actors more than $46 million by selling access to the infected routers. The service is believed to have been available since 2004.

SonicWall has released patches to address three security flaws affecting SMA 100 Secure Mobile Access (SMA) appliances that could be fashioned to result in remote code execution. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2025-32819 (CVSS score: 8.8) - A vulnerability in SMA100 allows a remote authenticated attacker with SSL-VPN user privileges to bypass the path traversal checks and delete an arbitrary file potentially resulting in a reboot to factory default settings. CVE-2025-32820 (CVSS score: 8.3) - A vulnerability in SMA100 allows a remote authenticated attacker with SSL-VPN user privileges can inject a path traversal sequence to make any directory on the SMA appliance writable CVE-2025-32821 (CVSS score: 6.7) - A vulnerability in SMA100 allows a remote authenticated attacker with SSL-VPN admin privileges can with admin privileges can inject shell command arguments to upload a file on the appliance "An attacker with access to an SMA SSL-VPN user account can chain...

Cisco has released software fixes to address a maximum-severity security flaw in its IOS XE Wireless Controller that could enable an unauthenticated, remote attacker to upload arbitrary files to a susceptible system. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-20188 , has been rated 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. "This vulnerability is due to the presence of a hard-coded JSON Web Token (JWT) on an affected system," the company said in a Wednesday advisory. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted HTTPS requests to the AP image download interface. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to upload files, perform path traversal, and execute arbitrary commands with root privileges." That said, in order for the exploitation to be successful, the Out-of-Band AP Image Download feature must be enabled on the device. It's disabled by default. The following products are affected, if they have a vulnerable release running and have the Ou...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a series of now-patched security vulnerabilities in Apple's AirPlay protocol that, if successfully exploited, could enable an attacker to take over susceptible devices supporting the proprietary wireless technology. The shortcomings have been collectively codenamed AirBorne by Israeli cybersecurity company Oligo. "These vulnerabilities can be chained by attackers to potentially take control of devices that support AirPlay – including both Apple devices and third-party devices that leverage the AirPlay SDK," security researchers Uri Katz, Avi Lumelsky, and Gal Elbaz said . Some of the vulnerabilities, like CVE-2025-24252 and CVE-2025-24132, can be strung together to fashion a wormable zero-click RCE exploit, enabling bad actors to deploy malware that propagates to devices on any local network the infected device connects to. This could then pave the way for sophisticated attacks that can lead to the deployment of backdoors an...