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Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a set of malicious npm packages that are designed to deliver a Windows-based remote access trojan (RAT). The list of identified packages, is below - aes-decode-runner-pro (145 downloads) postcss-minify-selector (256 downloads) postcss-minify-selector-parser (615 downloads) All the packages were published over the past month by an npm user named " abdrizak " and continue to be available for download from npm as of writing.  "Aes-decode-runner-pro and postcss-minify-selector-parser both present themselves as layered AES/custom-codec packages and depend on the legitimate postcss-selector-parser," JFrog said in an analysis. "Postcss-minify-selector presents itself as a PostCSS selector minifier and depends on postcss-minify-selector-parser." As for "postcss-minify-selector-parser," the name is a reference to " postcss-selector-parser ," a widely used npm library with more than 1...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new campaign that delivers CastleStealer by means of a previously unreported malware loader dubbed OXLOADER . According to Elastic Security Labs, the campaign leverages malicious Google Ads as a starting point to distribute the malware. Evidence indicates that the threat actor is likely Russian-speaking and financially motivated, owing to the presence of explicit exclusions to prevent infecting machines located in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) region. The campaign has been codenamed REF8372. "The loader uses several obfuscation layers (control-flow flattening, opaque predicates, mixed Boolean-Arithmetic), self-modifying decryption stubs, and abuses the Windows .reloc section to stage shellcode," researchers Daniel Stepanic and Jia Yu Chan said in a technical breakdown. The attack begins when unsuspecting users enter queries such as "lts version of node.js" on search engines like Google, red...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged multiple ClickFix campaigns that deliver three malware loaders called BabaDeda Loader , Lorem Ipsum Loader , and Potemkin , per independent reports from Morphisec , BlueVoyant , and Huntress , respectively. Attacks involving BabaDeda Loader, observed in April 2026, have targeted education and financial organizations. "Earlier BabaDeda activity was known for concealing malicious payloads inside legitimate looking installer packages," Morphisec researcher Shmuel Uzan said. "This new framework keeps that same code genome but expands it into a far more capable loader built for stealth, evasion, and payload flexibility." The starting point of the attacks is a ClickFix social engineering attack that deceives users into running attacker-supplied PowerShell commands to deliver the loader, which is then used to drop information stealers and remote access trojans (RATs) by combining well-known techniques like hidden PowerShell, i...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new malspam campaign that makes use of Google's DoubleClick domain as a way to evade detection and ultimately deliver an unidentified .NET-based loader. "Before the victim ever reaches attacker-controlled infrastructure, the lure routes through DoubleClick, a legitimate Google-owned domain that many security tools are less likely to treat as suspicious," Huntress researchers Anna Pham and Adam Mooney said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "From there, the victim is passed into a malspam kit that personalizes itself on the fly using the victim's email address, dynamically pulling in company branding and location details to make the page feel convincing without requiring the operators to handcraft a lure for each target." What makes this attack noteworthy is that it eliminates the need for having a bespoke kit for each targeted organization, thereby making these operations more scalable and cost-effective...

Threat actors are continuing to exploit a critical, now-patched security flaw impacting FortiClient Endpoint Management Server (EMS) deployments to deliver a credential-stealing malware family dubbed EKZ Infostealer. "The campaign abused trusted endpoint management infrastructure to deliver malware across managed endpoints," Arctic Wolf said . "Threat actors disguised the credential stealer payload as a Fortinet endpoint update, silently executing the malicious executable through PowerShell." The activity, observed by the cybersecurity company in May 2026, involves the exploitation of CVE-2026-35616 (CVSS score: 9.1), a critical pre-authentication API access bypass leading to privilege escalation. The issue was addressed by Fortinet in FortiClient EMS 7.4.7 and later. A successful compromise is followed by the threat actor taking steps to modify configurations to defer firmware upgrade reminders, as well as modifying a Remote Access Profile configuration and...

The Iranian hacking group known as MuddyWater has been linked to a new campaign affecting at least nine organizations across nine countries on four continents in the first quarter of 2026. The activity targeted industrial and electronics manufacturing, education and public-sector bodies, financial services, and professional services, per the Threat Hunter Team from Symantec and Carbon Black. Among the victims is a major South Korean electronics manufacturer, with the attackers spending a week inside its network in February 2026. Also singled as part of the sprawling espionage effort were an international airport in the Middle East, Southeast Asian industrial manufacturers, and a Latin American financial-services provider. "The attackers relied heavily on DLL side-loading using legitimately signed Fortemedia (fmapp.exe) and SentinelOne (sentinelmemoryscanner.exe) binaries to execute malicious DLLs while masquerading as benign software," Broadcom's cybersecurity t...

Threat actors are exploiting a recently disclosed critical security flaw in Ghost CMS to inject malicious JavaScript code with an aim to fuel ClickFix attacks. According to QiAnXin XLab, the activity involves the exploitation of CVE-2026-26980 (CVSS score: 9.4), an SQL injection vulnerability in Ghost's Content API that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to read arbitrary data from the database. The security flaw was addressed in February 2026 in version 6.19.1. The vulnerability was discovered by Anthropic using Claude. What makes the vulnerability severe is that it allows an attacker to gain access to a site's admin API key without permission, granting them the ability to poison the site by injecting malicious code. The admin API key can be used to invoke the admin API and can directly modify articles published on the content management system. The threat actor leveraged the security flaw to "obtain the target site's Admin API Key without authorizati...

In Your Biggest Security Risk Isn't Malware — It's What You Already Trust , we made a simple argument: the most dangerous activity inside most organizations no longer looks like an attack. It looks like administration. PowerShell, WMIC, netsh, Certutil, MSBuild — the same trusted utilities your IT team uses every day are also the preferred toolkit of modern threat actors. Bitdefender's analysis of 700,000 high-severity incidents found legitimate-tool abuse in 84% of them . The reaction we heard most was a fair one: We know. So what do we actually do about it? That's what Bitdefender's complimentary Internal Attack Surface Assessment   is built to answer. It's a 45-day, low-effort engagement available to organizations with 250 or more employees that turns the abstract problem of "living off the land" into a specific, prioritized list of users, endpoints, and tools you can safely take away from attackers without breaking the business. Why This, Why ...

A malicious Hugging Face repository managed to take a spot in the platform's trending list by impersonating OpenAI's Privacy Filter open-weight model to deliver a Rust-based information stealer to Windows users. The project, named Open-OSS/privacy-filter , masqueraded as its legitimate counterpart released by OpenAI late last month ( openai/privacy-filter ), including copying the entire description verbatim to trick unsuspecting users into downloading it. Access to the malicious model has since been disabled by Hugging Face. Privacy Filter was unveiled in April 2026 by the artificial intelligence (AI) company as a way to detect and redact personally identifiable information (PII) in unstructured text with an aim to incorporate strong privacy and security protections into applications. "The repository had typosquatted OpenAI's legitimate Privacy Filter release, copied its model card nearly verbatim, and shipped a loader.py file that fetches and executes infostealer...

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of an active malicious campaign that's targeting the workforce in the Czech Republic with a previously undocumented botnet dubbed PowMix since at least December 2025. "PowMix employs randomized command-and-control (C2) beaconing intervals, rather than persistent connection to the C2 server, to evade the network signature detections," Cisco Talos researcher Chetan Raghuprasad said in a report published today. "PowMix embeds the encrypted heartbeat data along with unique identifiers of the victim machine into the C2 URL paths, mimicking legitimate REST API URLs. PowMix has the capability to remotely update the new C2 domain to the botnet configuration file dynamically." The attack chain begins with a malicious ZIP file, likely delivered via a phishing email, to activate a multi-stage infection chain that drops PowMix. Specifically, it involves a Windows Shortcut (LNK) that's used to launch a PowerShell loader, which ...

Threat actors likely associated with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) have been observed using GitHub as command-and-control (C2) infrastructure in multi-stage attacks targeting organizations in South Korea. The attack chain, per Fortinet FortiGuard Labs , involves obfuscated Windows shortcut (LNK) files acting as the starting point to drop a decoy PDF document and a PowerShell script that sets the stage for the next phase of the attack. It's assessed that these LNK files are distributed via phishing emails. As soon as the payloads are downloaded, the victim is displayed the PDF document, while the malicious PowerShell script runs silently in the background. The PowerShell script performs checks to resist analysis by scanning for running processes related to virtual machines, debuggers, and forensic tools. If any of those processes are detected, the script immediately terminates. Otherwise, it extracts a Visual Basic Scri...

A financially motivated operation codenamed REF1695  has been observed leveraging fake installers to deploy remote access trojans (RATs) and cryptocurrency miners since November 2023. "Beyond cryptomining, the threat actor monetizes infections through CPA (Cost Per Action) fraud, directing victims to content locker pages under the guise of software registration," Elastic Security Labs researchers Jia Yu Chan, Cyril François, and Remco Sprooten said in an analysis published this week. Recent iterations of the campaign have also been found to deliver a previously undocumented .NET implant codenamed CNB Bot. These attacks leverage an ISO file as the infection vector to deliver a .NET Reactor-protected loader and a text file with explicit instructions to the user to bypass Microsoft Defender SmartScreen protections against running unrecognized applications by clicking on "More info" and "Run anyway...

For years, cybersecurity has followed a familiar model: block malware, stop the attack. Now, attackers are moving on to what’s next. Threat actors now use malware less frequently in favor of what’s already inside your environment, including abusing trusted tools, native binaries, and legitimate admin utilities to move laterally, escalate privileges, and persist without raising alarms. Most organizations fail to see this risk until after the damage is done. To help visualize this challenge, consider a complimentary Internal Attack Surface Assessment — a guided, low-friction way to see where trusted tools may be working against you. Now, let’s look at how this risk operates within your environment, and 3 reasons why attackers prefer using your own tools against you. 1. Most Attacks No Longer Look Like Attacks Threat actors prefer attacks that don’t look like attacks. Recent analysis of over 700,000 high-severity incidents shows a clear shift : 84% of attacks now abuse legitimate ...

A new campaign has leveraged the ClickFix social engineering tactic as a way to distribute a previously undocumented malware loader referred to as DeepLoad . "It likely uses AI-assisted obfuscation and process injection to evade static scanning, while credential theft starts immediately and captures passwords and sessions even if the primary loader is blocked," ReliaQuest researchers Thassanai McCabe and Andrew Currie said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The starting point of the attack chain is a ClickFix lure that tricks users into running PowerShell commands by pasting the command into the Windows Run dialog under the pretext of addressing a non-existent issue. This, in turn, uses "mshta.exe," a legitimate Windows utility to download and run an obfuscated PowerShell loader. The loader, for its part, has been found to conceal its actual functionality among meaningless variable assignments, likely in an attempt to deceive security tools. It's ass...

A suspected China-based cyber espionage operation has targeted Southeast Asian military organizations as part of a state-sponsored campaign that dates back to at least 2020. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 is tracking the threat activity under the moniker CL-STA-1087 , where CL refers to cluster, and STA stands for state-backed motivation. "The activity demonstrated strategic operational patience and a focus on highly targeted intelligence collection, rather than bulk data theft," security researchers Lior Rochberger and Yoav Zemah said. "The attackers behind this cluster actively searched for and collected highly specific files concerning military capabilities, organizational structures, and collaborative efforts with Western armed forces." The campaign exhibits hallmarks commonly associated with advanced persistent threat (APT) operations, including carefully crafted delivery methods, defense evasion strategies, highly stable operational infrastructure, and custom ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a suspected artificial intelligence (AI)-generated malware codenamed Slopoly put to use by a financially motivated threat actor named Hive0163 . "Although still relatively unspectacular, AI-generated malware such as Slopoly shows how easily threat actors can weaponize AI to develop new malware frameworks in a fraction of the time it used to take," IBM X-Force researcher Golo Mühr said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Hive0163's operations are driven by extortion through large-scale data exfiltration and ransomware. The e-crime group is primarily associated with a wide range of malicious tools, including NodeSnake, Interlock RAT, JunkFiction loader, and Interlock ransomware. In one ransomware attack observed by the company in early 2026, the threat actor was observed deploying Slopoly during the post-exploitation phase so as to maintain persistent access to the compromised server for more than a week. Slo...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a multi-stage malware campaign that uses batch scripts as a pathway to deliver various encrypted remote access trojan (RATs) payloads that correspond to XWorm , AsyncRAT , and Xeno RAT . The stealthy attack chain has been codenamed VOID#GEIST by Securonix Threat Research. At a high level, the obfuscated batch script is used to deploy a second batch script, stage a legitimate embedded Python runtime, and decrypt encrypted shellcode blobs, which are executed directly in memory by injecting them into separate instances of "explorer.exe" using a technique called Early Bird Asynchronous Procedure Call (APC) injection . "Modern malware campaigns increasingly shift from standalone executables toward complex, script-based delivery frameworks that closely mimic legitimate user activity," researchers Akshay Gaikwad, Shikha Sangwan, and Aaron Beardslee said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "Rath...

Microsoft on Thursday disclosed details of a new widespread ClickFix social engineering campaign that has leveraged the Windows Terminal app as a way to activate a sophisticated attack chain and deploy the Lumma Stealer malware. The activity, observed in February 2026, makes use of the terminal emulator program instead of instructing users to launch the Windows Run dialog and paste a command into it. "This campaign instructs targets to use the Windows + X → I shortcut to launch Windows Terminal (wt.exe) directly, guiding users into a privileged command execution environment that blends into legitimate administrative workflows and appears more trustworthy to users," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a series of posts on X. What makes the latest variant notable is that it bypasses detections specifically designed to flag Run dialog abuse, not to mention take advantage of the legitimacy of Windows Terminal to trick unsuspecting users into running malicious ...

A suspected Iran-nexus threat actor has been attributed to a campaign targeting government officials in Iraq by impersonating the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs to deliver a set of never-before-seen malware. Zscaler ThreatLabz, which observed the activity in January 2026, is tracking the cluster under the name Dust Specter . The attacks, which manifest in the form of two different infection chains, culminate in the deployment of malware dubbed SPLITDROP, TWINTASK, TWINTALK, and GHOSTFORM. "Dust Specter used randomly generated URI paths for command-and-control (C2) communication with checksum values appended to the URI paths to ensure that these requests originated from an actual infected system," security researcher Sudeep Singh said . "The C2 server also utilized geofencing techniques and User-Agent verification." A notable aspect of the campaign is the compromise of the Iraqi government-related infrastructure to stage malicious payloads, not to me...

Microsoft on Monday warned of phishing campaigns that employ phishing emails and OAuth URL redirection mechanisms to bypass conventional phishing defenses implemented in email and browsers. The activity, the company said, targets government and public-sector organizations with the end goal of redirecting victims to attacker-controlled infrastructure without stealing their tokens. It described the phishing attacks as an identity-based threat that takes advantage of OAuth's standard, by-design behavior rather than exploiting software vulnerabilities or stealing credentials. "OAuth includes a legitimate feature that allows identity providers to redirect users to a specific landing page under certain conditions, typically in error scenarios or other defined flows," the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team said . "Attackers can abuse this native functionality by crafting URLs with popular identity providers, such as Entra ID or Google Workspace, that use manipu...