ransomware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Threat actors associated with the Anubis ransomware operation have been observed exploiting the Citrix Bleed 2 (CVE-2025-5777) vulnerability to obtain initial access. "Although tactics differ between affiliates, common patterns emerged in tradecraft through use of legitimate Remote Management and Monitoring (RMM) tooling, credential access, and hands-on-keyboard procedures used for lateral movement," Arctic Wolf said in a report published this week. "Anubis affiliates repeatedly abused legitimate remote access and administration tools, including ScreenConnect, Zoho Assist, MeshAgent, Remotely, UltraVNC, and Total Software Deployment, to blend in with normal IT activity while maintaining control of victim systems." Anubis is a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) group that first emerged in late 2024 as a rebrand of Sphinx ransomware. The ransomware operation was formally announced on the Ransomware and Advanced Malware Protection (RAMP) underground forum in Febr...

This week’s security news is mostly about weak spots. Browsers, bots, sandboxes, AI systems, and email flows all show the same problem in different ways. Everything looks normal until someone tests a small gap and finds a way through. This is not one big break. It is small permissions, weak checks, open systems, and normal tools doing things they were allowed to do. That same pattern runs through the stories below.

Security firm Sysdig says it has found what it believes is the first ransomware attack run from start to finish by an AI agent. Its Threat Research Team calls the operator JADEPUFFER and says a large language model handled the whole job: breaking in, stealing credentials, moving deeper into the network, then encrypting and wiping a company's production database. Ransomware has always needed a skilled person somewhere in the loop, either at the keyboard or writing the script the malware follows. If a model can chain those steps on its own, the skill needed to run an attack drops to whatever it costs to rent an AI agent. The way in was an old, already-patched bug. JADEPUFFER exploited  CVE-2025-3248 , a missing-authentication flaw in  Langflow , an open-source tool for building AI apps and agent workflows. The flaw lets anyone who can reach the server run their own Python code on it, no login needed. Langflow boxes are a tempting target because they often sit ...

The recently discovered financially-motivated FortiBleed campaign has been attributed to INC and Lynx ransomware operations, indicating that the verified, stolen credentials were intended for follow-on intrusions. "An operator tied to FortiBleed's infrastructure was found actively working negotiation panels for both groups, tying mass FortiGate credential theft directly to ransomware deployment for the first time," SOCRadar said in a new report published Wednesday. The company said it tracked scanning activity against approximately 11,250 FortiGate portals in more than 150 countries, followed by confirmed admin-level access on 409 targets and successful completion of the full attack chain on 354 of them. In all, at least 12 ransomware deployments have resulted from this access, causing hundreds of endpoints to be encrypted across affected organizations. The large-scale credential-harvesting operation, which came to light last month, involved the threat actors sys...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added a high-severity flaw impacting Microsoft SharePoint Server to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-45659 (CVSS score: 8.8), is a case of remote code execution arising from the deserialization of untrusted data. The issue was addressed by Microsoft in May 2026 for SharePoint Server Subscription Edition, SharePoint Server 2019, and SharePoint Enterprise Server 2016. Microsoft noted that any authenticated attacker could trigger the vulnerability, and that it does not require admin or other elevated privileges. In a network-based attack, an authenticated attacker with a minimum of Site Member permissions (PR:L) could leverage it to execute code remotely on the SharePoint Server. "Microsoft SharePoint Server contains a deserialization of untrusted data vulnerability which allows an authorized attacker t...

A teenager accused of belonging to the hacking group Scattered Spider has been extradited from Finland to face U.S. charges of conspiracy, computer intrusion, and fraud, the U.S. Department of Justice  announced  on July 1. Peter Stokes , 19, a dual U.S. and Estonian citizen, appeared in a Chicago federal court on June 30, where a judge ordered him held in custody. Finnish police arrested him in April on an Interpol Red Notice, an international arrest request, before his extradition in late June. His case is the latest in a run of arrests targeting a crew tied to breaches at casinos, retailers, and airlines. Court records identify Stokes by the online handle "Bouquet" and describe at least four intrusions, the first when he was 16. In one case, in May 2025, prosecutors say he and others broke into a luxury jewelry retailer, copied its data, and demanded about $8 million in cryptocurrency. The retailer refused to pay, evicted the intruders, and spent at least $2 milli...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new malware artifact generated using DeepSeek that constructed a novel attack path combining "unrealistic browser-malware concepts with a real browser capability" to turn it into a working ransomware technique that runs entirely inside the browser on both Windows and Android devices. "This is the first documented case where a frontier AI model independently bridged the gap between a theoretical browser-only ransomware risk and a practical, working attack chain – surfacing a novel attack path that defenders had previously dismissed as unfeasible due to browser sandboxing limits," Check Point said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "The expertise needed to discover a new attack path is no longer the bottleneck, and defenders need to account for that shift now — before threat actors operationalize it at scale." The identified sample is a Python Flask application named " deepseek_python_20260125_da...

It’s dumb out there again. This week has the usual smell of prod on fire and nobody wanting to admit who left the door open — old creds still working, trusted apps doing sketchy crap, browser tricks jumping the fence, and “normal” workflows turning into phishing pipes because apparently email was not enough hell already. The worst part is how cheap some of it feels. Not elite. Not cinematic. Just stale secrets, fake updates, lazy trust, and random boxes quietly becoming someone else’s infrastructure. Same internet, fresh headache. Let’s get into it.

A new, stealthy backdoor named Mistic has been deployed as part of suspected financially motivated attacks aimed at multiple organizations spanning insurance, education, IT, and professional services sectors since April 2026. According to Symantec and Carbon Black's Threat Hunter Team, the backdoor, also tracked as MLTBackdoor, is said to be linked to an initial access broker (IAB) named KongTuke (aka 404 TDS, Chaya_002, LandUpdate808, TAG-124, and Woodgnat), and dropped along with ModeloRAT, a Python remote access trojan (RAT) previously attributed to the group. "The backdoor runs payloads in memory with no file written to disk and includes a kill switch that lets it delete itself, which are features consistent with an operator seeking long-term, low-visibility access," Broadcom's cybersecurity teams said in a report shared with The Hacker News. ModeloRAT was first flagged by Huntress in January 2026 in connection with a variant of a ClickFix campaign dub...

A new report from INTERPOL has revealed a "dramatic increase" in cybercrime in Asia and the South Pacific, fueled by rapid digitalization, internet penetration, new technologies, organized criminal networks, and a disparity in cybersecurity maturity. According to INTERPOL's 2025/2026 Asia and South Pacific Cyberthreat Assessment Report, phishing has emerged as the most widespread and financially damaging form of cybercrime, with a third of countries in the region reporting more than 10,000 cases between January 2024 and March 2025. In all, over half of INTERPOL member countries have reported that cybercrime accounted for no less than 30% of all crimes recorded nationally. "The findings in this report highlight a rapidly evolving cyber threat landscape across Asia and the South Pacific, where cybercriminals are leveraging artificial intelligence, ransomware-as-a-service models and sophisticated social engineering techniques on an industrial scale," Neal Jett...

The Gentlemen ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation is actively developing and maintaining a suite of endpoint detection and response (EDR) killers that it hands out to affiliates for impairing system defenses before deploying the encryptor. This mature portfolio of EDR-terminating tools is centered around a framework that's known as GentleKiller . "They also incorporate third-party or leaked tools such as HexKiller, ThrottleBlood, and HavocKiller," ESET security researcher Jakub Souček said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "These tools are standardized through a shared defense-evasion layer, impersonating predominantly security vendors using fake version information, and copied legitimate certificates and icons." The Slovakian cybersecurity company also called out the ransomware crew for its ability to "unusually quickly operationalize" newly disclosed proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits related to an attack technique called bring your...

The internet did not break this week. It got used exactly as designed, which is worse. Searches were siphoned through shady browser add-ons. AI chat links turned into malware delivery paths. macOS attacks ran in memory and left almost nothing behind. Cloud agents looked like helpers until attackers treated them like open shells. Add exposed edge gear, poisoned packages, cash courier scams, stealers, loaders, and phishing that barely bothers pretending anymore. Here’s the full mess.

Cybersecurity researchers have charted the evolution of INC from an nascent ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation to one of the most prolific cybercrime groups in 2026, claiming no less than 830 victims since August 2023. "The disruption of LockBit and the shutdown of BlackCat created opportunities for INC to expand as affiliates migrated to alternative ransomware operations," Acronis researcher Darrel Virtusio said . "United States organizations account for more than 65% of listed victims, with legal services, manufacturing, construction, technology and health care among the most targeted sectors." INC's Windows and Linux/ESXi encryptors have also been rewritten in Rust to facilitate easier cross-platform development and better resist reverse engineering efforts. Attacks deploying the ransomware are characterized by the use of an updated credential dumper capable of targeting newer Veeam backup deployments that use the salted DPAPI credential encryp...

Threat actors associated with the DragonForce ransomware have been observed using a custom Go-based remote access trojan (RAT) called Backdoor.Turn to conceal command-and-control (C2) traffic inside Microsoft Teams relay infrastructure. According to findings from Broadcom-owned Symantec and Carbon Black, the backdoor was deployed against a major U.S. services firm. The name of the company was not disclosed. "Backdoor.Turn obtains an anonymous Teams visitor token from Microsoft’s Skype-backed identity services, uses a legitimate Microsoft TURN relay to set up the connection, and then runs a QUIC session to the attacker’s real command-and-control (C2) server," the Threat Hunter Team said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "To network defenders, the only traffic they could see was outbound connections to legitimate Microsoft Teams servers. The attackers were on the victim network for between one and two months."

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...

Authorities in Europe have disrupted AudiA6 , a cryptocurrency laundering service used by ransomware gangs and cybercriminal networks. Europol, in a statement issued Thursday, said the dismantling of AudiA6 cut off a "key financial pipeline used to wash hundreds of millions in illicit profits." The service is estimated to have been used to launder more than €336 million (~$389 million) since the service was launched in 2021. "The platform became a central hub for ransomware actors and cybercriminals seeking to cash out stolen digital assets while hiding the money trail from authorities," the agency added . The operators of AudiA6 are suspected to have also administered a dark web cybercrime forum known as Dark2Web, where cybercriminals advertised illicit services and connected with other threat actors across the world. As part of the operation that took place on June 10, 2026, a number of coordinated actions were carried out, including - The arrest of ...

A new analysis of The Gentlemen operation has revealed that the financially motivated threat group initially operated as an affiliate responsible for conducting double extortion attacks, while leveraging resources from various ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) schemes like LockBit (aka Tenacious Mantis), Qilin (aka Pestilent Mantis), and Medusa (aka Venomous Mantis). According to a detailed report published by PRODAFT, the group, which it tracks as Phantom Mantis, is led by a Russian-speaking cybercriminal it calls LARVA-368, who goes by the online aliases hastalamuerte, ArmCorp, zeta88, nobody0, and santamuerte. The Gentlemen is known to be active since March 2025, claiming a total of 478 victims to date, per data from Ransomware.Live. "In July 2025, Phantom Mantis transitioned into The Gentlemen, an independent partnership program no longer dependent on other RaaS groups," the Swiss cybersecurity company said. "Additionally, LARVA-368 relies heavily on artificia...

It's been one of those weeks. You expect the usual noise: recycled malware, sloppy attacks, another easy target getting hit. Instead, there's a supply chain attack kit in a public repo, a $5,000-a-month RAT that clones browsers, and research showing AI agents can be tricked into leaking real credentials. The bigger problem is how polished this all looks now. Mule networks run like SaaS. Deepfake KYC bypass is sold as a feature. Endpoint tools can be quietly weakened using built-in OS settings, with no exploit needed. Here's the full list of threats, tools, flaws, and updates worth knowing.

Veeam has released security patches to address a critical flaw in its Backup & Replication software that could result in remote code execution. Tracked as CVE-2026-44963 , the vulnerability carries a CVSS score of 9.4 out of a maximum of 10.0. "A vulnerability allowing remote code execution (RCE) on the Backup Server by an authenticated domain user," Veeam said in a Tuesday advisory. It credited watchTowr researcher Sina Kheirkhah for responsibly discovering and reporting the issue. It impacts Veeam Backup & Replication 12.3.2.4465 and all earlier versions of 12 builds. Veeam has noted that the vulnerability does not affect any version 13.x build of the backup software due to architectural changes introduced in version 13. The shortcoming has been addressed in Veeam Backup & Replication version 12.3.2.4854. In March 2026, Veeam resolved multiple critical vulnerabilities in Backup & Replication software that, if successfully exploited, could resu...

Check Point has warned of active exploitation of a critical vulnerability impacting Remote Access VPN and Mobile Access deployments that are configured to use the deprecated IKEv1 key exchange protocol. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-50751 (CVSS score: 9.3), is a case of a logic flow weakness in certificate validation that allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to bypass user authentication and establish a remote access VPN connection without a valid user password. "By exploiting a logic flaw in certificate validation, an attacker can establish a VPN session without possession of a valid password, effectively bypassing authentication requirements," Check Point said . "Additional post-authentication activity is required to access internal resources or escalate privileges." The shortcoming impacts the following products and versions -