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The threat actors behind the Qilin ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) scheme are now offering legal counsel for affiliates to put more pressure on victims to pay up, as the cybercrime group intensifies its activity and tries to fill the void left by its rivals. The new feature takes the form of a "Call Lawyer" feature on the affiliate panel, per Israeli cybersecurity company Cybereason. The development represents a newfound resurgence of the e-crime group as once-popular ransomware groups like LockBit, Black Cat, RansomHub, Everest, and BlackLock have suffered abrupt cessations, operational failures, and defacements. The group, also tracked as Gold Feather and Water Galura, has been active since October 2022. Data compiled from the dark web leak sites run by ransomware groups shows that Qilin led with 72 victims in April 2025. In May, it is estimated to be behind 55 attacks , putting it behind Safepay (72) and Luna Moth (67). It's also the third most active group after...

The notorious cybercrime group known as Scattered Spider (aka UNC3944) that recently targeted various U.K. and U.S. retailers has begun to target major insurance companies, according to Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG). "Google Threat Intelligence Group is now aware of multiple intrusions in the U.S. which bear all the hallmarks of Scattered Spider activity," John Hultquist, chief analyst at GTIG, said in an email Monday. "We are now seeing incidents in the insurance industry. Given this actor's history of focusing on a sector at a time, the insurance industry should be on high alert, especially for social engineering schemes which target their help desks and call centers." Scattered Spider is the name assigned to an amorphous collective that's known for its use of advanced social engineering tactics to breach organizations. In recent months, the threat actors are believed to have forged an alliance with the DragonForce ransomware cartel in the ...

Ransomware has become a highly coordinated and pervasive threat, and traditional defenses are increasingly struggling to neutralize it. Today's ransomware attacks initially target your last line of defense — your backup infrastructure. Before locking up your production environment, cybercriminals go after your backups to cripple your ability to recover, increasing the odds of a ransom payout. Notably, these attacks are carefully engineered takedowns of your defenses. The threat actors disable backup agents, delete snapshots, modify retention policies, encrypt backup volumes (especially those that are network accessible) and exploit vulnerabilities in integrated backup platforms. They are no longer trying just to deny your access but erase the very means of recovery. If your backup environment isn't built with this evolving threat landscape in mind, it's at high risk of getting compromised. How can IT pros defend against this? In this guide, we'll uncover the weak strategies that lea...

An emerging ransomware strain has been discovered incorporating capabilities to encrypt files as well as permanently erase them, a development that has been described as a "rare dual-threat." "The ransomware features a 'wipe mode,' which permanently erases files, rendering recovery impossible even if the ransom is paid," Trend Micro researchers Maristel Policarpio, Sarah Pearl Camiling, and Sophia Nilette Robles said in a report published last week. The ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation in question is named Anubis, which became active in December 2024, claiming victims across healthcare, hospitality, and construction sectors in Australia, Canada, Peru, and the U.S. Analysis of early, trial samples of the ransomware suggests that the developers initially named it Sphinx, before tweaking the brand name in the final version. It's worth noting that the e-crime crew has no ties to an Android banking trojan and a Python-based backdoor of the s...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday disclosed that ransomware actors are targeting unpatched SimpleHelp Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) instances to compromise customers of an unnamed utility billing software provider. "This incident reflects a broader pattern of ransomware actors targeting organizations through unpatched versions of SimpleHelp RMM since January 2025," the agency said in an advisory. Earlier this year, SimpleHelp disclosed a set of flaws (CVE-2024-57727, CVE-2024-57728, and CVE-2024-57726) that could result in information disclosure, privilege escalation, and remote code execution. The vulnerabilities have since come under repeated exploitation in the wild, including by ransomware groups like DragonForce, to breach targets of interest. Last month, Sophos revealed that a Managed Service Provider's SimpleHelp deployed was accessed by the threat actor using these flaws, and then leveraged it to pivot t...

Former members tied to the Black Basta ransomware operation have been observed sticking to their tried-and-tested approach of email bombing and Microsoft Teams phishing to establish persistent access to target networks. "Recently, attackers have introduced Python script execution alongside these techniques, using cURL requests to fetch and deploy malicious payloads," ReliaQuest said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The development is a sign that the threat actors are continuing to pivot and regroup, despite the Black Basta brand suffering a huge blow and a decline after the public leak of its internal chat logs earlier this February. The cybersecurity company said half of the Teams phishing attacks that were observed between February and May 2025 originated from onmicrosoft[.]com domains, and that breached domains accounted for 42% of the attacks during the same period. The latter is a lot more stealthy and allows threat actors to impersonate legitimate traffi...

INTERPOL on Wednesday announced the dismantling of more than 20,000 malicious IP addresses or domains that have been linked to 69 information-stealing malware variants. The joint action, codenamed Operation Secure , took place between January and April 2025, and involved law enforcement agencies from 26 countries to identify servers, map physical networks, and execute targeted takedowns. "These coordinated efforts resulted in the takedown of 79 percent of identified suspicious IP addresses," INTERPOL said in a statement. "Participating countries reported the seizure of 41 servers and over 100 GB of data, as well as the arrest of 32 suspects linked to illegal cyber activities." Vietnamese authorities arrested 18 suspects, and confiscated devices, SIM cards, business registration documents, and money worth $11,500. Further house raids have led to the arrest of another 12 people in Sri Lanka and two individuals in Nauru. The Hong Kong Police, per INTERPOL, iden...

The reconnaissance activity targeting American cybersecurity company SentinelOne was part of a broader set of partially-related intrusions into several targets between July 2024 and March 2025. "The victimology includes a South Asian government entity, a European media organization, and more than 70 organizations across a wide range of sectors," SentinelOne security researchers Aleksandar Milenkoski and Tom Hegel said in a report published today. Some of the targeted sectors include manufacturing, government, finance, telecommunications, and research. Also present among the victims was an IT services and logistics company that was managing hardware logistics for SentinelOne employees at the time of the breach in early 2025. The malicious activity has been attributed with high confidence to China-nexus threat actors, with some of the attacks tied to a threat cluster dubbed PurpleHaze , which, in turn, overlaps with Chinese cyber espionage groups publicly reported as APT15...

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...

In the wake of high-profile attacks on UK retailers Marks & Spencer and Co-op, Scattered Spider has been all over the media, with coverage spilling over into the mainstream news due to the severity of the disruption caused — currently looking like hundreds of millions in lost profits for M&S alone.  This coverage is extremely valuable for the cybersecurity community as it raises awareness of the battles that security teams are fighting every day. But it's also created a lot of noise that can make it tricky to understand the big picture.  The headline story from the recent campaign against UK retailers is the use of help desk scams. This typically involves the attacker calling up a company's help desk with some level of information — at minimum, PII that allows them to impersonate their victim, and sometimes a password, leaning heavily on their native English-speaking abilities to trick the help desk operator into giving them access to a user account.  Help Des...

The China-linked threat actor behind the recent in-the-wild exploitation of a critical security flaw in SAP NetWeaver has been attributed to a broader set of attacks targeting organizations in Brazil, India, and Southeast Asia since 2023. "The threat actor mainly targets the SQL injection vulnerabilities discovered on web applications to access the SQL servers of targeted organizations," Trend Micro security researcher Joseph C Chen said in an analysis published this week. "The actor also takes advantage of various known vulnerabilities to exploit public-facing servers." Some of the other prominent targets of the adversarial collective include Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. The cybersecurity company is tracking the intrusion set under the moniker Earth Lamia , stating the activity shares some degree of overlap with threat clusters documented by Elastic Security Labs as REF0657 , Sophos as STAC6451 , and Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 a...

Fake installers for popular artificial intelligence (AI) tools like OpenAI ChatGPT and InVideo AI are being used as lures to propagate various threats, such as the CyberLock and Lucky_Gh0$t ransomware families, and a new malware dubbed Numero. "CyberLock ransomware, developed using PowerShell, primarily focuses on encrypting specific files on the victim's system," Cisco Talos researcher Chetan Raghuprasad said in a report published today. "Lucky_Gh0$t ransomware is yet another variant of the Yashma ransomware, which is the sixth iteration of the Chaos ransomware series, featuring only minor modifications to the ransomware binary." Numero, on the other hand, is a destructive malware that impacts victims by manipulating the graphical user interface (GUI) components of their Windows operating system, thereby rendering the machines unusable. The cybersecurity company said the legitimate versions of the AI tools are popular in the business-to-business (B2B) sal...