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An Iranian-backed ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) named Pay2Key has resurfaced in the wake of the Israel-Iran-U.S. conflict last month, offering bigger payouts to cybercriminals who launch attacks against Israel and the U.S. The financially motivated scheme, now operating under the moniker Pay2Key.I2P, is assessed to be linked to a hacking group tracked as Fox Kitten (aka Lemon Sandstorm). "Linked to the notorious Fox Kitten APT group and closely tied to the well-known Mimic ransomware, [...] Pay2Key.I2P appears to partner with or incorporate Mimic's capabilities," Morphisec security researcher Ilia Kulmin said . "Officially, the group offers an 80% profit share (up from 70%) to affiliates supporting Iran or participating in attacks against the enemies of Iran, signaling their ideological commitment." Last year, the U.S. government revealed the advanced persistent threat's (APT) modus operandi of carrying out ransomware attacks by covertly partnering wi...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added a critical security flaw impacting Citrix NetScaler ADC and Gateway to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, officially confirming the vulnerability has been weaponized in the wild. The shortcoming in question is CVE-2025-5777 (CVSS score: 9.3), an instance of insufficient input validation that could be exploited by an attacker to bypass authentication when the appliance is configured as a Gateway or AAA virtual server. It's also called Citrix Bleed 2 owing to its similarities with Citrix Bleed (CVE-2023-4966). "Citrix NetScaler ADC and Gateway contain an out-of-bounds read vulnerability due to insufficient input validation," the agency said. "This vulnerability can lead to memory overread when the NetScaler is configured as a Gateway (VPN virtual server, ICA Proxy, CVPN, RDP Proxy) OR AAA virtual server." CISA pointed out that flaws like CVE-2025-5777 are f...

The U.K. National Crime Agency (NCA) on Thursday announced that four people have been arrested in connection with cyber attacks targeting major retailers Marks & Spencer, Co-op, and Harrods. The arrested individuals include two men aged 19, a third aged 17, and a 20-year-old woman. They were apprehended in the West Midlands and London on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offenses, blackmail, money laundering, and participating in the activities of an organized crime group. All four suspects were arrested from their homes and their electronic devices have been seized for further forensic analysis. Their names were not disclosed. "Since these attacks took place, specialist NCA cybercrime investigators have been working at pace and the investigation remains one of the Agency's highest priorities," Deputy Director Paul Foster, head of the NCA's National Cyber Crime Unit, said in a statement. "Today's arrests are a significant step in that investigation ...

The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Tuesday sanctioned a member of a North Korean hacking group called Andariel for their role in the infamous remote information technology (IT) worker scheme. The Treasury said Song Kum Hyok, a 38-year-old North Korean national with an address in the Chinese province of Jilin, enabled the fraudulent operation by using foreign-hired IT workers to seek remote employment with U.S. companies and planning to split income with them. Between 2022 and 2023, Song is alleged to have used the identities of U.S. people, including their names, addresses, and Social Security numbers, to craft aliases for the hired workers, who then used these personas to pose as U.S. nationals looking for remote jobs in the country. The development comes days after the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced sweeping actions targeting the North Korean information technology (IT) worker scheme, leading to the arrest of one indi...

Russian organizations have been targeted as part of an ongoing campaign that delivers a previously undocumented Windows spyware called Batavia. The activity, per cybersecurity vendor Kaspersky, has been active since July 2024. "The targeted attack begins with bait emails containing malicious links, sent under the pretext of signing a contract," the Russian company said . "The main goal of the attack is to infect organizations with the previously unknown Batavia spyware, which then proceeds to steal internal documents." The email messages are sent from the domain "oblast-ru[.]com," which is said to be owned by the attackers themselves. The links embedded within the digital missives lead to the download of an archive file containing a Visual Basic Encoded script (.VBE) file. When executed, the script profiles the compromised host and exfiltrates the system information to the remote server. This is followed by the retrieval of a next-stage payload from t...