ransomware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an ongoing campaign dubbed KongTuke that used a malicious Google Chrome extension masquerading as an ad blocker to deliberately crash the web browser and trick victims into running arbitrary commands using ClickFix -like lures to deliver a previously undocumented remote access trojan (RAT) dubbed ModeloRAT. This new escalation of ClickFix, observed earlier this month, has been codenamed CrashFix by Huntress. KongTuke , also tracked as 404 TDS, Chaya_002, LandUpdate808, and TAG-124, is the name given to a traffic distribution system (TDS) known for profiling victim hosts before redirecting them to a payload delivery site that infects their systems. Access to these compromised hosts is then handed off to other threat actors, including ransomware groups, for follow-on malware delivery. Some of the cybercriminal groups that have leveraged TAG-124 infrastructure include Rhysida ransomware , Interlock ransomware , and TA866 (aka Asylu...

Ukrainian and German law enforcement authorities have identified two Ukrainians suspected of working for the Russia-linked ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) group Black Basta. In addition, the group's alleged leader, a 35-year-old Russian national named Oleg Evgenievich Nefedov (Нефедов Олег Евгеньевич), has been added to the European Union's Most Wanted and INTERPOL's Red Notice lists, authorities noted. "According to the investigation, the suspects specialized in technical hacking of protected systems and were involved in preparing cyberattacks using ransomware," the Cyber Police of Ukraine said in a statement.  The agency said the accused individuals functioned as "hash crackers," who specialize in extracting passwords from information systems using specialized software. Once the credential information was obtained, members of the ransomware group broke into corporate networks and ultimately deployed ransomware and extorted money to recover the e...

The JavaScript (aka JScript) malware loader called GootLoader has been observed using a malformed ZIP archive that's designed to sidestep detection efforts by concatenating anywhere from 500 to 1,000 archives. "The actor creates a malformed archive as an anti-analysis technique," Expel security researcher Aaron Walton said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "That is, many unarchiving tools are not able to consistently extract it, but one critical unarchiving tool seems to work consistently and reliably: the default tool built into Windows systems." This leads to a scenario where the archive cannot be processed by tools like WinRAR or 7-Zip, and, therefore, prevents many automated workflows from analyzing the contents of the file. At the same time, it can be opened by the default Windows unarchiver, thereby ensuring that victims who fall victim to the social engineering scheme can extract and run the JavaScript malware. GootLoader is typically distrib...

The internet never stays quiet. Every week, new hacks, scams, and security problems show up somewhere. This week's stories show how fast attackers change their tricks, how small mistakes turn into big risks, and how the same old tools keep finding new ways to break in. Read on to catch up before the next wave hits. Unauthenticated RCE risk Security Flaw in Redis A high-severity security flaw has been disclosed in Redis (CVE-2025-62507, CVSS score: 8.8) that could potentially lead to remote code execution by means of a stack buffer overflow. It was fixed in version 8.3.2. JFrog's analysis of the flaw has revealed that the vulnerability is triggered when using the new Redis 8.2 XACKDEL command, which was introduced to simplify and optimize stream cleanup. Specifically, it resides in the implementation of xackdelCommand(), a function responsible for parsing and processing the list of stream IDs supplied by the user. "The core ...

Chinese-speaking threat actors are suspected to have leveraged a compromised SonicWall VPN appliance as an initial access vector to deploy a VMware ESXi exploit that may have been developed as far back as February 2024. Cybersecurity firm Huntress, which observed the activity in December 2025 and stopped it before it could progress to the final stage, said it may have resulted in a ransomware attack. Most notably, the attack is believed to have exploited three VMware vulnerabilities that were disclosed as zero-days by Broadcom in March 2025: CVE-2025-22224 (CVSS score: 9.3), CVE-2025-22225 (CVSS score: 8.2), and CVE-2025-22226 (CVSS score: 7.1). Successful exploitation of the issue could permit a malicious actor with admin privileges to leak memory from the Virtual Machine Executable (VMX) process or execute code as the VMX process. That same month, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added the flaws to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) ca...