ransomware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A lot of this week’s trouble starts with something that looks close enough. A familiar repo. A useful installer. A harmless sync setting. Then the handoff goes bad, the box starts talking to someone else, and the damage moves faster than the explanation. Old bugs are back, weak defaults are earning their keep, and some attack paths are so plain they barely feel like research. Here’s the mess. Game cheats drop spyware 11 Malicious NuGet Tools Masquerade as Game Cheats to Drop Windows Surveillance Payload Cybersecurity researchers 11 malicious NuGet packages published as .NET command-line tools that present themselves as game utilities, bots, and "panels," each of which act as a first-stage downloader responsible for fetching and executing a second-stage Python payload named "pepesoft.exe" from GitHub Releases and Hugging Face paths under the username "pepegit666," along with a dormant BitTorrent fallback...

The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has designated two individuals and a VPN service provider for enabling ransomware actors' and other cybercriminals' malicious activities, including ransomware attacks against Americans. The VPN, named First VPN Service ( 1VPNS ), has been accused of offering its tools to ransomware groups, along with its 45-year-old Ukrainian administrator, Dmytro Rashevskyi. The department has also sanctioned Yegeniy Vladimirovich Silayev, a Belarusian national, for selling cryptors to help conceal ransomware and other malware as safe programs to avoid being detected by security tools. First VPN was dismantled in May 2026 as part of a joint law enforcement operation by European and North American authorities for assisting criminal actors to obscure the origins of ransomware attacks, data theft, scanning, and denial-of-service attacks. The service had been operational since 2014, advertising that it neither keeps...

A 41-year-old former ransomware negotiator has been sentenced to nearly six years (i.e., 70 months) in prison in the U.S. for their role in conspiring with the now-defunct BlackCat ransomware operators to extort multiple victims and working with two other cybersecurity professionals to target additional victims in 2023. In a sentencing memorandum , federal prosecutors described Martino as a "double agent working to maximize the harm to his clients and the financial gain to cybercriminals who paid him a part of the ransom." Angelo Martino, 41, of Land O'Lakes, Florida, pleaded guilty to one-count information charging him with conspiring to interfere with interstate commerce through extortion back in April. The defendant worked as a negotiator on behalf of five different ransomware victims, while providing BlackCat attackers with confidential information regarding their negotiating position and strategy without their knowledge or permission. This information incl...

Most security mess starts as admin work. A link gets clicked. A tool gets trusted. A bucket name gets reused. A setting stays loose because nobody wants to touch it. This week is full of that kind of damage. Not loud. Not clever. Just small gaps doing big jobs. The worst part is how normal it all looks until the bill arrives. The full ThreatsDay list is below. Global fraud bust Global Operation Leads to ~6K Arrests A global anti-fraud operation involving 97 countries and territories has resulted in the arrest of 5,811 individuals and the interception of $293 million in illicit assets as part of an operation codenamed First Light 2026 that took place between January 15 and April 30, 2026, to tackle social engineering scams and associated money laundering activities. "Over 142,000 victims globally were identified during Operation First Light 2026, highlighting the extent to which social engineering scams and fraud have escalated ...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new ransomware family called GodDamn that employs the PoisonX kernel driver to neutralize security software as part of its defense evasion strategy. According to a new report published by the Threat Hunter Team from Symantec, the ransomware was first publicly spotted in the wild on May 21, 2026. It's assessed to be a rebrand of the Beast ransomware, which, in turn, was an enhanced version of Monster , a Delphi-based ransomware that surfaced in March 2022. Broadcom's cybersecurity arm is tracing the developer behind these ransomware families under the moniker Hyadina. In one attack orchestrated by the ransomware operation in early June 2026, the threat actors are said to have leveraged AnyDesk for remote access and used a NirSoft-based credential harvesting toolkit before deploying the ransomware. The exact initial access vector is unknown. The credential harvester is designed to extract sensitive data from common web browsers, W...