ransomware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

This week didn’t produce one big headline. It produced many small signals — the kind that quietly shape what attacks will look like next. Researchers tracked intrusions that start in ordinary places: developer workflows, remote tools, cloud access, identity paths, and even routine user actions. Nothing looked dramatic on the surface. That’s the point. Entry is becoming less visible while impact scales later. Several findings also show how attackers are industrializing their work — shared infrastructure, repeatable playbooks, rented access, and affiliate-style ecosystems. Operations are no longer isolated campaigns. They run more like services. This edition pulls those fragments together — short, precise updates that show where techniques are maturing, where exposure is widening, and what patterns are forming behind the noise. Startup espionage expansion Operation Nomad Leopard Targets Afghanistan In a sign that the threat actor has moved beyond government targets, th...

Behind the scenes of law enforcement in cyber: what do we know about caught cybercriminals? What brought them in, where do they come from and what was their function in the crimescape? Introduction: One view on the scattered fight against cybercrime The growing sophistication and diversification of cybercrime have compelled law enforcement agencies worldwide to respond through increasingly coordinated and publicized actions. Yet, despite the visibility of these operations, there remains no comprehensive overview, to our knowledge, on how law enforcement is addressing cybercrime globally. Publicly available information is dispersed across agencies, jurisdictions, case-specific reporting (e.g., “Operation Endgame”) [1] , and reporting formats, offering fragmented insights rather than a cohesive understanding of what types of crime are being targeted, what actions are taken, and who the offenders are. This results in isolated glimpses rather than a consistent global picture. Therefor...

This week’s updates show how small changes can create real problems. Not loud incidents, but quiet shifts that are easy to miss until they add up. The kind that affects systems people rely on every day. Many of the stories point to the same trend: familiar tools being used in unexpected ways. Security controls are being worked on. Trusted platforms turning into weak spots. What looks routine on the surface often isn’t. There’s no single theme driving everything — just steady pressure across many fronts. Access, data, money, and trust are all being tested at once, often without clear warning signs. This edition pulls together those signals in short form, so you can see what’s changing before it becomes harder to ignore. Major cybercrime forum takedown FBI Seizes RAMP Forum The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has seized the notorious RAMP cybercrime forum. Visitors to the forum's Tor site and its clearnet domain, ramp4u...

Google on Tuesday revealed that multiple threat actors, including nation-state adversaries and financially motivated groups, are exploiting a now-patched critical security flaw in RARLAB WinRAR to establish initial access and deploy a diverse array of payloads. "Discovered and patched in July 2025, government-backed threat actors linked to Russia and China as well as financially motivated threat actors continue to exploit this n-day across disparate operations," the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said . "The consistent exploitation method, a path traversal flaw allowing files to be dropped into the Windows Startup folder for persistence, underscores a defensive gap in fundamental application security and user awareness." The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-8088 (CVSS score: 8.8), which was patched by WinRAR version 7.13 released on July 30, 2025. Successful exploitation of the flaw could allow an attacker to obtain arbitrary code execution by c...

If there’s a constant in cybersecurity, it’s that adversaries are always innovating. The rise of offensive AI is transforming attack strategies and making them harder to detect. Google’s Threat Intelligence Group , recently reported on adversaries using Large Language Models (LLMs) to both conceal code and generate malicious scripts on the fly, letting malware shape-shift in real-time to evade conventional defenses. A deeper look at these novel attacks reveals both unprecedented sophistication and deception.  In November 2025, Anthropic reported on what it described as the first known “AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign.” This operation featured AI integrated throughout the stages of attack, from initial access to exfiltration, which was executed largely autonomously by the AI itself.  Another recent trend concerns ClickFix-related attacks using steganography techniques (hiding malware within image files) that slipped past signature-based scans. Skillfully disguised ...