social engineering | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The Russian-speaking hacking group called RedCurl has been linked to a ransomware campaign for the first time, marking a departure in the threat actor's tradecraft. The activity, observed by Romanian cybersecurity company Bitdefender, involves the deployment of a never-before-seen ransomware strain dubbed QWCrypt. RedCurl , also called Earth Kapre and Red Wolf, has a history of orchestrating corporate espionage attacks aimed at various entities in Canada, Germany, Norway, Russia, Slovenia, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It's known to be active since at least November 2018. Attack chains documented by Group-IB in 2020 entailed the use of spear-phishing emails bearing Human Resources (HR)-themed lures to activate the malware deployment process. Earlier this January, Huntress detailed attacks mounted by the threat actor targeting several organizations in Canada to deploy a loader dubbed RedLoader with "simple backdoor capabilities." Then l...

Law enforcement authorities in seven African countries have arrested 306 suspects and confiscated 1,842 devices as part of an international operation codenamed Red Card that took place between November 2024 and February 2025. The coordinated effort "aims to disrupt and dismantle cross-border criminal networks which cause significant harm to individuals and businesses," INTERPOL said , adding it focused on targeted mobile banking, investment, and messaging app scams. The cyber-enabled scams involved more than 5,000 victims. The countries that participated in the operation include Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Togo, and Zambia. "The success of Operation Red Card demonstrates the power of international cooperation in combating cybercrime, which knows no borders and can have devastating effects on individuals and communities," Neal Jetton, INTERPOL's Director of the Cybercrime Directorate, said. "The recovery of significant asse...

Organizations now use an average of 112 SaaS applications —a number that keeps growing. In a 2024 study, 49% of 644 respondents who frequently used Microsoft 365 believed that they had less than 10 apps connected to the platform, despite the fact that aggregated data indicated over 1,000+ Microsoft 365 SaaS-to-SaaS connections on average per deployment. And that's just one major SaaS provider. Imagine other unforeseen critical security risks: Each SaaS app has unique security configurations —making misconfigurations a top risk. Business-critical apps (CRM, finance, and collaboration tools) store vast amounts of sensitive data, making them prime targets for attackers. Shadow IT and third-party integrations introduce hidden vulnerabilities that often go unnoticed. Large and small third-party AI service providers (e.g. audio/video transcription service) may not comply with legal and regulatory requirements, or properly test and review code. Major SaaS providers also have thous...

The threat actors behind the ClearFake campaign are using fake reCAPTCHA or Cloudflare Turnstile verifications as lures to trick users into downloading malware such as Lumma Stealer and Vidar Stealer. ClearFake , first highlighted in July 2023, is the name given to a threat activity cluster that employs fake web browser update baits on compromised WordPress as a malware distribution vector. The campaign is also known for relying on another technique known as EtherHiding to fetch the next-stage payload by utilizing Binance's Smart Chain (BSC) contracts as a way to make the attack chain more resilient. The end goal of these infection chains is to deliver information-stealing malware capable of targeting both Windows and macOS systems. As of May 2024, ClearFake attacks have adopted what has by now come to be known as ClickFix , a social engineering ploy that involves deceiving users into running malicious PowerShell code under the guise of addressing a non-existent technical i...

A new malware campaign has been observed leveraging social engineering tactics to deliver an open-source rootkit called r77 . The activity, condemned OBSCURE#BAT by Securonix, enables threat actors to establish persistence and evade detection on compromised systems. It's currently not known who is behind the campaign. The rootkit "has the ability to cloak or mask any file, registry key or task beginning with a specific prefix," security researchers Den Iuzvyk and Tim Peck said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "It has been targeting users by either masquerading as legitimate software downloads or via fake captcha social engineering scams." The campaign is designed to mainly target English-speaking individuals, particularly the United States, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. OBSCURE#BAT gets its name from the fact that the starting point of the attack is an obfuscated Windows batch script that, in turn, executes PowerShell commands to activ...

Microsoft has shed light on an ongoing phishing campaign that has targeted the hospitality sector by impersonating online travel agency Booking.com using an increasingly popular social engineering technique called ClickFix to deliver credential-stealing malware. The activity, the tech giant's threat intelligence team said, started in December 2024 and operates with the end goal of conducting financial fraud and theft. It's tracking the campaign under the moniker Storm-1865 . "This phishing attack specifically targets individuals in hospitality organizations in North America, Oceania, South and Southeast Asia, and Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western Europe, that are most likely to work with Booking.com, sending fake emails purporting to be coming from the agency," Microsoft said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The ClickFix technique has become widespread in recent months, as it tricks users into executing malware under the guise of fixing a supposed...

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as ScarCruft is said to have been behind a never-before-seen Android surveillance tool named KoSpy targeting Korean and English-speaking users. Lookout, which shared details of the malware campaign, said the earliest versions date back to March 2022. The most recent samples were flagged in March 2024. It's not clear how successful these efforts were. "KoSpy can collect extensive data, such as SMS messages, call logs, location, files, audio, and screenshots via dynamically loaded plugins," the company said in an analysis. The malicious artifacts masquerade as utility applications on the official Google Play Store, using the names File Manager, Phone Manager, Smart Manager, Software Update Utility, and Kakao Security to trick unsuspecting users into infecting their own devices. All the identified apps offer the promised functionality to avoid raising suspicion while stealthily deploying spyware-related components in the backg...

We've been hearing the same story for years: AI is coming for your job. In fact, in 2017, McKinsey printed a report, Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation , predicting that by 2030, 375 million workers would need to find new jobs or risk being displaced by AI and automation. Queue the anxiety.  There have been ongoing whispers about what roles would be impacted, and pentesting has recently come into question. With AI now able to automate tasks such as vulnerability scans and network scans—among other things—and with platforms like PlexTrac adding AI capabilities to cut back on the manual effort, will pentesters be out of a job? Let's start with some optimism. This year, McKinsey retracted its former prediction that 375 million workers would be displaced by AI, lowering the prediction to roughly 92 million workers. The article continued to ease concern stating that although some jobs may become obsolete, it's more likely that jobs will simply unde...

The Middle East and North Africa have become the target of a new campaign that delivers a modified version of a known malware called AsyncRAT since September 2024. "The campaign, which leverages social media to distribute malware, is tied to the region's current geopolitical climate," Positive Technologies researchers Klimentiy Galkin and Stanislav Pyzhov said in an analysis published last week. "The attackers host malware in legitimate online file-sharing accounts or Telegram channels set up specially for this purpose." The campaign is estimated to have claimed approximately 900 victims since the fall 2024, the Russian cybersecurity company added, indicating its widespread nature. A majority of the victims are located in Libya, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Tunisia. The activity, attributed to a threat actor dubbed Desert Dexter , was discovered in February 2025. It chiefly involves creating temporary accounts and news ...

The financially motivated threat actor known as EncryptHub has been observed orchestrating sophisticated phishing campaigns to deploy information stealers and ransomware, while also working on a new product called EncryptRAT . "EncryptHub has been observed targeting users of popular applications, by distributing trojanized versions," Outpost24 KrakenLabs said in a new report shared with The Hacker News. "Furthermore, the threat actor has also made use of third-party Pay-Per-Install (PPI) distribution services." The cybersecurity company described the threat actor as a hacking group that makes operational security errors and as someone who incorporates exploits for popular security flaws into their attack campaigns. EncryptHub, also tracked by Swiss cybersecurity company PRODAFT as LARVA-208, is assessed to have become active towards the end of June 2024, relying on a variety of approaches ranging from SMS phishing (smishing) to voice phishing (vishing) in an at...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new phishing campaign that employs the ClickFix technique to deliver an open-source command-and-control (C2) framework called Havoc . "The threat actor hides each malware stage behind a SharePoint site and uses a modified version of Havoc Demon in conjunction with the Microsoft Graph API to obscure C2 communications within trusted, well-known services," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The starting point of the attack is a phishing email containing an HTML attachment ("Documents.html") that, when opened, displays an error message, which uses the ClickFix technique to trick users into copying and executing a malicious PowerShell command into their terminal or PowerShell, thereby triggering the next-stage. The ClickFix bait used in the newly discovered campaign informs the user that there is an error connecting to Microsoft OneDrive, and that they need to rectif...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a widespread phishing campaign that uses fake CAPTCHA images shared via PDF documents hosted on Webflow's content delivery network (CDN) to deliver the Lumma stealer malware. Netskope Threat Labs said it discovered 260 unique domains hosting 5,000 phishing PDF files that redirect victims to malicious websites. "The attacker uses SEO to trick victims into visiting the pages by clicking on malicious search engine results," security researcher Jan Michael Alcantara said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "While most phishing pages focus on stealing credit card information, some PDF files contain fake CAPTCHAs that trick victims into executing malicious PowerShell commands, ultimately leading to the Lumma Stealer malware." The phishing campaign is estimated to have affected more than 1,150 organizations and more than 7,000 users since the second half of 2024, with the attacks primarily singling out victims in Nort...

Social engineering is advancing fast, at the speed of generative AI. This is offering bad actors multiple new tools and techniques for researching, scoping, and exploiting organizations. In a recent communication, the FBI pointed out: 'As technology continues to evolve, so do cybercriminals' tactics.' This article explores some of the impacts of this GenAI-fueled acceleration. And examines what it means for IT leaders responsible for managing defenses and mitigating vulnerabilities. More realism, better pretexting, and multi-lingual attack scenarios Traditional social engineering methods usually involve impersonating someone the target knows. The attacker may hide behind email to communicate, adding some psychological triggers to boost the chances of a successful breach. Maybe a request to act urgently, so the target is less likely to pause and develop doubts. Or making the email come from an employee's CEO, hoping the employee's respect for authority means they won't question...