supply chain attack | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered three packages on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that are designed to stealthily deliver a previously unknown malware family called  ZiChatBot on Windows and Linux systems. "While these wheel packages do implement the features described on their PyPI web pages, their true purpose is to covertly deliver malicious files," Kaspersky  said . "Unlike traditional malware, ZiChatBot does not communicate with a dedicated command-and-control (C2) server, but instead uses a series of REST APIs from the public team chat app Zulip as its C2 infrastructure." The activity has been described as a "carefully planned and executed PyPI supply chain attack" by the Russian cybersecurity company. The names of the packages, which have since been taken down, are listed below - uuid32-utils (1,479 downloads) colorinal (614 downloads) termncolor (387 downloads) All three packages were uploaded to PyPI during a short wi...

Google has announced expanded Binary Transparency for Android as a way to safeguard the ecosystem from supply chain attacks. "This new public ledger ensures the Google apps on your device are exactly what we intended to build and distribute," Google's product and security teams said . The initiative builds upon the foundation of Pixel Binary Transparency , which Google introduced in October 2021 to bolster software integrity by ensuring that Pixel devices are only running verified operating system (OS) software by keeping a public, cryptographic log that records metadata about official factory images. The verifiable security infrastructure mirrors Certificate Transparency , an open framework that requires all issued SSL/TLS certificates to be recorded in public, append-only, and cryptographically verifiable logs to help detect mis-issued or malicious certificates. The move is aimed at countering the risks posed by binary supply chain attacks, which often deliver ...

A newly identified supply chain attack targeting DAEMON Tools software has compromised its installers to serve a malicious payload, according to findings from Kaspersky. "These installers are distributed from the legitimate website of DAEMON Tools and are signed with digital certificates belonging to DAEMON Tools developers," Kaspersky researchers  Igor Kuznetsov, Georgy Kucherin, Leonid Bezvershenko, and Anton Kargin said . The installers have been trojanized since April 8, 2026, with versions ranging from 12.5.0.2421 to 12.5.0.2434 identified as compromised as part of the incident. While DAEMON Tools is also available for Mac, Kaspersky told The Hacker News that only the Windows version was compromised. The supply chain attack is active as of writing. AVB Disc Soft, the developer of the software, has been notified of the breach. Specifically, three different components of DAEMON Tools have been tampered with - DTHelper.exe DiscSoftBusServiceLite.exe DTShellHlp.exe ...

The North Korea-aligned state-sponsored hacking group known as ScarCruft has compromised a video game platform in a supply chain espionage attack, trojanizing its components with a backdoor called BirdCall to likely target ethnic Koreans residing in China. While prior versions of the backdoor have primarily targeted Windows users only, the supply chain attack is assessed to have enabled the threat actors to also target Android devices, essentially turning it into a multi-platform threat. According to ESET, the campaign has singled out sqgame[.]net, a gaming platform used by ethnic Koreans living in the Yanbian region in China bordering North Korea and Russia. It's also known to act as a primary, high-risk transit point for North Korean defectors crossing the Tumen River. Filip Jurčacko, senior malware researcher at ESET, told The Hacker News that the campaign was discovered in October 2025, adding the trojanized Android games are still available for download on the sqgame[.]ne...

A new software supply chain attack campaign has been observed using sleeper packages as a conduit to subsequently push malicious payloads that enabled credential theft, GitHub Actions tampering, and SSH persistence. The activity has been attributed to the GitHub account " BufferZoneCorp ," which has published a set of repositories that are associated with malicious Ruby gems and Go modules. As of writing, the packages have been yanked from RubyGems, and the Go modules have been blocked. The names of the libraries are listed below - Ruby: knot-activesupport-logger knot-devise-jwt-helper knot-rack-session-store knot-rails-assets-pipeline knot-rspec-formatter-json knot-date-utils-rb (Sleeper gem) knot-simple-formatter (Sleeper gem) Go: github[.]com/BufferZoneCorp/go-metrics-sdk github[.]com/BufferZoneCorp/go-weather-sdk github[.]com/BufferZoneCorp/go-retryablehttp github[.]com/BufferZoneCorp/go-stdlib-ext github[.]com/BufferZoneCorp/grpc-client github[.]com...

In yet another software supply chain attack, threat actors have managed to compromise the popular Python package Lightning to push two malicious versions to conduct credential theft. According to Aikido Security , OX Security , Socket , and StepSecurity , the two malicious versions are versions 2.6.2 and 2.6.3, both of which were published on April 30, 2026. The campaign is assessed to be an extension of the Mini Shai-Hulud supply chain incident that targeted SAP-related npm packages on Wednesday. As of writing, the project has been quarantined by the administrators of the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository. PyTorch Lightning is an open-source Python framework that provides a high-level interface for PyTorch. The open-source project has more than 31,100 stars on GitHub. "The malicious package includes a hidden _runtime directory containing a downloader and an obfuscated JavaScript payload," Socket said. "The execution chain runs automatically when the lightn...

Cybersecurity researchers are sounding the alarm about a new supply chain attack campaign targeting SAP-related npm Packages with credential-stealing malware. According to reports from Aikido Security , Onapsis , OX Security ,  SafeDep , Socket , StepSecurity , and Google-owned Wiz , the campaign – calling itself the Mini  Shai-Hulud – has affected the following packages associated with SAP's JavaScript and cloud application development ecosystem - mbt@1.2.48 @cap-js/db-service@2.10.1 @cap-js/postgres@2.2.2 @cap-js/sqlite@2.2.2 "The affected versions introduced new installation-time behavior that was not previously part of these packages' expected functionality," Socket said. "The compromised releases added a preinstall script that acts as a runtime bootstrapper, downloading a platform-specific Bun ZIP from GitHub Releases, extracting it, and immediately executing the extracted Bun binary." "The implementation also follows HTTP redirects wi...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered malicious code in an npm package after a malicious package as a dependency to the project by Anthropic's Claude Opus large language model (LLM). The package in question is " @validate-sdk/v2 ," which is listed on npm as a utility software development kit (SDK) for hashing, validation, encoding/decoding, and secure random generation. However, its real functionality is to plunder sensitive secrets from the compromised environment. The package, which shows signs of being vibe-coded using generative artificial intelligence (AI), was first uploaded to the repository in October 2025. The malware campaign has been codenamed PromptMink by ReversingLabs, which linked the activity as part of a broader campaign mounted by the North Korean threat actor known as Famous Chollima (aka Shifty Corsair), which is behind the long-running Contagious Interview campaign and the fraudulent IT Worker scam . "The new malware campaign [...] inv...

In yet another instance of threat actors quickly jumping on the exploitation bandwagon, a newly disclosed critical security flaw in BerriAI's LiteLLM Python package has come under active exploitation in the wild within 36 hours of the bug becoming public knowledge. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-42208 (CVSS score: 9.3), is an SQL injection that could be exploited to modify the underlying LiteLLM proxy database. "A database query used during proxy API key checks mixed the caller-supplied key value into the query text instead of passing it as a separate parameter," LiteLLM maintainers said in an alert last week. "An unauthenticated attacker could send a specially crafted Authorization header to any LLM API route (for example, POST /chat/completions) and reach this query through the proxy's error-handling path. An attacker could read data from the proxy's database and may be able to modify it, leading to unauthorized access to the proxy and the c...

A cybercrime group of Brazilian origin has resurfaced after more than three years to orchestrate a campaign that targets Minecraft players with a new stealer called LofyStealer (aka GrabBot). "The malware disguises itself as a Minecraft hack called 'Slinky,'" Brazil-based cybersecurity company ZenoX said in a technical report. "It uses the official game icon to induce voluntary execution, exploiting the trust of young users in the gaming scene." The activity has been attributed with high confidence to a threat actor known as LofyGang , which was observed leveraging typosquatted packages on the npm registry to push stealer malware in 2022, specifically with an intent to siphon credit card data and user accounts associated with Discord Nitro, gaming, and streaming services. The group, believed to be active since late 2021, advertises their tools and services on platforms like GitHub and YouTube, while also contributing to an underground hacking communit...

Threat hunters are warning that the cybercriminal operation known as VECT 2.0 acts more like a wiper than a ransomware due to a critical flaw in its encryption implementation across Windows, Linux, and ESXi variants that renders recovery impossible even for the threat actors. The fact that VECT's locker permanently destroys large files rather than encrypting them means even victims who opt to pay the ransom cannot get their data back, as the decryption keys are discarded by the malware during the time encryption occurs. "VECT is being marketed as ransomware, but for any file over 131KB – which is most of what enterprises actually care about – it functions as a data destruction tool," Eli Smadja, group manager at Check Point Research, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "CISOs need to understand that in a VECT incident, paying is not a recovery strategy. There is no decrypter that can be handed over, not because the attackers are unwilling, but beca...

Bitwarden CLI , the command-line interface for the password manager Bitwarden, has reportedly been compromised as part of a newly discovered and ongoing Checkmarx supply chain campaign , according to findings from JFrog and Socket. "The affected package version appears to be @bitwarden/cli@2026.4.0 , and the malicious code was published in 'bw1.js,' a file included in the package contents," the application security company said . "The attack appears to have leveraged a compromised GitHub Action in Bitwarden's CI/CD pipeline, consistent with the pattern seen across other affected repositories in this campaign." In a post on X, JFrog said the rogue version of the package "steals GitHub/npm tokens, .ssh, .env, shell history, GitHub Actions and cloud secrets, then exfiltrates the data to private domains and as GitHub commits." Specifically, the malicious code is executed by means of a preinstall hook, resulting in the theft of local, CI, Git...

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of malicious images pushed to the official " checkmarx/kics " Docker Hub repository. In an alert published today, software supply chain security company Socket revealed that unknown threat actors managed to have overwritten existing tags, including v2.1.20 and alpine, while also introducing a new v2.1.21 tag that does not correspond to an official release. The Docker repository has been archived as of writing. "Analysis of the poisoned image indicates that the bundled KICS binary was modified to include data collection and exfiltration capabilities not present in the legitimate version," Socket said. "The malware could generate an uncensored scan report, encrypt it, and send it to an external endpoint, creating a serious risk for teams using KICS to scan infrastructure-as-code files that may contain credentials or other sensitive configuration data." Further analysis of the incident has uncovered that related Ch...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a fresh set of packages that have been compromised by bad actors to deliver a self-propagating worm that spreads through stolen developer npm tokens. The supply chain worm has been detected by both Socket and StepSecurity , with the companies tracking the activity under the name CanisterSprawl owing to the use of an ICP canister to exfiltrate the stolen data, in a tactic reminiscent of TeamPCP's CanisterWorm to make the infrastructure resilient to takedowns. The list of affected packages is below - @automagik/genie (4.260421.33 - 4.260421.40) @fairwords/loopback-connector-es (1.4.3 - 1.4.4) @fairwords/websocket (1.0.38 - 1.0.39) @openwebconcept/design-tokens (1.0.1 - 1.0.3) @openwebconcept/theme-owc (1.0.1 - 1.0.3) pgserve (1.1.11 - 1.1.14) The malware is triggered during install time via a postinstall hook to steal credentials and secrets from developer environments, and then leverage the stolen npm tokens to push poisoned ver...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a vulnerability in Google's agentic integrated development environment (IDE), Antigravity, that could be exploited to achieve code execution. The flaw, since patched, combines Antigravity's permitted file-creation capabilities with an insufficient input sanitization in Antigravity's native file-searching tool, find_by_name, to bypass the program's Strict Mode , a restrictive security configuration that limits network access, prevents out-of-workspace writes, and ensures all commands are being run within a sandbox context . "By injecting the -X (exec-batch) flag through the Pattern parameter [in the find_by_name tool], an attacker can force fd to execute arbitrary binaries against workspace files," Pillar Security researcher Dan Lisichkin said in an analysis. "Combined with Antigravity's ability to create files as a permitted action, this enables a full attack chain: stage a malicious script, then trigger ...

Unknown threat actors compromised CPUID ("cpuid[.]com"), a website that hosts popular hardware monitoring tools like CPU-Z, HWMonitor, HWMonitor Pro, and PerfMonitor, for less than 24 hours to serve malicious executables for the software and deploy a remote access trojan called STX RAT. The incident lasted from approximately April 9, 15:00 UTC, to about April 10, 10:00 UTC, with the download URLs for CPU-Z and HWMonitor installers replaced with links to malicious websites. In a post shared on X, CPUID confirmed the breach, attributing it to a compromise of a "secondary feature (basically a side API)" that caused the main site to randomly display malicious links. It's worth noting that the attack did not impact its signed original files. According to Kaspersky , the names of the rogue websites are as follows - cahayailmukreatif.web[.]id pub-45c2577dbd174292a02137c18e7b1b5a.r2[.]dev transitopalermo[.]com vatrobran[.]hr "The t...

Unknown threat actors have hijacked the update system for the Smart Slider 3 Pro plugin for WordPress and Joomla to push a poisoned version containing a backdoor. The incident impacts Smart Slider 3 Pro version 3.5.1.35 for WordPress, per WordPress security company Patchstack. Smart Slider 3 is a popular WordPress slider plugin with more than 800,000 active installations across its free and Pro editions. "An unauthorized party gained access to Nextend’s update infrastructure and distributed a fully attacker-authored build through the official update channel," the company said . "Any site that updated to 3.5.1.35 between its release on April 7, 2026, and its detection approximately 6 hours later received a fully weaponized remote access toolkit." Nextend, which maintains the plugin, said an unauthorized party gained unauthorized access to its update system and pushed a malicious version (3.5.1.35 Pro) that remained accessible for approximately six hours, before ...