supply chain attack | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new iteration of the ongoing Contagious Interview campaign, where the North Korean threat actors have published a set of 26 malicious packages to the npm registry. The packages masquerade as developer tools, but contain functionality to extract the actual command-and-control (C2) by using seemingly harmless Pastebin content as a dead drop resolver and ultimately drop a developer-targeted credential stealer and remote access trojan. The C2 infrastructure is hosted on Vercel across 31 deployments. The campaign , tracked by Socket and kmsec.uk's Kieran Miyamoto is being tracked under the moniker StegaBin . It's attributed to a North Korean threat activity cluster known as Famous Chollima. "The loader extracts C2 URLs steganographically encoded within three Pastebin pastes, innocuous computer science essays in which characters at evenly-spaced positions have been replaced to spell out hidden infrastructure addresses," Socket...

OpenClaw has fixed a high-severity security issue that, if successfully exploited, could have allowed a malicious website to connect to a locally running artificial intelligence (AI) agent and take over control. "Our vulnerability lives in the core system itself – no plugins, no marketplace, no user-installed extensions – just the bare OpenClaw gateway, running exactly as documented," Oasis Security said in a report published this week. The flaw has been codenamed ClawJacked by the cybersecurity company. The attack assumes the following threat model: A developer has OpenClaw set up and running on their laptop, with its gateway , a local WebSocket server, bound to localhost and protected by a password. The attack kicks in when the developer lands on an attacker-controlled website through social engineering or some other means. The infection sequence then follows the steps below - Malicious JavaScript on the web page opens a WebSocket connection to localhost on the ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a malicious Go module that's designed to harvest passwords, create persistent access via SSH, and deliver a Linux backdoor named Rekoobe. The Go module, github[.]com/xinfeisoft/crypto, impersonates the legitimate "golang.org/x/crypto" codebase, but injects malicious code that's responsible for exfiltrating secrets entered via terminal password prompts to a remote endpoint, fetches a shell script in response, and executes it. "This activity fits namespace confusion and impersonation of the legitimate golang.org/x/crypto subrepository (and its GitHub mirror github.com/golang/crypto)," Socket security researcher Kirill Boychenko said . "The legitimate project identifies go.googlesource.com/crypto as canonical and treats GitHub as a mirror, a distinction the threat actor abuses to make github.com/xinfeisoft/crypto look routine in dependency graphs." Specifically, the backdoor has been placed with...

A "coordinated developer-targeting campaign" is using malicious repositories disguised as legitimate Next.js projects and technical assessments to trick victims into executing them and establish persistent access to compromised machines. "The activity aligns with a broader cluster of threats that use job-themed lures to blend into routine developer workflows and increase the likelihood of code execution," the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team said in a report published this week. The tech giant said the campaign is characterized by the use of multiple entry points that lead to the same outcome, where attacker-controlled JavaScript is retrieved at runtime and executed to facilitate command-and-control (C2). The attacks rely on the threat actors setting up fake repositories on trusted developer platforms like Bitbucket, using names like "Cryptan-Platform-MVP1" to trick developers looking for jobs into running them as part of an assessment proces...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new malicious package discovered on the NuGet Gallery, impersonating a library from financial services firm Stripe in an attempt to target the financial sector. The package, codenamed StripeApi.Net, attempts to masquerade as Stripe.net , a legitimate library from Stripe that has over 75 million downloads. It was uploaded by a user named StripePayments on February 16, 2026. The package is no longer available. "The NuGet page for the malicious package is set up to resemble the official Stripe.net package as closely as possible," ReversingLabs Petar Kirhmajer said . "It uses the same icon as the legitimate package and contains a nearly identical readme, only swapping the 'Stripe.net' references to read 'Stripe-net.'" In a further effort to lend credibility to the typosquatted package, the threat actor behind the campaign is said to have artificially inflated the download count to more than 180,00...

A vulnerability in GitHub Codespaces could have been exploited by bad actors to seize control of repositories by injecting malicious Copilot instructions in a GitHub issue. The artificial intelligence (AI)-driven vulnerability has been codenamed RoguePilot by Orca Security. It has since been patched by Microsoft following responsible disclosure. "Attackers can craft hidden instructions inside a GitHub issue that are automatically processed by GitHub Copilot, giving them silent control of the in-codespaces AI agent," security researcher Roi Nisimi said in a report. The vulnerability has been described as a case of passive or indirect prompt injection where a malicious instruction is embedded within data or content that's processed by the large language model (LLM), causing it to produce unintended outputs or carry out arbitrary actions. The cloud security company also called it a type of AI-mediated supply chain attack that induces the LLM to automatically execute ...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed what they say is an active "Shai-Hulud-like" supply chain worm campaign that has leveraged a cluster of at least 19 malicious npm packages to enable credential harvesting and cryptocurrency key theft. The campaign has been codenamed SANDWORM_MODE by supply chain security company Socket. As with prior Shai-Hulud attack waves , the malicious code embedded into the packages comes with capabilities to siphon system information, access tokens, environment secrets, and API keys from developer environments and automatically propagate by abusing stolen npm and GitHub identities to extend its reach. "The sample retains Shai-Hulud hallmarks and adds GitHub API exfiltration with DNS fallback, hook-based persistence, SSH propagation fallback, MCP server injection with embedded prompt injection targeting AI coding assistants, and LLM API Key harvesting," the company said . The packages, published to npm by two npm publisher aliases,...

In yet another software supply chain attack, the open-source, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistant Cline CLI was updated to stealthily install OpenClaw , a self-hosted autonomous AI agent that has become exceedingly popular in the past few months. "On February 17, 2026, at 3:26 AM PT, an unauthorized party used a compromised npm publish token to publish an update to Cline CLI on the NPM registry: cline@2.3.0," the maintainers of the Cline package said in an advisory. "The published package contains a modified package.json with an added postinstall script: 'postinstall": "npm install -g openclaw@latest.'" As a result, this causes OpenClaw to be installed on the developer's machine when Cline version 2.3.0 is installed. Cline said no additional modifications were introduced to the package and there was no malicious behavior observed. However, it noted that the installation of OpenClaw was not authorized or intended. The s...

Notepad++ has released a security fix to plug gaps that were exploited by an advanced threat actor from China to hijack the software update mechanism to selectively deliver malware to targets of interest. The version 8.9.2 update incorporates what maintainer Don Ho calls a "double lock" design that aims to make the update process "robust and effectively unexploitable." This includes verification of the signed installer downloaded from GitHub (implemented in version 8.8.9 and later), as well as the newly added verification of the signed XML returned by the update server at notepad-plus-plus[.]org. In addition to these enhancements, security-focused changes have been introduced to WinGUp, the auto-updater component - Removal of libcurl.dll to eliminate DLL side-loading risk Removal of two unsecured cURL SSL options: CURLSSLOPT_ALLOW_BEAST and CURLSSLOPT_NO_REVOKE Restriction of plugin management execution to programs signed with the same certificate as WinGUp...

Cybersecurity researchers disclosed they have detected a case of an information stealer infection successfully exfiltrating a victim's OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot and Moltbot ) configuration environment. "This finding marks a significant milestone in the evolution of infostealer behavior: the transition from stealing browser credentials to harvesting the 'souls' and identities of personal AI [artificial intelligence] agents," Hudson Rock said . Alon Gal, CTO of Hudson Rock, told The Hacker News that the stealer was likely a variant of Vidar based on the infection details. Vidar is an off-the-shelf information stealer that's known to be active since late 2018. That said, the cybersecurity company said the data capture was not facilitated by a custom OpenClaw module within the stealer malware, but rather through a "broad file-grabbing routine" that's designed to look for certain file extensions and specific directory names containing sensitiv...

The information technology (IT) workers associated with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) are now applying to remote positions using real LinkedIn accounts of individuals they're impersonating, marking a new escalation of the fraudulent scheme. "These profiles often have verified workplace emails and identity badges, which DPRK operatives hope will make their fraudulent applications appear legitimate," Security Alliance (SEAL) said in a series of posts on X. The IT worker threat is a long-running operation mounted by North Korea in which operatives from the country pose as remote workers to secure jobs in Western companies and elsewhere under stolen or fabricated identities. The threat is also tracked by the broader cybersecurity community as Jasper Sleet, PurpleDelta, and Wagemole. The end goal of these efforts is two-pronged: to generate a steady revenue stream to fund the nation's weapons programs, conduct espionage by stealing sensitive...

A China-linked threat actor known as Lotus Blossom has been attributed with medium confidence to the recently discovered compromise of the infrastructure hosting Notepad++. The attack enabled the state-sponsored hacking group to deliver a previously undocumented backdoor codenamed Chrysalis to users of the open-source editor, according to new findings from Rapid7. The development comes shortly after Notepad++ maintainer Don Ho said that a compromise at the hosting provider level allowed threat actors to hijack update traffic starting June 2025 and selectively redirect such requests from certain users to malicious servers to serve a tampered update by exploiting insufficient update verification controls that existed in older versions of the utility. The weakness was plugged in December 2025 with the release of version 8.8.9. It has since emerged that the hosting provider for the software was breached to perform targeted traffic redirections until December 2, 2025, when the atta...

The maintainer of Notepad++ has revealed that state-sponsored attackers hijacked the utility's update mechanism to redirect update traffic to malicious servers instead. "The attack involved [an] infrastructure-level compromise that allowed malicious actors to intercept and redirect update traffic destined for notepad-plus-plus.org," developer Don Ho said . "The compromise occurred at the hosting provider level rather than through vulnerabilities in Notepad++ code itself." The exact mechanism through which this was realized is currently being investigated, Ho added. The development comes a little over a month after Notepad++ released version 8.8.9 to address an issue that resulted in traffic from WinGUp, the Notepad++ updater, being "occasionally" redirected to malicious domains, resulting in the download of poisoned executables. Specifically, the problem stemmed from the way the updater verified the integrity and authenticity of the downloaded u...

The update infrastructure for eScan antivirus, a security solution developed by Indian cybersecurity company MicroWorld Technologies, has been compromised by unknown attackers to deliver a persistent downloader to enterprise and consumer systems. "Malicious updates were distributed through eScan's legitimate update infrastructure, resulting in the deployment of multi-stage malware to enterprise and consumer endpoints globally," Morphisec researcher Michael Gorelik said . MicroWorld Technologies has revealed that it detected unauthorized access to its infrastructure and immediately isolated the impacted update servers, which remained offline for over eight hours. It has also released a patch that reverts the changes introduced as part of the malicious update. Impacted organizations are recommended to contact MicroWorld Technologies to obtain the fix. It also pinned the attack as resulting from unauthorized access to one of its regional update server configurations, whi...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new malicious Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension for Moltbot (formerly Clawdbot) on the official Extension Marketplace that claims to be a free artificial intelligence (AI) coding assistant, but stealthily drops a malicious payload on compromised hosts. The extension, named "ClawdBot Agent - AI Coding Assistant" ("clawdbot.clawdbot-agent"), has since been taken down by Microsoft. It was published by a user named "clawdbot" on January 27, 2026.  Moltbot has taken off in a big way, crossing more than 85,000 stars on GitHub as of writing. The open-source project, created by Austrian developer Peter Steinberger, allows users to run a personal AI assistant powered by a large language model (LLM) locally on their own devices and interact with it over already established communication platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Google Chat, Signal, iMessage, Microsoft Teams, and WebChat.

The North Korean threat actor known as Konni has been observed using PowerShell malware generated using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to target developers and engineering teams in the blockchain sector. The phishing campaign has targeted Japan, Australia, and India, highlighting the adversary's expansion of the targeting scope beyond South Korea , Russia , Ukraine , and European nations , Check Point Research said in a technical report published last week. Active since at least 2014, Konni is primarily known for its targeting of organizations and individuals in South Korea. It's also tracked as Earth Imp, Opal Sleet, Osmium, TA406, and Vedalia. In November 2025, the Genians Security Center (GSC) detailed the hacking group's targeting of Android devices by exploiting Google's asset tracking service, Find Hub, to remotely reset victim devices and erase personal data from them, signaling a new escalation of their tradecraft. As recently as this month, Konni ha...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added four security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2025-68645 (CVSS score: 8.8) - A PHP remote file inclusion vulnerability in Synacor Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) that could allow a remote attacker to craft requests to the "/h/rest" endpoint and allow inclusion of arbitrary files from the WebRoot directory without any authentication (Fixed in November 2025 with version 10.1.13 ) CVE-2025-34026 (CVSS score: 9.2) - An authentication bypass in the Versa Concerto SD-WAN orchestration platform that could allow an attacker to access administrative endpoints (Fixed in April 2025 with version 12.2.1 GA ) CVE-2025-31125 (CVSS score: 5.3) - An improper access control vulnerability in Vite Vitejs that could allow contents of arbitrary files to be returned to the bro...

A new malicious package discovered in the Python Package Index (PyPI) has been found to impersonate a popular library for symbolic mathematics to deploy malicious payloads, including a cryptocurrency miner, on Linux hosts. The package, named sympy-dev , mimics SymPy , replicating the latter's project description verbatim in an attempt to deceive unsuspecting users into thinking that they are downloading a "development version" of the library. It has been downloaded over 1,100 times since it was first published on January 17, 2026. Although the download count is not a reliable yardstick for measuring the number of infections, the figure likely suggests some developers may have fallen victim to the malicious campaign. The package remains available for download as of writing. According to Socket , the original library has been modified to act as a downloader for an XMRig cryptocurrency miner on compromised systems. The malicious behavior is designed to trigger only when ...

The North Korean threat actors associated with the long-running Contagious Interview campaign have been observed using malicious Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) projects as lures to deliver a backdoor on compromised endpoints. The latest finding demonstrates continued evolution of the new tactic that was first discovered in December 2025, Jamf Threat Labs said. "This activity involved the deployment of a backdoor implant that provides remote code execution capabilities on the victim system," security researcher Thijs Xhaflaire said in a report shared with The Hacker News. First disclosed by OpenSourceMalware last month, the attack essentially involves instructing prospective targets to clone a repository on GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket, and launch the project in VS Code as part of a supposed job assessment. The end goal of these efforts is to abuse VS Code task configuration files to execute malicious payloads staged on Vercel domains, depending on the oper...

A critical misconfiguration in Amazon Web Services (AWS) CodeBuild could have allowed complete takeover of the cloud service provider's own GitHub repositories, including its AWS JavaScript SDK, putting every AWS environment at risk. The vulnerability has been codenamed CodeBreach by cloud security company Wiz. The issue was fixed by AWS in September 2025 following responsible disclosure on August 25, 2025. "By exploiting CodeBreach, attackers could have injected malicious code to launch a platform-wide compromise, potentially affecting not just the countless applications depending on the SDK, but the Console itself, threatening every AWS account," researchers Yuval Avrahami and Nir Ohfeld said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The flaw, Wiz noted, is the result of a weakness in the continuous integration (CI) pipelines that could have enabled unauthenticated attackers to breach the build environment, leak privileged credentials like GitHub admin tokens, and...