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The threat actors behind a large-scale, ongoing smishing campaign have been attributed to more than 194,000 malicious domains since January 1, 2024, targeting a broad range of services across the world, according to new findings from Palo Alto Networks Unit 42. "Although these domains are registered through a Hong Kong-based registrar and use Chinese nameservers, the attack infrastructure is primarily hosted on popular U.S. cloud services," security researchers Reethika Ramesh, Zhanhao Chen, Daiping Liu, Chi-Wei Liu, Shehroze Farooqi, and Moe Ghasemisharif said . The activity has been attributed to a China-linked group known as the Smishing Triad , which is known to flood mobile devices with fraudulent toll violation and package misdelivery notices to trick users into taking immediate action and providing sensitive information. These campaigns have proven to be lucrative, allowing the threat actors to make more than $1 billion over the last three years, according to a re...

Microsoft on Thursday released out-of-band security updates to patch a critical-severity Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) vulnerability with a proof-of-concept (Poc) exploit publicly available and has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-59287 (CVSS score: 9.8), a remote code execution flaw in WSUS that was originally fixed by the tech giant as part of its Patch Tuesday update published last week. Three security researchers, MEOW, f7d8c52bec79e42795cf15888b85cbad, and Markus Wulftange with CODE WHITE GmbH, have been acknowledged for discovering and reporting the bug. The shortcoming concerns a case of deserialization of untrusted data in WSUS that allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code over a network. It's worth noting that the vulnerability does not impact Windows servers that do not have the WSUS Server Role enabled. In a hypothetical attack scenario, a remote, unauthenticated attacker could send a crafted even...

A Pakistan-nexus threat actor has been observed targeting Indian government entities as part of spear-phishing attacks designed to deliver a Golang-based malware known as DeskRAT . The activity, observed in August and September 2025 by Sekoia, has been attributed to Transparent Tribe (aka APT36), a state-sponsored hacking group known to be active since at least 2013. It also builds upon a prior campaign disclosed by CYFIRMA in August 2025. The attack chains involve sending phishing emails containing a ZIP file attachment, or in some cases, a link pointing to an archive hosted on legitimate cloud services like Google Drive. Present within the ZIP file is a malicious Desktop file embedding commands to display a decoy PDF ("CDS_Directive_Armed_Forces.pdf") using Mozilla Firefox while simultaneously executing the main payload. Both the artifacts are pulled from an external server "modgovindia[.]com" and executed. Like before, the campaign is designed to target BO...

Does your organization suffer from a cybersecurity perception gap? Findings from the  Bitdefender 2025 Cybersecurity Assessment suggest the answer is probably "yes" — and many leaders may not even realize it. This disconnect matters. Small differences in perception today can evolve into major blind spots tomorrow. After all, perception influences what organizations prioritize, where they allocate resources, and how they respond in critical moments. Confidence at the Top, Caution on the Ground Bitdefender's latest assessment surveyed  1,200 cybersecurity and IT professionals , and at first glance, the results suggest optimism. An impressive  93% say they are "somewhat" or "very confident" in their ability to manage cyber risk as the attack surface expands. But dig deeper, and the optimism begins to split. Nearly half ( 45% ) of C-level respondents — including CISOs and CIOs — describe themselves as "very confident" in their organization's readiness. Yet among mid-l...

A malicious network of YouTube accounts has been observed publishing and promoting videos that lead to malware downloads, essentially abusing the popularity and trust associated with the video hosting platform for propagating malicious payloads. Active since 2021, the network has published more than 3,000 malicious videos to date, with the volume of such videos tripling since the start of the year. It has been codenamed the YouTube Ghost Network by Check Point. Google has since stepped in to remove a majority of these videos. The campaign leverages hacked accounts and replaces their content with "malicious" videos that are centred around pirated software and Roblox game cheats to infect unsuspecting users searching for them with stealer malware. Some of these videos have racked up hundreds of thousands of views, ranging from 147,000 to 293,000. "This operation took advantage of trust signals, including views, likes, and comments, to make malicious content seem safe,...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a self-propagating worm that spreads via Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extensions on the Open VSX Registry and the Microsoft Extension Marketplace, underscoring how developers have become a prime target for attacks. The sophisticated threat, codenamed GlassWorm by Koi Security, is the second such supply chain attack to hit the DevOps space within a span of a month after the Shai-Hulud worm that targeted the npm ecosystem in mid-September 2025. What makes the attack stand out is the use of the Solana blockchain for command-and-control (C2), making the infrastructure resilient to takedown efforts. It also uses Google Calendar as a C2 fallback mechanism. Another novel aspect is that the GlassWorm campaign relies on "invisible Unicode characters that make malicious code literally disappear from code editors," Idan Dardikman said in a technical report. "The attacker used Unicode variation selectors – special characters that are...

Threat actors with ties to North Korea have been attributed to a new wave of attacks targeting European companies active in the defense industry as part of a long-running campaign known as Operation Dream Job . "Some of these [companies] are heavily involved in the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sector, suggesting that the operation may be linked to North Korea's current efforts to scale up its drone program," ESET security researchers Peter Kálnai and Alexis Rapin said in a report shared with The Hacker News. It's assessed that the end goal of the campaign is to plunder proprietary information and manufacturing know-how using malware families such as ScoringMathTea and MISTPEN. The Slovak cybersecurity company said it observed the campaign starting in late March 2025. Some of the targeted entities include a metal engineering company in Southeastern Europe, a manufacturer of aircraft components in Central Europe, and a defense company in Central Europe. While Sc...

AI is everywhere—and your company wants in. Faster products, smarter systems, fewer bottlenecks. But if you're in security, that excitement often comes with a sinking feeling. Because while everyone else is racing ahead, you're left trying to manage a growing web of AI agents you didn't create, can't fully see, and weren't designed to control. Join our upcoming webinar and learn how to make AI security work with you, not against you . The Quiet Crisis No One Talks About Did you know most companies now have 100 AI agents for every one human employee? Even more shocking? 99% of those AI identities are completely unmanaged. No oversight. No lifecycle controls. And every one of them could be a backdoor waiting to happen. It's not your fault. Traditional tools weren't built for this new AI world. But the risks are real—and growing. Let's Change That. Together. In our free webinar, " Turning Controls into Accelerators of AI Adoption ," we'll help you flip the script. Th...

Criminals don't need to be clever all the time; they just follow the easiest path in: trick users, exploit stale components, or abuse trusted systems like OAuth and package registries. If your stack or habits make any of those easy, you're already a target. This week's ThreatsDay highlights show exactly how those weak points are being exploited — from overlooked misconfigurations to sophisticated new attack chains that turn ordinary tools into powerful entry points. Lumma Stealer Stumbles After Doxxing Drama Decline in Lumma Stealer Activity After Doxxing Campaign The activity of the Lumma Stealer (aka Water Kurita) information stealer has witnessed a "sudden drop" since last months after the identities of five alleged core group members were exposed as part of what's said to be an aggressive underground exposure campaign dubbed Lumma Rats since late August 2025. The targeted individuals are affiliated with the malware's development and administ...

As machine identities explode across cloud environments, enterprises report dramatic productivity gains from eliminating static credentials. And only legacy systems remain the weak link. For decades, organizations have relied on static secrets, such as API keys, passwords, and tokens, as unique identifiers for workloads. While this approach provides clear traceability, it creates what security researchers describe as an "operational nightmare" of manual lifecycle management, rotation schedules, and constant credential leakage risks. This challenge has traditionally driven organizations toward centralized secret management solutions like HashiCorp Vault or CyberArk, which provide universal brokers for secrets across platforms. However, these approaches perpetuate the fundamental problem: the proliferation of static secrets requiring careful management and rotation. "Having a workload in Azure that needs to read data from AWS S3 is not ideal from a security perspective...