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As the field of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve at a rapid pace, new research has found how techniques that render the Model Context Protocol ( MCP ) susceptible to prompt injection attacks could be used to develop security tooling or identify malicious tools, according to a new report from Tenable. MCP, launched by Anthropic in November 2024, is a framework designed to connect Large Language Models (LLMs) with external data sources and services, and make use of model-controlled tools to interact with those systems to enhance the accuracy, relevance, and utility of AI applications. It follows a client-server architecture, allowing hosts with MCP clients such as Claude Desktop or Cursor to communicate with different MCP servers, each of which exposes specific tools and capabilities. While the open standard offers a unified interface to access various data sources and even switch between LLM providers, they also come with a new set of risks, ranging from excess...

How Many Gaps Are Hiding in Your Identity System? It's not just about logins anymore. Today's attackers don't need to "hack" in—they can trick their way in. Deepfakes, impersonation scams, and AI-powered social engineering are helping them bypass traditional defenses and slip through unnoticed. Once inside, they can take over accounts, move laterally, and cause long-term damage—all without triggering alarms. But here's the catch: most organizations only focus on parts of the identity lifecycle—usually authentication. That leaves critical gaps wide open during enrollment, recovery, and even routine access. This upcoming webinar from Beyond Identity and Nametag breaks down what it really takes to protect your entire identity lifecycle —from the first time a user joins, to every login, to the moment they forget their credentials. 🔐 What's Covered: AI Threats Are Already Here – Learn how attackers are using deepfakes to impersonate real users Phishing-Resistant MFA – Go beyond...

A China-aligned advanced persistent threat (APT) group called TheWizards has been linked to a lateral movement tool called Spellbinder that can facilitate adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attacks. "Spellbinder enables adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attacks, through IPv6 stateless address autoconfiguration ( SLAAC ) spoofing , to move laterally in the compromised network, intercepting packets and redirecting the traffic of legitimate Chinese software so that it downloads malicious updates from a server controlled by the attackers," ESET researcher Facundo Muñoz said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The attack paves the way for a malicious downloader that's delivered by hijacking the software update mechanism associated with Sogou Pinyin. The downloader then acts as a conduit to drop a modular backdoor codenamed WizardNet. This is not the first time Chinese threat actors have abused Sogou Pinyin's software update process to deliver their own malware. In Janu...

Everyone has cybersecurity stories involving family members. Here's a relatively common one. The conversation usually goes something like this:  "The strangest thing happened to my streaming account. I got locked out of my account, so I had to change my password. When I logged back in, all my shows were gone. Everything was in Spanish and there were all these Spanish shows I've never seen before. Isn't that weird?" This is an example of an account takeover attack on a customer account. Typically what happens is that a streaming account is compromised, probably due to a weak and reused password, and access is resold as part of a common digital black market product, often advertised as something like "LIFETIME STREAMING SERVICE ACCOUNT - $4 USD." In the grand scheme of things, this is a relatively mild inconvenience for most customers. You can reset your credentials with a much stronger password, call your bank to issue a new credit card and be back to binge-watching The Crown i...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a Russian-speaking cyber espionage group called Nebulous Mantis that has deployed a remote access trojan called RomCom RAT since mid-2022. RomCom "employs advanced evasion techniques, including living-off-the-land (LOTL) tactics and encrypted command and control (C2) communications, while continuously evolving its infrastructure – leveraging bulletproof hosting to maintain persistence and evade detection," Swiss cybersecurity company PRODAFT said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Nebulous Mantis, also tracked by the cybersecurity community under the names CIGAR , Cuba , Storm-0978, Tropical Scorpius, UAC-0180, UNC2596 , and Void Rabisu , is known to target critical infrastructure, government agencies, political leaders, and NATO-related defense organizations. Attack chains mounted by the group typically involve the use of spear-phishing emails with weaponized document links to distribute RomCom RAT. The domains and com...

Cybersecurity researchers have revealed that RansomHub 's online infrastructure has "inexplicably" gone offline as of April 1, 2025, prompting concerns among affiliates of the ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation. Singaporean cybersecurity company Group-IB said that this may have caused affiliates to migrate to Qilin, given that "disclosures on its DLS [data leak site] have doubled since February."  RansomHub, which first emerged in February 2024, is estimated to have stolen data from over 200 victims. It replaced two high-profile RaaS groups, LockBit and BlackCat, to become a frontrunner, courting their affiliates, including Scattered Spider and Evil Corp , with lucrative payment splits. "Following a possible acquisition of the web application and ransomware source code of Knight (formerly Cyclops), RansomHub quickly rose in the ransomware scene, thanks to the dynamic features of its multi-platform encryptor and an aggressive, affiliate-friendly ...

Meta on Tuesday announced LlamaFirewall , an open-source framework designed to secure artificial intelligence (AI) systems against emerging cyber risks such as prompt injection, jailbreaks, and insecure code, among others. The framework , the company said, incorporates three guardrails, including PromptGuard 2, Agent Alignment Checks, and CodeShield. PromptGuard 2 is designed to detect direct jailbreak and prompt injection attempts in real-time, while Agent Alignment Checks is capable of inspecting agent reasoning for possible goal hijacking and indirect prompt injection scenarios. CodeShield refers to an online static analysis engine that seeks to prevent the generation of insecure or dangerous code by AI agents. "LlamaFirewall is built to serve as a flexible, real-time guardrail framework for securing LLM-powered applications," the company said in a GitHub description of the project. "Its architecture is modular, enabling security teams and developers to com...

A high court in the Indian state of Karnataka has ordered the blocking of end-to-end encrypted email provider Proton Mail across the country. The High Court of Karnataka, on April 29, said the ruling was in response to a legal complaint filed by M Moser Design Associated India Pvt Ltd in January 2025. The complaint alleged its staff had received e-mails containing obscene, abusive, and vulgar language, artificial intelligence (AI) generated deepfake imagery, and other sexually explicit content, according to LiveLaw . In a hearing , Justice M Nagaprasanna ordered the Indian government to "initiate proceedings in terms of section 69A of the Information Technology (IT) Act 2008 read with Rule 10 of the Information Technology (Procedure and Safeguards of blocking of Access of Information by Public) Rules, 2009 to block Proton Mail."  "Till such proceedings are taken up and concluded by the government of India, the offending uniform resource locators (URLs) [...] shal...

Popular messaging app WhatsApp on Tuesday unveiled a new technology called Private Processing to enable artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in a privacy-preserving manner. "Private Processing will allow users to leverage powerful optional AI features – like summarizing unread messages or editing help – while preserving WhatsApp's core privacy promise," the Meta-owned service said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. With the introduction of the latest feature, the idea is to facilitate the use of AI features while still keeping users' messages private. It's expected to be made available in the coming weeks. The capability, in a nutshell, allows users to initiate a request to process messages using AI within a secure environment called the confidential virtual machine (CVM) such that no other party, including Meta and WhatsApp, can access them. Confidential processing is one of the three tenets that underpin the feature, the others being - Enf...

Various generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) services have been found vulnerable to two types of jailbreak attacks that make it possible to produce illicit or dangerous content. The first of the two techniques, codenamed Inception, instructs an AI tool to imagine a fictitious scenario, which can then be adapted into a second scenario within the first one where there exists no safety guardrails . "Continued prompting to the AI within the second scenarios context can result in bypass of safety guardrails and allow the generation of malicious content," the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) said in an advisory released last week. The second jailbreak is realized by prompting the AI for information on how not to reply to a specific request.  "The AI can then be further prompted with requests to respond as normal, and the attacker can then pivot back and forth between illicit questions that bypass safety guardrails and normal prompts," CERT/CC added. Success...

Cybersecurity company SentinelOne has revealed that a China-nexus threat cluster dubbed PurpleHaze conducted reconnaissance attempts against its infrastructure and some of its high-value customers. "We first became aware of this threat cluster during a 2024 intrusion conducted against an organization previously providing hardware logistics services for SentinelOne employees," security researchers Tom Hegel, Aleksandar Milenkoski, and Jim Walter said in an analysis published Monday. PurpleHaze is assessed to be a hacking crew with loose ties to another state-sponsored group known as APT15 , which is also tracked as Flea, Nylon Typhoon (formerly Nickel), Playful Taurus, Royal APT, and Vixen Panda. The adversarial collective has also been observed targeting an unnamed South Asian government-supporting entity in October 2024, employing an operational relay box (ORB) network and a Windows backdoor dubbed GoReShell. The implant, written in the Go programming language, repurp...