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The threat actor known as Confucius has been attributed to a new phishing campaign that has targeted Pakistan with malware families like WooperStealer and Anondoor. "Over the past decade, Confucius has repeatedly targeted government agencies, military organizations, defense contractors, and critical industries -- especially in Pakistan – using spear-phishing and malicious documents as initial access vectors," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Cara Lin said . Confucius is a long-running hacking group that's believed to have been active since 2013 and operating across South Asia. Recent campaigns undertaken by the threat actor have employed a Python-based backdoor called Anondoor, signaling an evolution of the group's tradecraft and its technical agility. One of the attack chains documented by Fortinet targeted users in Pakistan sometime in December 2024, tricking recipients into opening a .PPSX file, which then triggers the delivery of WooperStealer using DLL ...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a malicious package on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that claims to offer the ability to create a SOCKS5 proxy service, while also providing a stealthy backdoor-like functionality to drop additional payloads on Windows systems. The deceptive package, named soopsocks, attracted a total of 2,653 downloads before it was taken down. It was first uploaded by a user named " soodalpie " on September 26, 2025, the same date the account was created. "While providing this capability, it exhibits behavior as a backdoor proxy server targeting Windows platforms, using automated installation processes via VBScript or an executable version," JFrog said in an analysis. The executable ("_AUTORUN.EXE") is a compiled Go file that, besides including a SOCKS5 implementation as advertised, is also designed to run PowerShell scripts, set firewall rules, and relaunch itself with elevated permissions. It also carries out ...

Penetration testing is critical to uncovering real-world security weaknesses. With the shift into continuous testing and validation, it is time we automate the delivery of these results. The way results are delivered hasn't kept up with today's fast-moving threat landscape. Too often, findings are packaged into static reports, buried in PDFs or spreadsheets, and handed off manually to already-overloaded IT and engineering teams. By the time remediation begins, days or even weeks may have passed since the issues were first discovered. As we explored in our recent article on how automation is redefining pentest delivery , static, manual processes no longer cut it. Security teams need faster insights, cleaner handoffs, and more consistent workflows if they want to keep pace with modern exposure management.  That's where automation makes the difference, ensuring findings move seamlessly from discovery to remediation in real time. Where Should You Start? Knowing automation matters...

From unpatched cars to hijacked clouds, this week's Threatsday headlines remind us of one thing — no corner of technology is safe. Attackers are scanning firewalls for critical flaws, bending vulnerable SQL servers into powerful command centers, and even finding ways to poison Chrome's settings to sneak in malicious extensions. On the defense side, AI is stepping up to block ransomware in real time, but privacy fights over data access and surveillance are heating up just as fast. It's a week that shows how wide the battlefield has become — from the apps on our phones to the cars we drive. Don't keep this knowledge to yourself: share this bulletin to protect others, and add The Hacker News to your Google News list so you never miss the updates that could make the difference. Claude Now Finds Your Bugs Anthropic Touts Safety Protections Built Into Claude Sonnet 4.6 Anthropic said it has rolled out a number of safety and security improve...

Google Mandiant and Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) have disclosed that they are tracking a new cluster of activity possibly linked to a financially motivated threat actor known as Cl0p . The malicious activity involves sending extortion emails to executives at various organizations and claiming to have stolen sensitive data from their Oracle E-Business Suite. "This activity began on or before September 29, 2025, but Mandiant's experts are still in the early stages of multiple investigations, and have not yet substantiated the claims made by this group," Genevieve Stark, Head of Cybercrime and Information Operations Intelligence Analysis at GTIG, told The Hacker News in a statement. Mandiant CTO Charles Carmakal described the ongoing activity as a "high-volume email campaign" that's launched from hundreds of compromised accounts, with evidence suggesting that at least one of those accounts has been previously associated with activity from FIN11 ...

Running a SOC often feels like drowning in alerts. Every morning, dashboards light up with thousands of signals; some urgent, many irrelevant. The job is to find the real threats fast enough to keep cases from piling up, prevent analyst burnout, and maintain client or leadership confidence. The toughest challenges, however, aren't the alerts that can be dismissed quickly, but the ones that hide in plain sight. These tricky threats drag out investigations, create unnecessary escalations, and quietly drain resources over time. Why Detection Gaps Keep Opening What slows SOCs down isn't the flood of alerts alone but the way investigations get split across disconnected tools. Intel in one platform, detonation in another, enrichment in a third; every switch wastes time. Across hundreds of cases, those minutes add up to stalled investigations, unnecessary escalations, and threats that linger longer than they should. Action Plan That Delivers 3× SOC Efficiency in Threat Detection SOC tea...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two Android spyware campaigns dubbed ProSpy and ToSpy that impersonate apps like Signal and ToTok to target users in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.). Slovak cybersecurity company ESET said the malicious apps are distributed via fake websites and social engineering to trick unsuspecting users into downloading them. Once installed, both the spyware malware strains establish persistent access to compromised Android devices and exfiltrate data. "Neither app containing the spyware was available in official app stores; both required manual installation from third-party websites posing as legitimate services," ESET researcher Lukáš Štefanko said . Notably, one of the websites distributing the ToSpy malware family mimicked the Samsung Galaxy Store, luring users into manually downloading and installing a malicious version of the ToTok app." The ProSpy campaign, discovered in June 2025, is believed to have been ongoing since 2024, ...

In yet another piece of research, academics from Georgia Institute of Technology and Purdue University have demonstrated that the security guarantees offered by Intel's Software Guard eXtensions (SGX) can be bypassed on DDR4 systems to passively decrypt sensitive data. SGX is designed as a hardware feature in Intel server processors that allows applications to be run in a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). It essentially isolates trusted code and resources within what's called enclaves, preventing attackers from viewing their memory or CPU state.  In doing so, the mechanism ensures that the data stays confidential even when the underlying operating system has been tampered with or compromised by other means. However, the latest findings show the limitations of SGX. "We show how one can build a device to physically inspect all memory traffic inside a computer cheaply and easily, in environments with only basic electrical tools, and using equipment easily purchased on...

A high-severity security flaw has been disclosed in the One Identity OneLogin Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution that, if successfully exploited, could expose sensitive OpenID Connect ( OIDC ) application client secrets under certain circumstances. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-59363 , has been assigned a CVSS score of 7.7 out of 10.0. It has been described as a case of incorrect resource transfer between spheres ( CWE-669 ), which causes a program to cross security boundaries and obtain unauthorized access to confidential data or functions. CVE-2025-59363 "allowed attackers with valid API credentials to enumerate and retrieve client secrets for all OIDC applications within an organization's OneLogin tenant," Clutch Security said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The identity security said the problem stems from the fact that the application listing endpoint – /api/2/apps – was configured to return more data than expected, including the ...

AI is changing automation—but not always for the better. That's why we're hosting a new webinar, " Workflow Clarity: Where AI Fits in Modern Automation ," with Thomas Kinsella, Co-founder & Chief Customer Officer at Tines, to explore how leading teams are cutting through the hype and building workflows that actually deliver. The rise of AI has changed how organizations think about automation. But here's the reality many teams are quietly wrestling with: AI isn't a silver bullet. Purely human-led workflows buckle under pressure, rigid rules-based automations break the moment reality shifts, and fully autonomous AI agents risk introducing black-box decision-making that's impossible to audit. For cybersecurity and operations leaders, the stakes are even higher. You need workflows that are fast but reliable, powerful but secure, and—above all—explainable. So where does AI really fit in? The Hidden Problem with "All-In" Automation The push to automate everythi...

A severe security flaw has been disclosed in the Red Hat OpenShift AI service that could allow attackers to escalate privileges and take control of the complete infrastructure under certain conditions. OpenShift AI is a platform for managing the lifecycle of predictive and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models at scale and across hybrid cloud environments. It also facilitates data acquisition and preparation, model training and fine-tuning, model serving and model monitoring, and hardware acceleration. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-10725 , carries a CVSS score of 9.9 out of a maximum of 10.0. It has been classified by Red Hat as "Important" and not "Critical" in severity owing to the need for a remote attacker to be authenticated in order to compromise the environment. "A low-privileged attacker with access to an authenticated account, for example, as a data scientist using a standard Jupyter notebook, can escalate their privileges to ...

Unknown threat actors are abusing Milesight industrial cellular routers to send SMS messages as part of a smishing campaign targeting users in European countries since at least February 2022. French cybersecurity company SEKOIA said the attackers are exploiting the cellular router's API to send malicious SMS messages containing phishing URLs, with the campaigns primarily targeting Sweden, Italy, and Belgium using typosquatted URLs that impersonate government platforms like CSAM and eBox, as well as banking, postal, and telecom providers. Of the 18,000 routers of this type accessible on the public internet, no less than 572 are assessed to be potentially vulnerable due to them exposing the inbox/outbox APIs. About half of the identified vulnerable routers are located in Europe. "Moreover, the API enables retrieval of both incoming and outgoing SMS messages, which indicates that the vulnerability has been actively exploited to disseminate malicious SMS campaigns since at le...