The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

A nation-state threat actor with ties to North Korea has been linked to an ongoing campaign targeting South Korean business, government, and cryptocurrency sectors. The attack campaign, dubbed DEEP#DRIVE by Securonix, has been attributed to a hacking group known as Kimsuky , which is also tracked under the names APT43, Black Banshee, Emerald Sleet, Sparkling Pisces, Springtail, TA427, and Velvet Chollima. "Leveraging tailored phishing lures written in Korean and disguised as legitimate documents, the attackers successfully infiltrated targeted environments," security researchers Den Iuzvyk and Tim Peck said in a report shared with The Hacker News, describing the activity as a "sophisticated and multi-stage operation." The decoy documents, sent via phishing emails as .HWP, .XLSX, and .PPTX files, are disguised as work logs, insurance documents and crypto-related files to trick recipients into opening them, thereby triggering the infection process. The attack...

Ever felt like your team is stuck in a constant battle? Developers rush to add new features, while security folks worry about vulnerabilities. What if you could bring both sides together without sacrificing one for the other? We invite you to our upcoming webinar, " Opening the Fast Lane for Secure Deployments ." This isn't another tech talk full of buzzwords—it's a down-to-earth session that shows you practical ways to build security into your projects from the start. Many teams face a familiar problem: security checks at the end slow things down, but rushing ahead can leave dangerous gaps. It's not about choosing between fast or safe—it's about finding a way to do both. Join Sarit Tager, VP of Product Management at Palo Alto Networks, as he explains how to: Focus on What Matters: Learn how to spot and fix the most critical issues early. Work Without Roadblocks: See how to add smart security steps without stopping progress. Think Differently: Move from the ol...

An RA World ransomware attack in November 2024 targeting an unnamed Asian software and services company involved the use of a malicious tool exclusively used by China-based cyber espionage groups, raising the possibility that the threat actor may be moonlighting as a ransomware player in an individual capacity. "During the attack in late 2024, the attacker deployed a distinct toolset that had previously been used by a China-linked actor in classic espionage attacks," the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "In all the prior intrusions involving the toolset, the attacker appeared to be engaged in classic espionage, seemingly solely interested in maintaining a persistent presence on the targeted organizations by installing backdoors." This included a July 2024 compromise of the Foreign Ministry of a country in southeastern Europe that involved the use of classic DLL side-loading techniques to deploy PlugX ...

AI is everywhere now, transforming how businesses operate and how users engage with apps, devices, and services. A lot of applications now have some Artificial Intelligence inside, whether supporting a chat interface, intelligently analyzing data or matching user preferences. No question AI benefits users, but it also brings new security challenges, especially Identity-related security challenges. Let's explore what these challenges are and what you can do to face them with Okta. Which AI? Everyone talks about AI, but this term is very general, and several technologies fall under this umbrella. For example, symbolic AI uses technologies such as logic programming, expert systems, and semantic networks. Other approaches use neural networks, Bayesian networks, and other tools. Newer Generative AI uses Machine Learning (ML) and Large Language Models (LLM) as core technologies to generate content such as text, images, video, audio, etc. Many of the applications we use most often toda...

Palo Alto Networks has addressed a high-severity security flaw in its PAN-OS software that could result in an authentication bypass. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-0108 , carries a CVSS score of 7.8 out of 10.0. The score, however, drops to 5.1 if access to the management interface is restricted to a jump box . "An authentication bypass in the Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS software enables an unauthenticated attacker with network access to the management web interface to bypass the authentication otherwise required by the PAN-OS management web interface and invoke certain PHP scripts," Palo Alto Networks said in an advisory. "While invoking these PHP scripts does not enable remote code execution, it can negatively impact the integrity and confidentiality of PAN-OS." The vulnerability affects the following versions - PAN-OS 11.2 < 11.2.4-h4 (Fixed in >= 11.2.4-h4) PAN-OS 11.1 < 11.1.6-h1 (Fixed in >= 11.1.6-h1) PAN-OS 11.0 (Upgrade to a sup...

Threat hunters have shed light on a new campaign targeting the foreign ministry of an unnamed South American nation with bespoke malware capable of granting remote access to infected hosts. The activity, detected in November 2024, has been attributed by Elastic Security Labs to a threat cluster it tracks as REF7707 . Some of the other targets include a telecommunications entity and a university, both located in Southeast Asia. "While the REF7707 campaign is characterized by a well-engineered, highly capable, novel intrusion set, the campaign owners exhibited poor campaign management and inconsistent evasion practices," security researchers Andrew Pease and Seth Goodwin said in a technical analysis. The exact initial access vector used in the attacks is currently not clear, although it has been observed that Microsoft's certutil application is used to download additional payloads from a web server associated with the Foreign Ministry. The certutil commands used to ...

A subgroup within the infamous Russian state-sponsored hacking group known as Sandworm has been attributed to a multi-year initial access operation dubbed BadPilot that stretched across the globe. "This subgroup has conducted globally diverse compromises of Internet-facing infrastructure to enable Seashell Blizzard to persist on high-value targets and support tailored network operations," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a new report shared with The Hacker News ahead of publication. The geographical spread of the initial access subgroup's targets include the whole of North America, several countries in Europe, as well as others, including Angola, Argentina, Australia, China, Egypt, India, Kazakhstan, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, Turkey, and Uzbekistan. The development marks a significant expansion of the hacking group's victimology footprint over the past three years, which is otherwise known to be concentrated around Eastern Europe - 2022: Energy...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a bypass for a now-patched security vulnerability in the NVIDIA Container Toolkit that could be exploited to break out of a container's isolation protections and gain complete access to the underlying host. The new vulnerability is being tracked as CVE-2025-23359 (CVSS score: 8.3). It affects the following versions - NVIDIA Container Toolkit (All versions up to and including 1.17.3) - Fixed in version 1.17.4 NVIDIA GPU Operator (All versions up to and including 24.9.1) - Fixed in version 24.9.2 "NVIDIA Container Toolkit for Linux contains a Time-of-Check Time-of-Use ( TOCTOU ) vulnerability when used with default configuration, where a crafted container image could gain access to the host file system," the company said in an advisory on Tuesday. "A successful exploit of this vulnerability might lead to code execution, denial of service, escalation of privileges, information disclosure, and data tampering." Cl...

CISOs are finding themselves more involved in AI teams, often leading the cross-functional effort and AI strategy. But there aren't many resources to guide them on what their role should look like or what they should bring to these meetings.  We've pulled together a framework for security leaders to help push AI teams and committees further in their AI adoption—providing them with the necessary visibility and guardrails to succeed. Meet the CLEAR framework. If security teams want to play a pivotal role in their organization's AI journey, they should adopt the five steps of CLEAR to show immediate value to AI committees and leadership: C – Create an AI asset inventory L – Learn what users are doing E – Enforce your AI policy A – Apply AI use cases R – Reuse existing frameworks If you're looking for a solution to help take advantage of GenAI securely, check out Harmonic Security .  Alright, let's break down the CLEAR framework.  Create an AI Asset Invent...

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as Kimsuky has been observed using a new tactic that involves deceiving targets into running PowerShell as an administrator and then instructing them to paste and run malicious code provided by them. "To execute this tactic, the threat actor masquerades as a South Korean government official and over time builds rapport with a target before sending a spear-phishing email with an [sic] PDF attachment," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a series of posts shared on X. To read the purported PDF document, victims are persuaded to click a URL containing a list of steps to register their Windows system. The registration link urges them to launch PowerShell as an administrator and copy/paste the displayed code snippet into the terminal, and execute it. Should the victim follow through, the malicious code downloads and installs a browser-based remote desktop tool, along with a certificate file with a hardcoded PIN from a rem...

Microsoft on Tuesday released fixes for 63 security flaws impacting its software products, including two vulnerabilities that it said has come under active exploitation in the wild. Of the 63 vulnerabilities, three are rated Critical, 57 are rated Important, one is rated Moderate, and two are rated Low in severity. This is aside from the 23 flaws Microsoft addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of last month's Patch Tuesday update . The update is notable for fixing two actively exploited flaws - CVE-2025-21391 (CVSS score: 7.1) - Windows Storage Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability  CVE-2025-21418 (CVSS score: 7.8) - Windows Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability "An attacker would only be able to delete targeted files on a system," Microsoft said in an alert for CVE-2025-21391. "This vulnerability does not allow disclosure of any confidential information, but could allow an attacker to delete d...