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

A new malware campaign has been observed leveraging social engineering tactics to deliver an open-source rootkit called r77 . The activity, condemned OBSCURE#BAT by Securonix, enables threat actors to establish persistence and evade detection on compromised systems. It's currently not known who is behind the campaign. The rootkit "has the ability to cloak or mask any file, registry key or task beginning with a specific prefix," security researchers Den Iuzvyk and Tim Peck said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "It has been targeting users by either masquerading as legitimate software downloads or via fake captcha social engineering scams." The campaign is designed to mainly target English-speaking individuals, particularly the United States, Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. OBSCURE#BAT gets its name from the fact that the starting point of the attack is an obfuscated Windows batch script that, in turn, executes PowerShell commands to activ...

Microsoft has shed light on an ongoing phishing campaign that has targeted the hospitality sector by impersonating online travel agency Booking.com using an increasingly popular social engineering technique called ClickFix to deliver credential-stealing malware. The activity, the tech giant's threat intelligence team said, started in December 2024 and operates with the end goal of conducting financial fraud and theft. It's tracking the campaign under the moniker Storm-1865 . "This phishing attack specifically targets individuals in hospitality organizations in North America, Oceania, South and Southeast Asia, and Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western Europe, that are most likely to work with Booking.com, sending fake emails purporting to be coming from the agency," Microsoft said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The ClickFix technique has become widespread in recent months, as it tricks users into executing malware under the guise of fixing a supposed...

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as ScarCruft is said to have been behind a never-before-seen Android surveillance tool named KoSpy targeting Korean and English-speaking users. Lookout, which shared details of the malware campaign, said the earliest versions date back to March 2022. The most recent samples were flagged in March 2024. It's not clear how successful these efforts were. "KoSpy can collect extensive data, such as SMS messages, call logs, location, files, audio, and screenshots via dynamically loaded plugins," the company said in an analysis. The malicious artifacts masquerade as utility applications on the official Google Play Store, using the names File Manager, Phone Manager, Smart Manager, Software Update Utility, and Kakao Security to trick unsuspecting users into infecting their own devices. All the identified apps offer the promised functionality to avoid raising suspicion while stealthily deploying spyware-related components in the backg...

Two high-severity security flaws have been disclosed in the open-source ruby-saml library that could allow malicious actors to bypass Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) authentication protections. SAML is an XML-based markup language and open-standard used for exchanging authentication and authorization data between parties, enabling features like single sign-on (SSO), which allows individuals to use a single set of credentials to access multiple sites, services, and apps. The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2025-25291 and CVE-2025-25292 , carry a CVSS score of 8.8 out of 10.0. They affect the following versions of the library - < 1.12.4 >= 1.13.0, < 1.18.0 Both the shortcomings stem from how both REXML and Nokogiri parse XML differently, causing the two parsers to generate entirely different document structures from the same XML input This parser differential allows an attacker to be able to execute a Signature Wrapping attack, leading to an authentication by...

As IT environments grow more complex, IT professionals are facing unprecedented pressure to secure business-critical data. With hybrid work the new standard and cloud adoption on the rise, data is increasingly distributed across different environments, providers and locations, expanding the attack surface for emerging cyberthreats. While the need for a strong data protection strategy has become more critical than ever, organizations find themselves caught in a difficult balancing act. They are struggling to manage the rising costs and complexities of business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) while ensuring that their business-critical data remains secure and recoverable. To help IT teams and managed service providers (MSPs) understand how their peers are navigating these challenges, the State of Backup and Recovery Report 2025 has gathered insights from more than 3,000 IT professionals, security experts and administrators worldwide. The report reveals how businesses are tackl...

Meta has warned that a security vulnerability impacting the FreeType open-source font rendering library may have been exploited in the wild. The vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2025-27363 , and carries a CVSS score of 8.1, indicating high severity. Described as an out-of-bounds write flaw, it could be exploited to achieve remote code execution when parsing certain font files. "An out-of-bounds write exists in FreeType versions 2.13.0 and below when attempting to parse font subglyph structures related to TrueType GX and variable font files," the company said in an advisory. "The vulnerable code assigns a signed short value to an unsigned long and then adds a static value causing it to wrap around and allocate too small of a heap buffer. The code then writes up to 6 signed long integers out of bounds relative to this buffer. This may result in arbitrary code execution." The company did not share any specifics on how the shortcoming is be...

Browser maker Mozilla is urging users to update their Firefox instances to the latest version to avoid facing issues with using add-ons due to the impending expiration of a root certificate. "On March 14, 2025, a root certificate used to verify signed content and add-ons for various Mozilla projects, including Firefox, will expire," Mozilla said . "Without updating to Firefox version 128 or higher (or ESR 115.13 + for ESR users, including Windows 7/8/8.1 and macOS 10.12-10.14 users), this expiration may cause significant issues with add-ons, content signing, and DRM-protected media playback." Mozilla said the latest version of Firefox includes a new root certificate that will prevent this from happening. The update is crucial for all users of Firefox running a version prior to 128, or Extended Support Release (ESR) versions before 115.13, both of which were released on July 9, 2024. This includes all versions of Firefox for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android...

The China-nexus cyber espionage group tracked as UNC3886 has been observed targeting end-of-life MX Series routers from Juniper Networks as part of a campaign designed to deploy custom backdoors, highlighting their ability to focus on internal networking infrastructure. "The backdoors had varying custom capabilities, including active and passive backdoor functions, as well as an embedded script that disables logging mechanisms on the target device," Google-owned Mandiant said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The threat intelligence firm described the development as an evolution of the adversary's tradecraft, which has historically leveraged zero-day vulnerabilities in Fortinet, Ivanti, and VMware devices to breach networks of interest and establish persistence for remote access. First documented in September 2022, the hacking crew is assessed to be "highly adept" and capable of targeting edge devices and virtualization technologies with the ultima...

Threat intelligence firm GreyNoise is warning of a "coordinated surge" in the exploitation of Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerabilities spanning multiple platforms. "At least 400 IPs have been seen actively exploiting multiple SSRF CVEs simultaneously, with notable overlap between attack attempts," the company said , adding it observed the activity on March 9, 2025. The countries which have emerged as the target of SSRF exploitation attempts include the United States, Germany, Singapore, India, Lithuania, and Japan. Another notable country is Israel, which has witnessed a surge on March 11, 2025. The list of SSRF vulnerabilities being exploited are listed below - CVE-2017-0929 (CVSS score: 7.5) - DotNetNuke CVE-2020-7796 (CVSS score: 9.8) - Zimbra Collaboration Suite CVE-2021-21973 (CVSS score: 5.3) - VMware vCenter CVE-2021-22054 (CVSS score: 7.5) - VMware Workspace ONE UEM CVE-2021-22175 (CVSS score: 9.8) - GitLab CE/EE CVE-2021-22214 (...

We've been hearing the same story for years: AI is coming for your job. In fact, in 2017, McKinsey printed a report, Jobs Lost, Jobs Gained: Workforce Transitions in a Time of Automation , predicting that by 2030, 375 million workers would need to find new jobs or risk being displaced by AI and automation. Queue the anxiety.  There have been ongoing whispers about what roles would be impacted, and pentesting has recently come into question. With AI now able to automate tasks such as vulnerability scans and network scans—among other things—and with platforms like PlexTrac adding AI capabilities to cut back on the manual effort, will pentesters be out of a job? Let's start with some optimism. This year, McKinsey retracted its former prediction that 375 million workers would be displaced by AI, lowering the prediction to roughly 92 million workers. The article continued to ease concern stating that although some jobs may become obsolete, it's more likely that jobs will simply unde...

Microsoft on Tuesday released security updates to address 57 security vulnerabilities in its software, including a whopping six zero-days that it said have been actively exploited in the wild. Of the 56 flaws, six are rated Critical, 50 are rated Important, and one is rated Low in severity. Twenty-three of the addressed vulnerabilities are remote code execution bugs and 22 relate to privilege escalation. The updates are in addition to 17 vulnerabilities Microsoft addressed in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of last month's Patch Tuesday update , one of which is a spoofing flaw specific to the browser ( CVE-2025-26643 , CVSS score: 5.4). The six vulnerabilities that have come under active exploitation are listed below - CVE-2025-24983 (CVSS score: 7.0) - A Windows Win32 Kernel Subsystem use-after-free (UAF) vulnerability that allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally CVE-2025-24984 (CVSS score: 4.6) - A Windows NTFS information disclosu...