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A quiet tweak in a popular open-source tool opened the door to a supply chain breach—what started as a targeted attack quickly spiraled, exposing secrets across countless projects. That wasn't the only stealth move. A new all-in-one malware is silently stealing passwords, crypto, and control—while hiding in plain sight. And over 300 Android apps joined the chaos, running ad fraud at scale behind innocent-looking icons. Meanwhile, ransomware gangs are getting smarter—using stolen drivers to shut down defenses—and threat groups are quietly shifting from activism to profit. Even browser extensions are changing hands, turning trusted tools into silent threats. AI is adding fuel to the fire—used by both attackers and defenders—while critical bugs, cloud loopholes, and privacy shakeups are keeping teams on edge. Let's dive into the threats making noise behind the scenes. ⚡ Threat of the Week Coinbase the Initial Target of GitHub Action Supply Chain Breach — The supply chain compromise...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered two malicious extensions in the Visual Studio Code (VSCode) Marketplace that are designed to deploy ransomware that's under development to its users. The extensions, named "ahban.shiba" and "ahban.cychelloworld," have since been taken down by the marketplace maintainers. Both the extensions, per ReversingLabs , incorporate code that's designed to invoke a PowerShell command, which then grabs a PowerShell-script payload from a command-and-control (C2) server and executes it. The payload is suspected to be ransomware in early-stage development, only encrypting files in a folder called "testShiba" on the victim's Windows desktop. Once the files are encrypted, the PowerShell payload displays a message, stating "Your files have been encrypted. Pay 1 ShibaCoin to ShibaWallet to recover them." However, no other instructions or cryptocurrency wallet addresses are provided to the victims, anothe...

Find out how Reco keeps Microsoft 365 Copilot safe by spotting risky prompts, protecting data, managing user access, and identifying threats - all while keeping productivity high. Microsoft 365 Copilot promises to boost productivity by turning natural language prompts into actions. Employees can generate reports, comb through data, or get instant answers just by asking Copilot.  However, alongside this convenience comes serious security concerns. Copilot operates across a company's SaaS apps (from SharePoint to Teams and beyond), which means a careless prompt or a compromised user account could expose troves of sensitive information.  Security experts warn that organizations shouldn't assume default settings will keep them safe. Without proactive controls, every file in your organization could be accessible via Copilot. A malicious actor might use Copilot to discover and exfiltrate confidential data without having to manually search through systems. With the right prom...

If given the choice, most users are likely to favor a seamless experience over complex security measures, as they don't prioritize strong password security. However, balancing security and usability doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. By implementing the right best practices and tools, you can strike a balance between robust password security and a frictionless user experience (UX). This article explores how to achieve the perfect balance between strong password security and a seamless user experience, even as the standards for strong passwords continue to evolve. Why user friction is bad for cybersecurity End users that find security measures cumbersome or frustrating might disregard them, resulting in unintentional cyber risk exposures. These scenarios are especially pronounced in the workplace; if cybersecurity protocols (e.g., strong password security policies) are perceived as obstacles to productivity, employees will frequently ignore or circumvent them due to how difficult, ...

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in the Next.js React framework that could be potentially exploited to bypass authorization checks under certain conditions. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-29927 , carries a CVSS score of 9.1 out of 10.0. "Next.js uses an internal header x-middleware-subrequest to prevent recursive requests from triggering infinite loops," Next.js said in an advisory.  "It was possible to skip running middleware , which could allow requests to skip critical checks—such as authorization cookie validation—before reaching routes." It's worth noting that CVE-2025-29927 impacts only self-hosted versions that use "next start" with "output: standalone." Next.js apps hosted on Vercel and Netlify, or deployed as static exports, are not affected. The shortcoming has been addressed in versions 12.3.5, 13.5.9, 14.2.25, and 15.2.3. If patching is not an option, it's recommended that users prevent external user ...

The supply chain attack involving the GitHub Action "tj-actions/changed-files" started as a highly-targeted attack against one of Coinbase's open-source projects, before evolving into something more widespread in scope. "The payload was focused on exploiting the public CI/CD flow of one of their open source projects – agentkit, probably with the purpose of leveraging it for further compromises," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said in a report. "However, the attacker was not able to use Coinbase secrets or publish packages." The incident came to light on March 14, 2025, when it was found that "tj-actions/changed-files" was compromised to inject code that leaked sensitive secrets from repositories that ran the workflow. It has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2025-30066 (CVSS score: 8.6). According to Endor Labs, 218 GitHub repositories are estimated to have exposed their secrets due to the supply chain attack, and a majority of the leak...

The U.S. Treasury Department has announced that it's removing sanctions against Tornado Cash, a cryptocurrency mixer service that has been accused of aiding the North Korea-linked Lazarus Group to launder their ill-gotten proceeds. "Based on the Administration's review of the novel legal and policy issues raised by use of financial sanctions against financial and commercial activity occurring within evolving technology and legal environments, we have exercised our discretion to remove the economic sanctions against Tornado Cash," the Treasury said in a statement. In conjunction with the move, over 100 Ethereum (ETH) wallet addresses are also being removed from the Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list. The department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added Tornado Cash to its sanctions list in August 2022. It was estimated to have been used to launder more than $7.6 billion worth of virtual assets since its creation in 2019, the Treasury said a...

Threat hunters have uncovered a new threat actor named UAT-5918 that has been attacking critical infrastructure entities in Taiwan since at least 2023. "UAT-5918, a threat actor believed to be motivated by establishing long-term access for information theft, uses a combination of web shells and open-sourced tooling to conduct post-compromise activities to establish persistence in victim environments for information theft and credential harvesting," Cisco Talos researchers Jungsoo An, Asheer Malhotra, Brandon White, and Vitor Ventura said . Besides critical infrastructure, some of the other targeted verticals include information technology, telecommunications, academia, and healthcare. Assessed to be an advanced persistent threat (APT) group looking to establish long-term persistent access in victim environments, UAT-5918 is said to share tactical overlaps with several Chinese hacking crews tracked as Volt Typhoon , Flax Typhoon , Tropic Trooper , Earth Estries , and Dalb...

The threat actors behind the Medusa ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation have been observed using a malicious driver dubbed ABYSSWORKER as part of a bring your own vulnerable driver ( BYOVD ) attack designed to disable anti-malware tools. Elastic Security Labs said it observed a Medusa ransomware attack that delivered the encryptor by means of a loader packed using a packer-as-a-service (PaaS) called HeartCrypt. "This loader was deployed alongside a revoked certificate-signed driver from a Chinese vendor we named ABYSSWORKER, which it installs on the victim machine and then uses to target and silence different EDR vendors," the company said in a report. The driver in question, "smuol.sys," mimics a legitimate CrowdStrike Falcon driver ("CSAgent.sys"). Dozens of ABYSSWORKER artifacts have been detected on the VirusTotal platform dating from August 8, 2024, to February 25, 2025. All the identified samples are signed using likely stolen, revoked ce...

The China-linked advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as Aquatic Panda has been linked to a "global espionage campaign" that took place in 2022 targeting seven organizations. These entities include governments, Catholic charities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and think tanks across Taiwan, Hungary, Turkey, Thailand, France, and the United States. The activity, which took place over a period of 10 months between January and October 2022, has been codenamed Operation FishMedley by ESET. "Operators used implants – such as ShadowPad, SodaMaster, and Spyder – that are common or exclusive to China-aligned threat actors," security researcher Matthieu Faou said in an analysis. Aquatic Panda , also called Bronze University, Charcoal Typhoon, Earth Lusca, and RedHotel, is a cyber espionage group from China that's known to be active since at least 2019. The Slovakian cybersecurity company is tracking the hacking crew under the name FishMonger. Sai...

After conducting over 10,000 automated internal network penetration tests last year, vPenTest has uncovered a troubling reality that many businesses still have critical security gaps that attackers can easily exploit. Organizations often assume that firewalls, endpoint protection, and SIEMs are enough to keep them secure. But how effective are these defenses when put to the test? That's where vPenTest , Vonahi Security's automated network pentesting platform, comes in. Designed to simulate real-world attack scenarios, vPenTest helps organizations find exploitable vulnerabilities before cybercriminals can. These aren't complex, zero-day exploits. They're misconfigurations, weak passwords, and unpatched vulnerabilities that attackers routinely exploit to gain access, move laterally, and escalate privileges within networks. Here's how these risks break down: 50% stem from misconfigurations – Default settings, weak access controls, and overlooked security policies. 30% are due to m...

Two known threat activity clusters codenamed Head Mare and Twelve have likely joined forces to target Russian entities, new findings from Kaspersky reveal. "Head Mare relied heavily on tools previously associated with Twelve. Additionally, Head Mare attacks utilized command-and-control (C2) servers exclusively linked to Twelve prior to these incidents," the company said . "This suggests potential collaboration and joint campaigns between the two groups." Both Head Mare and Twelve were previously documented by Kaspersky in September 2024, with the former leveraging a now-patched vulnerability in WinRAR (CVE-2023-38831) to obtain initial access and deliver malware and in some cases, even deploy ransomware families like LockBit for Windows and Babuk for Linux (ESXi) in exchange for a ransom. Twelve, on the other hand, has been observed staging destructive attacks, taking advantage of various publicly available tools to encrypt victims' data and irrevocably d...