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Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new campaign targeting WordPress sites that disguises the malware as a security plugin. The plugin, which goes by the name "WP-antymalwary-bot.php," comes with a variety of features to maintain access, hide itself from the admin dashboard, and execute remote code. "Pinging functionality that can report back to a command-and-control (C&C) server is also included, as is code that helps spread malware into other directories and inject malicious JavaScript responsible for serving ads," Wordfence's Marco Wotschka said in a report. First discovered during a site cleanup effort in late January 2025, the malware has since been detected in the wild with new variants. Some of the other names used for the plugin are listed below - addons.php wpconsole.php wp-performance-booster.php scr.php Once installed and activated, it provides threat actors administrator access to the dashboard and makes use of the REST API...

Security Operations Center (SOC) teams are facing a fundamentally new challenge — traditional cybersecurity tools are failing to detect advanced adversaries who have become experts at evading endpoint-based defenses and signature-based detection systems. The reality of these "invisible intruders" is driving a significant need for a multi-layered approach to detecting threats, including Network Detection and Response (NDR) solutions.  The invisible intruder problem Imagine your network has been compromised — not today or yesterday, but months ago. Despite your significant investments in security tools running 24/7, an advanced adversary has been quietly moving through your systems, carefully avoiding detection. They've stolen credentials, established backdoors, and exfiltrated sensitive data, all while your dashboards showed nothing but green. This scenario is not hypothetical. The average dwell time for attackers — the period between initial compro...

Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic has revealed that unknown threat actors leveraged its Claude chatbot for an "influence-as-a-service" operation to engage with authentic accounts across Facebook and X. The sophisticated activity, branded as financially-motivated, is said to have used its AI tool to orchestrate 100 distinct personas on the two social media platforms, creating a network of "politically-aligned accounts" that engaged with "10s of thousands" of authentic accounts. The now-disrupted operation, Anthropic researchers said, prioritized persistence and longevity over vitality and sought to amplify moderate political perspectives that supported or undermined European, Iranian, the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.), and Kenyan interests. These included promoting the U.A.E. as a superior business environment while being critical of European regulatory frameworks, focusing on energy security narratives for European audiences, and cultural...

For over a decade, application security teams have faced a brutal irony: the more advanced the detection tools became, the less useful their results proved to be. As alerts from static analysis tools, scanners, and CVE databases surged, the promise of better security grew more distant. In its place, a new reality took hold—one defined by alert fatigue and overwhelmed teams. According to OX Security's 2025 Application Security Benchmark Report , a staggering 95–98% of AppSec alerts do not require action - and may, in fact, be harming organizations more than helping. Our research, spanning over 101 million security findings across 178 organizations, shines a spotlight on a fundamental inefficiency in modern AppSec operations. Of nearly 570,000 average alerts per organization, just 202 represented true, critical issues. It's a startling conclusion that's hard to ignore: security teams are chasing shadows, wasting time, burning through budgets, and straining relations wit...

Russian companies have been targeted as part of a large-scale phishing campaign that's designed to deliver a known malware called DarkWatchman . Targets of the attacks include entities in the media, tourism, finance and insurance, manufacturing, retail, energy, telecom, transport, and biotechnology sectors, Russian cybersecurity company F6 said . The activity is assessed to be the work of a financially motivated group called Hive0117, which has been attributed by IBM X-Force to attacks aimed at users in Lithuania, Estonia, and Russia spanning telecom, electronic, and industrial sectors. Then in September 2023, the DarkWatchman malware was once again used in a phishing campaign targeting energy, finance, transport, and software security industries based in Russia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Estonia. Russian banks, retailers and marketplaces, telecom operators, agro-industrial enterprises, fuel and energy companies, logistics businesses, and IT firms were singled out again in No...

Enterprise data backup platform Commvault has revealed that an unknown nation-state threat actor breached its Microsoft Azure environment by exploiting CVE-2025-3928 but emphasized there is no evidence of unauthorized data access. "This activity has affected a small number of customers we have in common with Microsoft, and we are working with those customers to provide assistance," the company said in an update. "Importantly, there has been no unauthorized access to customer backup data that Commvault stores and protects, and no material impact on our business operations or our ability to deliver products and services." In an advisory issued on March 7, 2025, Commvault said it was notified by Microsoft on February 20 about unauthorized activity within its Azure environment and that the threat actor exploited CVE-2025-3928 as a zero-day. It also said it rotated affected credentials and enhanced security measures. The disclosure comes as the U.S. Cybersecurity ...

SonicWall has revealed that two now-patched security flaws impacting its SMA100 Secure Mobile Access (SMA) appliances have been exploited in the wild. The vulnerabilities in question are listed below - CVE-2023-44221 (CVSS score: 7.2) - Improper neutralization of special elements in the SMA100 SSL-VPN management interface allows a remote authenticated attacker with administrative privilege to inject arbitrary commands as a 'nobody' user, potentially leading to OS Command Injection Vulnerability CVE-2024-38475 (CVSS score: 9.8) - Improper escaping of output in mod_rewrite in Apache HTTP Server 2.4.59 and earlier allows an attacker to map URLs to file system locations that are permitted to be served by the server Both the flaws affect SMA 100 Series devices, including SMA 200, 210, 400, 410, 500v, and were addressed in the following versions - CVE-2023-44221 - 10.2.1.10-62sv and higher versions (Fixed on December 4, 2023) CVE-2024-38475 - 10.2.1.14-75sv and higher ve...

As the field of artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve at a rapid pace, fresh 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 exc...

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...