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Europol has announced the takedown of distributed denial of service (DDoS)-for-hire services that were used to launch thousands of cyber-attacks across the world. In connection with the operation, Polish authorities have arrested four individuals aged between 19 and 22 and the United States has seized nine domains that are associated with the now-defunct platforms. "The suspects are believed to be behind six separate stresser/booter services that enabled paying customers to flood websites and servers with malicious traffic — knocking them offline for as little as EUR 10," Europol said in a statement. The services, named cfxapi, cfxsecurity, neostress, jetstress, quickdown and zapcut, are said to have been instrumental in launching widespread attacks on schools, government services, businesses, and gaming platforms between 2022 and 2025.  Europol said the platforms offered "slick user interfaces," enabling malicious actors with little to no technical expertis...

A second security flaw impacting the OttoKit (formerly SureTriggers ) WordPress plugin has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-27007 (CVSS score: 9.8), is a privilege escalation bug impacting all versions of the plugin prior to and including version 1.0.82.  "This is due to the create_wp_connection() function missing a capability check and insufficiently verifying a user's authentication credentials," Wordfence said . "This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to establish a connection, which ultimately can make privilege escalation possible." That said, the vulnerability is exploitable only in two possible scenarios - When a site has never enabled or used an application password, and OttoKit has never been connected to the website using an application password before When an attacker has authenticated access to a site and can generate a valid application password Wordfence revealed that it obs...

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...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed multiple security flaw in the on-premise version of SysAid IT support software that could be exploited to achieve pre-authenticated remote code execution with elevated privileges. The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2025-2775, CVE-2025-2776, and CVE-2025-2777, have all been described as XML External Entity ( XXE ) injections, which occur when an attacker is able to successfully interfere with an application's parsing of XML input. This, in turn, could permit attackers to inject unsafe XML entities into the web application, allowing them to carry out a Server-Side Request Forgery ( SSRF ) attack and in worst cases, remote code execution. A description of the three vulnerabilities, according to watchTowr Labs researchers Sina Kheirkhah and Jake Knott, is as follows - CVE-2025-2775 and CVE-2025-2776 - A pre-authenticated XXE within the /mdm/checkin endpoint CVE-2025-2777 - A pre-authenticated XXE within the /lshw endpoint watchTowr L...

Security Service Edge (SSE) platforms have become the go-to architecture for securing hybrid work and SaaS access. They promise centralized enforcement, simplified connectivity, and consistent policy control across users and devices. But there's a problem: they stop short of where the most sensitive user activity actually happens—the browser. This isn't a small omission. It's a structural limitation. And it's leaving organizations exposed in the one place they can't afford to be: the last mile of user interaction. A new report Reevaluating SSEs: A Technical Gap Analysis of Last-Mile Protection analyzing gaps in SSE implementations reveals where current architectures fall short—and why many organizations are reevaluating how they protect user interactions inside the browser. The findings point to a fundamental visibility challenge at the point of user action. SSEs deliver value for what they're designed to do—enforce network-level policies and route traffic securely between en...

Threat actors with links to the Play ransomware family exploited a recently patched security flaw in Microsoft Windows as a zero-day as part of an attack targeting an unnamed organization in the United States. The attack, per the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom, leveraged CVE-2025-29824 , a privilege escalation flaw in the Common Log File System (CLFS) driver. It was patched by Microsoft last month. Play , also called Balloonfly and PlayCrypt, is known for its double extortion tactics, wherein sensitive data is exfiltrated prior to encryption in exchange for a ransom. It's active since at least mid-2022. In the activity observed by Symantec, the threat actors are said to have likely leveraged a public-facing Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) as an entry point, taking advantage of an as-yet-undetermined method to move to another Windows machine on the target network. The attack is notable for the use of Grixba , a bespoke information stealer previously attr...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malicious package on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that masquerades as a seemingly harmless Discord-related utility but incorporates a remote access trojan. The package in question is discordpydebug , which was uploaded to PyPI on March 21, 2022. It has been downloaded 11,574 times and continues to be available on the open-source registry. Interestingly, the package has not received any update since then. "At first glance, it appeared to be a simple utility aimed at developers working on Discord bots using the Discord.py library," the Socket Research Team said . "However, the package concealed a fully functional remote access trojan (RAT)." The package, once installed, contacts an external server ("backstabprotection.jamesx123.repl[.]co"), and includes features to read and write arbitrary files based on commands, readfile or writefile, received from the server. The RAT also supports the ability...

A federal jury on Tuesday decided that NSO Group must pay Meta-owned WhatsApp WhatsApp approximately $168 million in monetary damages, more than four months after a federal judge ruled that the Israeli company violated U.S. laws by exploiting WhatsApp servers to deploy Pegasus spyware, targeting over 1,400 individuals globally. WhatsApp originally filed the lawsuit against NSO Group in 2019, accusing the latter of using Pegasus to target journalists, human rights activists, and political dissidents. Court documents released as part of the trial have revealed that 456 Mexicans were targeted during the campaign, followed by 100 victims in India, 82 in Bahrain, 69 in Morocco, and 58 in Pakistan. In total, individuals across 51 different countries were targeted. The attacks leveraged a then zero-day vulnerability in WhatsApp's voice calling feature ( CVE-2019-3568 , CVSS score: 9.8) to trigger the deployment of the spyware.  In a ruling issued in December 2024, United States ...

Threat actors have been observed actively exploiting security flaws in GeoVision end-of-life (EoL) Internet of Things (IoT) devices to corral them into a Mirai botnet for conducting distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The activity, first observed by the Akamai Security Intelligence and Response Team (SIRT) in early April 2025, involves the exploitation of two operating system command injection flaws ( CVE-2024-6047 and CVE-2024-11120 , CVSS scores: 9.8) that could be used to execute arbitrary system commands. "The exploit targets the /DateSetting.cgi endpoint in GeoVision IoT devices, and injects commands into the szSrvIpAddr parameter," Akamai researcher Kyle Lefton said in a report shared with The Hacker News. In the attacks detected by the web security and infrastructure company, the botnet has been found injecting commands to download and execute an ARM version of the Mirai malware called LZRD . Some of the vulnerabilities exploited by the botnet includ...

Cybersecurity researchers have lifted the lid on two threat actors that orchestrate investment scams through spoofed celebrity endorsements and conceal their activity through traffic distribution systems (TDSes). The activity clusters have been codenamed Reckless Rabbit and Ruthless Rabbit by DNS threat intelligence firm Infoblox. The attacks have been observed to lure victims with bogus platforms, including cryptocurrency exchanges, which are then advertised on social media platforms. An important aspect of these scams is the use of web forms to collect user data. "Reckless Rabbit creates ads on Facebook that lead to fake news articles featuring a celebrity endorsement for the investment platform," security researchers Darby Wise, Piotr Glaska, and Laura da Rocha said . "The article includes a link to the scam platform which contains an embedded web form persuading the user to enter their personal information to 'register' for the investment opportunity....

It wasn't ransomware headlines or zero-day exploits that stood out most in this year's Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) — it was what fueled them. Quietly, yet consistently, two underlying factors played a role in some of the worst breaches: third-party exposure and machine credential abuse . According to the 2025 DBIR, third-party involvement in breaches doubled year-over-year, jumping from 15% to 30% . In parallel, attackers increasingly exploited machine credentials and ungoverned machine accounts to gain access, escalate privileges, and exfiltrate sensitive data. The message is clear: it's no longer enough to protect your employee users alone. To truly defend against modern threats, organizations must govern all identities — human, non-employee, and machine — within a unified security strategy. Third-Party Risk: Expanding Faster Than Organizations Can Control Today's enterprise is a patchwork of partnerships: contractors, vendors, business p...

Microsoft has warned that using pre-made templates, such as out-of-the-box Helm charts, during Kubernetes deployments could open the door to misconfigurations and leak valuable data. "While these 'plug-and-play' options greatly simplify the setup process, they often prioritize ease of use over security," Michael Katchinskiy and Yossi Weizman from the Microsoft Defender for Cloud Research team said . "As a result, a large number of applications end up being deployed in a misconfigured state by default, exposing sensitive data, cloud resources, or even the entire environment to attackers." Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes that allows developers to package, configure, and deploy applications and services onto Kubernetes clusters. It's part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Kubernetes application packages are structured in the Helm packaging format called charts , which are YAML manifests and templates used to describe the Kuber...