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Let's be honest: if you're one of the first (or the first) security hires at a small or midsize business, chances are you're also the unofficial CISO, SOC, IT Help Desk, and whatever additional roles need filling. You're not running a security department. You are THE security department. You're getting pinged about RFPs in one area, and reviewing phishing alerts in another, all while sifting through endless FP alerts across the board. The tools meant to help are often creating more work than they solve. Security teams end up choosing between letting things slip or becoming the "Department of No." Chances are you inherited your company's Google Workspace. Thankfully, Google handles the infrastructure, the uptime, and the spam filtering. But while Google takes care of a lot, it doesn't cover everything, and it can be difficult for security teams to operationalize all of Google's underlying capabilities without significant engineering work. It's your job to se...

The threat actors known as Golden Chickens have been attributed to two new malware families dubbed TerraStealerV2 and TerraLogger, suggesting continued development efforts to fine-tune and diversify their arsenal. "TerraStealerV2 is designed to collect browser credentials, cryptocurrency wallet data, and browser extension information," Recorded Future Insikt Group said . "TerraLogger, by contrast, is a standalone keylogger. It uses a common low-level keyboard hook to record keystrokes and writes the logs to local files." Golden Chickens, also known as TA4557 and Venom Spider, is the name given to a financially motivated threat actor linked to a notorious malware family called More_eggs . It's known to be active since at least 2018, offering its warez under a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model. Campaigns distributing More_eggs entail the use of spear-phishing emails to target hiring managers using fake resumes, allowing attackers to steal confidential data. ...

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...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered three malicious Go modules that include obfuscated code to fetch next-stage payloads that can irrevocably overwrite a Linux system's primary disk and render it unbootable. The names of the packages are listed below - github[.]com/truthfulpharm/prototransform github[.]com/blankloggia/go-mcp github[.]com/steelpoor/tlsproxy "Despite appearing legitimate, these modules contained highly obfuscated code designed to fetch and execute remote payloads," Socket researcher Kush Pandya said . The packages are designed to check if the operating system on which they are being run is Linux, and if so retrieve a next-stage payload from a remote server using wget. The payload is a destructive shell script that overwrites the entire primary disk (" /dev/sda ") with zeroes, effectively preventing the machine from booting up. "This destructive method ensures no data recovery tool or forensic process can restore the data, as...

An Iranian state-sponsored threat group has been attributed to a long-term cyber intrusion aimed at a critical national infrastructure (CNI) in the Middle East that lasted nearly two years. The activity, which lasted from at least May 2023 to February 2025, entailed "extensive espionage operations and suspected network prepositioning – a tactic often used to maintain persistent access for future strategic advantage," the FortiGuard Incident Response (FGIR) team said in a report. The network security company noted that the attack exhibits tradecraft overlaps with a known Iranian nation-state threat actor called Lemon Sandstorm (formerly Rubidium), which is also tracked as Parisite, Pioneer Kitten, and UNC757. It's been assessed to be active since at least 2017, striking aerospace, oil and gas, water, and electric sectors across the United States, the Middle East, Europe, and Australia. According to industrial cybersecurity company Dragos, the adversary has leveraged ...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Thursday announced charges against a 36-year-old Yemeni national for allegedly deploying the Black Kingdom ransomware against global targets, including businesses, schools, and hospitals in the United States. Rami Khaled Ahmed of Sana'a, Yemen, has been charged with one count of conspiracy, one count of intentional damage to a protected computer, and one count of threatening damage to a protected computer. Ahmed is assessed to be currently living in Yemen. "From March 2021 to June 2023, Ahmed and others infected computer networks of several U.S.-based victims, including a medical billing services company in Encino, a ski resort in Oregon, a school district in Pennsylvania, and a health clinic in Wisconsin," the DoJ said in a statement. Ahmed is accused of developing and deploying the ransomware by exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange Server known as ProxyLogon. The ransomware worked by either encrypting data from ...

Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) on Friday fined popular video-sharing platform TikTok €530 million ($601 million) for infringing data protection regulations in the region by transferring European users' data to China. "TikTok infringed the GDPR regarding its transfers of EEA [European Economic Area] User Data to China and its transparency requirements," the DPC said in a statement. "The decision includes administrative fines totaling €530 million and an order requiring TikTok to bring its processing into compliance within 6 months." The order, in addition, requires the company to suspend data transfers to China within the time period. The penalty is the result of an investigation that was launched in September 2021 that probed the company's transfer of personal data to China and its compliance with stringent data protection laws regarding data transfers to third countries. Commenting on the decision, DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyl...

Run by the team at workflow orchestration and AI platform Tines, the Tines library features pre-built workflows shared by security practitioners from across the community - all free to import and deploy through the platform's Community Edition . A recent standout is a workflow that automates monitoring for security advisories from CISA and other vendors, enriches advisories with CrowdStrike threat intelligence, and streamlines ticket creation and notification. Developed by Josh McLaughlin, a security engineer at LivePerson, the workflow drastically reduces manual work while keeping analysts in control of final decisions, helping teams stay on top of new vulnerabilities. "Before automation, creating tickets for 45 vulnerabilities took about 150 minutes of work," Josh explains. "After automation, the time needed for the same number of tickets dropped to around 60 minutes, saving significant time and freeing analysts from manual tasks like copy-pasting and web browsing." LivePerson's s...

The malware loader known as MintsLoader has been used to deliver a PowerShell-based remote access trojan called GhostWeaver. "MintsLoader operates through a multi-stage infection chain involving obfuscated JavaScript and PowerShell scripts," Recorded Future's Insikt Group said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The malware employs sandbox and virtual machine evasion techniques, a domain generation algorithm (DGA), and HTTP-based command-and-control (C2) communications." Phishing and drive-by download campaigns distributing MintsLoader have been detected in the wild since early 2023, per Orange Cyberdefense . The loader has been observed delivering various follow-on payloads like StealC and a modified version of the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) client. The malware has also been put to use by threat actors operating e-crime services like SocGholish (aka FakeUpdates) and LandUpdate808 (aka TAG-124), distributing via p...

A year after Microsoft announced passkeys support for consumer accounts, the tech giant has announced a big change that pushes individuals signing up for new accounts to use the phishing-resistant authentication method by default. "Brand new Microsoft accounts will now be 'passwordless by default,'" Microsoft's Joy Chik and Vasu Jakkal said . "New users will have several passwordless options for signing into their account and they'll never need to enroll a password. Existing users can visit their account settings to delete their password." The Windows maker said it has also simplified the sign-in and sign-up user experience by prioritizing passwordless methods. Furthermore, the sign-in process now automatically detects the best available method on a user's account and sets that as the default. For example, if an account has the option to sign in via a password and a "one time code," the user will be prompted to login via one time ...

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...