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A joint law enforcement operation undertaken by Dutch and U.S. authorities has dismantled a criminal proxy network that's powered by thousands of infected Internet of Things (IoT) and end-of-life (EoL) devices, enlisting them into a botnet for providing anonymity to malicious actors. In conjunction with the domain seizure, Russian nationals, Alexey Viktorovich Chertkov, 37, Kirill Vladimirovich Morozov, 41, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Shishkin, 36, and Dmitriy Rubtsov, 38, a Kazakhstani national, have been charged by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) for operating, maintaining, and profiting from the proxy services. The DoJ noted that users paid a monthly subscription fee, ranging from $9.95 to $110 per month, netting the threat actors more than $46 million by selling access to the infected routers. The service is believed to have been available since 2004.

The North Korean threat actors behind the Contagious Interview campaign have been observed using updated versions of a cross-platform malware called OtterCookie with capabilities to steal credentials from web browsers and other files. NTT Security Holdings, which detailed the new findings, said the attackers have "actively and continuously" updated the malware, introducing versions v3 and v4 in February and April 2025, respectively. The Japanese cybersecurity company is tracking the cluster under the name WaterPlum , which is also known as CL-STA-0240, DeceptiveDevelopment, DEV#POPPER, Famous Chollima, PurpleBravo, and Tenacious Pungsan. OtterCookie was first documented by NTT last year after having observed it in attacks since September 2024. Delivered by means of a JavaScript payload via a malicious npm package, trojanized GitHub or Bitbucket repository, or a bogus videoconferencing app, it's designed to contact an external server to execute commands on compromis...

Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) is the backbone of modern identity management, enabling secure access to the applications, data, and services your business relies on. As hybrid work and cloud adoption accelerate, Entra ID plays an even more central role — managing authentication, enforcing policy, and connecting users across distributed environments. That prominence also makes it a prime target. Microsoft reports over 600 million attacks on Entra ID every day. These aren't just random attempts, but include coordinated, persistent, and increasingly automated campaigns designed to exploit even small vulnerabilities. Which brings us to the core question: Are Entra ID's native protections enough? Where do they fall short — and what steps should you take to close the gaps and ensure you're covered? Understanding Entra ID At its core, Microsoft Entra ID is your enterprise identity and access management system. It defines how users prove who they are, what resources...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning of a new campaign that's targeting Portuguese-speaking users in Brazil with trial versions of commercial remote monitoring and management (RMM) software since January 2025. "The spam message uses the Brazilian electronic invoice system, NF-e, as a lure to entice users into clicking hyperlinks and accessing malicious content hosted in Dropbox," Cisco Talos researcher Guilherme Venere said in a Thursday report. The attack chains begin with specially crafted spam emails that claim to originate from financial institutions or cell phone carriers, warning of overdue bills or outstanding payments in order to trick users into clicking on bogus Dropbox links that point to a binary installer for the RMM tool. Two notable RMM tools observed are N-able RMM Remote Access and PDQ Connect , granting attackers the ability to read and write files to the remote file system. In some cases, the threat actors then use the remote capabilities of th...

AI agents are changing the way businesses work. They can answer questions, automate tasks, and create better user experiences. But with this power comes new risks — like data leaks, identity theft, and malicious misuse. If your company is exploring or already using AI agents, you need to ask:  Are they secure? AI agents work with sensitive data and make real-time decisions. If they're not protected, attackers can exploit them to steal information, spread misinformation, or take control of systems. Join Michelle Agroskin, Product Marketing Manager at Auth0 , for a free, expert-led webinar — Building AI Agents Securely  — that breaks down the most important AI security issues and what you can do about them. What You'll Learn: What AI Agents Are: Understand how AI agents work and why they're different from chatbots or traditional apps. What Can Go Wrong: Learn about real risks — like adversarial attacks, data leakage, and identity misuse. How to Secure Them: Discover prov...

The Vulnerability Treadmill The reactive nature of vulnerability management, combined with delays from policy and process, strains security teams. Capacity is limited and patching everything immediately is a struggle. Our Vulnerability Operation Center (VOC) dataset analysis identified 1,337,797 unique findings (security issues) across 68,500 unique customer assets. 32,585 of them were distinct CVEs, with 10,014 having a CVSS score of 8 or higher. Among these, external assets have 11,605 distinct CVEs, while internal assets have 31,966. With this volume of CVEs, it's no surprise that some go unpatched and lead to compromises. Why are we stuck in this situation, what can be done, and is there a better approach out there? We'll explore the state of vulnerability reporting, how to prioritize vulnerabilities by threat and exploitation, examine statistical probabilities, and briefly discuss risk. Lastly, we'll consider solutions to minimize vulnerability impact while giving management ...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged three malicious npm packages that are designed to target the Apple macOS version of Cursor, a popular artificial intelligence (AI)-powered source code editor. "Disguised as developer tools offering 'the cheapest Cursor API,' these packages steal user credentials, fetch an encrypted payload from threat actor-controlled infrastructure, overwrite Cursor's main.js file, and disable auto-updates to maintain persistence," Socket researcher Kirill Boychenko said . The packages in question are listed below - sw-cur (2,771 downloads) sw-cur1 (307 downloads), and aiide-cur (163 downloads) All three packages continue to be available for download from the npm registry. "Aiide-cur" was first published on February 14, 2025. It was uploaded by a user named "aiide." The npm library is described as a "command-line tool for configuring the macOS version of the Cursor editor." The other two packages, ...

Google on Thursday announced it's rolling out new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered countermeasures to combat scams across Chrome, Search, and Android. The tech giant said it will begin using Gemini Nano , its on-device large language model (LLM), to improve Safe Browsing in Chrome 137 on desktops. "The on-device approach provides instant insight on risky websites and allows us to offer protection, even against scams that haven't been seen before. Gemini Nano's LLM is perfect for this use because of its ability to distill the varied, complex nature of websites, helping us adapt to new scam tactics more quickly," the company said . Google noted that it's already using this AI-driven approach to tackle remote tech support scams, which often seek to trick users into parting with their personal or financial information under the pretext of a non-existent computer problem. This works by evaluating the web pages using the LLM for potential signals that are...

A China-linked unnamed threat actor dubbed Chaya_004 has been observed exploiting a recently disclosed security flaw in SAP NetWeaver. Forescout Vedere Labs, in a report published Thursday, said it uncovered a malicious infrastructure likely associated with the hacking group weaponizing CVE-2025-31324 (CVSS score: 10.0) since April 29, 2025. CVE-2025-31324 refers to a critical SAP NetWeaver flaw that allows attackers to achieve remote code execution (RCE) by uploading web shells through a susceptible "/developmentserver/metadatauploader" endpoint. The vulnerability was first flagged by ReliaQuest late last month when it found the shortcoming being abused in real-world attacks by unknown threat actors to drop web shells and the Brute Ratel C4 post-exploitation framework. According to Onapsis, hundreds of SAP systems globally have fallen victim to attacks spanning industries and geographies, including energy and utilities, manufacturing, media and entertainment, oil an...

Cybersecurity researchers have exposed what they say is an "industrial-scale, global cryptocurrency phishing operation" engineered to steal digital assets from cryptocurrency wallets for several years. The campaign has been codenamed FreeDrain by threat intelligence firms SentinelOne and Validin . "FreeDrain uses SEO manipulation, free-tier web services (like gitbook.io, webflow.io, and github.io), and layered redirection techniques to target cryptocurrency wallets," security researchers Kenneth Kinion, Sreekar Madabushi, and Tom Hegel said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "Victims search for wallet-related queries, click on high-ranking malicious results, land on lure pages, and are redirected to phishing pages that steal their seed phrases." The scale of the campaign is reflected in the fact that over 38,000 distinct FreeDrain sub-domains hosting lure pages have been identified. These pages are hosted on cloud infrastructure lik...

61% of security leaders reported suffering a breach due to failed or misconfigured controls over the past 12 months. This is despite having an average of 43 cybersecurity tools in place. This massive rate of security failure is clearly not a security investment problem. It is a configuration problem. Organizations are beginning to understand that a security control installed or deployed is not necessarily a security control configured to defend against real-world threats. The recent Gartner® Report , Reduce Threat Exposure With Security Controls Optimization, addresses the gap between intention and outcome. We feel it discusses a hard truth: without continuous validation and tuning, security tools deliver a false sense of, well, security. In this article, we'll take a deep dive into why control effectiveness should be the new benchmark for cybersecurity success, and how organizations can make this shift. The Myth of Tool Coverage Buying more tools has long been considered the k...

SonicWall has released patches to address three security flaws affecting SMA 100 Secure Mobile Access (SMA) appliances that could be fashioned to result in remote code execution. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2025-32819 (CVSS score: 8.8) - A vulnerability in SMA100 allows a remote authenticated attacker with SSL-VPN user privileges to bypass the path traversal checks and delete an arbitrary file potentially resulting in a reboot to factory default settings. CVE-2025-32820 (CVSS score: 8.3) - A vulnerability in SMA100 allows a remote authenticated attacker with SSL-VPN user privileges can inject a path traversal sequence to make any directory on the SMA appliance writable CVE-2025-32821 (CVSS score: 6.7) - A vulnerability in SMA100 allows a remote authenticated attacker with SSL-VPN admin privileges can with admin privileges can inject shell command arguments to upload a file on the appliance "An attacker with access to an SMA SSL-VPN user account can chain...