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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...

Threat actors with ties to the Qilin ransomware family have leveraged malware known as SmokeLoader along with a previously undocumented .NET compiled loader codenamed NETXLOADER as part of a campaign observed in November 2024. "NETXLOADER is a new .NET-based loader that plays a critical role in cyber attacks," Trend Micro researchers Jacob Santos, Raymart Yambot, John Rainier Navato, Sarah Pearl Camiling, and Neljorn Nathaniel Aguas said in a Wednesday analysis. "While hidden, it stealthily deploys additional malicious payloads, such as Agenda ransomware and SmokeLoader. Protected by .NET Reactor 6, NETXLOADER is difficult to analyze." Qilin , also called Agenda, has been an active ransomware threat since it surfaced in the threat landscape in July 2022. Last year, cybersecurity company Halcyon discovered an improved version of the ransomware that it named Qilin.B. Recent data shared by Group-IB shows that disclosures on Qilin's data leak site have mo...

The nation-state threat actor known as MirrorFace has been observed deploying malware dubbed ROAMINGMOUSE as part of a cyber espionage campaign directed against government agencies and public institutions in Japan and Taiwan. The activity, detected by Trend Micro in March 2025, involved the use of spear-phishing lures to deliver an updated version of a backdoor called ANEL. "The ANEL file from the 2025 campaign discussed in this blog implemented a new command to support an execution of BOF (Beacon Object File) in memory," security researcher Hara Hiroaki said . "This campaign also potentially leveraged SharpHide to launch the second stage backdoor NOOPDOOR." The China-aligned threat actor, also known as Earth Kasha, is assessed to be a sub-cluster within APT10. In March 2025, ESET shed light on a campaign referred to as Operation AkaiRyū that targeted a diplomatic organization in the European Union in August 2024 with ANEL (aka UPPERCUT). The targeting of v...

The Russia-linked threat actor known as COLDRIVER has been observed distributing a new malware called LOSTKEYS as part of an espionage-focused campaign using ClickFix-like social engineering lures. "LOSTKEYS is capable of stealing files from a hard-coded list of extensions and directories, along with sending system information and running processes to the attacker," the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said . The malware, the company said, was observed in January, March, and April 2025 in attacks on current and former advisors to Western governments and militaries, as well as journalists, think tanks, and NGOs. In addition, individuals connected to Ukraine have also been singled out. LOSTKEYS is the second custom malware attributed to COLDRIVER after SPICA , marking a continued departure from the credential phishing campaigns the threat actor has been known for. The hacking group is also tracked under the names Callisto, Star Blizzard, and UNC4057. "They ar...

Cisco has released software fixes to address a maximum-severity security flaw in its IOS XE Wireless Controller that could enable an unauthenticated, remote attacker to upload arbitrary files to a susceptible system. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-20188 , has been rated 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. "This vulnerability is due to the presence of a hard-coded JSON Web Token (JWT) on an affected system," the company said in a Wednesday advisory. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted HTTPS requests to the AP image download interface. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to upload files, perform path traversal, and execute arbitrary commands with root privileges." That said, in order for the exploitation to be successful, the Out-of-Band AP Image Download feature must be enabled on the device. It's disabled by default. The following products are affected, if they have a vulnerable release running and have the Ou...

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...