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Misconfigured Docker instances are the target of a campaign that employs the Tor anonymity network to stealthily mine cryptocurrency in susceptible environments. "Attackers are exploiting misconfigured Docker APIs to gain access to containerized environments, then using Tor to mask their activities while deploying crypto miners," Trend Micro researchers Sunil Bharti and Shubham Singh said in an analysis published last week. In using Tor, the idea is to anonymize their origins during the installation of the miner on compromised systems. The attacks, per the cybersecurity company, commence with a request from the IP address 198.199.72[.]27 to obtain a list of all containers on the machine. If no containers are present, the attacker proceeds to create a new one based on the "alpine" Docker image and mounts the "/hostroot" directory – i.e., the root directory ("/") of the physical or virtual host machine – as a volume inside it. This behavior p...

The U.S. House of Representatives has formally banned congressional staff members from using WhatsApp on government-issued devices, citing security concerns. The development was first reported by Axios. The decision, according to the House Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), was motivated by worries about the app's security. "The Office of Cybersecurity has deemed WhatsApp a high-risk to users due to the lack of transparency in how it protects user data, absence of stored data encryption, and potential security risks involved with its use," the CAO said in a memo, according to Axios. To that end, House staff are prohibited from downloading the app on any device issued by the government, including its mobile, desktop, or web browser versions. WhatsApp has pushed back against these concerns, stating messages sent on the platform are end-to-end encrypted by default, and that it offers a "higher level" of security than most of the apps on CAO's approved ...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of a new cyber attack campaign by the Russia-linked APT28 (aka UAC-0001) threat actors using Signal chat messages to deliver two new malware families dubbed BEARDSHELL and COVENANT. BEARDSHELL, per CERT-UA, is written in C++ and offers the ability to download and execute PowerShell scripts, as well as upload the results of the execution back to a remote server over the Icedrive API. The agency said it first observed BEARDSHELL, alongside a screenshot-taking tool named SLIMAGENT, as part of incident response efforts in March-April 2024 in a Windows computer. While there were no details available on how the infection took place at that time, the agency said it received threat intelligence from ESET more than a year later that detected evidence of unauthorized access to a "gov.ua" email account. The exact nature of the information shared was not disclosed, but it likely pertains to a report from the Slov...

The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have issued an advisory warning of cyber attacks mounted by the China-linked Salt Typhoon actors to breach major global telecommunications providers as part of a cyber espionage campaign. The attackers exploited a critical Cisco IOS XE software ( CVE-2023-20198 , CVSS score: 10.0) to access configuration files from three network devices registered to a Canadian telecommunications company in mid-February 2025. The threat actors are also said to have modified at least one of the files to configure a Generic Routing Encapsulation ( GRE ) tunnel, enabling traffic collection from the network. The name of the targeted company was not disclosed. Stating that the targeting likely goes beyond the telecommunications sector, the agencies said the targeting of Canadian devices may permit the threat actors to collect information from the compromised networks and use them as leverage to breach additiona...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new jailbreaking method called Echo Chamber that could be leveraged to trick popular large language models (LLMs) into generating undesirable responses, irrespective of the safeguards put in place. "Unlike traditional jailbreaks that rely on adversarial phrasing or character obfuscation, Echo Chamber weaponizes indirect references, semantic steering, and multi-step inference," NeuralTrust researcher Ahmad Alobaid said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The result is a subtle yet powerful manipulation of the model's internal state, gradually leading it to produce policy-violating responses." While LLMs have steadily incorporated various guardrails to combat prompt injections and jailbreaks , the latest research shows that there exist techniques that can yield high success rates with little to no technical expertise. It also serves to highlight a persistent challenge associated with developing eth...

The United States government has warned of cyber attacks mounted by pro-Iranian groups after it launched airstrikes on Iranian nuclear sites as part of the Iran–Israel war that commenced on June 13, 2025. Stating that the ongoing conflict has created a "heightened threat environment" in the country, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a bulletin that cyber actors are likely to target U.S. networks. "Low-level cyber attacks against U.S. networks by pro-Iranian hacktivists are likely, and cyber actors affiliated with the Iranian government may conduct attacks against U.S. networks," the DHS said . "Both hacktivists and Iranian government-affiliated actors routinely target poorly secured U.S. networks and Internet-connected devices for disruptive cyber attacks." The development comes after U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. military had conducted a bombing attack on three Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordo, Natanz, and ...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a Go-based malware called XDigo that has been used in attacks targeting Eastern European governmental entities in March 2025. The attack chains are said to have leveraged a collection of Windows shortcut ( LNK ) files as part of a multi-stage procedure to deploy the malware, French cybersecurity company HarfangLab said . XDSpy is the name assigned to a cyber espionage that's known to target government agencies in Eastern Europe and the Balkans since 2011. It was first documented by the Belarusian CERT in early 2020.  In recent years, companies in Russia and Moldova have been targeted by various campaigns to deliver malware families like UTask, XDDown, and DSDownloader that can download additional payloads and steal sensitive information from compromised hosts. HarfangLab said it observed the threat actor leveraging a remote code execution flaw in Microsoft Windows that's triggered when processing specially crafted LNK files. The v...

It sure is a hard time to be a SOC analyst. Every day, they are expected to solve high-consequence problems with half the data and twice the pressure. Analysts are overwhelmed—not just by threats, but by the systems and processes in place that are meant to help them respond. Tooling is fragmented. Workflows are heavy. Context lives in five places, and alerts never slow down. What started as a fast-paced, high-impact role has, for many analysts, become a repetitive loop of alert triage and data wrangling that offers little room for strategy or growth.  Most SOC teams also run lean. Last year, our annual SANS SOC Survey found that a majority of SOCs only consist of just 2–10 full-time analysts , a number unchanged since the survey began tracking in 2017. Meanwhile, the scope of coverage has exploded, ranging from on-prem infrastructure to cloud environments, remote endpoints, SaaS platforms, and beyond. Compounded at scale, this has led to systemic burnout across SOC environment...

Google has revealed the various safety measures that are being incorporated into its generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems to mitigate emerging attack vectors like indirect prompt injections and improve the overall security posture for agentic AI systems. "Unlike direct prompt injections, where an attacker directly inputs malicious commands into a prompt, indirect prompt injections involve hidden malicious instructions within external data sources," Google's GenAI security team said . These external sources can take the form of email messages, documents, or even calendar invites that trick the AI systems into exfiltrating sensitive data or performing other malicious actions. The tech giant said it has implemented what it described as a "layered" defense strategy that is designed to increase the difficulty, expense, and complexity required to pull off an attack against its systems. These efforts span model hardening, introducing purpose-built mac...

Not every risk looks like an attack. Some problems start as small glitches, strange logs, or quiet delays that don't seem urgent—until they are. What if your environment is already being tested, just not in ways you expected? Some of the most dangerous moves are hidden in plain sight. It's worth asking: what patterns are we missing, and what signals are we ignoring because they don't match old playbooks? This week's reports bring those quiet signals into focus—from attacks that bypassed MFA using trusted tools, to supply chain compromises hiding behind everyday interfaces. Here's what stood out across the cybersecurity landscape: ⚡ Threat of the Week Cloudflare Blocks Massive 7.3 Tbps DDoS Attack — Cloudflare said it autonomously blocked the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack ever recorded, which hit a peak of 7.3 terabits per second (Tbps). The attack, the company said, targeted an unnamed hosting provider and delivered 37.4 terabytes in 45 seconds. It origi...

The April 2025 cyber attacks targeting U.K. retailers Marks & Spencer and Co-op have been classified as a "single combined cyber event." That's according to an assessment from the Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC), a U.K.-based independent, non-profit body set up by the insurance industry to categorize major cyber events. "Given that one threat actor claimed responsibility for both M&S and Co-op, the close timing, and the similar tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), CMC has assessed the incidents as a single combined cyber event," the CMC said . The organization has categorized the disruption of the retailers as a "Category 2 systemic event." It's estimated that the security breaches will have a total financial impact of £270 million ($363 million) to £440 million ($592 million). However, the cyber attack on Harrods around the same time has not been included at this stage, citing a lack of adequate information about the cause and...

The threat actors behind the Qilin ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) scheme are now offering legal counsel for affiliates to put more pressure on victims to pay up, as the cybercrime group intensifies its activity and tries to fill the void left by its rivals. The new feature takes the form of a "Call Lawyer" feature on the affiliate panel, per Israeli cybersecurity company Cybereason. The development represents a newfound resurgence of the e-crime group as once-popular ransomware groups like LockBit, Black Cat, RansomHub, Everest, and BlackLock have suffered abrupt cessations, operational failures, and defacements. The group, also tracked as Gold Feather and Water Galura, has been active since October 2022. Data compiled from the dark web leak sites run by ransomware groups shows that Qilin led with 72 victims in April 2025. In May, it is estimated to be behind 55 attacks , putting it behind Safepay (72) and Luna Moth (67). It's also the third most active group after...