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A new malware attributed to the Russia-linked hacking group known as COLDRIVER has undergone numerous developmental iterations since May 2025, suggesting an increased "operations tempo" from the threat actor. The findings come from Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), which said the state-sponsored hacking crew has rapidly refined and retooled its malware arsenal merely five days following the publication of its LOSTKEYS malware around the same time. While it's currently not known for how long the new malware families have been under development, the tech giant's threat intelligence team said it has not observed a single instance of LOSTKEYS since disclosure. The new malware, codenamed NOROBOT, YESROBOT, and MAYBEROBOT, is "a collection of related malware families connected via a delivery chain," GTIG researcher Wesley Shields said in a Monday analysis. The latest attack waves are something of a departure from COLDRIVER's typical modus opera...

A European telecommunications organization is said to have been targeted by a threat actor that aligns with a China-nexus cyber espionage group known as Salt Typhoon . The organization, per Darktrace , was targeted in the first week of July 2025, with the attackers exploiting a Citrix NetScaler Gateway appliance to obtain initial access. Salt Typhoon, also known as Earth Estries, FamousSparrow, GhostEmperor, and UNC5807, is the name given to an advanced persistent threat actor with ties to China. Known to be active since 2019, the group gained prominence last year following its attacks on telecommunications services providers, energy networks, and government systems in the U.S. The adversary has a track record of exploiting security flaws in edge devices, maintaining deep persistence, and exfiltrating sensitive data from victims in more than 80 countries across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In the incident observed against the European telecommunications enti...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added five security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) Catalog, officially confirming a recently disclosed vulnerability impacting Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) has been weaponized in real-world attacks. The security defect in question is CVE-2025-61884 (CVSS score: 7.5), which has been described as a server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in the Runtime component of Oracle Configurator that could allow attackers unauthorized access to critical data. "This vulnerability is remotely exploitable without authentication," CISA said. CVE-2025-61884 is the second flaw in Oracle EBS to be actively exploited along with CVE-2025-61882 (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical bug that could permit unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code on susceptible instances. Earlier this month, Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) and Mandiant revealed dozens of organizations may hav...

It's easy to think your defenses are solid — until you realize attackers have been inside them the whole time. The latest incidents show that long-term, silent breaches are becoming the norm. The best defense now isn't just patching fast, but watching smarter and staying alert for what you don't expect. Here's a quick look at this week's top threats, new tactics, and security stories shaping the landscape. ⚡ Threat of the Week F5 Exposed to Nation-State Breach — F5 disclosed that unidentified threat actors broke into its systems and stole files containing some of BIG-IP's source code and information related to undisclosed vulnerabilities in the product. The company said it learned of the incident on August 9, 2025, although it's believed that the attackers were in its network for at least 12 months. The attackers are said to have used a malware family called BRICKSTORM, which is attributed to a China-nexus espionage group dubbed UNC5221. GreyNoise said it observed elevat...

ClickFix, FileFix, fake CAPTCHA — whatever you call it, attacks where users interact with malicious scripts in their web browser are a fast-growing source of security breaches.  ClickFix attacks prompt the user to solve some kind of problem or challenge in the browser — most commonly a CAPTCHA, but also things like fixing an error on a webpage.  The name is a little misleading, though — the key factor in the attack is that they trick users into running malicious commands on their device by copying malicious code from the page clipboard and running it locally. Examples of ClickFix lures used by attackers in the wild. ClickFix is known to be regularly used by the Interlock ransomware group and other prolific threat actors, including state-sponsored APTs. A number of recent public data breaches have been linked to ClickFix-style TTPs, such as Kettering Health, DaVita, City of St. Paul, Minnesota, and the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Centers (with many more breaches ...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a coordinated campaign that leveraged 131 rebranded clones of a WhatsApp Web automation extension for Google Chrome to spam Brazilian users at scale. The 131 spamware extensions share the same codebase, design patterns, and infrastructure, according to supply chain security company Socket. The browser add-ons collectively have about 20,905 active users. "They are not classic malware, but they function as high-risk spam automation that abuses platform rules," security researcher Kirill Boychenko said. "The code injects directly into the WhatsApp Web page, running alongside WhatsApp's own scripts, automates bulk outreach and scheduling in ways that aim to bypass WhatsApp's anti-spam enforcement." The end goal of the campaign is to blast outbound messaging via WhatsApp in a manner that bypasses the messaging platform's rate limits and anti-spam controls. The activity is assessed to have been ongoing for at lea...

China on Sunday accused the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) of carrying out a "premeditated" cyber attack targeting the National Time Service Center ( NTSC ), as it described the U.S. as a "hacker empire" and the "greatest source of chaos in cyberspace." The Ministry of State Security (MSS), in a WeChat post , said it uncovered "irrefutable evidence" of the agency's involvement in the intrusion that dated back to March 25, 2022. The attack was ultimately foiled, it added. Established in 1966 under the jurisdiction of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), NTSC is responsible for generating, maintaining, and transmitting the national standard of time (Beijing Time). "Any cyberattack damaging these facilities would jeopardize the secure and stable operation of 'Beijing Time,' triggering severe consequences such as network communication failures, financial system disruptions, power supply interruptions, transportation paraly...

Europol on Friday announced the disruption of a sophisticated cybercrime-as-a-service (CaaS) platform that operated a SIM farm and enabled its customers to carry out a broad spectrum of crimes ranging from phishing to investment fraud. The coordinated law enforcement effort, dubbed Operation SIMCARTEL , saw 26 searches carried out, resulting in the arrest of seven suspects and the seizure of 1,200 SIM box devices , which contained 40,000 active SIM cards. Five of those detained are Latvian nationals. In addition, five servers were dismantled and two websites (gogetsms[.]com and apisim[.]com) advertising the service was taken over on October 10, 2025, to display a seizure banner. Separately, four luxury vehicles were confiscated, and €431,000 ($502,000) in suspects' bank accounts and €266,000 ($310,000) in their cryptocurrency accounts were frozen. The countries that participated in the operation comprised authorities from Austria, Estonia, Finland, and Latvia, in collaboration...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new campaign that has likely targeted the Russian automobile and e-commerce sectors with a previously undocumented .NET malware dubbed CAPI Backdoor . According to Seqrite Labs , the attack chain involves distributing phishing emails containing a ZIP archive as a way to trigger the infection. The cybersecurity company's analysis is based on the ZIP artifact that was uploaded to the VirusTotal platform on October 3, 2025. Present with the archive is a decoy Russian-language document that purports to be a notification related to income tax legislation and a Windows shortcut (LNK) file. The LNK file, which has the same name as the ZIP archive (i.e., "Перерасчет заработной платы 01.10.2025"), is responsible for the execution of the .NET implant ("adobe.dll") using a legitimate Microsoft binary named " rundll32.exe ," a living-off-the-land (LotL) technique known to be adopted by threat actors. The backd...

The threat actors behind a malware family known as Winos 4.0 (aka ValleyRAT) have expanded their targeting footprint from China and Taiwan to target Japan and Malaysia with another remote access trojan (RAT) tracked as HoldingHands RAT (aka Gh0stBins). "The campaign relied on phishing emails with PDFs that contained embedded malicious links," Pei Han Liao, researcher with Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "These files masqueraded as official documents from the Ministry of Finance and included numerous links in addition to the one that delivered Winos 4.0." Winos 4.0 is a malware family that's often spread via phishing and search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning, directing unsuspecting users to fake websites masquerading as popular software like Google Chrome, Telegram, Youdao, Sogou AI, WPS Office, and DeepSeek, among others. The use of Winos 4.0 is primarily linked to an "aggressive" Chinese cybercri...

The North Korean threat actor linked to the Contagious Interview campaign has been observed merging some of the functionality of two of its malware programs, indicating that the hacking group is actively refining its toolset. That's according to new findings from Cisco Talos, which said recent campaigns undertaken by the hacking group have seen the functions of BeaverTail and OtterCookie coming closer to each other more than ever, even as the latter has been fitted with a new module for keylogging and taking screenshots.  The activity is attributed to a threat cluster that's tracked by the cybersecurity community under the monikers CL-STA-0240, DeceptiveDevelopment, DEV#POPPER, Famous Chollima, Gwisin Gang, PurpleBravo, Tenacious Pungsan, UNC5342, Void Dokkaebi, and WaterPlum. The development comes as Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) and Mandiant revealed the threat actor's use of a stealthy technique known as EtherHiding to fetch next-stage payloads from the...

The danger isn't that AI agents have bad days — it's that they never do. They execute faithfully, even when what they're executing is a mistake. A single misstep in logic or access can turn flawless automation into a flawless catastrophe. This isn't some dystopian fantasy—it's Tuesday at the office now. We've entered a new phase where autonomous AI agents act with serious system privileges. They execute code, handle complex tasks, and access sensitive data with unprecedented autonomy. They don't sleep, don't ask questions, and don't always wait for permission. That's powerful. That's also risky. Because today's enterprise threats go way beyond your garden-variety phishing scams and malware. The modern security perimeter? It's all about identity management. Here's the million-dollar question every CISO should be asking: Who or what has access to your critical systems, can you secure and govern that access, and can you actually prove it? Ho...