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The notorious cybercrime collective known as Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters (SLH) has been observed offering financial incentives to recruit women to pull off social engineering attacks. The idea is to hire them for voice phishing campaigns targeting IT help desks, Dataminr said in a new threat brief. The group is said to be offering anywhere between $500 and $1,000 upfront per call, in addition to providing them with the necessary pre-written scripts to carry out the attack. "SLH is diversifying its social engineering pool by specifically recruiting women to conduct vishing attacks, likely to increase the success rate of help desk impersonation," the threat intelligence firm said . A high-profile cybercrime supergroup comprising LAPSUS$, Scattered Spider, and ShinyHunters, SLH has a record of engaging in advanced social engineering attacks to sidestep multi-factor authentication (MFA) through techniques like MFA prompt bombing and SIM swapping.  The group's modus ope...

Triage is supposed to make things simpler. In a lot of teams, it does the opposite. When you can’t reach a confident verdict early, alerts turn into repeat checks, back-and-forth, and “just escalate it” calls. That cost doesn’t stay inside the SOC; it shows up as missed SLAs, higher cost per case, and more room for real threats to slip through. So where does triage go wrong? Here are five triage issues that turn investigations into expensive guesswork, and how top teams are changing the outcome with execution evidence. 1. Decisions Made Without Real Evidence Business risk: The hardest triage failure to notice is when decisions get made before proof exists. If responders rely on partial signals (labels, hash matches, reputation), they end up approving or escalating cases without seeing what the file or link actually does.  That uncertainty fuels false positives, missed real threats, slower containment, and higher cost per case, while giving attackers more time before anyone h...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered four malicious NuGet packages that are designed to target ASP.NET web application developers to steal sensitive data. The campaign, discovered by Socket , exfiltrates ASP.NET Identity data , including user accounts, role assignments, and permission mappings, as well as manipulates authorization rules to create persistent backdoors in victim applications. The names of the packages are listed below - NCryptYo DOMOAuth2_ IRAOAuth2.0 SimpleWriter_ The NuGet packages were published to the repository between August 12 and 21, 2024, by a user named hamzazaheer . They have since been taken down from the repository following responsible disclosure, but not before attracting more than 4,500 downloads. According to the software supply chain security company, NCryptYo acts as a first-stage dropper that establishes a local proxy on localhost:7152 that relays traffic to an attacker-controlled command-and-control (C2) server whose address is dyna...

Why automating sensitive data transfers is now a mission-critical priority More than half of national security organizations still rely on manual processes to transfer sensitive data, according to The CYBER360: Defending the Digital Battlespace report. This should alarm every defense and government leader because manual handling of sensitive data is not just inefficient, it is a systemic vulnerability.  Recent breaches in defense supply chains show how manual processes create exploitable gaps that adversaries can weaponize. This is not just a technical issue. It is a strategic challenge for every organization operating in contested domains, where speed and certainty define mission success. In an era defined by accelerating cyber threats and geopolitical tension, every second counts. Delays, errors, and gaps in control can cascade into consequences that compromise mission readiness, decision-making, and operational integrity. This is exactly what manual processes introduce: unc...

A 39-year-old Australian national who was previously employed at U.S. defense contractor L3Harris has been sentenced to a little over seven years in prison for selling eight zero-day exploits to Russian exploit broker Operation Zero in exchange for millions of dollars. Peter Williams pleaded guilty to two counts of theft of trade secrets in October 2025. In addition to the jail term, Williams has been ordered to serve three years of supervised release with special conditions, as well as forfeit illicit proceeds, including properties, clothing, jewelry, and luxury watches, purchased from the cryptocurrency payments he received in return for selling the exploits. The case's connection to Operation Zero was disclosed by cybersecurity journalist Kim Zetter late last year. The nature of the exploits are presently unclear. But a sentencing memorandum published earlier this month revealed that the tools could have been "used against any manner of victim, civilian or military ...

SolarWinds has released updates to address four critical security flaws in its Serv-U file transfer software that, if successfully exploited, could result in remote code execution. The vulnerabilities, all rated 9.1 on the CVSS scoring system, are listed below - CVE-2025-40538 - A broken access control vulnerability that allows an attacker to create a system admin user and execute arbitrary code as root via domain admin or group admin privileges. CVE-2025-40539 - A type confusion vulnerability that allows an attacker to execute arbitrary native code as root. CVE-2025-40540 - A type confusion vulnerability that allows an attacker to execute arbitrary native code as root. CVE-2025-40541 - An insecure direct object reference (IDOR) vulnerability that allows an attacker to execute native code as root. SolarWinds noted that the vulnerabilities require administrative privileges for successful exploitation. It also said that they carry a medium security risk on Windows deployme...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added a recently disclosed vulnerability in FileZen to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-25108 (CVSS v4 score: 8.7), is a case of operating system (OS) command injection that could allow an authenticated user to execute arbitrary commands via specially crafted HTTP requests. "Soliton Systems K.K FileZen contains an OS command injection vulnerability when a user logs-in to the affected product and sends a specially crafted HTTP request," CISA said. According to the Japan Vulnerability Notes (JVN), the vulnerability affects the following versions of the file transfer product - Versions 4.2.1 to 4.2.8 Versions 5.0.0 to 5.0.10 Soliton noted in its advisory that successful exploitation of the issue is only possible when FileZen Antivirus Check Option is enabled, adding it has "received at le...

A vulnerability in GitHub Codespaces could have been exploited by bad actors to seize control of repositories by injecting malicious Copilot instructions in a GitHub issue. The artificial intelligence (AI)-driven vulnerability has been codenamed RoguePilot by Orca Security. It has since been patched by Microsoft following responsible disclosure. "Attackers can craft hidden instructions inside a GitHub issue that are automatically processed by GitHub Copilot, giving them silent control of the in-codespaces AI agent," security researcher Roi Nisimi said in a report. The vulnerability has been described as a case of passive or indirect prompt injection where a malicious instruction is embedded within data or content that's processed by the large language model (LLM), causing it to produce unintended outputs or carry out arbitrary actions. The cloud security company also called it a type of AI-mediated supply chain attack that induces the LLM to automatically execute ...

A Russia-aligned threat actor has been observed targeting a European financial institution as part of a social engineering attack to likely facilitate intelligence gathering or financial theft, signaling a possible expansion of the threat actor's targeting beyond Ukraine and into entities supporting the war-torn nation . The activity, which targeted an unnamed entity involved in regional development and reconstruction initiatives, has been attributed to a cybercrime group tracked as UAC-0050 (aka DaVinci Group ). BlueVoyant has designated the name Mercenary Akula to the threat cluster. The attack was observed earlier this month. "The attack spoofed a Ukrainian judicial domain to deliver an email containing a link to a remote access payload," researchers Patrick McHale and Joshua Green said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The target was a senior legal and policy advisor involved in procurement, a role with privileged insight into institutional operation...

Most identity programs still prioritize work the way they prioritize IT tickets: by volume, loudness, or “what failed a control check.” That approach breaks the moment your environment stops being mostly-human and mostly-onboarded. In modern enterprises, identity risk is created by a compound of factors: control posture, hygiene, business context, and intent. Any one of these can perhaps be manageable on its own. The real danger is the toxic combination, when multiple weaknesses align and attackers get a clean chain from entry to impact. A useful prioritization framework treats identity risk as contextual exposure, not configuration completeness. 1. Controls Posture: Compliance and Security As Risk Signals, Not Checkboxes Controls posture answers a simple question: If something goes wrong, will we prevent it, detect it, and prove it? In classic IAM programs, controls are assessed as “configured / not configured.” But prioritization needs more nuance: a missing control is a risk ...

The North Korea-linked Lazarus Group (aka Diamond Sleet and Pompilus) has been observed using Medusa ransomware in an attack targeting an unnamed entity in the Middle East, according to a new report by the Symantec and Carbon Black Threat Hunter Team. Broadcom's threat intelligence division said it also identified the same threat actors mounting an unsuccessful attack against a healthcare organization in the U.S. Medusa is a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation launched by a cybercrime group known as Spearwing in 2023. The group has claimed more than 366 attacks to date. "Analysis of the Medusa leak site reveals attacks against four healthcare and non-profit organizations in the U.S. since the beginning of November 2025," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Victims included a non-profit in the mental health sector and an educational facility for autistic children. It is unknown if all these victims were targeted by North Korean opera...

The threat activity cluster known as UnsolicitedBooker has been observed targeting telecommunications companies in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, marking a shift from prior attacks aimed at Saudi Arabian entities. The attacks involve the deployment of two distinct backdoors codenamed LuciDoor and MarsSnake, according to a report published by Positive Technologies last week. "The group used several unique and rare instruments of Chinese origin," researchers Alexander Badaev and Maxim Shamanov said . UnsolicitedBooker was first documented by ESET in May 2025, attributing the China-aligned threat actor to a cyber attack targeting an unnamed international organization in Saudi Arabia with a backdoor dubbed MarsSnake. The group is assessed to be active since at least March 2023 and has a history of targeting organizations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Further analysis of the threat actor has uncovered tactical overlaps with two other clusters, including Space Pirates an...