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Tycoon 2FA , one of the prominent phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) toolkits that allowed cybercriminals to stage adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) credential harvesting attacks at scale, was dismantled by a coalition of law enforcement agencies and security companies. The subscription-based phishing kit , which first emerged in August 2023 , was described by Europol as one of the largest phishing operations worldwide. The kit was sold via Telegram and Signal for a starting price of $120 for 10 days or $350 for access to a web-based administration panel for a month. Tycoon 2FA's primary developer is alleged to be Saad Fridi , who is said to be based in Pakistan. The panel serves as a hub for configuring, tracking, and refining campaigns. It features pre‑built templates, attachment files for common lure formats, domain and hosting configuration, redirect logic, and victim tracking. Operators can also configure how the malicious content is delivered through attachments, as well as kee...

A joint law enforcement operation has dismantled LeakBase , one of the world's largest online forums for cybercriminals to buy and sell stolen data and cybercrime tools. The LeakBase forum, per the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), had over 142,000 members and more than 215,000 messages between members as of December 2025. Those attempting to access the forum's website (" leakbase[.]la ") are now greeted with a seizure banner that says it was confiscated by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as part of an international law enforcement effort. "All forum content, including users' accounts, posts, credit details, private messages, and IP logs, has been secured and preserved for evidentiary purposes," the banner reads. Available in English and accessible over the clearnet, LeakBase offered hacked databases , including hundreds of millions of account credentials and financial information such as credit and debit card numbers, banking account ...

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of a surge in retaliatory hacktivist activity following the U.S.-Israel coordinated military campaign against Iran , codenamed Epic Fury and Roaring Lion. "The hacktivist threat in the Middle East is highly lopsided, with two groups, Keymous+ and DieNet, driving nearly 70% of all attack activity between February 28 and March 2," Radware said in a Tuesday report. The first distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack was launched by Hider Nex (aka Tunisian Maskers Cyber Force) on February 28, 2026. According to details shared by Orange Cyberdefense, Hider Nex is a shadowy Tunisian hacktivist group that supports pro-Palestinian causes. It leverages a hack-and-leak strategy combining DDoS attacks with data breaches to leak sensitive data and advance its geopolitical agenda. The group emerged in mid-2025. In all, a total of 149 hacktivist DDoS claims were recorded targeting 110 distinct organizations across 16 countries. The attacks were...

Google said it identified a "new and powerful" exploit kit dubbed Coruna (aka CryptoWaters) targeting Apple iPhone models running iOS versions between 13.0 and 17.2.1. The exploit kit featured five full iOS exploit chains and a total of 23 exploits, Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said. It's not effective against the latest version of iOS. The findings were first reported by WIRED. "The core technical value of this exploit kit lies in its comprehensive collection of iOS exploits, with the most advanced ones using non-public exploitation techniques and mitigation bypasses," according to GTIG. "The framework surrounding the exploit kit is extremely well engineered; the exploit pieces are all connected naturally and combined together using common utility and exploitation frameworks." The kit is said to have circulated among multiple threat actors since February 2025, moving from a commercial surveillance operation to a government-backed att...

As AI becomes the central engine for enterprise productivity, security leaders are finally getting the green light — and the budget — to secure it. But there’s a quiet crisis unfolding in the boardroom: many organizations know they need "AI Governance," but they have no idea what they are actually looking for. The CISO’s Dilemma: You Have the AI Budget, but Do You Have the Requirements? As AI becomes the central engine for enterprise productivity, security leaders are finally getting the green light—and the budget—to secure it. But there’s a quiet crisis unfolding in the boardroom: many organizations know they need "AI Governance," but they have no idea what they are actually looking for. Without a structured way to evaluate the exploding market of AI Usage Control (AUC) solutions, teams risk "investing" in legacy tools that were never built for the age of agentic workflows and shadow browser extensions. A new RFP Guide for Evaluating AI Usage Control...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged malicious Packagist PHP packages masquerading as Laravel utilities that act as a conduit for a cross-platform remote access trojan (RAT) that's functional on Windows, macOS, and Linux systems. The names of the packages are listed below - nhattuanbl/lara-helper (37 Downloads) nhattuanbl/simple-queue (29 Downloads) nhattuanbl/lara-swagger (49 Downloads) According to Socket, the package "nhattuanbl/lara-swagger" does not directly embed malicious code, lists "nhattuanbl/lara-helper" as a Composer dependency , causing it to install the RAT. The packages are still available for download from the PHP package registry. Both lara-helper and simple-queue have been found to contain a PHP file named "src/helper.php," which employs a number of tricks to complicate static analysis by making use of techniques like control flow obfuscation, encoding domain names, command names, and file paths, and randomized identifie...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an advanced persistent threat (APT) group dubbed Silver Dragon that has been linked to cyber attacks targeting entities in Europe and Southeast Asia since at least mid-2024. "Silver Dragon gains its initial access by exploiting public-facing internet servers and by delivering phishing emails that contain malicious attachments," Check Point said in a technical report. "To maintain persistence, the group hijacks legitimate Windows services, which allows the malware processes to blend into normal system activity." Silver Dragon is assessed to be operating within the APT41 umbrella . APT41 is the cryptonym assigned to a prolific Chinese hacking group known for its targeting of healthcare, telecoms, high-tech, education, travel services, and media sectors for cyber espionage as early as 2012. It's also believed to engage in financially motivated activity potentially outside of state control. Attacks mounted by...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added a recently disclosed security flaw impacting Broadcom VMware Aria Operations to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing active exploitation in the wild. The high-severity vulnerability, CVE-2026-22719 (CVSS score: 8.1), has been described as a case of command injection that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary commands. "A malicious unauthenticated actor may exploit this issue to execute arbitrary commands, which may lead to remote code execution in VMware Aria Operations while support-assisted product migration is in progress," the company said in an advisory released late last month. The shortcoming was addressed, along withCVE-2026-22720, a stored cross-site scripting vulnerability, and CVE-2026-22721, a privilege escalation vulnerability that could result in administrative access. It impacts the following products - VMware Cloud Foundatio...

Threat hunters have called attention to a new campaign as part of which bad actors masqueraded as fake IT support to deliver the Havoc command-and-control (C2) framework as a precursor to data exfiltration or ransomware attack. The intrusions, identified by Huntress last month across five partner organizations, involved the threat actors using email spam as lures, followed by a phone call from an IT desk that activates a layered malware delivery pipeline. "In one organization, the adversary moved from initial access to nine additional endpoints over the course of eleven hours, deploying a mix of custom Havoc Demon payloads and legitimate RMM tools for persistence, with the speed of lateral movement strongly suggesting the end goal was data exfiltration, ransomware, or both," researchers Michael Tigges, Anna Pham, and Bryan Masters said. It's worth noting that the modus operandi is consistent with email bombing and Microsoft Teams phishing attacks orchestrated by t...

Every CISO knows the uncomfortable truth about their Security Operations Center: the people most responsible for catching threats in real time are the people with the least experience. Tier 1 analysts sit at the front line of detection, and yet they are also the most vulnerable to the cognitive and organizational pressures that quietly erode SOC performance over time. The Paradox at the Gate: Why Tier 1 Carries the Weight but Lacks the Armor Tier 1 is the layer that processes the highest volume of alerts, performs initial triage, and determines what gets escalated. But it is built on a foundation that is structurally fragile. Entry-level analysts, high turnover rates, and relentless alert queues create conditions where even well-designed detection rules fail to translate into timely, accurate responses. The paradox is here:  Tier 1 performance defines SOC performance; But Tier 1 is often the least supported, least empowered, and most cognitively overloaded layer Tier 1 an...

The threat actor behind the recently disclosed artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted campaign targeting Fortinet FortiGate appliances leveraged an open-source, AI-native security testing platform called CyberStrikeAI to execute the attacks. The new findings come from Team Cymru, which detected its use following an analysis of the IP address ("212.11.64[.]250") that was used by the suspected Russian-speaking threat actor to conduct automated mass scanning for vulnerable appliances. CyberStrikeAI is an "open-source artificial intelligence (AI) offensive security tool (OST) developed by a China-based developer who we assess has some ties to the Chinese government," security researcher Will Thomas (aka @BushidoToken ) said . Details of the AI-powered activity came to light last month when Amazon Threat Intelligence said it detected the unknown attacker systematically targeting FortiGate devices using generative artificial intelligence (AI) services like Anthropic ...

The Rise of MCPs in the Enterprise The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is quickly becoming a practical way to push LLMs from “chat” into real work. By providing structured access to applications, APIs, and data, MCP enables prompt-driven AI agents that can retrieve information, take action, and automate end-to-end business workflows across the enterprise. This is already showing up in production through horizontal assistants and custom vertical agents. like Microsoft Copilot, ServiceNow, Zendesk bots, and Salesforce Agentforce, with custom and vertical agents moving fast behind them. This echoes the recent Gartner “Market Guide for Guardian Agents” report , where analysts note that the rapid enterprise adoption of these AI agents is significantly outpacing the maturity of the governance and policy controls required to manage them. We believe the primary disconnect is that these AI “colleagues” don’t look like humans. They don’t join or leave through HR They don’t submit access re...