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An INTERPOL-led operation last month resulted in the disruption of Sniper Dz , a decade-long phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform, Group-IB said Thursday. The effort, codenamed Operation Ramz , took place between October 2025 and February 2026, and saw authorities from 13 countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region making 201 arrests. Included among them was Guedz, the primary developer and administrator of Sniper Dz, a PhaaS service that's said to have collected more than 45,000 victim records. The arrest was made by the Algerian National Police. Over the years, the platform rebranded itself as Joker Dz, Storm Dz, and Spam Dz. As part of Operation Ramz, the website used to offer PhaaS capabilities to other cybercriminals was taken down. Authorities also seized hardware containing phishing software and scripts. "Active since at least 2015, Sniper Dz evolved into a sophisticated criminal platform offering ready-made phishing kits, hosting infrastructu...

Authorities in Europe have disrupted AudiA6 , a cryptocurrency laundering service used by ransomware gangs and cybercriminal networks. Europol, in a statement issued Thursday, said the dismantling of AudiA6 cut off a "key financial pipeline used to wash hundreds of millions in illicit profits." The service is estimated to have been used to launder more than €336 million (~$389 million) since the service was launched in 2021. "The platform became a central hub for ransomware actors and cybercriminals seeking to cash out stolen digital assets while hiding the money trail from authorities," the agency added . The operators of AudiA6 are suspected to have also administered a dark web cybercrime forum known as Dark2Web, where cybercriminals advertised illicit services and connected with other threat actors across the world. As part of the operation that took place on June 10, 2026, a number of coordinated actions were carried out, including - The arrest of ...

The ShinyHunters extortion crew exploited an unpatched flaw in Oracle PeopleSoft to break into enterprise systems, steal data, and demand payment to keep it private. The campaign hit universities hardest. Google's Mandiant attributes it to the group it tracks as UNC6240, and dates the activity between May 27 and June 9. Oracle did not publish its advisory until June 10, so the bug was a zero-day the entire time. The flaw, CVE-2026-35273 , is a remote code execution bug in PeopleSoft Enterprise PeopleTools rated 9.8 out of 10. It needs no login and no user interaction, just network access over HTTP, to take over the server. If you run PeopleSoft with the Environment Management Hub reachable from outside, that is your exposure, and the immediate move is to lock those endpoints down. The vulnerability sits in the Updates Environment Management component, the piece behind the Environment Management Hub (PSEMHUB). Oracle lists PeopleTools 8.61 and 8.62 as affected and says earl...

Two security teams have shown, in separate research published this week, that OpenClaw , the popular self-hosted AI agent, can be driven to run attacker-controlled code or hand over sensitive data through ordinary-looking inputs. Imperva buried instructions inside shared contacts, vCards, and location pins that the agent executed without the victim ever seeing them. Varonis built a test agent on the platform, gave it a mailbox full of synthetic business data, and watched a single plain email talk it into forwarding mock AWS keys and a fake customer export to an outside address. The flaw Imperva found is patched in OpenClaw 2026.4.23, so update if you run it. The phishing weakness Varonis found is not something a patch fixes; it comes down to limiting what the agent can do on its own. Different doors into the same room: the agent trusts what reaches it, and its access becomes the attacker's. Hidden commands in a shared contact Imperva researcher Yohann Sillam looked at ...

Security researcher Chaotic Eclipse (aka Nightmare-Eclipse and MSNightmare) has released a new Windows BitLocker bypass dubbed GreatXML , a day after they published an exploit for Microsoft Defender. "This was an accidental discovery, it took a total of 4 hours to find this," the researcher said in a post on Blogger. "If you ever attempted to use Windows Defender Offline Scan , you're automatically vulnerable to a BitLocker bypass. I'm unsure if you can still trigger the bug without ever using the offline scan feature, because you can definitely." The exploit works as follows - Copy an XML file ("unattend.xml") and a recovery folder containing another XML file ("Recovery/WindowsRE/ReAgent.xml") to the root of the recovery partition. Reboot to Windows Recovery Environment ( WinRE ) by holding Shift while clicking Restart in the Windows power menu. If every step is followed correctly, the result is a shell spawned with unre...

A new analysis of The Gentlemen operation has revealed that the financially motivated threat group initially operated as an affiliate responsible for conducting double extortion attacks, while leveraging resources from various ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) schemes like LockBit (aka Tenacious Mantis), Qilin (aka Pestilent Mantis), and Medusa (aka Venomous Mantis). According to a detailed report published by PRODAFT, the group, which it tracks as Phantom Mantis, is led by a Russian-speaking cybercriminal it calls LARVA-368, who goes by the online aliases hastalamuerte, ArmCorp, zeta88, nobody0, and santamuerte. The Gentlemen is known to be active since March 2025, claiming a total of 478 victims to date, per data from Ransomware.Live. "In July 2025, Phantom Mantis transitioned into The Gentlemen, an independent partnership program no longer dependent on other RaaS groups," the Swiss cybersecurity company said. "Additionally, LARVA-368 relies heavily on artificia...

Most good security work is invisible by design. Today is the exception. The 2026 Cybersecurity Stars Awards winners are announced across 95 subcategories in four main award categories. The reason is simple. Cybersecurity is full of work that deserves recognition and rarely gets it. Products that quietly close real gaps. Teams that stop incidents nobody reads about. Companies that raise the baseline for everyone else. The Cybersecurity Stars Awards put names on that work, once a year, through independent judging. Every nomination was reviewed by an independent panel of judges and scored against three criteria: innovation, impact, and technical excellence. Entries were not ranked by popularity, brand size, or campaign reach. They were judged on the work itself. Some subcategories have more than one winner. The awards recognize every entry that meets the standard, not just one per category. By design, the winners span four main categories and 97 subcategories, including agentic...

It's been one of those weeks. You expect the usual noise: recycled malware, sloppy attacks, another easy target getting hit. Instead, there's a supply chain attack kit in a public repo, a $5,000-a-month RAT that clones browsers, and research showing AI agents can be tricked into leaking real credentials. The bigger problem is how polished this all looks now. Mule networks run like SaaS. Deepfake KYC bypass is sold as a feature. Endpoint tools can be quietly weakened using built-in OS settings, with no exploit needed. Here's the full list of threats, tools, flaws, and updates worth knowing.

For thirty years, vulnerability management ran on a buffer: the months between when a vulnerability was found and when someone could figure out how to weaponize it. The solution was straightforward enough; triage by severity, schedule the fix, validate, and move on. The buffer was what made that work. Today, that buffer is gone. AI didn't make your team slower. It changed the other side of the equation, compressing discovery-to-exploit from months to hours . And the sad truth for defenders is that a process built for breathing room can't survive without it. AI Turned Vulnerability Discovery Into a Volume Game In its May 2026 update, Anthropic reported that it and approximately 50 partners used Claude Mythos Preview to find more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities in systemically important software in a single month. Earlier figures were just as stark. Pointed at Firefox, the gated Mythos model wrote 181 working exploits , against just 2 from t...

The Vietnam-aligned threat actor known as OceanLotus has been attributed to two distinct campaigns that targeted domestic entities and stock investors with a backdoor known as SPECTRALVIPER. The campaigns involve a prolonged cyber espionage operation aimed at a Vietnamese infrastructure and transport construction corporation between mid-2024 and February 2026, as well as a supply chain attack leveraging FireAnt Metakit, a popular software platform used by stock investors in Vietnam. The second activity cluster took place from October 2025 to March 2026. The two sets of attacks represent a shift in operational focus, per ESET, with the threat actor placing an increasing emphasis on domestic espionage rather than external targets. The group, active since 2012, also has a history of targeting China . "Whether the shift represents a temporary adjustment or a long-term strategic change remains unclear; however, this 15-year-old APT group continues to demonstrate aggressive tact...

GitHub has announced what it said are "breaking changes" coming to npm version 12, one of which turns off install scripts by default to combat software supply chain threats. The changes aim to combat attack techniques that abuse the "npm install" command to trigger the execution of malicious code using npm lifecycle hooks. "Npm install" is used to download and install all the necessary dependencies for a Node.js project. Version 12 is scheduled for release next month. Describing install-time lifecycle scripts as the "single largest code-execution surface in the npm ecosystem," GitHub said the "npm install" command runs scripts from every transitive dependency, as a result of which a single compromised package anywhere in the dependency tree can run arbitrary code on a developer machine or CI runner. By blocking such behaviours, the idea is to require explicit user approval before code execution is initiated automatically durin...

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of a "resurgence and expansion" of JDY , a covert network associated with China-nexus state-sponsored threat actors. "The JDY botnet comprises over 1,500 SOHO [small office and home office] and IoT devices and operates as a centrally controlled, high-performance scanner used to discover, fingerprint, and continuously map exposed services at scale," Lumen's Black Lotus Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. JDY was first flagged as a cluster within another botnet codenamed KV-botnet in mid-December 2023. Primarily used for broader scanning against internet targets, the stealthy network comprising compromised SOHO routers, firewalls, and IoT devices has been put to use by Chinese hacking groups like Volt Typhoon. Following KV-botnet's takedown by the U.S. government in early 2024, the botnet operators began making behavioral changes to the network, with the second KV cluster largely going offline. It...