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Cybersecurity researchers are alerting to a new malware campaign that employs the ClickFix social engineering tactic to trick users into downloading an information stealer malware known as Atomic macOS Stealer ( AMOS ) on Apple macOS systems. The campaign, according to CloudSEK, has been found to leverage typosquat domains mimicking U.S.-based telecom provider Spectrum. "macOS users are served a malicious shell script designed to steal system passwords and download an AMOS variant for further exploitation," security researcher Koushik Pal said in a report published this week. "The script uses native macOS commands to harvest credentials, bypass security mechanisms, and execute malicious binaries." It's believed that the activity is the work of Russian-speaking cybercriminals owing to the presence of Russian language comments in the malware's source code. The starting point of the attack is a web page that impersonates Spectrum ("panel-spectrum[....

When generative AI tools became widely available in late 2022, it wasn't just technologists who paid attention. Employees across all industries immediately recognized the potential of generative AI to boost productivity, streamline communication and accelerate work. Like so many waves of consumer-first IT innovation before it—file sharing, cloud storage and collaboration platforms—AI landed in the enterprise not through official channels, but through the hands of employees eager to work smarter. Faced with the risk of sensitive data being fed into public AI interfaces, many organizations responded with urgency and force: They blocked access. While understandable as an initial defensive measure, blocking public AI apps is not a long-term strategy—it's a stopgap. And in most cases, it's not even effective. Shadow AI: The Unseen Risk The Zscaler ThreatLabz team has been tracking AI and machine learning (ML) traffic across enterprises, and the numbers tell a compelling story. In 2024 ...

India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has revealed that it has arrested six individuals and dismantled two illegal call centers that were found to be engaging in a sophisticated transnational tech support scam targeting Japanese citizens. The law enforcement agency said it conducted coordinated searches at 19 locations across Delhi, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh on May 28, 2025, as part of an initiative called Operation Chakra V, which aims to combat cyber-enabled financial crimes. The cybercrime syndicates, per the CBI, defrauded foreign nationals, mainly Japanese citizens, by masquerading as technical support personnel from various multinational corporations, including Microsoft.  "The syndicate operated call centers designed to appear as legitimate customer service centers, through which victims were deceived into believing that their electronic devices were compromised," the agency said . "Under this pretext, victims were coerced into transferring funds ...

For many organizations, identity security appears to be under control. On paper, everything checks out. But new research from Cerby, based on insights from over 500 IT and security leaders, reveals a different reality: too much still depends on people—not systems—to function. In fact, fewer than 4% of security teams have fully automated their core identity workflows . Core workflows, like enrolling in Multi Factor Authentication (MFA), keeping credentials secure and up to date, and revoking access the moment someone leaves—are often manual, inconsistent, and vulnerable to error. And when security execution relies on memory or follow-up, gaps appear fast. Human error remains one of the biggest threats to enterprise security. Verizon's 2025 Data Breach report found that the human element was involved in 60% of breaches. The same manual missteps that led to breaches a decade ago still expose identity systems today. Cerby's 2025 Identity Automation Gap research report shows just how wi...

Cybersecurity involves both playing the good guy and the bad guy. Diving deep into advanced technologies and yet also going rogue in the Dark Web. Defining technical policies and also profiling attacker behavior. Security teams cannot be focused on just ticking boxes, they need to inhabit the attacker's mindset. This is where AEV comes in. AEV (Adversarial Exposure Validation) is an advanced offense technology that mimics how adversaries will attack your system, while providing remediation strategies. It lets you discover and address how your environment can be exploited and what the impact of the exploitation could be, in a dynamic and ongoing way. In this article, we'll share everything you need to know about AEV, and how your team can leverage it to build continuous resilience against attacks. What is AEV? According to the Gartner® Market Guide for Adversarial Exposure Validation (March 2025), AEV is defined as "technologies that deliver consistent, continuous, and automated ...

A critical infrastructure entity within Ukraine was targeted by a previously unseen data wiper malware named PathWiper, according to new findings from Cisco Talos. "The attack was instrumented via a legitimate endpoint administration framework, indicating that the attackers likely had access to the administrative console, that was then used to issue malicious commands and deploy PathWiper across connected endpoints," researchers Jacob Finn, Dmytro Korzhevin, and Asheer Malhotra said in an analysis published Thursday. The attack is assessed to be the work of a Russia-nexus advanced persistent threat (APT) actor based on the tradecraft observed and the overlapping capabilities with destructive malware used in attacks against Ukraine. Talos said the commands issued by the administrative tool's console were received by its client running on the victim endpoints and then executed as a batch (BAT) file. The BAT file, in turn, consisted of a command to run a malicious Visu...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged several popular Google Chrome extensions that have been found to transmit data in HTTP and hard-code secrets in their code, exposing users to privacy and security risks. "Several widely used extensions [...] unintentionally transmit sensitive data over simple HTTP," Yuanjing Guo, a security researcher in the Symantec's Security Technology and Response team, said . "By doing so, they expose browsing domains, machine IDs, operating system details, usage analytics, and even uninstall information, in plaintext." The fact that the network traffic is unencrypted also means that they are susceptible to adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attacks, allowing malicious actors on the same network such as a public Wi-Fi to intercept and, even worse, modify this data, which could lead to far more serious consequences. The list of identified extensions are below - SEMRush Rank (extension ID: idbhoeaiokcojcgappfigpifhpkjgmab) and P...

The threat actor known as Bitter has been assessed to be a state-backed hacking group that's tasked with gathering intelligence that aligns with the interests of the Indian government. That's according to new findings jointly published by Proofpoint and Threatray in an exhaustive two-part analysis. "Their diverse toolset shows consistent coding patterns across malware families, particularly in system information gathering and string obfuscation," researchers Abdallah Elshinbary, Jonas Wagner, Nick Attfield, and Konstantin Klinger said. Bitter, also known as APT-C-08, APT-Q-37, Hazy Tiger, Orange Yali, T-APT-17, and TA397, has a history of focusing primarily on South Asian entities , with select intrusions also targeting China, Saudi Arabia, and South America. In December 2024, evidence emerged of the threat actor's targeting of Turkey using malware families such as WmRAT and MiyaRAT, indicating a gradual geographical expansion. Stating that Bitter fr...

Security teams face growing demands with more tools, more data, and higher expectations than ever. Boards approve large security budgets, yet still ask the same question: what is the business getting in return? CISOs respond with reports on controls and vulnerability counts – but executives want to understand risk in terms of financial exposure, operational impact, and avoiding loss. The disconnect has become difficult to ignore. The average cost of a breach has reached $4.88 million, according to recent IBM data . That figure reflects not just incident response but also downtime, lost productivity, customer attrition, and the extended effort required to restore operations and trust. The fallout is rarely confined to security. Security leaders need a model that brings those consequences into view before they surface. A Business Value Assessment (BVA) offers that model. It links exposures to cost, prioritization to return, and prevention to tangible value. This article will explain ...

An Iran-aligned hacking group has been attributed to a new set of cyber attacks targeting Kurdish and Iraqi government officials in early 2024. The activity is tied to a threat group ESET tracks as BladedFeline , which is assessed with medium confidence to be a sub-cluster within OilRig , a known Iranian nation-state cyber actor. It's said to be active since September 2017, when it targeted officials associated with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). "This group develops malware for maintaining and expanding access within organizations in Iraq and the KRG," the Slovak cybersecurity company said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "BladedFeline has worked consistently to maintain illicit access to Kurdish diplomatic officials, while simultaneously exploiting a regional telecommunications provider in Uzbekistan, and developing and maintaining access to officials in the government of Iraq." BladedFeline was first documented by ESET in Ma...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Wednesday announced the seizure of cryptocurrency funds and about 145 clearnet and dark web domains associated with an illicit carding marketplace called BidenCash. "The operators of the BidenCash marketplace use the platform to simplify the process of buying and selling stolen credit cards and associated personal information," the DoJ said . "BidenCash administrators charged a fee for every transaction conducted on the website." BidenCash launched in March 2022 to fill the void left by the shutdown of Joker's Stash a year earlier and several other carding forums like UniCC . Since the time it went operational, the illegal bazaar ("bidencash[.]asia," "bidencash[.]bd," and "bidencash[.]ws") is estimated to have supported more than 117,000 customers, facilitated the trafficking of over 15 million payment card numbers and personally identifiable information, and generated no less than $17 mi...

Cisco has released security patches to address a critical security flaw impacting the Identity Services Engine (ISE) that, if successfully exploited, could allow unauthenticated actors to carry out malicious actions on susceptible systems. The security defect, tracked as CVE-2025-20286 , carries a CVSS score of 9.9 out of 10.0. It has been described as a static credential vulnerability. "A vulnerability in Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) cloud deployments of Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to access sensitive data, execute limited administrative operations, modify system configurations, or disrupt services within the impacted systems," the company said in an advisory. The networking equipment maker, which credited Kentaro Kawane of GMO Cybersecurity for reporting the flaw, noted it's aware of the existence of a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit. There is no evidence th...

Google has disclosed details of a financially motivated threat cluster that it said "specializes" in voice phishing (aka vishing ) campaigns designed to breach organizations' Salesforce instances for large-scale data theft and subsequent extortion. The tech giant's threat intelligence team is tracking the activity under the moniker UNC6040 , which it said exhibits characteristics that align with threat groups with ties to an online cybercrime collective known as The Com . "Over the past several months, UNC6040 has demonstrated repeated success in breaching networks by having its operators impersonate IT support personnel in convincing telephone-based social engineering engagements," the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. This approach, Google's Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) added, has had the benefit of tricking English-speaking employees into performing actions that give the threat actors access or lead to the sharing of valua...