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A new campaign has been observed impersonating Ukrainian government agencies in phishing attacks to deliver CountLoader , which is then used to drop Amatera Stealer and PureMiner . "The phishing emails contain malicious Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) files designed to trick recipients into opening harmful attachments," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Yurren Wan said in a report shared with The Hacker News. In the attack chains documented by the cybersecurity company, the SVG files are used to initiate the download of a password-protected ZIP archive, which contains a Compiled HTML Help (CHM) file. The CHM file, when launched, activates a chain of events that culminate in the deployment of CountLoader. The email messages claim to be a notice from the National Police of Ukraine. CountLoader, which was the subject of a recent analysis by Silent Push, has been found to drop various payloads like Cobalt Strike, AdaptixC2, and PureHVNC RAT. In this attack chain, however,...

The Russian advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as COLDRIVER has been attributed to a fresh round of ClickFix-style attacks designed to deliver two new "lightweight" malware families tracked as BAITSWITCH and SIMPLEFIX. Zscaler ThreatLabz, which detected the new multi-stage ClickFix campaign earlier this month, described BAITSWITCH as a downloader that ultimately drops SIMPLEFIX, a PowerShell backdoor. COLDRIVER , also tracked as Callisto, Star Blizzard, and UNC4057, is the moniker assigned to a Russia-linked threat actor that's known to target a wide range of sectors since 2019. While early campaign waves were observed using spear-phishing lures to direct targets to credential harvesting pages, the group has been fleshing out its arsenal with custom tools like SPICA and LOSTKEYS , which underscores its technical sophistication. The adversary's use of ClickFix tactics was previously documented by the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) back in May 2...

Car makers don't trust blueprints. They smash prototypes into walls. Again and again. In controlled conditions. Because design specs don't prove survival. Crash tests do. They separate theory from reality. Cybersecurity is no different. Dashboards overflow with "critical" exposure alerts. Compliance reports tick every box.  But none of that proves what matters most to a CISO: The ransomware crew targeting your sector can't move laterally once inside. That a newly published exploit of a CVE won't bypass your defenses tomorrow morning. That sensitive data can't be siphoned through a stealthy exfiltration channel, exposing the business to fines, lawsuits, and reputational damage. That's why Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) matters.  BAS is the crash test for your security stack. It safely simulates real adversarial behaviors to prove which attacks your defenses can stop, and which would break through. It exposes those gaps before attackers exploit them or regulators d...

Cybersecurity company watchTowr Labs has disclosed that it has "credible evidence" of active exploitation of the recently disclosed security flaw in Fortra GoAnywhere Managed File Transfer (MFT) software as early as September 10, 2025, a whole week before it was publicly disclosed. "This is not 'just' a CVSS 10.0 flaw in a solution long favored by APT groups and ransomware operators – it is a vulnerability that has been actively exploited in the wild since at least September 10, 2025," Benjamin Harris, CEO and Founder of watchTowr, told The Hacker News. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-10035 , which has been described as a deserialization vulnerability in the License Servlet that could result in command injection without authentication. Fortra GoAnywhere version 7.8.4, or the Sustain Release 7.6.3, was released by Fortra last week to remediate the problem. According to an analysis released by watchTowr earlier this week, the vulnerability has ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an updated version of a known Apple macOS malware called XCSSET that has been observed in limited attacks. "This new variant of XCSSET brings key changes related to browser targeting, clipboard hijacking, and persistence mechanisms," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a Thursday report. "It employs sophisticated encryption and obfuscation techniques, uses run-only compiled AppleScripts for stealthy execution, and expands its data exfiltration capabilities to include Firefox browser data. It also adds another persistence mechanism through LaunchDaemon entries." XCSSET is the name assigned to a sophisticated modular malware that's designed to infect Xcode projects used by software developers and unleash its malicious capabilities when it's being built. Exactly how the malware is distributed remains unclear, but it's suspected that the propagation relies on the Xcode project files being shared amo...

The U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has revealed that threat actors have exploited the recently disclosed security flaws impacting Cisco firewalls as part of zero-day attacks to deliver previously undocumented malware families like RayInitiator and LINE VIPER . "The RayInitiator and LINE VIPER malware represent a significant evolution on that used in the previous campaign, both in sophistication and its ability to evade detection," the agency said . Cisco on Thursday revealed that it began investigating attacks on multiple government agencies linked to the state-sponsored campaign in May 2025 that targeted Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) 5500-X Series devices to implant malware, execute commands, and potentially exfiltrate data from the compromised devices. An in-depth analysis of firmware extracted from the infected devices running Cisco Secure Firewall ASA Software with VPN web services enabled ultimately led to the discovery of a memory corruption bug in...

Cisco is urging customers to patch two security flaws impacting the VPN web server of Cisco Secure Firewall Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) Software, which it said have been exploited in the wild. The zero-day vulnerabilities in question are listed below - CVE-2025-20333 (CVSS score: 9.9) - An improper validation of user-supplied input in HTTP(S) requests vulnerability that could allow an authenticated, remote attacker with valid VPN user credentials to execute arbitrary code as root on an affected device by sending crafted HTTP requests CVE-2025-20362 (CVSS score: 6.5) - An improper validation of user-supplied input in HTTP(S) requests vulnerability that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to access restricted URL endpoints without authentication by sending crafted HTTP requests Cisco said it's aware of "attempted exploitation" of both vulnerabilities, but did not reveal who may be behind it, ...

Welcome to this week's Threatsday Bulletin —your Thursday check-in on the latest twists and turns in cybersecurity and hacking. The digital threat landscape never stands still. One week it's a critical zero-day, the next it's a wave of phishing lures or a state-backed disinformation push. Each headline is a reminder that the rules keep changing and that defenders—whether you're protecting a global enterprise or your own personal data—need to keep moving just as fast. In this edition we unpack fresh exploits, high-profile arrests, and the newest tactics cybercriminals are testing right now. Grab a coffee, take five minutes, and get the key insights that help you stay a step ahead of the next breach. Firmware fights back SonicWall Releases SMA 100 Firmware Update to Remove Rootkit SonicWall has released a firmware update that it said will help customers remove rootkit malware deployed in attacks targeting SMA 100 series devices. "S...

The threat actor known as Vane Viper has been outed as a purveyor of malicious ad technology (adtech), while relying on a tangled web of shell companies and opaque ownership structures to deliberately evade responsibility. "Vane Viper has provided core infrastructure in widespread malvertising, ad fraud, and cyberthreat proliferation for at least a decade," Infoblox said in a technical report published last week in collaboration with Guardio and Confiant. "Vane Viper not only brokers traffic for malware droppers and phishers, but appears to run their own campaigns, consistent with previously documented ad-fraud techniques." Vane Viper, also called Omnatuor , was previously documented by the DNS threat intelligence firm in August 2022, describing it as a malvertising network akin to VexTrio Viper that takes advantage of vulnerable WordPress sites to build a massive network of compromised domains and use them to spread riskware, spyware, and adware. One of t...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a critical flaw impacting Salesforce Agentforce , a platform for building artificial intelligence (AI) agents, that could allow attackers to potentially exfiltrate sensitive data from its customer relationship management (CRM) tool by means of an indirect prompt injection. The vulnerability has been codenamed ForcedLeak (CVSS score: 9.4) by Noma Security, which discovered and reported the problem on July 28, 2025. It impacts any organization using Salesforce Agentforce with the Web-to-Lead functionality enabled. "This vulnerability demonstrates how AI agents present a fundamentally different and expanded attack surface compared to traditional prompt-response systems," Sasi Levi, security research lead at Noma, said in a report shared with The Hacker News. One of the most severe threats facing generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) systems today is indirect prompt injection , which occurs when malicious instructions are ins...

The North Korea-linked threat actors associated with the Contagious Interview campaign have been attributed to a previously undocumented backdoor called AkdoorTea, along with tools like TsunamiKit and Tropidoor. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET, which is tracking the activity under the name DeceptiveDevelopment, said the campaign targets software developers across all operating systems, Windows, Linux, and macOS, particularly those involved in cryptocurrency and Web3 projects. It's also referred to as DEV#POPPER, Famous Chollima, Gwisin Gang, Tenacious Pungsan, UNC5342, and Void Dokkaebi. "DeceptiveDevelopment's toolset is mostly multi-platform and consists of initial obfuscated malicious scripts in Python and JavaScript, basic backdoors in Python and Go, and a dark web project in .NET," ESET researchers Peter Kálnai and Matěj Havránek said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The campaign essentially involves the impersonated recruiters offering what appear to...

Despite a coordinated investment of time, effort, planning, and resources, even the most up-to-date cybersecurity systems continue to fail. Every day. Why?  It's not because security teams can't see enough. Quite the contrary. Every security tool spits out thousands of findings. Patch this. Block that. Investigate this. It's a tsunami of red dots that not even the most crackerjack team on earth could ever clear.  And here's the other uncomfortable truth: Most of it doesn't matte r. Fixing everything is impossible. Trying to is a fool's errand. Smart teams aren't wasting precious time running down meaningless alerts. They understand that the hidden key to protecting their organization is knowing which exposures are actually putting the business at risk. That's why Gartner introduced the concept of Continuous Threat Exposure Management and put prioritization and validation at the heart of it. It's not about more dashboards or prettier charts. It's abou...