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The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) has issued a bulletin about ongoing cyber attacks targeting unpatched Cisco IOS XE devices in the country with a previously undocumented implant known as BADCANDY . The activity, per the intelligence agency, involves the exploitation of CVE-2023-20198 (CVSS score: 10.0), a critical vulnerability that allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to create an account with elevated privileges and use it to seize control of susceptible systems. The security defect has come under active exploitation in the wild since last 2023, with China-linked threat actors like Salt Typhoon weaponizing it in recent months to breach telecommunications providers. ASD noted that variations of BADCANDY have been detected since October 2023, with a fresh set of attacks continuing to be recorded in 2024 and 2025. As many as 400 devices in Australia are estimated to have been compromised with the malware since July 2025, out of which 150 devices were infected in Oct...

OpenAI has announced the launch of an "agentic security researcher" that's powered by its GPT-5 large language model (LLM) and is programmed to emulate a human expert capable of scanning, understanding, and patching code. Called Aardvark , the artificial intelligence (AI) company said the autonomous agent is designed to help developers and security teams flag and fix security vulnerabilities at scale. It's currently available in private beta. "Aardvark continuously analyzes source code repositories to identify vulnerabilities, assess exploitability, prioritize severity, and propose targeted patches," OpenAI noted . It works by embedding itself into the software development pipeline, monitoring commits and changes to codebases, detecting security issues and how they might be exploited, and proposing fixes to address them using LLM-based reasoning and tool-use. Powering the agent is GPT‑5 , which OpenAI introduced in August 2025. The company describes it...

A suspected nation-state threat actor has been linked to the distribution of a new malware called Airstalk as part of a likely supply chain attack. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said it's tracking the cluster under the moniker CL-STA-1009 , where "CL" stands for cluster and "STA" refers to state-backed motivation. "Airstalk misuses the AirWatch API for mobile device management (MDM), which is now called Workspace ONE Unified Endpoint Management," security researchers Kristopher Russo and Chema Garcia said in an analysis. "It uses the API to establish a covert command-and-control (C2) channel, primarily through the AirWatch feature to manage custom device attributes and file uploads." The malware, which appears in PowerShell and .NET variants, makes use of a multi-threaded command-and-control (C2) communication protocol and is capable of capturing screenshots and harvesting cookies, browser history, bookmarks, and screenshots from web browse...

A China-affiliated threat actor known as UNC6384 has been linked to a fresh set of attacks exploiting an unpatched Windows shortcut vulnerability to target European diplomatic and government entities between September and October 2025. The activity targeted diplomatic organizations in Hungary, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands, as well as government agencies in Serbia, Arctic Wolf said in a technical report published Thursday. "The attack chain begins with spear-phishing emails containing an embedded URL that is the first of several stages that lead to the delivery of malicious LNK files themed around European Commission meetings, NATO-related workshops, and multilateral diplomatic coordination events," the cybersecurity company said. The files are designed to exploit ZDI-CAN-25373 to trigger a multi-stage attack chain that culminates in the deployment of the PlugX malware using DLL side-loading. PlugX is a remote access trojan that's also referred to as Destroy...

The exploitation of a recently disclosed critical security flaw in Motex Lanscope Endpoint Manager has been attributed to a cyber espionage group known as Tick . The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-61932 (CVSS score: 9.3), allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands with SYSTEM privileges on on-premise versions of the program. JPCERT/CC, in an alert issued this month, said that it has confirmed reports of active abuse of the security defect to drop a backdoor on compromised systems. Tick, also known as Bronze Butler, Daserf, REDBALDKNIGHT, Stalker Panda, Stalker Taurus, and Swirl Typhoon (formerly Tellurium), is a suspected Chinese cyber espionage actor known for its extensive targeting of East Asia, specifically Japan. It's assessed to be active since at least 2006. "We're aware of very targeted activity in Japan and believe the exploitation by Bronze Butler was limited to sectors aligned with their intelligence objectives," Rafe Pilling, directo...

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The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and National Security Agency (NSA), along with international partners from Australia and Canada, have released guidance to harden on-premise Microsoft Exchange Server instances from potential exploitation. "By restricting administrative access, implementing multi-factor authentication, enforcing strict transport security configurations, and adopting zero trust (ZT) security model principles, organizations can significantly bolster their defenses against potential cyber attacks," CISA said . The agencies said malicious activity aimed at Microsoft Exchange Server continues to take place, with unprotected and misconfigured instances facing the brunt of the attacks. Organizations are advised to decommission end-of-life on-premises or hybrid Exchange servers after transitioning to Microsoft 365. Some of the best practices outlined are listed below - Maintain security updates and patching cadence Migrate end-o...

Eclipse Foundation, which maintains the open-source Open VSX project, said it has taken steps to revoke a small number of tokens that were leaked within Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extensions published in the marketplace. The action comes following a report from cloud security company Wiz earlier this month, which found several extensions from both Microsoft's VS Code Marketplace and Open VSX to have inadvertently exposed their access tokens within public repositories, potentially allowing bad actors to seize control and distribute malware, effectively poisoning the extension supply chain. "Upon investigation, we confirmed that a small number of tokens had been leaked and could potentially be abused to publish or modify extensions," Mikaël Barbero, head of security at the Eclipse Foundation, said in a statement. "These exposures were caused by developer mistakes, not a compromise of the Open VSX infrastructure." Open VSX said it has also introduced a toke...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added a high-severity security flaw impacting Broadcom VMware Tools and VMware Aria Operations to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, following reports of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-41244 (CVSS score: 7.8), which could be exploited by an attacker to attain root level privileges on a susceptible system. "Broadcom VMware Aria Operations and VMware Tools contain a privilege defined with unsafe actions vulnerability," CISA said in an alert. "A malicious local actor with non-administrative privileges having access to a VM with VMware Tools installed and managed by Aria Operations with SDMP enabled may exploit this vulnerability to escalate privileges to root on the same VM." The vulnerability was addressed by Broadcom-owned VMware last month, but not before it was exploited as a zero-day by unknown threat actors since mid-Oct...

A design firm is editing a new campaign video on a MacBook Pro. The creative director opens a collaboration app that quietly requests microphone and camera permissions. MacOS is supposed to flag that, but in this case, the checks are loose. The app gets access anyway. On another Mac in the same office, file sharing is enabled through an old protocol called SMB version one. It's fast and convenient—but outdated and vulnerable. Attackers can exploit it in minutes if the endpoint is exposed to the internet. These are the kinds of configuration oversights that happen every day, even in organizations that take security seriously. They're not failures of hardware or antivirus software. They're configuration gaps that open doors to attackers, and they often go unnoticed because nobody is looking for them. That's where Defense Against Configurations (DAC) comes in. Misconfigurations are a gift to attackers: default settings left open, remote access that should be off (like outdated netwo...

Google on Thursday revealed that the scam defenses built into Android safeguard users around the world from more than 10 billion suspected malicious calls and messages every month. The tech giant also said it has blocked over 100 million suspicious numbers from using Rich Communication Services (RCS), an evolution of the SMS protocol, thereby preventing scams before they could even be sent. In recent years, the company has adopted various safeguards to combat phone call scams and automatically filter known spam using on-device artificial intelligence and move them automatically to the "spam & blocked" folder in the Google Messages app for Android. Earlier this month, Google also globally rolled out safer links in Google Messages, warning users when they attempt to click on any URLs in a message flagged as spam and step them visiting the potentially harmful website, unless the message is marked as "not spam." Google said its analysis of user-submitted rep...

The open-source command-and-control (C2) framework known as AdaptixC2 is being used by a growing number of threat actors, some of whom are related to Russian ransomware gangs. AdaptixC2 is an emerging extensible post-exploitation and adversarial emulation framework designed for penetration testing. While the server component is written in Golang, the GUI Client is written in C++ QT for cross-platform compatibility. It comes with a wide range of features, including fully encrypted communications, command execution, credential and screenshot managers, and a remote terminal, among others. An early iteration was publicly released by a GitHub user named " RalfHacker " ( @HackerRalf on X) in August 2024, who describes themselves as a penetration tester, red team operator, and "MalDev" (short for malware developer). In recent months, AdaptixC2 has been adopted by various hacking groups, including threat actors tied to the Fog and Akira ransomware operations, as ...