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A China-aligned threat actor has set its sights on European government and diplomatic organizations since mid-2025, following a two-year period of minimal targeting in the region. The campaign has been attributed to TA416 , a cluster of activity that overlaps with DarkPeony, RedDelta, Red Lich, SmugX, UNC6384, and Vertigo Panda. "This TA416 activity included multiple waves of web bug and malware delivery campaigns against diplomatic missions to the European Union and NATO across a range of European countries," Proofpoint researchers Mark Kelly and Georgi Mladenov said . "Throughout this period, TA416 regularly altered its infection chain, including abusing Cloudflare Turnstile challenge pages, abusing OAuth redirects, and using C# project files, as well as frequently updating its custom PlugX payload." TA416 has also been observed orchestrating multiple campaigns aimed at diplomatic and government entities in the Middle East following the outbreak...

Threat actors are increasingly using HTTP cookies as a control channel for PHP-based web shells on Linux servers and to achieve remote code execution, according to findings from the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team. "Instead of exposing command execution through URL parameters or request bodies, these web shells rely on threat actor-supplied cookie values to gate execution, pass instructions, and activate malicious functionality," the tech giant said . The approach offers added stealth as it allows malicious code to stay dormant during normal application execution and activate the web shell logic only when specific cookie values are present. This behavior, Microsoft noted, extends to web requests, scheduled tasks, and trusted background workers. The malicious activity takes advantage of the fact that cookie values are available at runtime through the $_COOKIE superglobal variable, allowing attacker-supplied inputs to be consumed with...

The maintainer of the Axios npm package has confirmed that the supply chain compromise was the result of a highly-targeted social engineering campaign orchestrated by North Korean threat actors tracked as UNC1069 . Maintainer Jason Saayman said the attackers tailored their social engineering efforts "specifically to me" by first approaching him under the guise of the founder of a legitimate, well-known company. "They had cloned the company's founders' likeness as well as the company itself," Saayman said in a post-mortem of the incident. "They then invited me to a real Slack workspace. This workspace was branded to the company's CI and named in a plausible manner. The Slack [workspace] was thought out very well; they had channels where they were sharing LinkedIn posts." Subsequently, the threat actors are said to have scheduled a meeting with him on Microsoft Teams. Upon joining the fake call, he was presented with a fake error mes...

The next major breach hitting your clients probably won't come from inside their walls. It'll come through a vendor they trust, a SaaS tool their finance team signed up for, or a subcontractor nobody in IT knows about. That's the new attack surface, and most organizations are underprepared for it. Cynomi's new guide, Securing the Modern Perimeter: The Rise of Third-Party Risk Management , makes the case that TPRM is no longer a compliance formality. It's a frontline security challenge and a defining growth opportunity for MSPs and MSSPs who get ahead of it. The Modern Perimeter Has Expanded For decades, cybersecurity strategy revolved around a defined perimeter. Firewalls, endpoint controls, and identity management systems were deployed to protect assets within a known boundary. That boundary has dissolved. Today, client data lives in third-party SaaS applications, flows through vendor APIs, and is processed by subcontractors ...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new version of the SparkCat malware on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, more than a year after the trojan was discovered targeting both the mobile operating systems. The malware has been found to conceal itself within seemingly benign apps, such as enterprise messengers and food delivery services, while silently scanning victims' photo galleries for cryptocurrency wallet recovery phrases. Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky said it found two infected apps on the App Store and one on the Google Play Store that primarily target cryptocurrency users in Asia. "The iOS variant, however, takes a different approach as it scans for cryptocurrency wallet mnemonic phrases, which are in English," the company said. "This makes the iOS variant potentially broader in reach, as it can affect users regardless of their region." The improved version of SparkCat for...

Solana-based decentralized exchange Drift has confirmed that attackers drained about $285 million from the platform during a security incident that took place on April 1, 2026. "Earlier today, a malicious actor gained unauthorized access to Drift Protocol through a novel attack involving durable nonces, resulting in a rapid takeover of Drift’s Security Council administrative powers," the company said in a series of posts on X. "This was a highly sophisticated operation that appears to have involved multi-week preparation and staged execution, including the use of durable nonce accounts to pre-sign transactions that delayed execution." Drift noted that the attack did not exploit a vulnerability in its programs or smart contracts, and that there is no evidence of compromised seed phrases. Rather, the breach is said to have "involved unauthorized or misrepresented transaction approvals obtained prior to execution, likely facilitated through durable n...

A large-scale credential harvesting operation has been observed exploiting the React2Shell vulnerability as an initial infection vector to steal database credentials, SSH private keys, Amazon Web Services (AWS) secrets, shell command history, Stripe API keys, and GitHub tokens at scale. Cisco Talos has attributed the operation to a threat cluster it tracks as UAT-10608 . At least 766 hosts spanning multiple geographic regions and cloud providers have been compromised as part of the activity. "Post-compromise, UAT-10608 leverages automated scripts for extracting and exfiltrating credentials from a variety of applications, that are then posted to its command-and-control (C2)," security researchers  Asheer Malhotra and Brandon White said in a report shared with The Hacker News ahead of publication. "The C2 hosts a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) titled 'NEXUS Listener' that can be used to view s...

Cisco has released updates to address a critical security flaw in the Integrated Management Controller (IMC) that, if successfully exploited, could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication and gain access to the system with elevated privileges. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20093, carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10.0. "This vulnerability is due to incorrect handling of password change requests," Cisco said in an advisory released Wednesday. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP request to an affected device." "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to bypass authentication, alter the passwords of any user on the system, including an Admin user, and gain access to the system as that user." Security researcher "jyh" has been credited with discovering and reporting the vulnerability. The shortcoming affects the following products regardless of the dev...

The latest ThreatsDay Bulletin is basically a cheat sheet for everything breaking on the internet right now. No corporate fluff or boring lectures here, just a quick and honest look at the messy reality of keeping systems safe this week. Things are moving fast. The list includes researchers chaining small bugs together to create massive backdoors, old software flaws coming back to haunt us, and some very clever new tricks that let attackers bypass security logs entirely without leaving a trace. We are also seeing sketchier traffic on the underground and the usual supply chain mess, where one bad piece of code threatens thousands of apps. It is definitely worth a quick scan before you log off for the day, if only to make sure none of this is sitting in your own network. Let's get into it. Pre-auth RCE chain exposed Security Flaws in Progress ShareFile watchTower Labs has disclosed two securi...

A financially motivated operation codenamed REF1695  has been observed leveraging fake installers to deploy remote access trojans (RATs) and cryptocurrency miners since November 2023. "Beyond cryptomining, the threat actor monetizes infections through CPA (Cost Per Action) fraud, directing victims to content locker pages under the guise of software registration," Elastic Security Labs researchers Jia Yu Chan, Cyril François, and Remco Sprooten said in an analysis published this week. Recent iterations of the campaign have also been found to deliver a previously undocumented .NET implant codenamed CNB Bot. These attacks leverage an ISO file as the infection vector to deliver a .NET Reactor-protected loader and a text file with explicit instructions to the user to bypass Microsoft Defender SmartScreen protections against running unrecognized applications by clicking on "More info" and "Run anyway...

In December 2025 , we shared the first-ever The State of Trusted Open Source report, featuring insights from our product data and customer base on open source consumption across our catalog of container image projects, versions, images, language libraries, and builds. These insights shed light on what teams pull, deploy, and maintain day to day, alongside the vulnerabilities and remediation realities these projects face. Fast forward a few months, and software development is accelerating at a pace that most didn’t see coming. AI is increasingly embedded across the development lifecycle, from code generation to infrastructure automation, as models become more advanced and better at meeting the demands of modern work. This shift is expanding what teams can build and how quickly they can ship. It is also reshaping the security landscape. Before diving into the numbers, it’s important to explain how we perform this analysis. We examined over 2,20...

Meta-owned messaging platform WhatsApp said it alerted about 200 users who were tricked into installing a bogus version of its iOS app that was infected with spyware. According to reports from Italian newspaper La Repubblica and news agency ANSA , the vast majority of the targets are located in Italy. It's assessed that the threat actors behind the activity used social engineering tactics to get users to install malicious software that mimicked WhatsApp. All the affected users have been logged out and have been recommended to uninstall the malware-laced apps and download the official WhatsApp app. WhatsApp did not reveal who was targeted in these attacks. The tech giant said it's also taking action against Asigint, an Italian subsidiary of spyware company SIO, for allegedly creating a counterfeit version of WhatsApp.  On its website, the company advertises solutions to law enforcement agencies, government organizations, and police and intelligenc...