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The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has disclosed details of a new phishing campaign in which the cybersecurity agency itself was impersonated to distribute a remote administration tool known as AGEWHEEZE. As part of the attacks, the threat actors, tracked as UAC-0255 , sent emails on March 26 and 27, 2026, posing as CERT-UA to distribute a password-protected ZIP archive hosted on Files.fm and urged recipients to install the "specialized software." The targets of the campaign included state organizations, medical centers, security companies, educational institutions, financial institutions, and software development companies. Some of the emails were sent from the email address "incidents@cert-ua[.]tech." The ZIP file ("CERT_UA_protection_tool.zip") is designed to download malware packaged as security software from the agency. The malware, per CERT-UA, is a remote access trojan codenamed AGEWHEEZE.  A Go-based malware, AGEWHEEZE...

Microsoft is calling attention to a new campaign that has leveraged WhatsApp messages to distribute malicious Visual Basic Script (VBS) files. The activity, beginning in late February 2026, leverages these scripts to initiate a multi-stage infection chain for establishing persistence and enabling remote access. It's currently not known what lures the threat actors use to trick users into executing the scripts. "The campaign relies on a combination of social engineering and living-off-the-land techniques," the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team said . "It uses renamed Windows utilities to blend into normal system activity, retrieves payloads from trusted cloud services such as AWS, Tencent Cloud, and Backblaze B2, and installs malicious Microsoft Installer (MSI) packages to maintain control of the system." The use of legitimate tools and trusted platforms is a deadly combination, as it allows threat actors to blend in normal network activity and incre...

There is a character that keeps appearing in enterprise security departments, and most CISOs know exactly who that is. It doesn’t build. It doesn’t enable. Its entire function is to say "No." No to ChatGPT. No to DeepSeek. No to the file-sharing tool the product team swears by. For years, this looked like security. But in 2026, "Doctor No" is no longer just a management headache – it is a systemic security liability. Because when you block the work, users don’t stop. They reroute. The Tax-Evaders of Productivity When security feels like a tax on efficiency, employees find a way to "evade" it. The industry has long relied on Endpoint Agents to enforce control. But as any CISO knows, these agents come with a heavy "tax." They hook into the OS kernel, they’re invasive, they notoriously break during macOS updates, and they make high-performance machines run hot. The result? Users find workarounds. Files move into personal Gmail. Prompts are...

A multi-pronged phishing campaign is targeting Spanish-speaking users in organizations across Latin America and Europe to deliver Windows banking trojans like Casbaneiro (aka Metamorfo) via another malware called Horabot . The activity has been attributed to a Brazilian cybercrime threat actor tracked as Augmented Marauder and Water Saci . The e-crime group was first documented by Trend Micro in October 2025. "This threat group employs a wider-ranging attack model focused on a bespoke delivery and propagation mechanism that includes WhatsApp, ClickFix techniques, and email-centric phishing," BlueVoyant security researchers Thomas Elkins and Joshua Green said in a technical breakdown published Tuesday. "It is now evident that while these Brazil-based operators heavily leverage script-based WhatsApp automation to compromise retail and consumer users in Latin America, they concurrently maintain and deploy an advanced, email-hijacking engine to penetrate enterprise ...

Google on Thursday released security updates for its Chrome web browser to address 21 vulnerabilities, including a zero-day flaw that it said has been exploited in the wild. The high-severity vulnerability, CVE-2026-5281 (CVSS score: N/A), concerns a use-after-free bug in Dawn , an open-source and cross-platform implementation of the WebGPU standard. "Use-after-free in Dawn in Google Chrome prior to 146.0.7680.178 allowed a remote attacker who had compromised the renderer process to execute arbitrary code via a crafted HTML page," according to a description of the flaw in the NIST's National Vulnerability Database (NVD). As is customary for these alerts, Google did not provide any further details on how the shortcoming is being exploited and who may be behind the effort. This is typically done so as to ensure that a majority of users are updated with a fix and prevent other actors from joining the exploitation bandwagon. "Google is aware that an exploit for C...

For years, cybersecurity has followed a familiar model: block malware, stop the attack. Now, attackers are moving on to what’s next. Threat actors now use malware less frequently in favor of what’s already inside your environment, including abusing trusted tools, native binaries, and legitimate admin utilities to move laterally, escalate privileges, and persist without raising alarms. Most organizations fail to see this risk until after the damage is done. To help visualize this challenge, consider a complimentary Internal Attack Surface Assessment — a guided, low-friction way to see where trusted tools may be working against you. Now, let’s look at how this risk operates within your environment, and 3 reasons why attackers prefer using your own tools against you. 1. Most Attacks No Longer Look Like Attacks Threat actors prefer attacks that don’t look like attacks. Recent analysis of over 700,000 high-severity incidents shows a clear shift : 84% of attacks now abuse legitimate ...

Google has formally attributed the supply chain compromise of the popular Axios npm package to a financially motivated North Korean threat activity cluster tracked as UNC1069 . "We have attributed the attack to a suspected North Korean threat actor we track as UNC1069," John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), told The Hacker News in a statement. "North Korean hackers have deep experience with supply chain attacks, which they've historically used to steal cryptocurrency. The full breadth of this incident is still unclear, but given the popularity of the compromised package, we expect it will have far reaching impacts." The development comes after threat actors seized control of the package maintainer's npm account to push two trojanized versions 1.14.1 and 0.30.4 that introduced a malicious dependency named "plain-crypto-js" that's used to deliver a cross-platform backdoor capable of infecting Windows, ma...

Anthropic on Tuesday confirmed that internal code for its popular artificial intelligence (AI) coding assistant, Claude Code, had been inadvertently released due to a human error. "No sensitive customer data or credentials were involved or exposed," an Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement shared with CNBC News. "This was a release packaging issue caused by human error, not a security breach. We’re rolling out measures to prevent this from happening again." The discovery came after the AI upstart released version 2.1.88 of the Claude Code npm package, with users spotting that it contained a source map file that could be used to access Claude Code's source code – comprising nearly 2,000 TypeScript files and more than 512,000 lines of code. The version is no longer available for download from npm. Security researcher Chaofan Shou was the first to publicly flag it on X, stating "Claude code source code has been leaked via a map file in their npm re...

Google on Monday said it's officially rolling out Android developer verification to all developers to combat the problem of bad actors distributing harmful apps while "hiding behind anonymity." The development comes ahead of a planned verification mandate that goes into effect in Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand this September, before it expands globally next year. As part of this effort, Google is requiring app developers who distribute apps outside of Google Play to create an account in the Android Developer Console to confirm their identity. Those who distribute apps through Android's official app marketplace and have verified their identity may be "already set," the tech giant said. "For the vast majority of users, the experience of installing apps will stay exactly the same," Matthew Forsythe, director of product management for Android App Safety, said . "It's only when a user tries to install an unregistered app that...

A high-severity security flaw in the TrueConf client video conferencing software has been exploited in the wild as a zero-day as part of a campaign targeting government entities in Southeast Asia dubbed TrueChaos . The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-3502 (CVSS score: 7.8), a lack of integrity check when fetching application update code, allowing an attacker to distribute a tampered update, resulting in the execution of arbitrary code. It has been patched in the TrueConf Windows client starting with version 8.5.3 , released earlier this month. "The flaw stems from the abuse of TrueConf's updater validation mechanism, allowing an attacker who controls the on-premises TrueConf server to distribute and execute arbitrary files across all connected endpoints," Check Point said in a report published today. In other words, an attacker who manages to gain control of the on-premises TrueConf server can substitute the update package with a poisoned version, which then...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a security "blind spot" in Google Cloud's Vertex AI platform that could allow artificial intelligence (AI) agents to be weaponized by an attacker to gain unauthorized access to sensitive data and compromise an organization's cloud environment. According to Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, the issue relates to how the Vertex AI permission model can be misused by taking advantage of the service agent 's excessive permission scoping by default. "A misconfigured or compromised agent can become a 'double agent' that appears to serve its intended purpose, while secretly exfiltrating sensitive data, compromising infrastructure, and creating backdoors into an organization's most critical systems," Unit 42 researcher Ofir Shaty said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Specifically, the cybersecurity company found that the Per-Project, Per-Product Service Agent ( P4SA ) associated with a deployed AI agent ...

The cybersecurity landscape is accelerating at an unprecedented rate. What is emerging is not simply a rise in the number of vulnerabilities or tools, but a dramatic increase in speed. Speed of attack, speed of exploitation, and speed of change across modern environments. This is the defining challenge of the new era of digital warfare: the weaponization of Artificial Intelligence. Threat actors, from nation-states to sophisticated criminal enterprises, are no longer just attacking. They are automating the entire kill chain. In this AI arms race, traditional defensive strategies are no longer sufficient. Periodic point-in-time assessments, manual triage, and human-speed response were already under pressure in fast-moving environments. Against AI-enabled adversaries, they are increasingly inadequate. Solutions like PlexTrac are built to help organizations move beyond fragmented findings, disconnected tools, and slow manual workflows by unifying exposure management, remediation, and...