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Hackers Use LinkedIn Messages to Spread RAT Malware Through DLL Sideloading

Hackers Use LinkedIn Messages to Spread RAT Malware Through DLL Sideloading

Jan 20, 2026 Malware / Threat Intelligence
Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new phishing campaign that exploits social media private messages to propagate malicious payloads, likely with the intent to deploy a remote access trojan (RAT). The activity delivers "weaponized files via Dynamic Link Library (DLL) sideloading, combined with a legitimate, open-source Python pen-testing script," ReliaQuest said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The attack involves approaching high-value individuals through messages sent on LinkedIn, establishing trust, and deceiving them into downloading a malicious WinRAR self-extracting archive (SFX). Once launched, the archive extracts four different components - A legitimate open-source PDF reader application A malicious DLL that's sideloaded by the PDF reader A portable executable (PE) of the Python interpreter A RAR file that likely serves as a decoy The infection chain gets activated when the PDF reader application is run, causing the rogue DLL to be sid...
The Hidden Risk of Orphan Accounts

The Hidden Risk of Orphan Accounts

Jan 20, 2026 Enterprise Security / AI Security
The Problem: The Identities Left Behind As organizations grow and evolve, employees, contractors, services, and systems come and go - but their accounts often remain. These abandoned or “orphan” accounts sit dormant across applications, platforms, assets, and cloud consoles. The reason they persist isn’t negligence - it’s fragmentation.  Traditional IAM and IGA systems are designed primarily for human users and depend on manual onboarding and integration for each application - connectors, schema mapping, entitlement catalogs, and role modeling. Many applications never make it that far. Meanwhile, non-human identities (NHIs): service accounts, bots, APIs, and agent-AI processes are natively ungoverned, operating outside standard IAM frameworks and often without ownership, visibility, or lifecycle controls. The result? A shadow layer of untracked identities forming part of the broader identity dark matter - accounts invisible to governance but still active in infrastructure. Wh...
Evelyn Stealer Malware Abuses VS Code Extensions to Steal Developer Credentials and Crypto

Evelyn Stealer Malware Abuses VS Code Extensions to Steal Developer Credentials and Crypto

Jan 20, 2026 Cloud Security / Developer Security
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a malware campaign that's targeting software developers with a new information stealer called Evelyn Stealer by weaponizing the Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension ecosystem. "The malware is designed to exfiltrate sensitive information, including developer credentials and cryptocurrency-related data. Compromised developer environments can also be abused as access points into broader organizational systems," Trend Micro said in an analysis published Monday. The activity is designed to single out organizations with software development teams that rely on VS Code and third-party extensions, along with those with access to production systems, cloud resources, or digital assets, it added. It's worth noting that details of the campaign were first documented by Koi Security last month, when details emerged of three VS Code extensions – BigBlack.bitcoin-black, BigBlack.codo-ai, and BigBlack.mrbigblacktheme...
cyber security

Shadow AI Agents Are Multiplying. Here's How to Find and Secure Them

websiteNudge SecuritySaaS Security / AI Security
Learn how eight common discovery approaches work, what they find, and what they don’t.
cyber security

Gartner: 70% of SOCs Will Pilot AI Agents. Only 15% Will See Results

websiteProphet SecurityAI SOC / Cybersecurity
Here are Gartner’s key questions to ask when pressure-testing AI SOC vendors in production.
Cloudflare Fixes ACME Validation Bug Allowing WAF Bypass to Origin Servers

Cloudflare Fixes ACME Validation Bug Allowing WAF Bypass to Origin Servers

Jan 20, 2026 Web Security / Vulnerability
Cloudflare has addressed a security vulnerability impacting its Automatic Certificate Management Environment ( ACME ) validation logic that made it possible to bypass security controls and access origin servers .  "The vulnerability was rooted in how our edge network processed requests destined for the ACME HTTP-01 challenge path (/.well-known/acme-challenge/*)," the web infrastructure company's Hrushikesh Deshpande, Andrew Mitchell, and Leland Garofalo said. The web infrastructure company said it found no evidence that the vulnerability was ever exploited in a malicious context. ACME is a communications protocol ( RFC 8555 ) that facilitates automatic issuance, renewal, and revocation of SSL/TLS certificates. Every certificate provisioned to a website by a certificate authority (CA) is validated using challenges to prove domain ownership. This process is typically achieved using an ACME client like Certbot that proves domain ownership via an HTTP-01 (or DNS-01) ...
Why Secrets in JavaScript Bundles are Still Being Missed

Why Secrets in JavaScript Bundles are Still Being Missed

Jan 20, 2026 API Security / Vulnerability
Leaked API keys are no longer unusual, nor are the breaches that follow. So why are sensitive tokens still being so easily exposed? To find out, Intruder’s research team looked at what traditional vulnerability scanners actually cover and built a new secrets detection method to address gaps in existing approaches.  Applying this at scale by scanning 5 million applications revealed over 42,000 exposed tokens across 334 secret types, exposing a major class of leaked secrets that is not being handled well by existing tooling, particularly in single-page applications (SPAs). In this article, we break down existing secrets detection methods and reveal what we found when we scanned millions of applications for secrets hidden in JavaScript bundles. Established secrets detection methods (and their limitations) Traditional secrets detection The traditional, fully automated approach to detecting application secrets is to search a set of known paths and apply regular expressions to ma...
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