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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...

Apple on Wednesday expanded the availability of iOS 18.7.7 and iPadOS 18.7.7 to a broader range of devices to protect users from the risk posed by a recently disclosed exploit kit known as DarkSword . "We enabled the availability of iOS 18.7.7 for more devices on April 1, 2026, so users with Automatic Updates turned on can automatically receive important security protections from web attacks called DarkSword," the company said. "The fixes associated with the DarkSword exploit first shipped in 2025." The update is available for the following devices - iPhone XR, iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone 11 (all models), iPhone SE (2nd generation), iPhone 12 (all models), iPhone 13 (all models), iPhone SE (3rd generation), iPhone 14 (all models), iPhone 15 (all models), iPhone 16 (all models), and iPhone 16e iPad mini (5th generation - A17 Pro), iPad (7th generation - A16), iPad Air (3rd - 5th generation), iPad Air 11-inch (M2 - M3), iPad Air 13-...

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...