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Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a telecommunications fraud campaign that uses fake CAPTCHA verification tricks to dupe unsuspecting users into sending international text messages that incur charges on their mobile bills, generating illicit revenue for the threat actors who lease the phone numbers. According to a new report published by Infoblox, the operation is believed to have been active since at least June 2020, using methods like social engineering and back button hijacking in web browsers. As many as 35 phone numbers spanning 17 countries have been observed as part of the international revenue share fraud ( IRSF ) campaign. "The fake CAPTCHA has multiple steps, and each message crafted by the site is preconfigured with over a dozen phone numbers, meaning the victim isn't charged for just a single message – they're charged for sending SMSs to over 50 international destinations," researchers David Brunsdon and Darby Wise said in an analysi...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new Lua-based malware created years before the notorious Stuxnet worm that aimed to sabotage Iran's nuclear program by destroying uranium enrichment centrifuges. According to a new report published by SentinelOne, the previously undocumented cyber sabotage framework dates back to 2005, primarily targeting high-precision calculation software to tamper with results. It has been codenamed fast16 . "By combining this payload with self-propagation mechanisms, the attackers aim to produce equivalent inaccurate calculations across an entire facility," researchers Vitaly Kamluk and Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade said in an exhaustive report published this week. Fast16 is estimated to predate Stuxnet – the world's first known digital weapon designed for disruptive actions – by at least five years. While Stuxnet is widely attributed to the U.S. and Israel and later served as the architectural foundation for the Duqu information-...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added four vulnerabilities impacting SimpleHelp, Samsung MagicINFO 9 Server, and D-Link DIR-823X series routers to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The list of vulnerabilities is below - CVE-2024-57726 (CVSS score: 9.9) - A missing authorization vulnerability in SimpleHelp that could allow low-privileged technicians to create API keys with excessive permissions, which can then be used to escalate privileges to the server admin role. CVE-2024-57728 (CVSS score: 7.2) - A path traversal vulnerability in SimpleHelp that allows admin users to upload arbitrary files anywhere on the file system by uploading a crafted zip file (i.e., zip slip), which can be exploited to execute arbitrary code on the host in the context of the SimpleHelp server user. CVE-2024-7399 (CVSS score: 8.8) - A path traversal vulnerability in Samsung MagicINFO 9 Server that cou...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has revealed that an unnamed federal civilian agency's Cisco Firepower device running Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software was compromised in September 2025 with a new malware called FIRESTARTER . FIRESTARTER, per CISA and the U.K.'s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), is assessed to be a backdoor designed for remote access and control. It's believed to be deployed as part of a "widespread" campaign orchestrated by an advanced persistent threat (APT) actor to obtain access to Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) firmware by exploiting now-patched security flaws such as - CVE-2025-20333 (CVSS score: 9.9) - An improper validation of user-supplied input vulnerability that could allow an authenticated, remote attacker with valid VPN user credentials to execute arbitrary code as root on an affected device by sending crafted HTTP requests. CVE-2025-20362 (CVSS score: 6.5) - An improper...

The Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has revealed how a Chinese national posed as a U.S. researcher as part of a spear-phishing campaign to obtain sensitive information from the space agency, as well as from government entities, universities, and private companies, in violation of export control laws. "For years, NASA employees and research collaborators thought they were simply sharing software with colleagues," the OIG said in a Thursday release. "Instead, they were emailing sensitive defense technology to a Chinese national who was impersonating U.S. engineers." The individual linked to the campaign was outed as Chinese national Song Wu in September 2024, when the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced charges against him for orchestrating a multi-year phishing scheme that stretched from January 2017 to December 2021 and involved targeting dozens of U.S. professors, researchers, and engine...