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A China-nexus cyber espionage group has been observed deploying a BSD variant of a known backdoor called BRICKSTORM, as well as two other malware families codenamed PLENET (aka GRIMBOLT ) and AGENTPSD to target Linux systems. The activity has been attributed by Volexity to a threat cluster it tracks as VerdantBamboo , which it said overlaps with hacking groups known as Clay Typhoon (Microsoft), UNC5221 (Google), and Warp Panda (CrowdStrike). The cybersecurity company said it discovered the intrusion during an incident response engagement in September 2025, when it emerged that the adversary had compromised an unnamed victim's Egnyte Storage Sync system by exploiting a local privilege escalation flaw to deploy BRICKSTORM. The issue was addressed in Storage Sync version 13.13 , released in March 2026.

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a financially motivated data theft extortion campaign that has targeted dozens of organizations across professional, legal, and financial services in the U.S. between January and May 2026. The activity has been attributed by Google Mandiant and Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) to a threat actor dubbed UNC3753 , which is also known as Chatty Spider, Luna Moth, and Silent Ransom Group (SRG). "UNC3753 leverages voice phishing (vishing) and social engineering deception techniques to achieve remote access into corporate environments," researchers Chad Reams, Tufail Ahmed, Keith Knapp, Ashley Frazer, and Tyler McLellan said . "Using pretexts such as data migration or invoice-related emails, the threat actors initiate phone conversations posing as IT support and convince targets to host screen-sharing sessions and download remote monitoring and management (RMM) utilities." Upon gaining access, the threat a...

Microsoft has announced that Visual Studio Code (VS Code) will apply a two-hour delay before extensions for the integrated development environment (IDE) are updated automatically to a newer version in an attempt to tackle software supply chain threats. "When automatic updates are enabled, new versions are auto-updated two hours after they are published, adding an extra layer of protection against problematic or potentially compromised releases," Microsoft said . The new feature is available starting in VS Code 1.123. The tech giant noted that users still have the option to update any extension immediately at any point in time by using the "Update" button. When extensions have pending updates, a reason for why they haven't been updated yet will be available in the details view, along with when the automatic update will take place. That said, this two-hour delay does not apply to extensions from trusted publishers such as Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI, it...

OpenAI has begun rolling out a new Lockdown Mode to ChatGPT for eligible personal accounts to reduce the risk of data exfiltration arising from prompt injection attacks . The feature is primarily designed for people and organizations that handle sensitive data and require stricter protection guarantees. Lockdown Mode is available to logged-in users across Free, Go, Plus, and Pro, and self-serve ChatGPT Business plans. "Lockdown Mode is an optional advanced security setting that limits many tools and capabilities in OpenAI products that can connect to the web or external services," OpenAI said . "It is designed to reduce the risk of data exfiltration from prompt injection attacks by limiting outbound network requests, at the expense of disabling or limiting some useful features." The safeguards are aimed at hardening the attack surface against prompt injections, which continues to be a "frontier" problem impacting all large language models (LLMs...

A researcher has reverse-engineered the iOS SDK that Bright Data embeds in consumer apps and documented how, with the user's consent, it can turn devices, including always-on smart TVs, into exit nodes that relay web-scraping traffic for a data business Bright Data markets heavily to the AI industry. The company, the successor to Luminati, operates what it calls the largest residential proxy network in the world, advertised at more than 400 million residential IPs. Part of that supply comes from this SDK, shipped inside free apps behind an opt-in screen and described by Bright Data as a consent-sourced pool of 150 million-plus IPs. The findings, published June 5 by  Include Security  and independent researcher Buchodi, matter because the scraping comes from the user's home IP, not the customer's. The immediate risk is not a hacked account or stolen data; it is that a home connection and its bandwidth get used as someone else's scraping infrastructure. A connec...