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Germany's Federal Office of Information Security (BSI) has announced that it has disrupted a malware operation called BADBOX that came preloaded on at least 30,000 internet-connected devices sold across the country. In a statement published earlier this week, authorities said they severed the communications between the devices and their command-and-control (C2) servers by sinkholing the domains in question. Impacted devices include digital picture frames, media players, and streamers, and likely phones and tablets. "What all of these devices have in common is that they have outdated Android versions and were delivered with pre-installed malware," the BSI said in a press release. BADBOX was first documented by HUMAN's Satori Threat Intelligence and Research team in October 2023, describing it as a "complex threat actor scheme" that involves deploying the Triada Android malware on low-cost, off-brand Android devices by exploiting weak supply chain links...

Thai government officials have emerged as the target of a new campaign that leverages a technique called DLL side-loading to deliver a previously undocumented backdoor dubbed Yokai . "The target of the threat actors were Thailand officials based on the nature of the lures," Nikhil Hegde, senior engineer for Netskope's Security Efficacy team, told The Hacker News. "The Yokai backdoor itself is not limited and can be used against any potential target." The starting point of the attack chain is a RAR archive containing two Windows shortcut files named in Thai that translate to "United States Department of Justice.pdf" and "United States government requests international cooperation in criminal matters.docx." The exact initial vector used to deliver the payload is currently not known, although Hegde speculated that it would likely be spear-phishing due to the lures employed and the fact that RAR files have been used as malicious attachment...

A now-removed GitHub repository that advertised a WordPress tool to publish posts to the online content management system (CMS) is estimated to have enabled the exfiltration of over 390,000 credentials. The malicious activity is part of a broader attack campaign undertaken by a threat actor, dubbed MUT-1244 (where MUT refers to "mysterious unattributed threat") by Datadog Security Labs, that involves phishing and several trojanized GitHub repositories hosting proof-of-concept (PoC) code for exploiting known security flaws. "Victims are believed to be offensive actors – including pentesters and security researchers, as well as malicious threat actors – and had sensitive data such as SSH private keys and AWS access keys exfiltrated," researchers Christophe Tafani-Dereeper, Matt Muir, and Adrian Korn said in an analysis shared with The Hacker News. It's no surprise that security researchers have been an attractive target for threat actors, including nation-sta...

I had the honor of hosting the first episode of the Xposure Podcast live from Xposure Summit 2025. And I couldn't have asked for a better kickoff panel: three cybersecurity leaders who don't just talk security, they live it. Let me introduce them. Alex Delay , CISO at IDB Bank, knows what it means to defend a highly regulated environment. Ben Mead , Director of Cybersecurity at Avidity Biosciences, brings a forward-thinking security perspective that reflects the innovation behind Avidity's targeted RNA therapeutics. Last but not least, Michael Francess , Director of Cybersecurity Advanced Threat at Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, leads the charge in protecting the franchise. Each brought a unique vantage point to a common challenge: applying Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) to complex production environments. Gartner made waves in 2023 with a bold prediction: organizations that prioritize CTEM will be three times less likely to be breached by 2026. But here's the kicker -...

A security flaw has been disclosed in OpenWrt 's Attended Sysupgrade ( ASU ) feature that, if successfully exploited, could have been abused to distribute malicious firmware packages. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-54143 , carries a CVSS score of 9.3 out of a maximum of 10, indicating critical severity. Flatt Security researcher RyotaK has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw on December 4, 2024. The issue has been patched in ASU version 920c8a1 . "Due to the combination of the command injection in the imagebuilder image and the truncated SHA-256 hash included in the build request hash, an attacker can pollute the legitimate image by providing a package list that causes the hash collision," the project maintainers said in an alert. OpenWrt is a popular open-source Linux-based operating system for routers, residential gateways, and other embedded devices that route network traffic. Successful exploitation of the shortcoming could essentiall...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) has indicted 14 nationals belonging to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK or North Korea) for their alleged involvement in a long-running conspiracy to violate sanctions and commit wire fraud, money laundering, and identity theft by illegally seeking employment in U.S. companies and non-profit organizations. "The conspirators, who worked for DPRK-controlled companies Yanbian Silverstar and Volasys Silver Star, located in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Russian Federation (Russia), respectively, conspired to use false, stolen, and borrowed identities of U.S. and other persons to conceal their North Korean identities and foreign locations and obtain employment as remote information technology (IT) workers," the DoJ said . The IT worker scheme generated at least $88 million for the North Korean regime over a span of six years, it's been alleged. In addition, the remote workers engaged in information th...

Iran-affiliated threat actors have been linked to a new custom malware that's geared toward IoT and operational technology (OT) environments in Israel and the United States. The malware has been codenamed IOCONTROL by OT cybersecurity company Claroty, highlighting its ability to attack IoT and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) devices such as IP cameras, routers, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), human-machine interfaces (HMIs), firewalls, and other Linux-based IoT/OT platforms. "While the malware is believed to be custom-built by the threat actor, it seems that the malware is generic enough that it is able to run on a variety of platforms from different vendors due to its modular configuration," the company said . The development makes IOCONTROL the tenth malware family to specifically single out Industrial Control Systems (ICS) after Stuxnet, Havex, Industroyer (aka CrashOverride), Triton (aka Trisis), BlackEnergy2, Industroyer2, PIPEDREAM (a...

Run by the team at orchestration, AI, and automation platform Tines, the Tines library contains pre-built workflows shared by real security practitioners from across the community, all of which are free to import and deploy via the Community Edition of the platform.  Their bi-annual "You Did What with Tines?!" competition highlights some of the most interesting workflows submitted by their users, many of which demonstrate practical applications of large language models (LLMs) to address complex challenges in security operations. One recent winner is a workflow designed to automate CrowdStrike RFM reporting. Developed by Tom Power, a security analyst at The University of British Columbia, it uses orchestration, AI and automation to reduce the time spent on manual reporting. Here, we'll share an overview of the workflow, plus a step-by-step guide for getting it up and running. The problem - time-consuming reporting The workflow's builder, Tom Power, explains, "The CrowdStrike ...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new Linux rootkit called PUMAKIT that comes with capabilities to escalate privileges, hide files and directories, and conceal itself from system tools, while simultaneously evading detection. "PUMAKIT is a sophisticated loadable kernel module (LKM) rootkit that employs advanced stealth mechanisms to hide its presence and maintain communication with command-and-control servers," Elastic Security Lab researchers Remco Sprooten and Ruben Groenewoud said in a technical report published Thursday. The company's analysis comes from artifacts uploaded to the VirusTotal malware scanning platform earlier this September. The internals of the malware is based on a multi-stage architecture that comprises a dropper component named "cron," two memory-resident executables ("/memfd:tgt" and "/memfd:wpn"), an LKM rootkit ("puma.ko"), and a shared object (SO) userland rootkit called Kitsune ("li...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Thursday announced the shutdown of an illicit marketplace called Rydox ("rydox[.]ru" and "rydox[.]cc") for selling stolen personal information, access devices, and other tools for conducting cybercrime and fraud. In tandem, three Kosovo nationals and administrators of the service, Ardit Kutleshi, Jetmir Kutleshi, and Shpend Sokoli, have been arrested. Ardit Kutleshi and Jetmir Kutleshi are expected to be extradited to the U.S. Sokoli, who was apprehended on December 12, 2024, in Albania, will be charged and prosecuted in the nation. "The Rydox marketplace has conducted over 7,600 sales of personally identifiable information (PII), stolen access devices, and cybercrime tools, which generated at least $230,000 in revenue since its inception in or around February 2016," the DoJ said in a statement. This included credit card information and login credentials stolen from thousands of victims residing in the United S...