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Threat actors are leveraging public GitHub repositories to host malicious payloads and distribute them via Amadey as part of a campaign observed in April 2025. "The MaaS [malware-as-a-service] operators used fake GitHub accounts to host payloads, tools, and Amadey plug-ins, likely as an attempt to bypass web filtering and for ease of use," Cisco Talos researchers Chris Neal and Craig Jackson said in a report published today. The cybersecurity company said the attack chains leverage a malware loader called Emmenhtal (aka PEAKLIGHT) to deliver Amadey, which, for its part, downloads various custom payloads from public GitHub repositories operated by the threat actors. The activity shares tactical similarities with an email phishing campaign that used invoice payment and billing-related lures to distribute SmokeLoader via Emmenhtal in February 2025 in attacks targeting Ukrainian entities.

A Pakistan-nexus threat actor has been observed targeting Indian government entities as part of spear-phishing attacks designed to deliver a Golang-based malware known as DeskRAT . The activity, observed in August and September 2025 by Sekoia, has been attributed to Transparent Tribe (aka APT36), a state-sponsored hacking group known to be active since at least 2013. It also builds upon a prior campaign disclosed by CYFIRMA in August 2025. The attack chains involve sending phishing emails containing a ZIP file attachment, or in some cases, a link pointing to an archive hosted on legitimate cloud services like Google Drive. Present within the ZIP file is a malicious Desktop file embedding commands to display a decoy PDF ("CDS_Directive_Armed_Forces.pdf") using Mozilla Firefox while simultaneously executing the main payload. Both the artifacts are pulled from an external server "modgovindia[.]com" and executed. Like before, the campaign is designed to target BO...

OpenAI on Thursday disclosed that it took steps to cut off five covert influence operations (IO) originating from China, Iran, Israel, and Russia that sought to abuse its artificial intelligence (AI) tools to manipulate public discourse or political outcomes online while obscuring their true identity. These activities, which were detected over the past three months, used its AI models to generate short comments and longer articles in a range of languages, cook up names and bios for social media accounts, conduct open-source research, debug simple code, and translate and proofread texts. The AI research organization said two of the networks were linked to actors in Russia, including a previously undocumented operation codenamed Bad Grammar that primarily used at least a dozen Telegram accounts to target audiences in Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltic States and the United States (U.S.) with sloppy content in Russian and English. "The network used our models and accounts on Telegram t...

OpenAI on Friday revealed that it banned a set of accounts that used its ChatGPT tool to develop a suspected artificial intelligence (AI)-powered surveillance tool. The social media listening tool is said to likely originate from China and is powered by one of Meta's Llama models , with the accounts in question using the AI company's models to generate detailed descriptions and analyze documents for an apparatus capable of collecting real-time data and reports about anti-China protests in the West and sharing the insights with Chinese authorities. The campaign has been codenamed Peer Review owing to the "network's behavior in promoting and reviewing surveillance tooling," researchers Ben Nimmo, Albert Zhang, Matthew Richard, and Nathaniel Hartley noted, adding the tool is designed to ingest and analyze posts and comments from platforms such as X, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Telegram, and Reddit. In one instance flagged by the company, the actors used ChatG...

Threat hunters have flagged a previously undocumented Brazilian banking trojan dubbed TCLBANKER that's capable of targeting 59 banking, fintech, and cryptocurrency platforms. The activity is being tracked by Elastic Security Labs under the moniker REF3076 . The malware family is assessed to be a major update of the Maverick  family, which is known to leverage a worm called SORVEPOTEL to spread via WhatsApp Web to a victim's contacts. The Maverick campaign is attributed to a threat cluster that Trend Micro calls Water Saci. At the core of the attack chain is a loader with robust anti-analysis capabilities that deploys two embedded modules: a full-featured banking trojan and a worm component that uses WhatsApp and Microsoft Outlook for propagation. "The observed infection chain bundles a malicious MSI installer inside a ZIP file," security researchers Jia Yu Chan, Daniel Stepanic, Seth Goodwin, and Terrance DeJesus said . "These MSI installer packages are abus...

The threat actor behind the malware-as-a-service (MaaS) known as Eternity Group has been linked to new piece of malware called LilithBot . "It has advanced capabilities to be used as a miner, stealer, and a clipper along with its persistence mechanisms," Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers Shatak Jain and Aditya Sharma  said  in a Wednesday report. "The group has been continuously enhancing the malware, adding improvements such as anti-debug and anti-VM checks." Eternity Project  came on the scene earlier this year, advertising its warez and product updates on a Telegram channel. The services provided include a stealer, miner, clipper, ransomware, USB worm, and a DDoS bot. LilithBot is the latest addition to this list. Like its counterparts, the multifunctional malware bot is sold on a subscription basis to other cybercriminals in return for a cryptocurrency payment. Upon a successful compromise, the information gathered through the bot – browser history, cooki...

A new malware campaign has been exploiting the updating mechanism of the eScan antivirus software to distribute backdoors and cryptocurrency miners like XMRig through a long-standing threat codenamed GuptiMiner targeting large corporate networks. Cybersecurity firm Avast said the activity is the work of a threat actor with possible connections to a North Korean hacking group dubbed  Kimsuky , which is also known as Black Banshee, Emerald Sleet, and TA427. "GuptiMiner is a highly sophisticated threat that uses an interesting infection chain along with a couple of techniques that include performing DNS requests to the attacker's DNS servers, performing sideloading, extracting payloads from innocent-looking images, signing its payloads with a custom trusted root anchor certification authority, among others," Avast  said . The intricate and elaborate infection chain, at its core, leverages a security shortcoming in the update mechanism of Indian antivi...

A popular iOS software development kit (SDK) used by over 1,200 apps—with a total of more than a billion mobile users—is said to contain malicious code with the goal of perpetrating mobile ad-click fraud and capturing sensitive information. According to a report published by cybersecurity firm Snyk , Mintegral — a mobile programmatic advertising platform owned by Chinese mobile ad tech company Mobvista — includes an SDK component that allows it to collect URLs, device identifiers, IP Address, operating system version, and other user sensitive data from compromised apps to a remote logging server. The malicious iOS SDK has been named "SourMint" by Snyk researchers. "The malicious code can spy on user activity by logging URL-based requests made through the app," Snyk's Alyssa Miller said in a Monday analysis. "This activity is logged to a third-party server and could potentially include personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive in...

A previously unknown threat activity cluster targeted European organizations, particularly those in the healthcare sector, to deploy PlugX and its successor, ShadowPad, with the intrusions ultimately leading to deployment of a ransomware called NailaoLocker in some cases. The campaign, codenamed Green Nailao by Orange Cyberdefense CERT, involved the exploitation of a now-patched security flaw in Check Point network gateway security products ( CVE-2024-24919 , CVSS score: 7.5). The attacks were observed between June and October 2024. "The campaign relied on DLL search-order hijacking to deploy ShadowPad and PlugX – two implants often associated with China-nexus targeted intrusions," the company said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The initial access afforded by exploitation of vulnerable Check Point instances is said to have allowed the threat actors to retrieve user credentials and to connect to the VPN using a legitimate account. In the next stage,...

Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool - Download ! The Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool checks Windows Vista, WIndows 7, Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Windows Server 2003 computers for and helps remove infections by specific, prevalent malicious software—including Blaster, Sasser, and Mydoom. When the detection and removal process is complete, the tool displays a report describing the outcome, including which, if any, malicious software was detected and removed. The tool creates a log file named mrt.log in the %WINDIR%\debug folder. To download the x64 version of Malicious Software Removal Tool, click here . This tool is not a replacement for an anti-virus product. To help protect your computer, you should use an anti-virus product. Microsoft will release an updated version of this tool on the second Tuesday of each month. New versions will be made available through this web page, Windows Update, and the Malicious Software Removal Tool Web site on...

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has warned of phishing attacks that deploy an information-stealing malware called Jester Stealer on compromised systems. The mass email campaign carries the subject line "chemical attack" and contains a link to a macro-laced Microsoft Excel file, opening which leads to computers getting infected with Jester Stealer. The attack, which requires potential victims to enable macros after opening the document, works by downloading and executing an .EXE file that is retrieved from compromised web resources, CERT-UA detailed. Jester Stealer, as documented by Cyble in February 2022, comes with features to steal and transmit login credentials, cookies, and credit card information along with data from passwords managers, chat messengers, email clients, crypto wallets, and gaming apps to the attackers. It's purchasable for $99 per month or $249 for lifetime access. "The hackers get the stolen data via Telegram usi...

Here we are with our weekly roundup, briefing this week's top cybersecurity threats, incidents, and challenges, just in case you missed any of them. Last week has been very short with big news from the theft of over 4,700 Bitcoins from the largest cryptocurrency mining marketplace to the discovery of a new malware evasion technique that works on all versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system. Besides this, the newly discovered Janus vulnerability in the Android operating system and a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Malware Protection Engine (MPE) for which Microsoft released an emergency patch made their places in our weekly roundup. I recommend you to read the entire news (just click 'Read More' because there's some valuable advice in there as well). So, here we go with the list of this Week's Top Stories: Process Doppelgänging: New Malware Evasion Technique A team of researchers, who previously discovered AtomBombing...

Since most security tools also keep an eye on the network traffic to detect malicious IP addresses, attackers are increasingly adopting infrastructure of legitimate services in their attacks to hide their malicious activities. Cybersecurity researchers have now spotted a new malware attack campaign linked to the notorious DarkHydrus APT group that uses Google Drive as its command-and-control (C2) server. DarkHydrus first came to light in August last year when the APT group was leveraging the open-source Phishery tool to carry out credential-harvesting campaign against government entities and educational institutions in the Middle East. The latest malicious campaign conducted by the DarkHydrus APT group was also observed against targets in the Middle East, according to reports published by the 360 Threat Intelligence Center ( 360TIC ) and Palo Alto Networks. This time the advanced threat attackers are using a new variant of their backdoor Trojan, called RogueRobin , which i...

Cybersecurity researchers on Thursday revealed security issues in the Android app developed by Chinese drone-maker Da Jiang Innovations (DJI) that comes with an auto-update mechanism that bypasses Google Play Store and could be used to install malicious applications and transmit sensitive personal information to DJI's servers. The twin reports, courtesy of cybersecurity firms Synacktiv and GRIMM , found that DJI's Go 4 Android app not only asks for extensive permissions and collects personal data (IMSI, IMEI, the serial number of the SIM card), it makes use of anti-debug and encryption techniques to thwart security analysis. "This mechanism is very similar to command and control servers encountered with malware," Synacktiv said. "Given the wide permissions required by DJI GO 4 — contacts, microphone, camera, location, storage, change network connectivity — the DJI or Weibo Chinese servers have almost full control over the user's phone." The ...

However, manual lab setup and configuration can prove to be a laborious and time-consuming process. In this article, we'll look at 4 ways to create a reverse engineering lab, discuss how to save time, and, potentially, improve the detection rate using a  sandbox-as-a-service , and a recommended list of tools for a comprehensive setup. What is a malware analysis lab? In essence, a malware analysis lab provides a safe, isolated space for examining malware. The setup can range from a straightforward virtual machine using VirtualBox to a more intricate network of interconnected machines and actual networking hardware. But in this article, we'll look at building a lab tailored for static analysis, so what we will need is a secure environment where we can run disassemblers, edit binary files and debug. There are a couple of ways we can go about creating it: 1 — Virtualization Perhaps the simplest way to create a secure and isolated environment is by using a virtual machine....