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The Chinese state-sponsored threat actor known as Mustang Panda has been observed employing a novel technique to evade detection and maintain control over infected systems. This involves the use of a legitimate Microsoft Windows utility called Microsoft Application Virtualization Injector (MAVInject.exe) to inject the threat actor's malicious payload into an external process, waitfor.exe, whenever ESET antivirus application is detected running, Trend Micro said in a new analysis. "The attack involves dropping multiple files, including legitimate executables and malicious components, and deploying a decoy PDF to distract the victim," security researchers Nathaniel Morales and Nick Dai noted. "Additionally, Earth Preta utilizes Setup Factory, an installer builder for Windows software, to drop and execute the payload; this enables them to evade detection and maintain persistence in compromised systems." The starting point of the attack sequence is an execu...

A systematic analysis of attacks against Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) servers has revealed as many as 14 malware families, 10 of them newly documented, indicating that the Windows-based web server software continues to be a hotbed for  natively developed malware  for close to eight years. The findings were presented today by ESET malware researcher Zuzana Hromcova at the  Black Hat USA security conference . "The various kinds of native IIS malware identified are server-side malware and the two things it can do best is, first, see and intercept all communications to the server, and second, affect how the requests are processed," Hromcova told in an interview with The Hacker News. "Their motivations range from cybercrime to espionage, and a technique called SEO fraud." Government institutions in three Southeast Asian countries, a major telecommunications company in Cambodia, and a research institution in Vietnam, as well as dozens of private...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered an entirely new kind of Linux malware dubbed "CDRThief" that targets voice over IP (VoIP) softswitches in an attempt to steal phone call metadata. "The primary goal of the malware is to exfiltrate various private data from a compromised softswitch, including call detail records ( CDR )," ESET researchers said in a Thursday analysis . "To steal this metadata, the malware queries internal MySQL databases used by the softswitch. Thus, attackers demonstrate a good understanding of the internal architecture of the targeted platform." Softswitches (short for software switches) are generally VoIP servers that allow for telecommunication networks to provide management of voice, fax, data and video traffic, and call routing. ESET's research uncovered that CDRThief targeted a specific Linux VoIP platform, namely the VOS2009 and 3000 softswitches from Chinese company Linknat, and had its malicious functionalit...

Anything connected to the Internet could be hacked and so is the Internet of Things (IoTs) . The market fragmentation of IoTs or Internet-connected devices is a security nightmare, due to poor security measures implemented by their vendors. Now, the researchers at security firm ESET have discovered a piece of Malware that is targeting embedded devices such as routers, and other connected devices like gateways and wireless access points, rather than computers or smartphones. Dubbed KTN-Remastered or KTN-RM , the malware is a combination of both Tsunami (or Kaiten) as well as Gafgyt. Tsunami is a well-known IRC ( Internet Relay Chat ) bot used by miscreants for launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks while Gafgyt is used for Telnet scanning. KTN-RM, which researcher dubbed ' Remaiten ,' features an improved spreading mechanism by carrying downloader executable binaries for embedded platforms and other connected devices. How Does the ...

Security researchers have discovered a new data-stealing Trojan that makes special use of USB devices in order to spread itself and does not leave any trace of activity on the compromised systems. Dubbed USB Thief ( or Win32/PSW.Stealer.NAI), the malware has the capability of stealthy attacking against air-gapped or isolated computers, warns ESET security firm. The malware author has employed special programs to protect the USB Thief from being reproduced or copied, making it even harder to detect and reverse-engineer. USB Thief has been designed for targeted attacks on computer systems that are isolated from the Internet, according to the ESET malware analyst Tomáš Gardoň. The 'USB Thief' Trojan Malware The USB Thief Trojan malware is stored either as a portable application's plugin source or as a Dynamically Linked Library (DLL) used by the portable application. Since USB devices often store popular applications like Firefox, Notepad++ or TrueCrypt portab...

Cybersecurity researchers have discerned evidence of two Russian hacking groups Gamaredon and Turla collaborating together to target and co-comprise Ukrainian entities. Slovak cybersecurity company ESET said it observed the Gamaredon tools PteroGraphin and PteroOdd being used to execute Turla group's Kazuar backdoor on an endpoint in Ukraine in February 2025, indicating that Turla is very likely actively collaborating with Gamaredon to gain access to specific machines in Ukraine and deliver the Kazuar backdoor.  "PteroGraphin was used to restart the Kazuar v3 backdoor, possibly after it crashed or was not launched automatically," ESET said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Thus, PteroGraphin was probably used as a recovery method by Turla." In a separate instance in April and June 2025, ESET said it also detected the deployment of Kazuar v2 through two other Gamaredon malware families tracked as PteroOdd and PteroPaste. Both Gamaredon (aka Aqua B...

Cybersecurity researchers at ESET have unveiled what they claim to be the first-ever UEFI rootkit being used in the wild, allowing hackers to implant persistent malware on the targeted computers that could survive a complete hard-drive wipe. Dubbed LoJax , the UEFI rootkit is part of a malware campaign conducted by the infamous Sednit group, also known as APT28, Fancy Bear , Strontium , and Sofacy , to target several government organizations in the Balkans as well as in Central and Eastern Europe. Operating since at least 2007, Sednit group is a state-sponsored hacking group believed to be a unit of GRU (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate), a Russian secret military intelligence agency. The hacking group has been associated with a number of high profile attacks, including the DNC hack just before the U.S. 2016 presidential election . UEFI, or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, a replacement for the traditional BIOS, is a core and critical firmware component of a...

Cybersecurity researchers have charted the evolution of a widely used remote access trojan called AsyncRAT , which was first released on GitHub in January 2019 and has since served as the foundation for several other variants. "AsyncRAT has cemented its place as a cornerstone of modern malware and as a pervasive threat that has evolved into a sprawling network of forks and variants," ESET researcher Nikola Knežević said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "While its capabilities are not that impressive on their own, it is the open-source nature of AsyncRAT that has truly amplified its impact. Its plug-in-based architecture and ease of modification have sparked the proliferation of many forks, pushing the boundaries even further" While AsyncRAT's evolution highlights its technical adaptability, its real-world impact stems from how it's deployed in opportunistic phishing campaigns and bundled with loaders like GuLoader or SmokeLoader. These delivery metho...

The North Korea-backed Lazarus Group has been observed targeting job seekers with malware capable of executing on Apple Macs with Intel and M1 chipsets. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET linked it to a campaign dubbed " Operation In(ter)ception " that was first disclosed in June 2020 and involved using social engineering tactics to trick employees working in the aerospace and military sectors into opening decoy job offer documents. The latest attack is no different in that a job description for the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange platform was used as a launchpad to drop a signed Mach-O executable. ESET's analysis comes from a sample of the binary that was uploaded to VirusTotal from Brazil on August 11, 2022. "Malware is compiled for both Intel and Apple Silicon," the company  said  in a series of tweets. "It drops three files: a decoy PDF document ' Coinbase_online_careers_2022_07.pdf ', a bundle  'FinderFontsUpdater.app ,' and a downloa...

A cybersecurity researcher at ESET today published an analysis of a new piece of malware, a sample of which they spotted on the Virustotal malware scanning engine and believe the hacker behind it is likely interested in some high-value computers protected behind air‑gapped networks. Dubbed ' Ramsay ,' the malware is still under development with two more variants (v2.a and v2.b) spotted in the wild and doesn't yet appear to be a complex attacking framework based upon the details researcher shared. However, before reading anything further, it's important to note that the malware itself doesn't leverage any extraordinary or advanced technique that could let attackers jump air-gapped networks to infiltrate or exfiltrate data from the targeted computers. According to ESET researcher Ignacio Sanmillan, Ramsay infiltrates targeted computers through malicious documents, potentially sent via a spear-phishing email or dropped using a USB drive, and then exploits an ol...

A malware botnet called  Ebury  is estimated to have compromised 400,000 Linux servers since 2009, out of which more than 100,000 were still compromised as of late 2023. The findings come from Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET, which characterized it as one of the most advanced server-side malware campaigns for financial gain. "Ebury actors have been pursuing monetization activities [...], including the spread of spam, web traffic redirections, and credential stealing," security researcher Marc-Etienne M.Léveillé  said  in a deep dive analysis. "[The] operators are also involved in cryptocurrency heists by using AitM and credit card stealing via network traffic eavesdropping, commonly known as server-side web skimming." Ebury was first documented over a decade ago as part of a campaign codenamed  Operation Windigo  that targeted Linux servers to deploy the malware, alongside other backdoors and scripts like Cdorked and Calfbot to redirect web traffic and ...

SCADA system has always been an interesting target for cyber crooks, given the success of Stuxnet malware that was developed by the US and Israeli together to sabotage the Iranian nuclear facilities a few years ago, and " Havex " that previously targeted organizations in the energy sector. Now once again, hackers have used highly destructive malware and infected, at least, three regional power authorities in Ukraine, causing blackouts across the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Ukraine on 23rd December. The energy ministry confirmed it was investigating claims a cyber attack disrupted local energy provider Prykarpattyaoblenergo, causing the power outage that left half of the homes in Ivano-Frankivsk without electricity just before Christmas. According to a Ukrainian news service TSN, the outage was the result of nasty malware that disconnected electrical substations. Related Read: Dragonfly Russian Hackers Target 1000 Western Energy Firms . First Malware to...

A previously unknown threat activity cluster has been observed impersonating Slovak cybersecurity company ESET as part of phishing attacks targeting Ukrainian entities. The campaign, detected in May 2025, is tracked by the security outfit under the moniker InedibleOchotense , describing it as Russia-aligned. "InedibleOchotense sent spear-phishing emails and Signal text messages, containing a link to a trojanized ESET installer, to multiple Ukrainian entities," ESET said in its APT Activity Report Q2 2025–Q3 2025 shared with The Hacker News. InedibleOchotense is assessed to share tactical overlaps with a campaign documented by EclecticIQ that involved the deployment of a backdoor called BACKORDER and by CERT-UA as UAC-0212 , which it describes as a sub-cluster within the Sandworm (aka APT44) hacking group. While the email message is written in Ukrainian, ESET said the first line uses a Russian word, likely indicating a typo or a translation error. The email, which purp...

The Russia-affiliated Sandworm used yet another wiper malware strain dubbed  NikoWiper  as part of an attack that took place in October 2022 targeting an energy sector company in Ukraine. "The NikoWiper is based on  SDelete , a command line utility from Microsoft that is used for securely deleting files," cybersecurity company ESET  revealed  in its latest APT Activity Report shared with The Hacker News. The Slovak cybersecurity firm said the attacks coincided with  missile strikes  orchestrated by the Russian armed forces aimed at the Ukrainian energy infrastructure, suggesting overlaps in objectives. The disclosure comes merely days after ESET attributed Sandworm to a Golang-based data wiper known as  SwiftSlicer  that was deployed against an unnamed Ukrainian entity on January 25, 2023. The advanced persistent threat (APT) group linked to Russia's foreign military intelligence agency GRU has also been implicated in a partially success...