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Cybersecurity researchers have called attention to a cyber attack in which unknown threat actors deployed an open-source endpoint monitoring and digital forensic tool called Velociraptor , illustrating ongoing abuse of legitimate software for malicious purposes. "In this incident, the threat actor used the tool to download and execute Visual Studio Code with the likely intention of creating a tunnel to an attacker-controlled command-and-control (C2) server," the Sophos Counter Threat Unit Research Team said in a report published this week.  While threat actors are known to adopt living-off-the-land (LotL) techniques or take advantage of legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools in their attacks, the use of Velociraptor signals a tactical evolution, where incident response programs are being used to obtain a foothold and minimize the need for having to deploy their own malware.  Further analysis of the incident has revealed that the attackers used the Wind...

A new attack vector targeting the Visual Studio Code extensions marketplace could be leveraged to upload rogue extensions masquerading as their legitimate counterparts with the goal of mounting supply chain attacks. The technique "could act as an entry point for an attack on many organizations," Aqua security researcher Ilay Goldman  said  in a report published last week. VS Code extensions, curated via a  marketplace  made available by Microsoft, allow developers to add programming languages, debuggers, and tools to the VS Code source-code editor to augment their workflows.  "All extensions run with the privileges of the user that has opened the VS Code without any sandbox," Goldman said, explaining the potential risks of using VS Code extensions. "This means that the extension can install any program on your computer including ransomwares, wipers, and more." To that end, Aqua found that not only is it possible for a threat actor to impersonate a po...

Microsoft on Tuesday released another round of  security updates  for Windows operating system and other supported software, squashing 50 vulnerabilities, including six zero-days that are said to be under active attack. The flaws were identified and resolved in Microsoft Windows, .NET Core and Visual Studio, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Edge (Chromium-based and EdgeHTML), SharePoint Server, Hyper-V, Visual Studio Code - Kubernetes Tools, Windows HTML Platform, and Windows Remote Desktop. Of these 50 bugs, five are rated Critical, and 45 are rated Important in severity, with three of the issues publicly known at the time of release. The vulnerabilities that being actively exploited are listed below - CVE-2021-33742  (CVSS score: 7.5) - Windows MSHTML Platform Remote Code Execution Vulnerability CVE-2021-33739  (CVSS score: 8.4) - Microsoft DWM Core Library Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2021-31199  (CVSS score: 5.2) - Microsoft Enhanced Cryptogra...

A previously undocumented China-aligned advanced persistent threat (APT) group named PlushDaemon has been linked to a supply chain attack targeting a South Korean virtual private network (VPN) provider in 2023, according to new findings from ESET. "The attackers replaced the legitimate installer with one that also deployed the group's signature implant that we have named SlowStepper – a feature-rich backdoor with a toolkit of more than 30 components," ESET researcher Facundo Muñoz said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. PlushDaemon is assessed to be a China-nexus group that has been operational since at least 2019, targeting individuals and entities in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, the United States, and New Zealand. Central to its operations is a bespoke backdoor called SlowStepper, which is described as a large toolkit consisting of around 30 modules, programmed in C++, Python, and Go. Another crucial aspect of its attacks is the hijackin...

Microsoft's latest round of monthly security updates has been released with fixes for  68 vulnerabilities  spanning its software portfolio, including patches for six actively exploited zero-days. 12 of the issues are rated Critical, two are rated High, and 55 are rated Important in severity. This also includes the weaknesses that were closed out by  OpenSSL  the previous week. Also separately  addressed  in Microsoft Edge at the start of the month is an actively exploited flaw in Chromium-based browsers ( CVE-2022-3723 ) that was plugged by Google as part of an out-of-band update late last month. "The big news is that  two older zero-day CVEs  affecting Exchange Server, made public at the end of September, have finally been fixed," Greg Wiseman, product manager at Rapid7, said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "Customers are advised to update their  Exchange Server systems  immediately, regardless of whether any previousl...

In yet another software supply chain attack, the open-source, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistant Cline CLI was updated to stealthily install OpenClaw , a self-hosted autonomous AI agent that has become exceedingly popular in the past few months. "On February 17, 2026, at 3:26 AM PT, an unauthorized party used a compromised npm publish token to publish an update to Cline CLI on the NPM registry: cline@2.3.0," the maintainers of the Cline package said in an advisory. "The published package contains a modified package.json with an added postinstall script: 'postinstall": "npm install -g openclaw@latest.'" As a result, this causes OpenClaw to be installed on the developer's machine when Cline version 2.3.0 is installed. Cline said no additional modifications were introduced to the package and there was no malicious behavior observed. However, it noted that the installation of OpenClaw was not authorized or intended. The s...

The maintainers of the nx build system have alerted users to a supply chain attack that allowed attackers to publish malicious versions of the popular npm package and other auxiliary plugins with data-gathering capabilities. "Malicious versions of the nx package, as well as some supporting plugin packages, were published to npm, containing code that scans the file system, collects credentials, and posts them to GitHub as a repo under the user's accounts," the maintainers said in an advisory published Wednesday. Nx is an open-source, technology-agnostic build platform that's designed to manage codebases. It's advertised as an "AI-first build platform that connects everything from your editor to CI [continuous integration]." The npm package has over 3.5 million weekly downloads. The list of affected packages and versions is below. These versions have since been removed from the npm registry. The compromise of the nx package took place on August 26, 20...

The supply chain campaign known as GlassWorm has once again reared its head, infiltrating both Microsoft Visual Studio Marketplace and Open VSX with 24 extensions impersonating popular developer tools and frameworks like Flutter, React, Tailwind, Vim, and Vue. GlassWorm was first documented in October 2025, detailing its use of the Solana blockchain for command-and-control (C2) and harvest npm, Open VSX, GitHub, and Git credentials, drain cryptocurrency assets from dozens of wallets, and turn developer machines into attacker-controlled nodes for other criminal activities. The most crucial aspect of the campaign is the abuse of the stolen credentials to compromise additional packages and extensions, thereby spreading the malware like a worm. Despite continued efforts of Microsoft and Open VSX, the malware resurfaced a second time last month, and the attackers were observed targeting GitHub repositories. The latest wave of the GlassWorm campaign, spotted by Secure Annex's Jo...

This week saw a lot of new cyber trouble. Hackers hit Fortinet and Chrome with new 0-day bugs. They also broke into supply chains and SaaS tools. Many hid inside trusted apps, browser alerts, and software updates. Big firms like Microsoft, Salesforce, and Google had to react fast — stopping DDoS attacks, blocking bad links, and fixing live flaws. Reports also showed how fast fake news, AI risks, and attacks on developers are growing. Here’s what mattered most in security this week. ⚡ Threat of the Week Fortinet Warns of Another Silently Patched and Actively Exploited FortiWeb Flaw — Fortinet has warned that a new security flaw in FortiWeb has been exploited in the wild. The medium-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-58034, carries a CVSS score of 6.7 out of a maximum of 10.0. It has been addressed in version 8.0.2. "An Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command ('OS Command Injection') vulnerability [CWE-78] in FortiWeb may allow an a...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new iteration of the GlassWorm campaign that they say represents a "significant escalation" in how it propagates through the Open VSX registry. "Instead of requiring every malicious listing to embed the loader directly, the threat actor is now abusing extensionPack and extensionDependencies to turn initially standalone-looking extensions into transitive delivery vehicles in later updates, allowing a benign-appearing package to begin pulling a separate GlassWorm-linked extension only after trust has already been established," Socket said in a report published Friday. The software supply chain security company said it discovered at least 72 additional malicious Open VSX extensions since January 31, 2026, targeting developers. These extensions mimic widely used developer utilities, including linters and formatters, code runners, and tools for artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistants like Clade Code and Google...

Bad actors are leveraging browser notifications as a vector for phishing attacks to distribute malicious links by means of a new command-and-control (C2) platform called Matrix Push C2. "This browser-native, fileless framework leverages push notifications, fake alerts, and link redirects to target victims across operating systems," Blackfog researcher Brenda Robb said in a Thursday report. In these attacks, prospective targets are tricked into allowing browser notifications through social engineering on malicious or legitimate-but-compromised websites. Once a user agrees to receive notifications from the site, the attackers take advantage of the web push notification mechanism built into the web browser to send alerts that look like they have been sent by the operating system or the browser itself, leveraging trusted branding, familiar logos, and convincing language to maintain the ruse. These include alerts about, say, suspicious logins or browser updates, along with ...

New research has uncovered that publishers of over 100 Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extensions leaked access tokens that could be exploited by bad actors to update the extensions, posing a critical software supply chain risk. "A leaked VS Code Marketplace or Open VSX PAT [personal access token] allows an attacker to directly distribute a malicious extension update across the entire install base," Wiz security researcher Rami McCarthy said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "An attacker who discovered this issue would have been able to directly distribute malware to the cumulative 150,000 install base." The cloud security firm noted in many cases publishers failed to account for the fact that VS Code extensions, while distributed as .vsix files, can be unzipped and inspected, exposing hard-coded secrets embedded into them. In all, Wiz said it found over 550 validated secrets, distributed across more than 500 extensions from hundreds of distinct publishers....

Microsoft has revealed that it observed a multi‑stage intrusion that involved the threat actors exploiting internet‑exposed SolarWinds Web Help Desk (WHD) instances to obtain initial access and move laterally across the organization's network to other high-value assets. That said, the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team said it's not clear whether the activity weaponized recently disclosed flaws (CVE-2025-40551, CVSS score: 9.8, and CVE-2025-40536, CVSS score: 8.1), or a previously patched vulnerability (CVE-2025-26399, CVSS score: 9.8). "Since the attacks occurred in December 2025 and on machines vulnerable to both the old and new set of CVEs at the same time, we cannot reliably confirm the exact CVE used to gain an initial foothold," the company said in a report published last week. While CVE-2025-40536 is a security control bypass vulnerability that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to gain access to certain restricted functionality, CVE-2025-...

Threat actors have been observed uploading malicious typosquats of legitimate npm packages such as typescript-eslint and @types/node that have racked up thousands of downloads on the package registry. The counterfeit versions, named @typescript_eslinter/eslint and types-node , are engineered to download a trojan and retrieve second-stage payloads, respectively. "While typosquatting attacks are hardly new, the effort spent by nefarious actors on these two libraries to pass them off as legitimate is noteworthy," Sonatype's Ax Sharma said in an analysis published Wednesday. "Furthermore, the high download counts for packages like "types-node" are signs that point to both some developers possibly falling for these typosquats, and threat actors artificially inflating these counts to boost the trustworthiness of their malicious components." The npm listing for @typescript_eslinter/eslint, Sonatype's analysis revealed, points to a phony GitHub repo...

This week showed just how fast things can go wrong when no one’s watching. Some attacks were silent and sneaky. Others used tools we trust every day — like AI, VPNs, or app stores — to cause damage without setting off alarms. It’s not just about hacking anymore. Criminals are building systems to make money, spy, or spread malware like it’s a business. And in some cases, they’re using the same apps and services that businesses rely on — flipping the script without anyone noticing at first. The scary part? Some threats weren’t even bugs — just clever use of features we all take for granted. And by the time people figured it out, the damage was done. Let’s look at what really happened, why it matters, and what we should all be thinking about now. ⚡ Threat of the Week Silently Patched Fortinet Flaw Comes Under Attack — A vulnerability that was patched by Fortinet in FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF) has been exploited in the wild since early October 2025 by threat actors to c...

Everything is dumb again. This week feels broken in a very familiar way. Old tricks are back. New tools are doing shady crap. Supply chains got hit. Fake help desks worked. Weird research showed how easy some attacks still are. Most of it feels like stuff we should have fixed years ago. Bad extensions. Stolen creds. Remote tools are getting abused. Malware hides in places people trust. Same mess, cleaner packaging. Coffee is cold. The vuln list is ugly. Let’s get into it. ⚡ Threat of the Week New fast16 Malware Was Developed Years Before Stuxnet —A new Lua-based malware called fast16, created years before the notorious Stuxnet worm, is designed to primarily target high-precision calculation software to tamper with results. The framework dates back to 2005. Analysis suggests that fast16 was active at least five years before the emergence of Stuxnet. Widely regarded as a joint U.S.-Israeli project, Stuxnet marked a turning point in cyber warfare as the first disruptive digital weap...

In what's the latest instance of a software supply chain attack, unknown threat actors managed to compromise Toptal's GitHub organization account and leveraged that access to publish 10 malicious packages to the npm registry. The packages contained code to exfiltrate GitHub authentication tokens and destroy victim systems, Socket said in a report published last week. In addition, 73 repositories associated with the organization were made public. The list of affected packages is below - @toptal/picasso-tailwind @toptal/picasso-charts @toptal/picasso-shared @toptal/picasso-provider @toptal/picasso-select @toptal/picasso-quote @toptal/picasso-forms @xene/core @toptal/picasso-utils @toptal/picasso-typograph All the Node.js libraries were embedded with identical payloads in their package.json files, attracting a total of about 5,000 downloads before they were removed from the repository. The nefarious code has been found to specifically target the preinstall and p...