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The threat actors behind a loader malware called  HijackLoader  have added new techniques for defense evasion, as the malware continues to be increasingly used by other threat actors to deliver additional payloads and tooling. "The malware developer used a standard process hollowing technique coupled with an additional trigger that was activated by the parent process writing to a pipe," CrowdStrike researchers Donato Onofri and Emanuele Calvelli  said  in a Wednesday analysis. "This new approach has the potential to make defense evasion stealthier." HijackLoader was  first documented  by Zscaler ThreatLabz in September 2023 as having been used as a conduit to deliver DanaBot, SystemBC, and RedLine Stealer. It's also known to share a high degree of similarity with another loader known as IDAT Loader. Both the loaders are assessed to be operated by the same cybercrime group. In the intervening months, HijackLoader has been  propagated  via Clear...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new evasive malware loader named SquidLoader that spreads via phishing campaigns targeting Chinese organizations. AT&T LevelBlue Labs, which first observed the malware in late April 2024, said it incorporates features that are designed to thwart static and dynamic analysis and ultimately evade detection. Attack chains leverage phishing emails that come with attachments that masquerade as Microsoft Word documents, but, in reality, are binaries that pave the way for the execution of the malware, which is then used to fetch second-stage shellcode payloads from a remote server, including Cobalt Strike. "These loaders feature heavy evasion and decoy mechanisms which help them remain undetected while also hindering analysis," security researcher Fernando Dominguez said . "The shellcode that is delivered is also loaded in the same loader process, likely to avoid writing the payload to disk and thus risk being detected." ...

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...

Government and state-owned organizations in a number of Asian countries have been targeted by a distinct group of espionage hackers as part of an intelligence gathering mission that has been underway since early 2021. "A notable feature of these attacks is that the attackers leveraged a wide range of legitimate software packages in order to load their malware payloads using a technique known as  DLL side-loading ," the Symantec Threat Hunter team, part of Broadcom Software,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The campaign is said to be exclusively geared towards government institutions related to finance, aerospace, and defense, as well as state-owned media, IT, and telecom firms.  Dynamic-link library (DLL) side-loading is a popular cyberattack method that leverages how Microsoft Windows applications handle DLL files. In these intrusions, a spoofed malicious DLL is planted in the Windows Side-by-Side ( WinSxS ) directory so that the operating system ...

The China-linked Mustang Panda actor has been linked to a cyber attack targeting a Philippines government entity amid  rising tensions  between the two countries over the disputed South China Sea. Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 attributed the adversarial collective to three campaigns in August 2023, primarily singling out organizations in the South Pacific. "The campaigns leveraged legitimate software including Solid PDF Creator and SmadavProtect (an Indonesian-based antivirus solution) to sideload malicious files," the company  said . "Threat authors also creatively configured the malware to impersonate legitimate Microsoft traffic for command-and-control (C2) connections." Mustang Panda, also tracked under the names Bronze President, Camaro Dragon, Earth Preta, RedDelta, and Stately Taurus, is assessed to be a Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) active since at least 2012,  orchestrating   cyber espionage   campaigns  targeting non-governmenta...

A threat actor known as BrazenBamboo has exploited an unresolved security flaw in Fortinet's FortiClient for Windows to extract VPN credentials as part of a modular framework called DEEPDATA . Volexity, which disclosed the findings Friday, said it identified the zero-day exploitation of the credential disclosure vulnerability in July 2024, describing BrazenBamboo as the developer behind DEEPDATA, DEEPPOST, and LightSpy . "DEEPDATA is a modular post-exploitation tool for the Windows operating system that is used to gather a wide range of information from target devices," security researchers Callum Roxan, Charlie Gardner, and Paul Rascagneres said in a technical report. The malware first came to light earlier this week, when BlackBerry detailed the Windows-based surveillance framework as used by the China-linked APT41 threat actor to harvest data from WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, WeChat, LINE, QQ, Skype, Microsoft Outlook, DingDing, Feishu, KeePass, as well as applic...

A China-nexus threat actor known as APT24 has been observed using a previously undocumented malware dubbed BADAUDIO to establish persistent remote access to compromised networks as part of a nearly three-year campaign. "While earlier operations relied on broad strategic web compromises to compromise legitimate websites, APT24 has recently pivoted to using more sophisticated vectors targeting organizations in Taiwan," Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) researchers Harsh Parashar, Tierra Duncan, and Dan Perez said . "This includes the repeated compromise of a regional digital marketing firm to execute supply chain attacks and the use of targeted phishing campaigns." APT24, also called Pitty Tiger, is the moniker assigned to a suspected Chinese hacking group that has targeted government, healthcare, construction and engineering, mining, non-profit, and telecommunications sectors in the U.S. and Taiwan. The group is also known to engage in cyber operations wh...

A suspected Chinese-speaking threat actor has been attributed to a malicious campaign that targets the Uzbekistan Ministry of Foreign Affairs and South Korean users with a remote access trojan called  SugarGh0st RAT . The activity, which commenced no later than August 2023, leverages two different infection sequences to deliver the malware, which is a customized variant of  Gh0st RAT  (aka Farfli). It comes with features to "facilitate the remote administration tasks as directed by the C2 and modified communication protocol based on the similarity of the command structure and the strings used in the code," Cisco Talos researchers Ashley Shen and Chetan Raghuprasad  said . The attacks commence with a phishing email bearing decoy documents, opening which activates a multi-stage process that leads to the deployment of SugarGh0st RAT. The decoy documents are incorporated within a heavily obfuscated JavaScript dropper that's contained within a Windows Shortcut file ...

Threat hunters have shed light on a "sophisticated and evolving malware toolkit" called Ragnar Loader that's used by various cybercrime and ransomware groups like Ragnar Locker (aka Monstrous Mantis), FIN7, FIN8, and Ruthless Mantis (ex-REvil). "Ragnar Loader plays a key role in keeping access to compromised systems, helping attackers stay in networks for long-term operations," Swiss cybersecurity company PRODAFT said in a statement shared with The Hacker News. "While it's linked to the Ragnar Locker group, it's unclear if they own it or just rent it out to others. What we do know is that its developers are constantly adding new features, making it more modular and harder to detect." Ragnar Loader, also referred to as Sardonic, was first documented by Bitdefender in August 2021 in connection with an unsuccessful attack carried out by FIN8 aimed at an unnamed financial institution located in the U.S. It's said to have been put to use ...

Microsoft is calling attention to a new phishing campaign primarily aimed at U.S.-based organizations that has likely utilized code generated using large language models (LLMs) to obfuscate payloads and evade security defenses. "Appearing to be aided by a large language model (LLM), the activity obfuscated its behavior within an SVG file, leveraging business terminology and a synthetic structure to disguise its malicious intent," the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in an analysis published last week. The activity, detected on August 28, 2025, shows how threat actors are increasingly adopting artificial intelligence (AI) tools into their workflows, often with the goal of crafting more convincing phishing lures, automating malware obfuscation, and generating code that mimics legitimate content. In the attack chain documented by the Windows maker, bad actors have been observed leveraging an already compromised business email account to send phishing messages to stea...

Security researchers have find out ways to hijack the Intel-compatible PCs running Linux by exploiting the physical weaknesses in certain varieties of DDR DRAM (double data rate dynamic random-access memory) chips and gaining higher kernel privileges on the system. The technique, dubbed " rowhammer ", was outlined in a blog post published Monday by Google's Project Zero security initiative, a team of top security researchers dedicatedly identifies severe zero-day vulnerabilities in different software. Rowhammer is a problem with recent generation DRAM chips in which repeatedly accessing a row of memory can cause " bit flipping " in an adjacent row which could allow anyone to change the value of contents stored in computer memory. WHAT IS ROWHAMMER BUG DDR memory is arranged in an array of rows and columns, which are assigned to various services, applications and OS resources in large blocks. In order to prevent each application from access...

A new campaign has leveraged the ClickFix social engineering tactic as a way to distribute a previously undocumented malware loader referred to as DeepLoad . "It likely uses AI-assisted obfuscation and process injection to evade static scanning, while credential theft starts immediately and captures passwords and sessions even if the primary loader is blocked," ReliaQuest researchers Thassanai McCabe and Andrew Currie said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The starting point of the attack chain is a ClickFix lure that tricks users into running PowerShell commands by pasting the command into the Windows Run dialog under the pretext of addressing a non-existent issue. This, in turn, uses "mshta.exe," a legitimate Windows utility to download and run an obfuscated PowerShell loader. The loader, for its part, has been found to conceal its actual functionality among meaningless variable assignments, likely in an attempt to deceive security tools. It's ass...

Cybersecurity researchers are warning that a command-and-control (C&C) framework called Winos is being distributed within gaming-related applications like installation tools, speed boosters, and optimization utilities. "Winos 4.0 is an advanced malicious framework that offers comprehensive functionality, a stable architecture, and efficient control over numerous online endpoints to execute further actions," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Rebuilt from Gh0st RAT , it includes several modular components, each handling distinct functions." Campaigns distributing Winos 4.0 were documented back in June by Trend Micro and the KnownSec 404 Team. The cybersecurity companies are tracking the activity cluster under the names Void Arachne and Silver Fox. These attacks have been observed targeting Chinese-speaking users, leveraging black hat Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics, social media, and messaging platforms like Te...

The Computer Emergencies Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has disclosed details of a new campaign that has targeted governments and municipal healthcare institutions, mainly clinics and emergency hospitals, to deliver malware capable of stealing sensitive data from Chromium-based web browsers and WhatsApp. The activity, which was observed between March and April 2026, has been attributed to a threat cluster dubbed UAC-0247 . The origins of the campaign are presently unknown. According to CERT-UA, the starting point of the attack chain is an email message claiming to be a humanitarian aid proposal, urging recipients to click on a link that redirects to either a legitimate website compromised via a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability or a bogus site created with help from artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Regardless of what the site is, the goal is to download and run a Windows Shortcut (LNK) file, which then execut...

A coordinated law enforcement effort codenamed  Operation Duck Hunt  has felled  QakBot , a notorious Windows malware family that's estimated to have compromised over 700,000 computers globally and facilitated financial fraud as well as ransomware. To that end, the U.S. Justice Department (DoJ)  said  the malware is "being deleted from victim computers, preventing it from doing any more harm," adding it seized more than $8.6 million in cryptocurrency in illicit profits. The cross-border exercise involved the participation of France, Germany, Latvia, Romania, the Netherlands, the U.K., and the U.S., alongside technical assistance from cybersecurity company Zscaler. The dismantling has been hailed as "the largest U.S.-led financial and technical disruption of a botnet infrastructure leveraged by cybercriminals." No arrests were announced. QakBot, also known as QBot and Pinkslipbot, started its life as a banking trojan in 2007 before morphing into a general-pu...

The Chinese-speaking threat actor known as Earth Lusca has been observed using a new backdoor dubbed KTLVdoor as part of a cyber attack targeting an unnamed trading company based in China. The previously unreported malware is written in Golang, and thus is a cross-platform weapon capable of targeting both Microsoft Windows and Linux systems. "KTLVdoor is a highly obfuscated malware that masquerades as different system utilities, allowing attackers to carry out a variety of tasks including file manipulation, command execution, and remote port scanning," Trend Micro researchers Cedric Pernet and Jaromir Horejsi said in an analysis published Wednesday. Some of the tools KTLVdoor impersonates include sshd, Java, SQLite, bash, and edr-agent, among others, with the malware distributed in the form of dynamic-link library (.dll) or a shared object (.so). Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the activity cluster is the discovery of more than 50 command-and-control (C&C) s...

Threat activity clusters affiliated with the Chinese and Russian cybercriminal ecosystems have been observed using a new piece of malware that's designed to load Cobalt Strike onto infected machines. Dubbed  SILKLOADER  by Finnish cybersecurity company WithSecure, the malware leverages  DLL side-loading techniques  to deliver the commercial adversary simulation software. The development comes as  improved detection capabilities  against Cobalt Strike, a legitimate post-exploitation tool used for red team operations, is forcing threat actors to  seek alternative options  or concoct new ways to propagate the framework to evade detection. "The most common of these include adding complexity to the auto-generated beacon or stager payloads via the utilization of packers, crypters, loaders, or similar techniques," WithSecure researchers  said . SILKLOADER joins other loaders such as KoboldLoader, MagnetLoader, and LithiumLoader that have been...