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More than 4,000 Android apps that use Google's cloud-hosted Firebase databases are 'unknowingly' leaking sensitive information on their users, including their email addresses, usernames, passwords, phone numbers, full names, chat messages and location data. The investigation, led by Bob Diachenko from Security Discovery in partnership with Comparitech, is the result of an analysis of 15,735 Android apps, which comprise about 18 percent of all apps on Google Play store. "4.8 percent of mobile apps using Google Firebase to store user data are not properly secured, allowing anyone to access databases containing users' personal information, access tokens, and other data without a password or any other authentication," Comparitech said. Acquired by Google in 2014, Firebase is a popular mobile application development platform that offers a variety of tools to help third-party app developers build apps, securely store app data and files, fix issues, and ev...

Cybersecurity today moves at the pace of global politics. A single breach can ripple across supply chains, turn a software flaw into leverage, or shift who holds the upper hand. For leaders, this means defense isn't just a matter of firewalls and patches—it's about strategy. The strongest organizations aren't the ones with the most tools, but the ones that see how cyber risks connect to business, trust, and power. This week's stories highlight how technical gaps become real-world pressure points—and why security decisions now matter far beyond IT. ⚡ Threat of the Week Popular Password Managers Affected by Clickjacking — Popular password manager plugins for web browsers have been found susceptible to clickjacking security vulnerabilities that could be exploited to steal account credentials, two-factor authentication (2FA) codes, and credit card details under certain conditions. The technique has been dubbed Document Object Model (DOM)-based extension clickjacking by independent sec...

The cyber world never hits pause, and staying alert matters more than ever. Every week brings new tricks, smarter attacks, and fresh lessons from the field. This recap cuts through the noise to share what really matters—key trends, warning signs, and stories shaping today's security landscape. Whether you're defending systems or just keeping up, these highlights help you spot what's coming before it lands on your screen. ⚡ Threat of the Week Oracle 0-Day Under Attack — Threat actors with ties to the Cl0p ransomware group have exploited a zero-day flaw in E-Business Suite to facilitate data theft attacks. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-61882 (CVSS score: 9.8), concerns an unspecified bug that could allow an unauthenticated attacker with network access via HTTP to compromise and take control of the Oracle Concurrent Processing component. In a post shared on LinkedIn, Charles Carmakal, CTO of Mandiant at Google Cloud, said "Cl0p exploited multiple vulnerabilities in Ora...

Malware isn't just trying to hide anymore—it's trying to belong. We're seeing code that talks like us, logs like us, even documents itself like a helpful teammate. Some threats now look more like developer tools than exploits. Others borrow trust from open-source platforms, or quietly build themselves out of AI-written snippets. It's not just about being malicious—it's about being believable. In this week's cybersecurity recap, we explore how today's threats are becoming more social, more automated, and far too sophisticated for yesterday's instincts to catch. ⚡ Threat of the Week Secret Blizzard Conduct ISP-Level AitM Attacks to Deploy ApolloShadow — Russian cyberspies are abusing local internet service providers' networks to target foreign embassies in Moscow and likely collect intelligence from diplomats' devices. The activity has been attributed to the Russian advanced persistent threat (APT) known as Secret Blizzard (aka Turla). It likely involves using an adversary-...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a new Android trojan called PhantomCard that abuses near-field communication (NFC) to conduct relay attacks for facilitating fraudulent transactions in attacks targeting banking customers in Brazil. "PhantomCard relays NFC data from a victim's banking card to the fraudster's device," ThreatFabric said in a report. "PhantomCard is based on Chinese-originating NFC relay malware-as-a-service." The Android malware, distributed via fake Google Play web pages mimicking apps for card protection, goes by the name "Proteção Cartões" (package name "com.nfupay.s145" or "com.rc888.baxi.English"). The bogus pages also feature deceptive positive reviews to persuade victims into installing the app. It's currently not known how links to these pages are distributed, but it likely involves smishing or a similar social engineering technique. Once the app is installed and opened, it requests victim...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new, large-scale mobile malware campaign that's targeting Android and iOS platforms with fake dating, social networking, cloud storage, and car service apps to steal sensitive personal data. The cross-platform threat has been codenamed SarangTrap by Zimperium zLabs. Users in South Korea appear to be the primary focus. "This extensive campaign involved over 250 malicious Android applications and more than 80 malicious domains, all disguised as legitimate dating and social media applications," security researcher Rajat Goyal said . The bogus domains, which impersonate legitimate app store listing pages, are used as a lure to trick users into installing these apps, resulting in the exfiltration of contact lists and images, all while keeping up an illusion of legitimacy. Once installed, the Android apps also prompt the victim to enter an invitation code, after which it's validated against a command-and-control (C2) server. ...

The threat actor known as Arid Viper has been attributed to a mobile espionage campaign that leverages trojanized Android apps to deliver a spyware strain dubbed AridSpy. "The malware is distributed through dedicated websites impersonating various messaging apps, a job opportunity app, and a Palestinian Civil Registry app," ESET researcher Lukáš Štefanko said in a report published today. "Often these are existing applications that had been trojanized by the addition of AridSpy's malicious code." The activity is said to have spanned as many as five campaigns since 2022, with prior variants of AridSpy documented by Zimperium and 360 Beacon Labs . Three out of the five campaigns are still active. Arid Viper, a suspected Hamas-affiliated actor which is also called APT-C-23, Desert Falcon, Grey Karkadann, Mantis, and Two-tailed Scorpion, has a long track record of using mobile malware since its emergence in 2017. "Arid Viper has historically targeted mil...

Researchers reported on Monday that hackers are now exploiting Google's Analytics service to stealthily pilfer credit card information from infected e-commerce sites. According to several independent reports from PerimeterX , Kaspersky , and Sansec , threat actors are now injecting data-stealing code on the compromised websites in combination with tracking code generated by Google Analytics for their own account, letting them exfiltrate payment information entered by users even in conditions where content security policies are enforced for maximum web security. "Attackers injected malicious code into sites, which collected all the data entered by users and then sent it via Analytics," Kaspersky said in a report published yesterday. "As a result, the attackers could access the stolen data in their Google Analytics account." The cybersecurity firm said it found about two dozen infected websites across Europe and North and South America that specialized in...

Cybersecurity researchers have exposed the operations of an Android malware vendor who teamed up with a second threat actor to market and sell a remote access Trojan (RAT) capable of device takeover and exfiltration of photos, locations, contacts, and messages from popular apps such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Skype, Telegram, Kik, Line, and Google Messages. The vendor, who goes by the name of " Triangulum " in a number of darknet forums, is alleged to be a 25-year-old man of Indian origin, with the individual opening up shop to sell the malware three years ago on June 10, 2017, according to an analysis published by Check Point Research today. "The product was a mobile RAT, targeting Android devices and capable of exfiltration of sensitive data from a C&C server, destroying local data – even deleting the entire OS, at times," the researchers said. An Active Underground Market for Mobile Malware Piecing together Triangulum's trail of activities, t...

A new malware campaign dubbed SparkCat has leveraged a suit of bogus apps on both Apple's and Google's respective app stores to steal victims' mnemonic phrases associated with cryptocurrency wallets.  The attacks leverage an optical character recognition (OCR) model to exfiltrate select images containing wallet recovery phrases from photo libraries to a command-and-control (C2) server, Kaspersky researchers Dmitry Kalinin and Sergey Puzan said in a technical report. The moniker is a reference to an embedded software development kit (SDK) that employs a Java component called Spark that masquerades as an analytics module. It's currently not known whether the infection was a result of a supply chain attack or if it was intentionally introduced by the developers. While this is not the first time Android malware with OCR capabilities has been detected in the wild, it's one of the first instances where such a stealer has been found in Apple's App Store. The inf...

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of a new spear-phishing campaign that uses a legitimate remote access tool called Netbird to target Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) and financial executives at banks, energy companies, insurers, and investment firms across Europe, Africa, Canada, the Middle East, and South Asia.  "In what appears to be a multi-stage phishing operation, the attackers aimed to deploy NetBird, a legitimate wireguard-based remote access tool on the victim's computer," Trellix researcher Srini Seethapathy said in an analysis. The activity, first detected by the cybersecurity company in mid-May 2025, has not been attributed to a known threat actor or group. The starting point of the attack is a phishing email that impersonates a recruiter from Rothschild & Co. and claims to offer a "strategic opportunity" with the company. The email is designed to entice the recipients into opening a purported PDF attachment that, in reality, is a phishin...

Threat actors tied to North Korea have been observed targeting the Web3 and blockchain sectors as part of twin campaigns tracked as GhostCall and GhostHire . According to Kaspersky, the campaigns are part of a broader operation called SnatchCrypto that has been underway since at least 2017. The activity is attributed to a Lazarus Group sub-cluster called BlueNoroff , which is also known as APT38, CageyChameleon, CryptoCore, Genie Spider, Nickel Gladstone, Sapphire Sleet (formerly Copernicium), and Stardust Chollima. Victims of the GhostCall campaign span several infected macOS hosts located in Japan, Italy, France, Singapore, Turkey, Spain, Sweden, India, and Hong Kong, whereas Japan and Australia have been identified as the major hunting grounds for the GhostHire campaign. "GhostCall heavily targets the macOS devices of executives at tech companies and in the venture capital sector by directly approaching targets via platforms like Telegram, and inviting potential victims t...

The ubiquity of GitHub in information technology (IT) environments has made it a lucrative choice for threat actors to host and deliver malicious payloads and act as  dead drop resolvers , command-and-control, and data exfiltration points. "Using GitHub services for malicious infrastructure allows adversaries to blend in with legitimate network traffic, often bypassing traditional security defenses and making upstream infrastructure tracking and actor attribution more difficult," Recorded Future  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. The cybersecurity firm described the approach as "living-off-trusted-sites" (LOTS), a spin on the living-off-the-land (LotL) techniques often adopted by threat actors to conceal rogue activity and fly under the radar. Prominent among the methods by which GitHub is  abused   relates  to  payload   delivery , with some actors leveraging its features for command-and-control (C2) obfuscation. Last month, Reve...

An ongoing campaign targeting ministries of foreign affairs of NATO-aligned countries points to the involvement of Russian threat actors. The phishing attacks feature PDF documents with diplomatic lures, some of which are disguised as coming from Germany, to deliver a variant of a malware called  Duke , which has been attributed to  APT29  (aka BlueBravo, Cloaked Ursa, Cozy Bear, Iron Hemlock, Midnight Blizzard, and The Dukes). "The threat actor used Zulip – an open-source chat application – for command-and-control, to evade and hide its activities behind legitimate web traffic," Dutch cybersecurity company EclecticIQ  said  in an analysis last week. The infection sequence is as follows: The PDF attachment, named "Farewell to Ambassador of Germany," comes embedded with JavaScript code that initiates a multi-stage process to leave a persistent backdoor on compromised networks. APT29's use of invitation themes has been previously reported by Lab52, which...

The Russian nation-state actor known as  BlueBravo  has been observed targeting diplomatic entities throughout Eastern Europe with the goal of delivering a new backdoor called GraphicalProton, exemplifying the continuous evolution of the threat. The phishing campaign is characterized by the use of legitimate internet services (LIS) for command-and-control (C2) obfuscation, Recorded Future said in a new report published Thursday. The activity was observed between March and May 2023. BlueBravo , also known by the names APT29, Cloaked Ursa, and Midnight Blizzard (formerly Nobelium), is attributed to Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and has in the past  used  Dropbox, Firebase, Google Drive, Notion, and Trello to evade detection and stealthily establish communications with infected hosts. To that end, GraphicalProton is the latest addition to a long list of malware targeting diplomatic organizations after  GraphicalNeutrino  (aka SNOWYAMBER),...

A widely used NPM package called ' Pac-Resolver ' for the JavaScript programming language has been remediated with a fix for a high-severity remote code execution vulnerability that could be abused to run malicious code inside Node.js applications whenever HTTP requests are sent.  The flaw, tracked as  CVE-2021-23406 , has a severity rating of 8.1 on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system and affects Pac-Resolver versions before 5.0.0. A Proxy Auto-Configuration ( PAC ) file is a JavaScript function that determines whether web browser requests should be routed directly to the destination or forwarded to a web proxy server for a given hostname. PAC files are how proxy rules are distributed in enterprise environments. "This package is used for PAC file support in  Pac-Proxy-Agent , which is used in turn in  Proxy-Agent , which then used all over the place as the standard go-to package for HTTP proxy auto-detection and configuration in Node.js," Tim Perry  said...

Human rights activists in Morocco and the Western Sahara region are the targets of a new threat actor that leverages phishing attacks to trick victims into installing bogus Android apps and serve credential harvesting pages for Windows users. Cisco Talos is  tracking  the activity cluster under the name  Starry Addax , describing it as primarily singling out activists associated with the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR). Starry Addax's infrastructure – ondroid[.]site and ondroid[.]store – is designed to target both Android and Windows users, with the latter involving fake websites masquerading as login pages for popular social media websites. In light of active investigation into the campaign, Talos said it cannot publicly disclose which websites are being targeted with credential harvesting attacks. "However, the threat actors are establishing their own infrastructure and hosting credential harvesting pages such as fake login pages for media and email servic...