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Germany's Federal Office of Information Security (BSI) has announced that it has disrupted a malware operation called BADBOX that came preloaded on at least 30,000 internet-connected devices sold across the country. In a statement published earlier this week, authorities said they severed the communications between the devices and their command-and-control (C2) servers by sinkholing the domains in question. Impacted devices include digital picture frames, media players, and streamers, and likely phones and tablets. "What all of these devices have in common is that they have outdated Android versions and were delivered with pre-installed malware," the BSI said in a press release. BADBOX was first documented by HUMAN's Satori Threat Intelligence and Research team in October 2023, describing it as a "complex threat actor scheme" that involves deploying the Triada Android malware on low-cost, off-brand Android devices by exploiting weak supply chain links...

A Russian hacker indicted by a United States court for his involvement in online ad fraud schemes that defrauded multiple American companies out of tens of millions of dollars pleaded not guilty on Friday in a courtroom in Brooklyn, New York. Aleksandr Zhukov , 38, was arrested in November last year by Bulgarian authorities after the U.S. issued an international warrant against him, and was extradited by Bulgaria to the United States on Thursday (January 18, 2019). He is currently in prison in Brooklyn. In November 2018, law enforcement and multiple security firms collaborated to shut down one of the largest digital ad-fraud schemes, which they dubbed 3ve , that infected over 1.7 million computers worldwide to generate fake clicks used to defraud digital advertisers for years and made tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Pronounced "Eve," the online ad-fraud campaign was believed to have been active since at least 2014, but its fraudulent activity grew last yea...

India's telecommunications ministry has ordered major mobile device manufacturers to preload a government-backed cybersecurity app named Sanchar Saathi on all new phones within 90 days. According to a report from Reuters, the app cannot be deleted or disabled from users' devices. Sanchar Saathi , available on the web and via mobile apps for Android and iOS, allows users to report suspected fraud, spam, and malicious web links through call, SMS, or WhatsApp; block stolen handsets; and allow a mobile subscriber to check the number of mobile connections taken in their name. One of its important features is the ability to report incoming international calls that start with the country code for India (i.e., +91) to facilitate fraud. "Such international calls are received by illegal telecom setups over the internet from foreign countries and sent to Indian citizens disguised as domestic calls," the government notes on the website. "Reporting about such calls help...

As the travel industry rebounds post-pandemic, it is increasingly targeted by automated threats, with the sector experiencing nearly 21% of all bot attack requests last year. That’s according to research from Imperva, a Thales company. In their 2024 Bad Bot Report , Imperva finds that bad bots accounted for 44.5% of the industry’s web traffic in 2023—a significant jump from 37.4% in 2022.  The summer travel season and major European sporting events are expected to drive increased consumer demand for flights, accommodation, and other travel-related services. As a result, Imperva warns that the industry could see a surge in bot activity. These bots target the industry through unauthorized scraping, seat spinning, account takeover, and fraud. From Scraping to Fraud Bots are software applications that run automated tasks across the internet. Many of these tasks, from indexing websites for search engines to monitoring website performance, are legitimate, but a growing number are not...

Online account creation poses a challenge for engineers and system architects: if you put up too many barriers, you risk turning away genuine users. Make it too easy, and you risk fraud or fake accounts. The Problem with Identity Verification The traditional model of online identity – username/email and password – has long outlived its usefulness. This is how multi-factor or two-factor authentication (MFA or 2FA) has come into play, to patch up vulnerabilities of the so-called knowledge-based model, usually by SMS passcode to verify possession of a mobile phone number. The simplicity of SMS-based verification has taken apps by storm – it's the default option, as most users have a mobile phone. Yet bad actors have learned how to exploit this verification method, leading to the menace of  SIM swap fraud , which is alarmingly easy to pull off and rising rapidly in incidents. There's been no lack of effort in finding a more secure factor that is still universal. For example, b...

A new piece of JavaScript malware has been observed attempting to steal users' online banking account credentials as part of a campaign that has targeted more than 40 financial institutions across the world. The activity cluster, which employs JavaScript web injections, is estimated to have led to at least 50,000 infected user sessions spanning North America, South America, Europe, and Japan. IBM Security Trusteer said it detected the campaign in March 2023. "Threat actors' intention with the web injection module is likely to compromise popular banking applications and, once the malware is installed, intercept the users' credentials in order to then access and likely monetize their banking information," security researcher Tal Langus  said . Attack chains are characterized by the use of scripts loaded from the threat actor-controlled server ("jscdnpack[.]com"), specifically targeting a page structure that's common to several banks. It's susp...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a Chinese-speaking cybercrime group codenamed UAT-8099 that has been attributed to search engine optimization (SEO) fraud and theft of high-value credentials, configuration files, and certificate data.  The attacks are designed to target Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) servers, with most of the infections reported in India, Thailand, Vietnam, Canada, and Brazil, spanning universities, tech firms, and telecom providers. The group was first discovered in April 2025. The targets are primarily mobile users, encompassing both Android and Apple iPhone devices. UAT-8099 is the latest China-linked actor to engage in SEO fraud for financial gain. As recently as last month, ESET revealed details of another threat actor named GhostRedirector that has managed to compromise at least 65 Windows servers primarily located in Brazil, Thailand, and Vietnam with a malicious IIS module codenamed Gamshen to facilitate SEO fraud. "UAT-809...

Cybersecurity researchers have lifted the lid on a previously undocumented threat cluster dubbed GhostRedirector that has managed to compromise at least 65 Windows servers primarily located in Brazil, Thailand, and Vietnam. The attacks, per Slovak cybersecurity company ESET, led to the deployment of a passive C++ backdoor called Rungan and a native Internet Information Services (IIS) module codenamed Gamshen. The threat actor is believed to be active since at least August 2024. "While Rungan has the capability of executing commands on a compromised server, the purpose of Gamshen is to provide SEO fraud as-a-service, i.e., to manipulate search engine results, boosting the page ranking of a configured target website," ESET researcher Fernando Tavella said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Even though Gamshen only modifies the response when the request comes from Googlebot – i.e., it does not serve malicious content or otherwise affect regular visitors of the ...

The comfort zone in cybersecurity is gone. Attackers are scaling down, focusing tighter, and squeezing more value from fewer, high-impact targets. At the same time, defenders face growing blind spots — from spoofed messages to large-scale social engineering. This week’s findings show how that shrinking margin of safety is redrawing the threat landscape. Here’s what’s making headlines. Hijack Loader expands its reach in Latin America LATAM Targeted by PureHVNC Phishing emails containing SVG file attachments targeting Colombian, Spanish-speaking individuals with themes relating to the Attorney General's office of Colombia have been used to deliver PureHVNC RAT . "The emails entice the user to download an 'official document' from the judicial information system, which starts the infection chain of executing a Hijack Loader executable that leads to the PureHVNC Remote Access Trojan (RAT)," IBM X-Force said . The activity w...

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...