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Hackers have long used Word and Excel documents as delivery vehicles for malware, and in 2025, these tricks are far from outdated. From phishing schemes to zero-click exploits, malicious Office files are still one of the easiest ways into a victim's system. Here are the top three Microsoft Office-based exploits still making the rounds this year and what you need to know to avoid them. 1. Phishing in MS Office: Still Hackers' Favorite Phishing attacks using Microsoft Office files have been around for years, and they're still going strong. Why? Because they work, especially in business environments where teams constantly exchange Word and Excel documents. Attackers know that people are used to opening Office files, especially if they come from what looks like a colleague, a client, or a partner. A fake invoice, a shared report, or a job offer: it doesn't take much to convince someone to click. And once the file is open, the attacker has their chance. Phishing with Offic...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malicious package named "os-info-checker-es6" that disguises itself as an operating system information utility to stealthily drop a next-stage payload onto compromised systems. "This campaign employs clever Unicode-based steganography to hide its initial malicious code and utilizes a Google Calendar event short link as a dynamic dropper for its final payload," Veracode said in a r eport shared with The Hacker News. "Os-info-checker-es6" was first published in the npm registry on March 19, 2025, by a user named "kim9123." It has been downloaded 2,001 times as of writing. The same user has also uploaded another npm package called "skip-tot" that lists "os-info-checker-es6" as a dependency. The package has been downloaded 94 times . While the initial five versions exhibited no signs of data exfiltration or malicious behavior, a subsequent iteration uploaded on May 7, 2025, has ...

If you have visited any popular mainstream website over the past two months, your computer may have been infected — Thanks to a new exploit kit discovered by security researchers. Researchers from antivirus provider ESET released a report on Tuesday stating that they have discovered an exploit kit, dubbed Stegano , hiding malicious code in the pixels of banner advertisements that are currently in rotation on several high profile news websites. Stegano originally dates back to 2014, but since early October this year, cyber crooks had managed to get the malicious ads displayed on a variety of unnamed reputable news websites, each with Millions of daily visitors. Stegano derived from the word Steganography , which is a technique of hiding messages and content inside a digital graphic image, making the content impossible to spot with the naked eye. In this particular malvertising campaign, operators hide malicious code inside transparent PNG image's Alpha Channel, which def...

SaaS Adoption is Skyrocketing, Resilience Hasn't Kept Pace SaaS platforms have revolutionized how businesses operate. They simplify collaboration, accelerate deployment, and reduce the overhead of managing infrastructure. But with their rise comes a subtle, dangerous assumption: that the convenience of SaaS extends to resilience. It doesn't. These platforms weren't built with full-scale data protection in mind . Most follow a shared responsibility model — wherein the provider ensures uptime and application security, but the data inside is your responsibility. In a world of hybrid architectures, global teams, and relentless cyber threats, that responsibility is harder than ever to manage. Modern organizations are being stretched across: Hybrid and multi-cloud environments with decentralized data sprawl Complex integration layers between IaaS, SaaS, and legacy systems Expanding regulatory pressure with steeper penalties for noncompliance Escalating ransomware threats and inside...

Do you know how many kinds of sensors your smartphone has inbuilt? And what data they gather about your physical and digital activities? An average smartphone these days is packed with a wide array of sensors such as GPS, Camera, microphone, accelerometer, magnetometer, proximity, gyroscope, pedometer, and NFC, to name a few. Now, according to a team of scientists from Newcastle University in the UK, hackers can potentially guess PINs and passwords – that you enter either on a bank website, app, your lock screen – to a surprising degree of accuracy by monitoring your phone's sensors, like the angle and motion of your phone while you are typing. The danger comes due to the way malicious websites and apps access most of a smartphone's internal sensors without requesting any permission to access them – doesn't matter even if you are accessing a secure website over HTTPS to enter your password. Your Phone doesn't Restrict Apps from Accessing Sensors' Data ...

Due to the majority in the mobile platform, Google's Android operating system has been a prior target for cybercriminals and a recently exposed weakness in the way the operating system handles certificate validation, left millions of Android devices open to attack. Researchers at BlueBox security , who identified the vulnerability, dubbed the flaw as Fake ID , which affects all versions of Android operating system from 2.1 ( released in 2010 ) up to Android 4.4, also known as KitKat . ALL VERSIONS ARE VULNERABLE UPTO KITKAT Researchers marked the vulnerability as critical because it could allow a fake and malicious app to masquerade as a legitimate and trusted application, enabling an attacker to perform various actions such as inserting malicious code into a legitimate app, infiltrating your personal information or even take complete control of an affected device. Specifically, devices running the 3LM administration extension are at risk for a complete compromise, whic...

India-linked highly targeted mobile malware campaign, first unveiled two weeks ago , has been found to be part of a broader campaign targeting multiple platforms, including windows devices and possibly Android as well. As reported in our previous article , earlier this month researchers at Talos threat intelligence unit discovered a group of Indian hackers abusing mobile device management (MDM) service to hijack and spy on a few targeted iPhone users in India. Operating since August 2015, the attackers have been found abusing MDM service to remotely install malicious versions of legitimate apps, including Telegram, WhatsApp, and PrayTime, onto targeted iPhones. These modified apps have been designed to secretly spy on iOS users, and steal their real-time location, SMS, contacts, photos and private messages from third-party chatting applications. During their ongoing investigation, Talos researchers identified a new MDM infrastructure and several malicious binaries – designed...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a set of flaws impacting Palo Alto Networks and SonicWall virtual private network (VPN) clients that could be potentially exploited to gain remote code execution on Windows and macOS systems. "By targeting the implicit trust VPN clients place in servers, attackers can manipulate client behaviours, execute arbitrary commands, and gain high levels of access with minimal effort," AmberWolf said in an analysis. In a hypothetical attack scenario, this plays out in the form of a rogue VPN server that can trick the clients into downloading malicious updates that can cause unintended consequences. The result of the investigation is a proof-of-concept (PoC) attack tool called NachoVPN that can simulate such VPN servers and exploit the vulnerabilities to achieve privileged code execution. The identified flaws are listed below - CVE-2024-5921 (CVSS score: 5.6) - An insufficient certificate validation vulnerability impacting Palo Alto N...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new supply chain attack vector dubbed Rules File Backdoor that affects artificial intelligence (AI)-powered code editors like GitHub Copilot and Cursor, causing them to inject malicious code. "This technique enables hackers to silently compromise AI-generated code by injecting hidden malicious instructions into seemingly innocent configuration files used by Cursor and GitHub Copilot," Pillar security's Co-Founder and CTO Ziv Karliner said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. "By exploiting hidden unicode characters and sophisticated evasion techniques in the model facing instruction payload, threat actors can manipulate the AI to insert malicious code that bypasses typical code reviews." The attack vector is notable for the fact that it allows malicious code to silently propagate across projects, posing a supply chain risk. The crux of the attack hinges on the rules files that are used ...

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as Moonstone Sleet has continued to push malicious npm packages to the JavaScript package registry with the aim of infecting Windows systems, underscoring the persistent nature of their campaigns. The packages in question, harthat-api and harthat-hash , were published on July 7, 2024, according to Datadog Security Labs. Both the libraries did not attract any downloads and were shortly pulled after a brief period of time. The security arm of the cloud monitoring firm is tracking the threat actor under the name Stressed Pungsan, which exhibits overlaps with a newly discovered North Korean malicious activity cluster dubbed Moonstone Sleet. "While the name resembles the Hardhat npm package (an Ethereum development utility), its content does not indicate any intention to typosquat it," Datadog researchers Sebastian Obregoso and Zack Allen said . "The malicious package reuses code from a well-known GitHub repository called node-...

Security researchers have been warning of a new trick that cybercriminals are leveraging to hide their malicious code designed to re-introduce the infection to steal confidential information from Magento based online e-commerce websites. So, if you have already cleaned up your hacked Magento website, there are chances your website is still leaking login credentials and credit card details of your customers to hackers. More than 250,000 online stores use open-source Magento e-commerce platform, which makes them an enticing target for hackers, and therefore the security of both your data and your customer data is of the utmost importance. According to the researchers at Sucuri , who have previously spotted several Magento malware campaigns in the wild, cybercriminals are currently using a simple yet effective method to ensure that their malicious code is added back to a hacked website after it has been removed. To achieve this, criminals are hiding their 'credit card stea...

So you love Minecraft ? You might want to be very careful before downloading the cheats for the popular Minecraft game from Google Play Store. Nearly 3 Million users have downloaded malicious Minecraft Android applications for their smartphone and tablets from the Google Play store, security researchers warned. The security researchers from IT security firm ESET have uncovered as many as 33 fake "scareware" applications that have been uploaded to the Google Play store in the course of the past 9 months, masquerading as Minecraft cheats and tip guides. These malicious applications have been downloaded between 660,000 and 2.8 million times. "All of the discovered apps were fake in that they did not contain any of the promised functionality and only displayed banners that tried to trick users into believing that their Android system is infected with a dangerous virus," ESET researcher Lukas Stefanko wrote in a blog post . Once downloaded, these mali...

Yet another incident which showcases that you should not explicitly trust user-controlled software repositories. One of the most popular Linux distros Arch Linux has pulled as many as three user-maintained software repository AUR packages after it was found hosting malicious code. Arch Linux is an independently developed, general-purpose GNU/Linux distribution composed predominantly of free and open-source software, and supports community involvement. Besides official repositories like Arch Build System (ABS), Arch Linux users can also download software packages from several other repositories, including AUR (Arch User Repository), a community-driven repository created and managed by Arch Linux users. Since AUR packages are user-produced content, Arch maintainers always suggest Linux users to carefully check all files, especially PKGBUILD and any .install file for malicious commands. However, this AUR repository has recently been found hosting malware code in several inst...

A new campaign has targeted the npm package repository with malicious JavaScript libraries that are designed to infect Roblox users with open-source stealer malware such as Skuld and Blank-Grabber . "This incident highlights the alarming ease with which threat actors can launch supply chain attacks by exploiting trust and human error within the open source ecosystem, and using readily available commodity malware, public platforms like GitHub for hosting malicious executables, and communication channels like Discord and Telegram for C2 operations to bypass traditional security measures," Socket security researcher Kirill Boychenko said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The list of malicious packages is as follows - node-dlls (77 downloads) ro.dll (74 downloads) autoadv (66 downloads) rolimons-api (107 downloads) It's worth pointing out that "node-dlls" is an attempt on part of the threat actor to masquerade as the legitimate node-dll packa...

A widely used third-party NodeJS module with nearly 2 million downloads a week was compromised after one of its open-source contributor gone rogue, who infected it with a malicious code that was programmed to steal funds stored in Bitcoin wallet apps. The Node.js library in question is "Event-Stream," a toolkit that makes it easy for developers to create and work with streams, a collection of data in Node.js — just like arrays or strings. The malicious code detected earlier this week was added to Event-Stream version 3.3.6, published on September 9 via NPM repository , and had since been downloaded by nearly 8 million application programmers. Event-Stream module for Node.js was originally created by Dominic Tarr, who maintained the Event-Stream library for a long time, but handed over the development and maintenance of the project several months ago to an unknown programmer, called "right9ctrl." Apparently, right9ctrl gained Dominic's trust by making...

Android -  a widely used Smartphone platform offered by Google is once again suspected to affect its users with malicious software that puts their android devices at risk. This time the vulnerabilities occur in the way Android handle the updates to add new flavors to your device. Researchers from Indiana University and Microsoft have discovered [ Paper PDF ] a new set of Android vulnerabilities that is capable to carry out privilege escalation attacks because of the weakness in its Package Management Service (PMS) that puts more than one billion Android devices at risk. The researchers dubbed the new set of security-critical vulnerabilities as Pileup flaws which is a short for privilege escalation through updating, that waylays inside the Android PMS and intensifies the permissions offered to malicious apps whenever an android update occurs, without informing users. The research was carried out by Indiana University Bloomington researchers, Luyi Xing, Xiaorui Pan...