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Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two malicious Rust crates impersonating a legitimate library called fast_log to steal Solana and Ethereum wallet keys from source code. The crates, named faster_log and async_println, were published by the threat actor under the alias rustguruman and dumbnbased on May 25, 2025, amassing 8,424 downloads in total, according to software supply chain security company Socket. "The crates include working logging code for cover and embed routines that scan source files for Solana and Ethereum private keys, then exfiltrate matches via HTTP POST to a hardcoded command and control (C2) endpoint," security researcher Kirill Boychenko said . Following responsible disclosure, the maintainers of crates.io have taken steps to remove the Rust packages and disable the two accounts. It has also preserved logs of the threat actor-operated users along with the malicious crates for further analysis. "The malicious code was executed at runtime...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two new extensions on Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) Marketplace that are designed to infect developer machines with stealer malware. The VS Code extensions masquerade as a premium dark theme and an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistant, but, in actuality, harbor covert functionality to download additional payloads, take screenshots, and siphon data. The captured information is then sent to an attacker-controlled server. "Your code. Your emails. Your Slack DMs. Whatever's on your screen, they're seeing it too," Koi Security's Idan Dardikman said . "And that's just the start. It also steals your WiFi passwords, reads your clipboard, and hijacks your browser sessions." The names of the extensions are below - BigBlack.bitcoin-black (16 installs) - Removed by Microsoft on December 5, 2025  BigBlack.codo-ai (25 installs) - Removed by Microsoft on December 8, 2025 Microsoft's l...

"Test files" associated with the  XZ Utils backdoor  have made their way to a Rust crate known as  liblzma-sys , new  findings  from Phylum reveal. liblzma-sys, which has been downloaded over 21,000 times to date, provides Rust developers with bindings to the liblzma implementation, an underlying library that is part of the  XZ Utils  data compression software. The impacted version in question is 0.3.2. "The current distribution (v0.3.2) on Crates.io contains the test files for XZ that contain the backdoor," Phylum  noted  in a GitHub issue raised on April 9, 2024. "The test files themselves are not included in either the .tar.gz nor the .zip tags  here on GitHub  and are only present in liblzma-sys_0.3.2.crate that is installed from Crates.io." Following responsible disclosure, the files in question ("tests/files/bad-3-corrupt_lzma2.xz" and "tests/files/good-large_compressed.lzma") have since been removed from liblzma-sys vers...

An active malware campaign is targeting the Python Package Index (PyPI) and npm repositories for Python and JavaScript with typosquatted and fake modules that deploy a ransomware strain, marking the latest security issue to affect software supply chains. The typosquatted Python packages all impersonate the popular  requests library : dequests, fequests, gequests, rdquests, reauests, reduests, reeuests, reqhests, reqkests, requesfs, requesta, requeste, requestw, requfsts, resuests, rewuests, rfquests, rrquests, rwquests, telnservrr, and tequests. According to  Phylum , the rogue packages embed source code that retrieves a Golang-based ransomware binary from a remote server depending on the victim's operating system and microarchitecture. Successful execution causes the victim's desktop background to be changed to an actor-controlled image that claims to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). It's also designed to encrypt files and demand a $100 ransom in cryptocurr...

Researchers have pulled back the curtain on an updated version of an Apple macOS malware called RustBucket that comes with improved capabilities to establish persistence and avoid detection by security software. "This variant of RustBucket, a malware family that targets macOS systems, adds persistence capabilities not previously observed," Elastic Security Labs researchers  said  in a report published this week, adding it's "leveraging a dynamic network infrastructure methodology for command-and-control." RustBucket is the work of a North Korean threat actor known as BlueNoroff, which is part of a larger intrusion set tracked under the name  Lazarus Group , an elite hacking unit supervised by the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB), the country's primary intelligence agency. The malware came to light in April 2023, when Jamf Threat Labs  described  it as an AppleScript-based backdoor capable of retrieving a second-stage payload from a remote server. Ela...

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...

Monday opens with a trust problem. A mail server flaw is under active use. A network control system was targeted. Trusted packages were poisoned. A fake model page pushed a stealer. Then came the familiar ransom claim: the data was returned and deleted. The pattern is clear. One weak dependency can leak keys. One leaked key can open cloud access. One cloud foothold can become a production incident. AI is speeding up vulnerability discovery, attackers are moving quickly, and old exposure still keeps paying off. Patch the quiet risks first. Let’s get into it. ⚡ Threat of the Week On-Prem Microsoft Exchange Server Exploited in the Wild —Microsoft disclosed a security vulnerability impacting on-premise versions of Exchange Server, which has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-42897 (CVSS score: 8.1), has been described as a spoofing bug stemming from a cross-site scripting flaw. An anonymous researcher has been credited with discovering ...

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as ScarCruft is said to have been behind a never-before-seen Android surveillance tool named KoSpy targeting Korean and English-speaking users. Lookout, which shared details of the malware campaign, said the earliest versions date back to March 2022. The most recent samples were flagged in March 2024. It's not clear how successful these efforts were. "KoSpy can collect extensive data, such as SMS messages, call logs, location, files, audio, and screenshots via dynamically loaded plugins," the company said in an analysis. The malicious artifacts masquerade as utility applications on the official Google Play Store, using the names File Manager, Phone Manager, Smart Manager, Software Update Utility, and Kakao Security to trick unsuspecting users into infecting their own devices. All the identified apps offer the promised functionality to avoid raising suspicion while stealthily deploying spyware-related components in the backg...

An investigation into the compromise of an Amazon Web Services (AWS)-hosted infrastructure has led to the discovery of a new GNU/Linux rootkit dubbed LinkPro , according to findings from Synacktiv. "This backdoor features functionalities relying on the installation of two eBPF [extended Berkeley Packet Filter] modules, on the one hand to conceal itself, and on the other hand to be remotely activated upon receiving a 'magic packet,'" security researcher Théo Letailleur said . The infection, per the French cybersecurity company, involved the attackers exploiting an exposed Jenkins server vulnerable to CVE-2024-23897 (CVSS score: 9.8) as the starting point, following which a malicious Docker Hub image named "kvlnt/vv" (now removed) was deployed on several Kubernetes clusters. The Docker image consists of a Kali Linux base along with a folder called "app" containing three files - start.sh, a shell script to start the SSH service and execute the...

In yet another sign that developers continue to be targets of software supply chain attacks, a number of malicious packages have been discovered on the Rust programming language's crate registry. The libraries, uploaded between August 14 and 16, 2023, were published by a user named "amaperf," Phylum  said  in a report published last week. The names of the packages, now taken down, are as follows: postgress, if-cfg, xrvrv, serd, oncecell, lazystatic, and envlogger. It's not clear what the end goal of the campaign was, but the suspicious modules were found to harbor functionalities to capture the operating system information (i.e., Windows, Linux, macOS, or Unknown) and transmit the data to a hard-coded Telegram channel via the messaging platform's API. This suggests that the campaign may have been in its early stages and that the threat actor may have been casting a wide net to compromise as many developer machines as possible to deliver rogue updates with imp...

A previously undocumented threat cluster dubbed UAT-10362 has been attributed to spear-phishing campaigns targeting Taiwanese non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and suspected universities to deploy a new Lua-based malware called LucidRook. "LucidRook is a sophisticated stager that embeds a Lua interpreter and Rust-compiled libraries within a dynamic-link library (DLL) to download and execute staged Lua bytecode payloads," Cisco Talos researcher Ashley Shen said . The cybersecurity company said it discovered the activity in October 2025, with the attack using RAR or 7-Zip archives lures to deliver a dropper called LucidPawn, which then opens a decoy file and launches LucidRook. A notable characteristic of the intrusion set is the use of DLL side-loading to execute both LucidPawn and LucidRook. There are two distinct infection chains that lead to LucidRook, one using a Windows Shortcut (LNK) file with a PDF icon and another involving an executable that masquer...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered malicious code in an npm package after a malicious package as a dependency to the project by Anthropic's Claude Opus large language model (LLM). The package in question is " @validate-sdk/v2 ," which is listed on npm as a utility software development kit (SDK) for hashing, validation, encoding/decoding, and secure random generation. However, its real functionality is to plunder sensitive secrets from the compromised environment. The package, which shows signs of being vibe-coded using generative artificial intelligence (AI), was first uploaded to the repository in October 2025. The malware campaign has been codenamed PromptMink by ReversingLabs, which linked the activity as part of a broader campaign mounted by the North Korean threat actor known as Famous Chollima (aka Shifty Corsair), which is behind the long-running Contagious Interview campaign and the fraudulent IT Worker scam . "The new malware campaign [...] inv...

The first ThreatsDay Bulletin of 2026 lands on a day that already feels symbolic — new year, new breaches, new tricks. If the past twelve months taught defenders anything, it’s that threat actors don’t pause for holidays or resolutions. They just evolve faster. This week’s round-up shows how subtle shifts in behavior, from code tweaks to job scams, are rewriting what “cybercrime” looks like in practice. Across the landscape, big players are being tested, familiar threats are mutating, and smaller stories are quietly signaling bigger patterns ahead. The trend isn’t about one big breach anymore; it’s about many small openings that attackers exploit with precision. The pace of exploitation, deception, and persistence hasn’t slowed; it’s only become more calculated. Each update in this edition highlights how the line between normal operations and compromise is getting thinner by the week. Here’s a sharp look at what’s moving beneath the surface of the cybersecurity world as 2026 begin...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new cloud targeting, peer-to-peer (P2P) worm called  P2PInfect  that targets vulnerable Redis instances for follow-on exploitation. "P2PInfect exploits Redis servers running on both Linux and Windows Operating Systems making it more scalable and potent than other worms," Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researchers William Gamazo and Nathaniel Quist  said . "This worm is also written in Rust, a highly scalable and cloud-friendly programming language." It's estimated that as many as 934 unique Redis systems may be vulnerable to the threat. The first known instance of P2PInfect was detected on July 11, 2023. A notable characteristic of the worm is its ability to infects vulnerable Redis instances by exploiting a critical Lua sandbox escape vulnerability,  CVE-2022-0543  (CVSS score: 10.0), which has been previously exploited to deliver multiple  malware families  such as  Muhstik ,  Redigo , and  H...

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...

Ever wonder what happens when attackers don’t break the rules—they just follow them better than we do? When systems work exactly as they’re built to, but that “by design” behavior quietly opens the door to risk? This week brings stories that make you stop and rethink what’s truly under control. It’s not always about a broken firewall or missed patch—it’s about the small choices, default settings, and shortcuts that feel harmless until they’re not. The real surprise? Sometimes the threat doesn’t come from outside—it’s baked right into how things are set up. Dive in to see what’s quietly shaping today’s security challenges. ⚡ Threat of the Week FBI Warns of Scattered Spider's on Airlines — The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has warned of a new set of attacks mounted by the notorious cybercrime group Scattered Spider targeting the airline sector using sophisticated social engineering techniques to obtain initial access. Cybersecurity vendors Palo Alto Networks Unit 4...

Bad week. Turns out the easiest way to get hacked in 2026 is still the same old garbage: shady packages, fake apps, forgotten DNS junk, scam ads, and stolen logins getting dumped into Discord channels like it’s normal. Some of these attack chains don’t even feel sophisticated anymore. More like some tired guy with a Telegram account and too much free time. The worst part is how often this stuff still works. Meanwhile, AI tools are speeding up exploit hunting, browsers are keeping passwords sitting in memory for “performance reasons,” and even ransomware crews are pushing broken builds into the wild. Everybody’s scrambling to patch faster because attackers are automating faster. Anyway. ThreatsDay’s rough this week. Let’s get into it. Credential theft campaign New MicroStealer Spotted A new stealer called MicroStealer has been observed targeting education and telecom sectors to steal sensitive data. It was first observed in the wild in...