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Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new cryptojacking campaign that employs vulnerable drivers to disable known security solutions (EDRs) and thwart detection in what's called a Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver ( BYOVD ) attack. Elastic Security Labs is tracking the campaign under the name REF4578 and the primary payload as GHOSTENGINE. Previous research from Chinese cybersecurity firm Antiy Labs has codenamed the activity as HIDDEN SHOVEL. "GHOSTENGINE leverages vulnerable drivers to terminate and delete known EDR agents that would likely interfere with the deployed and well-known coin miner," Elastic researchers Salim Bitam, Samir Bousseaden, Terrance DeJesus, and Andrew Pease said . "This campaign involved an uncommon amount of complexity to ensure both the installation and persistence of the XMRig miner." It all starts with an executable file ("Tiworker.exe"), which is used to run a PowerShell script that retrieves an obfuscated Power...

Threat hunters have uncovered similarities between a banking malware called Coyote and a newly disclosed malicious program dubbed Maverick that has been propagated via WhatsApp. According to a report from CyberProof, both malware strains are written in .NET, target Brazilian users and banks, and feature identical functionality to decrypt, targeting banking URLs and monitor banking applications. More importantly, both include the ability to spread through WhatsApp Web . Maverick was first documented by Trend Micro early last month, attributing it to a threat actor dubbed Water Saci . The campaign involves two components: A self-propagating malware referred to as SORVEPOTEL that's spread via the desktop web version of WhatsApp and is used to deliver a ZIP archive containing the Maverick payload. The malware is designed to monitor active browser window tabs for URLs that match a hard-coded list of financial institutions in Latin America. Should the URLs match, it establishes con...

The popular HTTP client known as Axios has suffered a supply chain attack after two newly published versions of the npm package introduced a malicious dependency that delivers a trojan capable of targeting Windows, macOS, and Linux systems. Versions 1.14.1 and 0.30.4 of Axios have been found to inject " plain-crypto-js " version 4.2.1 as a fake dependency. According to StepSecurity, the two versions were published using the compromised npm credentials of the primary Axios maintainer ("jasonsaayman"), allowing the attackers to bypass the project's GitHub Actions CI/CD pipeline. "Its sole purpose is to execute a postinstall script that acts as a cross-platform remote access trojan (RAT) dropper, targeting macOS, Windows, and Linux," security researcher Ashish Kurmi said . "The dropper contacts a live command and control server and delivers platform-specific second-stage payloads. After execution, the malware deletes itself and replaces its own...

Threat actors with ties to North Korea have been observed targeting Web3 and cryptocurrency-related businesses with malware written in the Nim programming language, underscoring a constant evolution of their tactics. "Unusually for macOS malware, the threat actors employ a process injection technique and remote communications via wss, the TLS-encrypted version of the WebSocket protocol," SentinelOne researchers Phil Stokes and Raffaele Sabato said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "A novel persistence mechanism takes advantage of SIGINT/SIGTERM signal handlers to install persistence when the malware is terminated or the system rebooted." The cybersecurity company is tracking the malware components collectively under the name NimDoor. It's worth noting that some aspects of the campaign were previously documented by Huntabil.IT and later by Huntress and Validin , but with differences in the payloads deployed. The attack chains involve social enginee...

Ransomware doesn’t hit all at once—it slowly floods your defenses in stages. Like a ship subsumed with water, the attack starts quietly, below the surface, with subtle warning signs that are easy to miss. By the time encryption starts, it’s too late to stop the flood.  Each stage of a ransomware attack offers a small window to detect and stop the threat before it’s too late. The problem is most organizations aren’t monitoring for early warning signs - allowing attackers to quietly disable backups, escalate privileges, and evade detection until encryption locks everything down. By the time the ransomware note appears, your opportunities are gone.  Let’s unpack the stages of a ransomware attack, how to stay resilient amidst constantly morphing indicators of compromise (IOCs), and why constant validation of your defense is a must to stay resilient. The Three Stages of a Ransomware Attack - and How to Detect It Ransomware attacks don’t happen instantly. Attackers follow a st...

An active malware campaign targeting Latin America is dispensing a new variant of a banking trojan called  BBTok , particularly users in Brazil and Mexico. "The BBTok banker has a dedicated functionality that replicates the interfaces of more than 40 Mexican and Brazilian banks, and tricks the victims into entering its 2FA code to their bank accounts or into entering their payment card number," Check Point  said  in research published this week. The payloads are generated by a custom server-side PowerShell script and are unique for each victim based on the operating system and country, while being delivered via phishing emails that leverage a variety of file types. BBTok is a Windows-based banking malware that  first surfaced  in 2020. It's equipped with features that run the typical trojan gamut, allowing it to enumerate and kill processes, issue remote commands, manipulate keyboard, and serve fake login pages for banks operating in the two countries. The ...

Emotet, a notorious email-based malware behind several botnet-driven spam campaigns and ransomware attacks, contained a flaw that allowed cybersecurity researchers to activate a kill-switch and prevent the malware from infecting systems for six months. "Most of the vulnerabilities and exploits that you read about are good news for attackers and bad news for the rest of us," Binary Defense's James Quinn said. "However, it's important to keep in mind that malware is software that can also have flaws. Just as attackers can exploit flaws in legitimate software to cause harm, defenders can also reverse-engineer malware to discover its vulnerabilities and then exploit those to defeat the malware." The kill-switch was alive between February 6, 2020, to August 6, 2020, for 182 days, before the malware authors patched their malware and closed the vulnerability. Since its first identification in 2014, Emotet has evolved from its initial roots as a banking ...

The ransomware group known as Qilin (aka Agenda, Gold Feather, and Water Galura) has claimed more than 40 victims every month since the start of 2025, barring January, with the number of postings on its data leak site touching a high of 100 cases in June. The development comes as the ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation has emerged as one of the most active ransomware groups , accounting for 84 victims each in the months of August and September 2025. The Russian-speaking threat group emerged around July 2022. According to data compiled by Cisco Talos, the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France, and Germany are some of the countries most impacted by Qilin. The attacks have primarily singled out manufacturing (23%), professional and scientific services (18%), and wholesale trade (10%) sectors. Attacks mounted by Qilin affiliates have likely leveraged leaked administrative credentials on the dark web for initial access using a VPN interface, followed by performing RDP connections to th...

Google has formally attributed the supply chain compromise of the popular Axios npm package to a financially motivated North Korean threat activity cluster tracked as UNC1069 . "We have attributed the attack to a suspected North Korean threat actor we track as UNC1069," John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG), told The Hacker News in a statement. "North Korean hackers have deep experience with supply chain attacks, which they've historically used to steal cryptocurrency. The full breadth of this incident is still unclear, but given the popularity of the compromised package, we expect it will have far reaching impacts." The development comes after threat actors seized control of the package maintainer's npm account to push two trojanized versions 1.14.1 and 0.30.4 that introduced a malicious dependency named "plain-crypto-js" in order to deliver a cross-platform backdoor capable of infecting Windows, macOS, an...

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of an active malicious campaign that's targeting the workforce in the Czech Republic with a previously undocumented botnet dubbed PowMix since at least December 2025. "PowMix employs randomized command-and-control (C2) beaconing intervals, rather than persistent connection to the C2 server, to evade the network signature detections," Cisco Talos researcher Chetan Raghuprasad said in a report published today. "PowMix embeds the encrypted heartbeat data along with unique identifiers of the victim machine into the C2 URL paths, mimicking legitimate REST API URLs. PowMix has the capability to remotely update the new C2 domain to the botnet configuration file dynamically." The attack chain begins with a malicious ZIP file, likely delivered via a phishing email, to activate a multi-stage infection chain that drops PowMix. Specifically, it involves a Windows Shortcut (LNK) that's used to launch a PowerShell loader, which ...

Canadian organizations have emerged as the focus of a targeted cyber campaign orchestrated by a threat activity cluster known as STAC6565 . Cybersecurity company Sophos said it investigated almost 40 intrusions linked to the threat actor between February 2024 and August 2025. The campaign is assessed with high confidence to share overlaps with a hacking group known as Gold Blade , which is also tracked under the names Earth Kapre, RedCurl, and Red Wolf. The financially motivated threat actor is believed to be active since late 2018 , initially targeting entities in Russia, before expanding its focus to entities in Canada, Germany, Norway, Russia, Slovenia, Ukraine, the U.K., and the U.S. The group has a history of using phishing emails to conduct commercial espionage. However, recent attack waves have found RedCurl to have engaged in ransomware attacks using a bespoke malware strain dubbed QWCrypt . One of the notable tools in the threat actor's arsenal is RedLoader, which s...

A newly emerged ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) gang called Chaos is likely made up of former members of the BlackSuit crew , as the latter's dark web infrastructure has been the subject of a law enforcement seizure. Chaos, which sprang forth in February 2025, is the latest entrant in the ransomware landscape to conduct big-game hunting and double extortion attacks. "Chaos RaaS actors initiated low-effort spam flooding, escalating to voice-based social engineering for access, followed by RMM tool abuse for persistent connection and legitimate file-sharing software for data exfiltration," Cisco Talos researchers Anna Bennett, James Nutland, and Chetan Raghuprasad said . "The ransomware utilizes multi-threaded rapid selective encryption, anti-analysis techniques, and targets both local and network resources, maximizing impact while hindering detection and recovery." It's important to note here that the ransomware group is unrelated to the Chaos ransomware ...

This week, the shadows moved faster than the patches. While most teams were still triaging last month’s alerts, attackers had already turned control panels into kill switches, kernels into open doors, and open-source pipelines into silent delivery systems. The game has shifted from breach to occupation. They’re living inside SaaS sessions, pushing code with trusted commits, and scaling operations like legitimate businesses — except their product is chaos. And the underground is getting uncomfortably professional. Here’s the full weekly cybersecurity recap: ⚡ Threat of the Week cPanel Flaw Comes Under Attack —A critical flaw in cPanel and WebHost Manager (WHM) has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-41940, could result in an authentication bypass and allow remote attackers to gain elevated control of the control panel. In some cases , the attacks have led to a complete wipe of entire websites and backups. Other attacks have deployed ...

This week, cyber attackers are moving quickly, and businesses need to stay alert. They’re finding new weaknesses in popular software and coming up with clever ways to get around security. Even one unpatched flaw could let attackers in, leading to data theft or even taking control of your systems. The clock is ticking—if defenses aren’t updated regularly, it could lead to serious damage. The message is clear: don’t wait for an attack to happen. Take action now to protect your business. Here’s a look at some of the biggest stories in cybersecurity this week: from new flaws in WinRAR and NVIDIA Triton to advanced attack techniques you should know about. Let’s get into the details. ⚡ Threat of the Week Trend Micro Warns of Actively Exploited 0-Day — Trend Micro has released temporary mitigations to address critical security flaws in on-premise versions of Apex One Management Console that it said have been exploited in the wild. The vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-54948 and CVE-2025-54987),...

It's been a summer of ransomware hold-ups, supply chain attacks and fileless attacks flying under the radar of old-school security. With malware running amok while we were lying on the beach, here's a recap of the most burning strains and trends seen in the wild during the months of July and August 2019. Malware Evolution Trends The heat must have had an effect as this summer saw malware continuing to evolve, particularly around three core trends: Evasion-by-design Malware has been increasingly designed to bypass security controls leveraging a host of tactics, most notably by: Changing hashes via file obfuscation to evade AVs. Using encrypted communication with C2 servers to foil EDRs. Using feature manipulation and tampering to trick AI, machine-learning engines, and sandboxes through the detection of such environments and the deliberate delay in execution. Fileless Attacks and Living-Off-The-Land (LOTL) Taking evasion techniques one step further, an in...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an emergent ransomware family dubbed Reynolds that comes embedded with a built-in bring your own vulnerable driver (BYOVD) component for defense evasion purposes within the ransomware payload itself. BYOVD refers to an adversarial technique that abuses legitimate but flawed driver software to escalate privileges and disable Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions so that malicious activities go unnoticed. The strategy has been adopted by many ransomware groups over the years. "Normally, the BYOVD defense evasion component of an attack would involve a distinct tool that would be deployed on the system prior to the ransomware payload in order to disable security software," the Symantec and Carbon Black Threat Hunter Team said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "However, in this attack, the vulnerable driver (an NsecSoft NSecKrnl driver) was bundled with the ransomware itself." Broadcom's ...

Another Thursday, another pile of weird security stuff that somehow happened in just seven days. Some of it is clever. Some of it is lazy. A few bits fall into that uncomfortable category of “yeah… this is probably going to show up in real incidents sooner than we’d like.” The pattern this week feels familiar in a slightly annoying way. Old tricks are getting polished. New research shows how flimsy certain assumptions really are. A couple of things that make you stop mid-scroll and think, “wait… people are actually pulling this off?” There’s also the usual mix of strange corners of the ecosystem doing strange things — infrastructure behaving a little too professionally for comfort, tools showing up where they absolutely shouldn’t, and a few cases where the weakest link is still just… people clicking stuff they probably shouldn’t. Anyway. If you’ve got five minutes and a mild curiosity about what attackers, researchers, and the broader internet gremlins were up to lately, this week’...

Israeli entities spanning academia, engineering, local government, manufacturing, technology, transportation, and utilities sectors have emerged as the target of a new set of attacks undertaken by Iranian nation-state actors that have delivered a previously undocumented backdoor called MuddyViper. The activity has been attributed by ESET to a hacking group known as MuddyWater (aka Mango Sandstorm, Static Kitten, or TA450), a cluster assessed to be affiliated with Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS). The attacks also singled out one technology company based in Egypt. The campaign took place between September 30, 2024, and March 18, 2025. The hacking group first came to light in November 2017, when Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 detailed targeted attacks against the Middle East between February and October of that year using a custom backdoor dubbed POWERSTATS. It's also known for its destructive attacks on Israeli organizations using a Thanos ransomware varian...