The Hacker News | #1 Trusted Source for Cybersecurity News — Index Page

AI agents have rapidly evolved from experimental technology to essential business tools. The OWASP framework explicitly recognizes that Non-Human Identities play a key role in agentic AI security. Their analysis highlights how these autonomous software entities can make decisions, chain complex actions together, and operate continuously without human intervention. They're no longer just tools, but an integral and significant part of your organization's workforce. Consider this reality: Today's AI agents can analyze customer data, generate reports, manage system resources, and even deploy code, all without a human clicking a single button. This shift represents both tremendous opportunity and unprecedented risk. AI Agents are only as secure as their NHIs Here's what security leaders are not necessarily considering: AI agents don't operate in isolation . To function, they need access to data, systems, and resources. This highly privileged, often overlooked acces...

The Russia-linked threat actor known as Gamaredon (aka Shuckworm) has been attributed to a cyber attack targeting a foreign military mission based in Ukraine with an aim to deliver an updated version of a known malware called GammaSteel. The group targeted the military mission of a Western country, per the Symantec Threat Hunter team, with first signs of the malicious activity detected on February 26, 2025. "The initial infection vector used by the attackers appears to have been an infected removable drive," the Broadcom-owned threat intelligence division said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The attack started with the creation of a Windows Registry value under the UserAssist key, followed by launching "mshta.exe" using "explorer.exe" to initiate a multi-stage infection chain and launch two files. The first file, named "NTUSER.DAT.TMContainer00000000000000000001.regtrans-ms," is used to establish communications with a command-and...

Everybody knows browser extensions are embedded into nearly every user's daily workflow, from spell checkers to GenAI tools. What most IT and security people don't know is that browser extensions' excessive permissions are a growing risk to organizations. LayerX today announced the release of the Enterprise Browser Extension Security Report 2025 , This report is the first and only report to merge public extension marketplace statistics with real-world enterprise usage telemetry. By doing so, it sheds light on one of the most underestimated threat surfaces in modern cybersecurity: browser extensions. The report reveals several findings that IT and security leaders will find interesting, as they build their plans for H2 2025. This includes information and analysis on how many extensions have risky permissions, which kinds of permissions are given, if extension developers are to be trusted, and more. Below, we bring key statistics from the report. Highlights from the Enterprise Browse...

Law enforcement authorities have announced that they tracked down the customers of the SmokeLoader malware and detained at least five individuals. "In a coordinated series of actions , customers of the Smokeloader pay-per-install botnet, operated by the actor known as 'Superstar,' faced consequences such as arrests, house searches, arrest warrants or 'knock and talks,'" Europol said in a statement. Superstar is alleged to have run a pay-per-install service that enabled its customers to gain unauthorized access to victim machines, using the loader as a conduit to deploy next-stage payloads of their choice. According to the European law enforcement agency, the access afforded by the botnet was used for various purposes such as keylogging, webcam access, ransomware deployment, and cryptocurrency mining. The latest action, part of an ongoing coordinated exercise called Operation Endgame , which led to the dismantling of online infrastructure associated with...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an artificial intelligence (AI) powered platform called AkiraBot that's used to spam website chats, comment sections, and contact forms to promote dubious search engine optimization (SEO) services such as Akira and ServicewrapGO. "AkiraBot has targeted more than 400,000 websites and successfully spammed at least 80,000 websites since September 2024," SentinelOne researchers Alex Delamotte and Jim Walter said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The bot uses OpenAI to generate custom outreach messages based on the purpose of the website." Targets of the activity include contact forms and chat widgets present in small to medium-sized business websites, with the framework sharing spam content generated using OpenAI's large language models (LLMs). What makes the "sprawling" Python-based tool stand apart is its ability to craft content such that it can bypass spam filters. It's believe...

Lovable , a generative artificial intelligence (AI) powered platform that allows for creating full-stack web applications using text-based prompts, has been found to be the most susceptible to jailbreak attacks, allowing novice and aspiring cybercrooks to set up lookalike credential harvesting pages. "As a purpose-built tool for creating and deploying web apps, its capabilities line up perfectly with every scammer's wishlist," Guardio Labs' Nati Tal said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "From pixel-perfect scam pages to live hosting, evasion techniques, and even admin dashboards to track stolen data – Lovable didn't just participate, it performed. No guardrails, no hesitation." The technique has been codenamed VibeScamming – a play on the term vibe coding, which refers to an AI-dependent programming technique to produce software by describing the problem statement in a few sentences as a prompt to a large language model (LLM) tuned for codin...

A Chinese-affiliated threat actor known for its cyber-attacks in Asia has been observed exploiting a security flaw in security software from ESET to deliver a previously undocumented malware codenamed TCESB . "Previously unseen in ToddyCat attacks, [TCESB] is designed to stealthily execute payloads in circumvention of protection and monitoring tools installed on the device," Kaspersky said in an analysis published this week. ToddyCat is the name given to a threat activity cluster that has targeted several entities in Asia, with attacks dating all the way back to at least December 2020. Last year, the Russian cybersecurity vendor detailed the hacking group's use of various tools to maintain persistent access to compromised environments and harvest data on an "industrial scale" from organizations located in the Asia-Pacific region. Kaspersky said its investigation into ToddyCat-related incidents in early 2024 unearthed a suspicious DLL file ("version...

GitGuardian's State of Secrets Sprawl report for 2025 reveals the alarming scale of secrets exposure in modern software environments. Driving this is the rapid growth of non-human identities (NHIs), which have been outnumbering human users for years. We need to get ahead of it and prepare security measures and governance for these machine identities as they continue to be deployed, creating an unprecedented level of security risk. This report reveals an astounding 23.77 million new secrets were leaked on GitHub in 2024 alone. This is a 25% surge from the previous year. This dramatic increase highlights how the proliferation of non-human identities (NHIs), such as service accounts, microservices, and AI agents, are rapidly expanding the attack surface for threat actors. The Non-Human Identity Crisis NHI secrets, including API keys, service accounts, and Kubernetes workers, now outnumber human identities by at least 45-to-1 in DevOps environments. These machine-based credentials...

Microsoft has revealed that a now-patched security flaw impacting the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) was exploited as a zero-day in ransomware attacks aimed at a small number of targets. "The targets include organizations in the information technology (IT) and real estate sectors of the United States, the financial sector in Venezuela, a Spanish software company, and the retail sector in Saudi Arabia," the tech giant said . The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-29824, a privilege escalation bug in CLFS that could be exploited to achieve SYSTEM privileges. It was fixed by Redmond as part of its Patch Tuesday update for April 2025. Microsoft is tracking the activity and the post-compromise exploitation of CVE-2025-29824 under the moniker Storm-2460, with the threat actors also leveraging a malware named PipeMagic to deliver the exploit as well as ransomware payloads. The exact initial access vector used in the attacks is currently not known. However, the threa...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added a critical security flaw impacting Gladinet CentreStack to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-30406 (CVSS score: 9.0), concerns a case of a hard-coded cryptographic key that could be abused to achieve remote code execution. It has been addressed in version 16.4.10315.56368 released on April 3, 2025. "Gladinet CentreStack contains a use of hard-coded cryptographic key vulnerability in the way that the application manages keys used for ViewState integrity verification," CISA said. "Successful exploitation allows an attacker to forge ViewState payloads for server-side deserialization, allowing for remote code execution." Specifically, the shortcoming is rooted in the use of a hard-code "machineKey" in the IIS web.config file, which enables threat actors with knowl...

Microsoft has released security fixes to address a massive set of 125 flaws affecting its software products, including one vulnerability that it said has been actively exploited in the wild. Of the 125 vulnerabilities, 11 are rated Critical, 112 are rated Important, and two are rated Low in severity. Forty-nine of these vulnerabilities are classified as privilege escalation, 34 as remote code execution, 16 as information disclosure, and 14 as denial-of-service (DoS) bugs. The updates are aside from the 22 flaws the company patched in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of last month's Patch Tuesday update . The vulnerability that has been flagged as under active attack is an elevation of privilege (EoP) flaw impacting the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) Driver ( CVE-2025-29824 , CVSS score: 7.8) that stems from a use-after-free scenario, allowing an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally. CVE-2025-29824 is the sixth EoP vulnerability to be di...