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The threat activity cluster known as UnsolicitedBooker has been observed targeting telecommunications companies in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, marking a shift from prior attacks aimed at Saudi Arabian entities. The attacks involve the deployment of two distinct backdoors codenamed LuciDoor and MarsSnake, according to a report published by Positive Technologies last week. "The group used several unique and rare instruments of Chinese origin," researchers Alexander Badaev and Maxim Shamanov said . UnsolicitedBooker was first documented by ESET in May 2025, attributing the China-aligned threat actor to a cyber attack targeting an unnamed international organization in Saudi Arabia with a backdoor dubbed MarsSnake. The group is assessed to be active since at least March 2023 and has a history of targeting organizations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Further analysis of the threat actor has uncovered tactical overlaps with two other clusters, including Space Pirates an...

Anthropic on Monday said it identified "industrial-scale campaigns" mounted by three artificial intelligence (AI) companies, DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax, to illegally extract Claude's capabilities to improve their own models. The distillation attacks generated over 16 million exchanges with its large language model (LLM) through about 24,000 fraudulent accounts in violation of its terms of service and regional access restrictions. All three companies are based in China, where the use of its services is prohibited use of its services is prohibited due to "legal, regulatory, and security risks." Distillation refers to a technique where a less capable model is trained on the outputs generated by a stronger AI system. While distillation is a legitimate way for companies to produce smaller, cheaper versions of their own frontier models, it's illegal for competitors to leverage it to acquire such capabilities from other AI companies at a fraction of t...

The Russia-linked state-sponsored threat actor tracked as APT28 has been attributed to a new campaign targeting specific entities in Western and Central Europe. The activity, per S2 Grupo's LAB52 threat intelligence team, was active between September 2025 and January 2026. It has been codenamed Operation MacroMaze . "The campaign relies on basic tooling and the exploitation of legitimate services for infrastructure and data exfiltration," the cybersecurity company said . The attack chains employ spear-phishing emails as a starting point to distribute lure documents that contain a common structural element within their XML, a field named "INCLUDEPICTURE" that points to a webhook[.]site URL that hosts a JPG image. This, in turn, causes the image file to be fetched from the remote server when the document is opened. Put differently, this mechanism acts as a beaconing mechanism akin to a tracking pixel that triggers an outbound HTTP request to the webhook[.]si...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new cryptojacking campaign that uses pirated software bundles as lures to deploy a bespoke XMRig miner program on compromised hosts. "Analysis of the recovered dropper, persistence triggers, and mining payload reveals a sophisticated, multi-stage infection prioritizing maximum cryptocurrency mining hashrate, often destabilizing the victim system," Trellix researcher Aswath A said in a technical report published last week. "Furthermore, the malware exhibits worm-like capabilities, spreading across external storage devices, enabling lateral movement even in air-gapped environments." The entry point of the attack is the use of social engineering decoys, advertising free premium software in the form of pirated software bundles, such as installers for office productivity suites, to trick unsuspecting users into downloading malware-laced executables. The binary acts as the central nervous system of the infectio...

Security news rarely moves in a straight line. This week, it feels more like a series of sharp turns, some happening quietly in the background, others playing out in public view. The details are different, but the pressure points are familiar. Across devices, cloud services, research labs, and even everyday apps, the line between normal behavior and hidden risk keeps getting thinner. Tools meant to protect, update, or improve systems are also becoming pathways when something goes wrong. This recap gathers the signals in one place. Quick reads, real impact, and developments that deserve a closer look before they become next week’s bigger problem. ⚡ Threat of the Week Dell RecoverPoint for VMs Zero-Day Exploited — A maximum severity security vulnerability in Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines has been exploited as a zero-day by a suspected China-nexus threat cluster dubbed UNC6201 since mid-2024. The activity involves the exploitation of CVE-2026-22769 (CVSS score: 10.0), a ca...

As more organizations run their own Large Language Models (LLMs), they are also deploying more internal services and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to support those models. Modern security risks are being introduced less from the models themselves and more from the infrastructure that serves, connects and automates the model. Each new LLM endpoint expands the attack surface, often in ways that are easy to overlook during rapid deployment, especially when endpoints are trusted implicitly. When LLM endpoints accumulate excessive permissions and long-lived credentials are exposed, they can provide far more access than intended. Organizations must prioritize endpoint privilege management because exposed endpoints have become an increasingly common attack vector for cybercriminals to access the systems, identities and secrets that power LLM workloads. What is an endpoint in modern LLM infrastructure? In modern LLM infrastructure, an endpoint is any interface where something —...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed what they say is an active "Shai-Hulud-like" supply chain worm campaign that has leveraged a cluster of at least 19 malicious npm packages to enable credential harvesting and cryptocurrency key theft. The campaign has been codenamed SANDWORM_MODE by supply chain security company Socket. As with prior Shai-Hulud attack waves , the malicious code embedded into the packages comes with capabilities to siphon system information, access tokens, environment secrets, and API keys from developer environments and automatically propagate by abusing stolen npm and GitHub identities to extend its reach. "The sample retains Shai-Hulud hallmarks and adds GitHub API exfiltration with DNS fallback, hook-based persistence, SSH propagation fallback, MCP server injection with embedded prompt injection targeting AI coding assistants, and LLM API Key harvesting," the company said . The packages, published to npm by two npm publisher aliases,...

The Iranian hacking group known as MuddyWater (aka Earth Vetala, Mango Sandstorm, and MUDDYCOAST) has targeted several organizations and individuals mainly located across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region as part of a new campaign codenamed Operation Olalampo . The activity, first observed on January 26, 2026, has resulted in the deployment of new malware families that share overlapping samples previously identified as used by the threat actor, according to a report published by Group-IB. These include downloaders like GhostFetch and HTTP_VIP, along with a Rust backdoor called CHAR and an advanced implant codenamed GhostBackDoor that's dropped by GhostFetch. "These attacks follow similar patterns and align with the killchains previously observed in MuddyWater attacks; starting with a phishing email with a Microsoft Office document attached to it that contains malicious macro code that decodes the embedded payload and drops it on the system and executes it, pro...

A Russian-speaking, financially motivated threat actor has been observed taking advantage of commercial generative artificial intelligence (AI) services to compromise over 600 FortiGate devices located in 55 countries. That's according to new findings from Amazon Threat Intelligence, which said it observed the activity between January 11 and February 18, 2026. "No exploitation of FortiGate vulnerabilities was observed—instead, this campaign succeeded by exploiting exposed management ports and weak credentials with single-factor authentication, fundamental security gaps that AI helped an unsophisticated actor exploit at scale," CJ Moses, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of Amazon Integrated Security, said in a report. The tech giant described the threat actor as having limited technical capabilities, a constraint they overcame by relying on multiple commercial generative AI tools to implement various phases of the attack cycle, such as tool development, attac...

Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic has begun to roll out a new security feature for Claude Code that can scan a user's software codebase for vulnerabilities and suggest patches. The capability, called Claude Code Security , is currently available in a limited research preview to Enterprise and Team customers. "It scans codebases for security vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches for human review, allowing teams to find and fix security issues that traditional methods often miss," the company said in a Friday announcement. Anthropic said the feature aims to leverage AI as a tool to help find and resolve vulnerabilities to counter attacks where threat actors weaponize the same tools to automate vulnerability discovery.  With AI agents increasingly capable of detecting security vulnerabilities that have otherwise escaped human notice, the tech upstart said the same capabilities could be used by adversaries to uncover exploitable weakness...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added two security flaws impacting Roundcube webmail software to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerabilities in question are listed below - CVE-2025-49113 (CVSS score: 9.9) - A deserialization of untrusted data vulnerability that allows remote code execution by authenticated users because the _from parameter in a URL is not validated in program/actions/settings/upload.php. (Fixed in June 2025 ) CVE-2025-68461 (CVSS score: 7.2) - A cross-site scripting vulnerability via the animate tag in an SVG document. (Fixed in December 2025 ) Dubai-based cybersecurity company FearsOff, whose founder and CEO, Kirill Firsov, was credited with discovering and reporting CVE-2025-49113, said attackers have already " diffed and weaponized the vulnerability " within 48 hours of public disclosure of the flaw. An exploit for the vulnerability wa...

With $5.5 trillion in global AI risk exposure and 700,000 U.S. workers needing reskilling, four new AI certifications and Certified CISO v4 help close the gap between AI adoption and workforce readiness . EC-Council , creator of the world-renowned Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) credential and a global leader in applied cybersecurity education, today launched its Enterprise AI Credential Suite, with four new role-based AI certifications debuting alongside Certified CISO v4 , an overhauled executive cyber leadership program. The dual launch is the largest single expansion of EC-Council’s portfolio in its 25-year history. It addresses a structural gap that no single tool, platform, or policy can solve alone: AI is scaling faster than the workforce trained to run, secure, and govern it. The launch aligns with U.S. priorities on workforce development and applied AI education outlined in Executive Order 14179, the July 2025 AI Action Plan’s workforce development pillar, and Executive Or...