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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...

Threat actors have been observed exploiting a recently disclosed critical security flaw impacting BeyondTrust Remote Support (RS) and Privileged Remote Access (PRA) products to conduct a wide range of malicious actions, including deploying VShell and  The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-1731 (CVSS score: 9.9), allows attackers to execute operating system commands in the context of the site user. In a report published Thursday, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said it detected the security flaw being actively exploited in the wild for network reconnaissance, web shell deployment, command-and-control (C2), backdoor and remote management tool installs, lateral movement, and data theft. The campaign has targeted financial services, legal services, high technology, higher education, wholesale and retail, and healthcare sectors across the U.S., France, Germany, Australia, and Canada. The cybersecurity company described the vulnerability as a case of sanitization failure that enab...

In yet another software supply chain attack, the open-source, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistant Cline CLI was updated to stealthily install OpenClaw , a self-hosted autonomous AI agent that has become exceedingly popular in the past few months. "On February 17, 2026, at 3:26 AM PT, an unauthorized party used a compromised npm publish token to publish an update to Cline CLI on the NPM registry: cline@2.3.0," the maintainers of the Cline package said in an advisory. "The published package contains a modified package.json with an added postinstall script: 'postinstall": "npm install -g openclaw@latest.'" As a result, this causes OpenClaw to be installed on the developer's machine when Cline version 2.3.0 is installed. Cline said no additional modifications were introduced to the package and there was no malicious behavior observed. However, it noted that the installation of OpenClaw was not authorized or intended. The s...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new ClickFix campaign that abuses compromised legitimate sites to deliver a previously undocumented remote access trojan (RAT) called MIMICRAT (aka AstarionRAT). "The campaign demonstrates a high level of operational sophistication: compromised sites spanning multiple industries and geographies serve as delivery infrastructure, a multi-stage PowerShell chain performs ETW and AMSI bypass before dropping a Lua-scripted shellcode loader, and the final implant communicates over HTTPS on port 443 using HTTP profiles that resemble legitimate web analytics traffic," Elastic Security Labs said in a Friday report. According to the enterprise search and cybersecurity company, MIMICRAT is a custom C++ RAT with support for Windows token impersonation, SOCKS5 tunneling, and a set of 22 commands for comprehensive post-exploitation capabilities. The campaign was discovered earlier this month. It's also assessed to share tactic...

With one in three cyber-attacks now involving compromised employee accounts, insurers and regulators are placing far greater emphasis on identity posture when assessing cyber risk.  For many organizations, however, these assessments remain largely opaque. Elements such as password hygiene, privileged access management, and the extent of multi-factor authentication (MFA) coverage are increasingly influential in how cyber risk and insurance costs are evaluated. Understanding the identity-centric factors behind these assessments is critical for organizations seeking to demonstrate lower risk exposure and secure more favorable insurance terms. Why identity posture now drives underwriting With the global average cost of a data breach reaching $4.4 million in 2025, more organizations are turning to cyber insurance to manage financial exposure. In the UK, coverage has increased from 37% in 2023 to 45% in 2025, but rising claims volumes are prompting insurers to tighten underwrit...

A 29-year-old Ukrainian national has been sentenced to five years in prison in the U.S. for his role in facilitating North Korea's fraudulent information technology (IT) worker scheme. In November 2025, Oleksandr "Alexander" Didenko pleaded guilty to wire fraud conspiracy and aggravated identity theft for stealing the identities of U.S. citizens and selling them to IT workers to help them land jobs at 40 U.S. companies and draw regular salaries, which were then funneled back to the regime to support its weapons programs. He was apprehended by Polish authorities in late 2024, and later extradited to the U.S. Didenko has also been ordered to serve 12 months of supervised release and to pay $46,547.28 in restitution. Last year, Didenko also agreed to forfeit more than $1.4 million, which includes about $181,438 in U.S. dollars and cryptocurrency seized from him and his co-conspirators. The defendant is said to have run a website named Upworksell[.]com to help oversea...

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has warned of an increase in ATM jackpotting incidents across the country, leading to losses of more than $20 million in 2025. The agency said 1,900 ATM jackpotting incidents have been reported since 2020, out of which 700 took place last year. In December 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said about $40.73 million has been collectively lost to jackpotting attacks since 2021. "Threat actors exploit physical and software vulnerabilities in ATMs and deploy malware to dispense cash without a legitimate transaction," the FBI said in a Thursday bulletin. The jackpotting attacks involve the use of specialized malware, such as Ploutus, to infect ATMs and force them to dispense cash. In most cases, cybercriminals have been observed gaining unauthorized access to the machines by opening an ATM face with widely available generic keys. There are at least two different ways by which the malware is deployed: Removing the A...

Two former Google engineers and one of their husbands have been indicted in the U.S. for allegedly committing trade secret theft from the search giant and other tech firms and transferring the information to unauthorized locations, including Iran. Samaneh Ghandali, 41, and her husband Mohammadjavad Khosravi (aka Mohammad Khosravi), 40, along with her sister Soroor Ghandali, 32, have been accused of conspiring to commit trade secret theft from Google and other leading technology companies, theft and attempted theft of trade secrets, and obstruction of justice. The three defendants, all Iranian nationals and residing in San Jose, were arrested on Thursday and made their initial appearances in federal district court in the California city. According to the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), the Ghandali sisters worked at Google before joining another technology company identified as Company 3. Khosravi is said to have been employed at a different company (named Company 2). All three o...