WordPress RCE, SonicWall 0-Days, AI Service Attacks, SharePoint 0-Day and More – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

A single request should not be able to do this much. But this week, small inputs led to code execution, memory loss, stolen keys, and disabled security tools.

The paths were often simple: exposed systems, weak checks, old drivers, fake prompts, and public code used for malware delivery. Some bugs were new. Others were already being used before defenders had time to patch.

Here is the full recap of what broke, what was exploited, and what needs attention now.

⚡ Threat of the Week

New wp2shell WordPress Core Flaw Lets Unauthenticated Attackers Run Code – Searchlight Cyber disclosed a pre-authenticated remote code execution vulnerability in WordPress Core that can be exploited anonymously on a standard WordPress installation, without requiring any plugins or other special conditions. It is a combination of CVE-2026-63030 (REST API batch-route confusion) and CVE-2026-60137 (SQL injection in WordPress core) that can be chained to turn an anonymous request into code execution. watchTowr said it’s already seeing proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits in circulation and that it’s beginning to see the first signs of in-the-wild exploitation. «This is going to hurt,» watchTowr CEO Benjamin Harris said. «WordPress runs on hundreds of millions of websites globally. Some of those will be auto-patched by their hosting providers, but plenty will not, and that is where the damage will be done. Our advice is simple: patch as fast as you possibly can, and do not stop there. Put the controls and investigations in place to determine whether an attacker got there first and to detect and remove any backdoors that may already have been dropped before you patched.» The cybersecurity company said it’s the latest example of vulnerabilities being surfaced by AI-assisted tooling and how the technology is being abused by attackers to weaponize them.

🔔 Top News

  • SonicWall SMA Zero-Days Exploited as 0-Days – A previously undocumented threat actor codenamed UTA0533 has been attributed to the exploitation of recently disclosed SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 1000 series VPN appliances as zero-days prior to their public disclosure since June 22, 2026. The discovery was made following an incident response investigation initiated earlier this month. The impacted organization has not been identified. «This threat actor was observed using multiple zero-day exploits, malware designed specifically for SonicWall SMA VPN appliances, as well as other attacker tradecraft,» Volexity said. The vulnerabilities in question are CVE-2026-15409 (CVSS score: 10.0) and CVE-2026-15410 (CVSS score: 7.2), both of which could be chained to facilitate arbitrary command execution and take over susceptible devices. Patches for both vulnerabilities were released by SonicWall last week.
  • DoS Flaw in OpenSSL – The Okta Red Team disclosed details of HollowByte, a denial-of-service (DoS) flaw in OpenSSL. «By sending a malicious payload of just 11 bytes, a remote, unauthenticated attacker can force a server to allocate disproportionate chunks of memory before any security handshake even begins,» Okta said. Put differently, an unauthenticated attacker — through 11 bytes of carefully crafted data — can convince OpenSSL to reserve up to 128 KB of heap memory for a handshake message that never actually arrives, causing a server to exhaust available RAM and trigger a DoS condition. The OpenSSL team resolved the issue in versions 4.0.1, 3.6.3, 3.5.7, 3.4.6, and 3.0.21. «Instead of trusting the header outright, OpenSSL now grows the buffer only as bytes actually land on the wire. A claim with no follow-through now costs the server nothing,» Okta said.
  • CISA Adds New SharePoint RCE Zero-Day to KEV Catalog – The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added a newly patched security flaw impacting Microsoft SharePoint Server to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, requiring Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies to apply the fixes by July 19, 2026. The vulnerability, CVE-2026-58644 (CVSS score: 9.8), is a critical deserialization of untrusted data vulnerability that allows an unauthorized attacker to execute arbitrary code. Patches for the flaw have been released as part of the Patch Tuesday updates released on July 14, 2026. Microsoft revised its bulletin to clarify that CVE-2026-58644 has been exploited in the wild, meaning the shortcoming was weaponized as a zero-day prior to the fixes becoming available. The development came as Microsoft shipped its largest Patch Tuesday on record, addressing 622 vulnerabilities.
  • OkoBot Malware Framework Infects Windows to Phish Crypto Seed Phrases – A new malware framework called OkoBot is designed to capture the contents of cryptocurrency wallet windows. OkoBot is an updated version of TookPS, which is a downloader for retrieving malicious commands and scripts from attacker-controlled servers to further propagate attacks, including a Python-based infostealer and a remote access trojan called TeviRAT. «This campaign differs from previous activity in that it uses a new framework to deliver all malicious modules and orchestrate them via an SSH tunnel,» Kaspersky said. «In total, the framework includes more than 20 malicious payloads and implants, covering a wide variety of functions. At the time of writing, the threat remains active.» The infection chain makes use of ClickFix and malware distributed through GitHub that masquerades as legitimate software for initial access. It also comes with a web browser extensions loader to deliver Rilide, a browser-based stealer, as well as inject an implant into Trezor Suite, Ledger Wallet, and Ledger Live processes to collect seed phrases, log keystrokes and clipboard content, take screenshots, and capture keystrokes and the video stream of the target application’s window using the OkoSpyware module. Hundreds of victims of the OkoBot campaign have been detected in more than 25 countries, with the highest concentration in Brazil, Vietnam, Canada, Mexico, and Türkiye. The activity remains unattributed.
  • NadMesh Scans Exposed AI Services for Cloud Keys and Kubernetes Tokens – A new Go botnet called NadMesh has been observed hunting for exposed AI services related to ComfyUI, Ollama, n8n, Open WebUI, Langflow, and Gradio to steal AWS keys and Kubernetes tokens. «It folds scanning, exploitation, and credential/AI-service intelligence harvesting into a single autonomous platform,» QiAnXin XLab said. «On the victim, the bot agent establishes persistence along three independent paths: an SSH public-key backdoor (.ssh/authorized_keys), persistence files in multiple locations (/dev/shm/.a, /var/tmp/.a, /tmp/.a), and hidden cron watchdogs (/etc/cron.d/.sys_monitor, /etc/cron.d/.s).»

‎️🔥 Trending CVEs

Bugs drop weekly, and the gap between a patch and an exploit is shrinking fast. These are the heavy hitters for the week: high-severity, widely used, or already being poked at in the wild.

Check the list, patch what you have, and hit the ones marked urgent first – CVE-2026-63030, CVE-2026-60137 (WordPress Core), CVE-2026-58644, CVE-2026-56164 (Microsoft SharePoint Server), CVE-2026-56155 (Microsoft Active Directory Federation Services), CVE-2026-53412 (Zoom Desktop Client for Windows and Zoom VDI Client for Windows), CVE-2026-44747, CVE-2026-27690, CVE-2026-44761 (SAP), CVE-2026-57219, CVE-2026-57221 (RabbitMQ), CVE-2026-59208, CVE-2026-54305 (n8n), CVE-2026-60105 (Monsta FTP), CVE-2026-14960, CVE-2026-14961 (tdeio64.sys driver), CVE-2026-33894, CVE-2026-33895 (Digital Bazaar node-forge), CVE-2026-6875 (ServiceNow AI Platform), CVE-2026-42533, CVE-2026-60005, CVE-2026-56434 (F5 NGINX Plus and NGINX Open Source), CVE-2026-20296, CVE-2026-20297 (Splunk Enterprise), CVE-2026-15265 (Tenable Agent), CVE-2026-6423 (ESET Inspect Connector), CVE-2026-15053 (Tanium Server), CVE-2026-44909, CVE-2026-59173, CVE-2026-59762 (HTTP/2 server implementations), CVE-2026-14890 (SGLang), CVE-2026-14266 (7-Zip), CVE-2026-59084 (Apache Tomcat), CVE-2026-15682 (AnyDesk), and CVE-2026-54523 (Kyverno).

🎥 Cybersecurity Webinars

  • Your AI Agent Has Credentials. Can You Stop It When It Goes Rogue? Hands-on testing of OpenClaw shows how agentic AI can expose secrets, bypass safety controls, and create a powerful new attack surface. Join Okta Threat Intelligence Director Jeremy Kirk to examine how attackers are abusing AI agents and learn practical ways to control access, enforce least privilege, detect shadow AI, and shut down risky agents before they cause damage.
  • When AI Ships 50× More Code, Human Review Stops Scaling → AI-assisted development is pushing code production beyond what traditional security reviews and CVE-driven remediation can handle. This webinar gives security leaders a practical framework for governing the expanding attack surface, building secure-by-default controls, and enabling teams to develop at machine speed without surrendering control of software risk.

📰 Around the Cyber World

  • New Campaign Delivers Remcos RAT – A new malware distribution campaign has abused the credibility of government institutions to increase the likelihood of infection success. The activity targets Indian businesses and taxpayers using Goods and Services Tax (GST)-related themes to distribute malware. «The threat actors impersonated legitimate government departments and distributed malicious emails disguised as official notifications related to taxation, refunds, compliance requirements, and regulatory matters,» Seqrite Labs said. «The threat actors employ convincing documents and filenames that closely resemble official GST notifications, making it difficult for recipients to distinguish malicious content from legitimate government correspondence.» The end goal is to deploy Remcos RAT and steal sensitive information.
  • India’s Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant Suffers a Data Leak – The Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant located in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu suffered an accidental exposure after Reliance Infra (RPOWER) got hit by a ransomware group called World Leaks, a spin-off of Hunters International, which, in turn, is another variant of the Hive ransomware family. The leak consists of 18,997 files, totalling 14.3GB of data, per security researcher Rakesh Krishnan. They contain purported blueprints for the ventilation and cooling systems used in Unit 3 and Unit 4, along with a complete floor layout of a «common control room». It’s assessed that Reliance Infra was not impacted directly, but rather through a third-party vendor named Yotta.
  • Blind Eagle Shows No Signs of Stopping – Nearly a year after Blind Eagle’s activities were documented, a new report from LevelBlue has found the threat actor to be active, moving part of its VBScript delivery infrastructure onto the Russian bulletproof hosting provider Proton66 as of June 2025. The group has also devised a bespoke string-obfuscation scheme, a RunPE loader built entirely on a bare AutoIt3 interpreter, and an upgraded version of AsyncRAT that introduces Windows Notification Facility (WNF) process injection, a custom Base28 payload encoding, a full Hidden VNC (HVNC) banking-fraud module with browser profile cloning, and a Chrome App-Bound Encryption (ABE) bypass, per LevelBlue.
  • Qilin Ransomware Use of EDR Killer – Qilin ransomware operations have been observed adopting aggressive, kernel-level defense evasion to blind and disable endpoint security products before its main ransomware payload is executed on a victim’s network. The EDR killer, packed via the Shanya packer, is sold on illicit marketplaces for $2,000. «The EDR killer compares the returned locale to a known locale blacklist to avoid attacking any Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) countries such as Russia and Belarus,» Flashpoint said. «The EDR killer then writes a vulnerable driver to disk and loads this driver via Service Manager. This driver is the ThrottleStop driver from TechPowerUp LLC’s free and legitimate application of the same name, used to bypass CPU throttling. However, the driver suffers from a vulnerability, allowing the malware to map physical memory to kernel-mode virtual memory to perform direct kernel read and write operations.» Also put to use is a custom Rust-written loader that performs reflective Portable Executable (PE) loading of the ransomware payload.
  • DefiTuna Suffers a Security Incident – DeFiTuna, an Automated Market Maker (AMM) on the Solana blockchain, was exploited on July 16, 2026, for $569,601 USDC. «The attackers created a highly illiquid TUNA/USDC pool and used it as the destination for borrowed USDC routed through Jupiter,» CertiK said. «Because the swap returned only a negligible amount of TUNA, DeFiTuna’s value calculation rounded the position’s total assets down to zero. The protocol then incorrectly treated the position as healthy, allowing the attackers to bypass the solvency check and withdraw the USDC through attacker-controlled liquidity positions.»
  • Next.js Opts for Scheduled Security Releases – Vercel announced that Next.js is adopting a formal security release program, replacing ad-hoc patches for security fixes following a surge in AI-assisted vulnerability discovery. «This kind of scheduled, pre-announced security release has become standard practice for major open source projects, and we think it’s the right model for Next.js at its current scale,» Vercel said. «Here’s what you can expect going forward: roughly once a month, we’ll publish advance notice of upcoming security releases. Each announcement will include the expected release timeline and the highest anticipated severity among the vulnerabilities it covers. This lead time lets you plan your upgrades, and it lets us coordinate with hosting providers and other platform partners to deploy mitigations, such as firewall rules, that help protect applications that haven’t been patched yet.»
  • Disguised Gambling Apps Target Brazil – A new analysis from 9to5Mac has revealed more than 60 «jacket apps» on the App Store that are disguised as simple games and utilities that become online betting platforms when accessed from Brazilian IP addresses. Most of the apps are published by developer accounts with only a single App Store listing, with further investigation linking them to a «public GitHub repository containing instructions for a Cursor agent to create simple, vibe-coded apps that serve as fronts for the betting platforms.»
  • Ransomware Stats for Q2 2026 – The Gentlemen has become the most active ransomware group for Q2 2026, claiming 300 victims, surging past Qilin (289), DragonForce, Akira, and LockBit. Another group named Deadlock resurfaced after 11 months of silence with 75 June victims. In all, the top 11 tracked groups accounted for 1,368 of Q2’s victim claims across 99 countries. «What sets The Gentlemen apart is its packaging, where affiliates receive ready-made tools that ship and update faster than most competing programs,» ReliaQuest said.
  • 2 Members of Chinese Money Laundering Network Charged with Laundering $43M in Investment Fraud – The U.S. Justice Department unsealed charges against a New York man and woman for conspiracy to launder money derived from cyber investment fraud scams. «Between 2020 and 2022, Zhuoying Chen, 27, of Brooklyn, New York, and Haojie Zhang, 38, of Queens, New York, managed a network of more than a dozen individuals based in Queens and Brooklyn, who opened 140 bank accounts in the name of approximately 45 shell companies to launder at least $43 million in proceeds of investment scams,» the department said. «Then, Chen and Zhang allegedly conspired with China-based co-conspirators to transfer the funds involved in the fraud schemes abroad. The fraud schemes consist of perpetrators contacting victims via messaging services or social media applications. The perpetrators would initiate relationships with the victims and gain their trust, convincing victims to send money for lucrative investment opportunities. The perpetrators would show the victims fake profits on the purported investment and encourage the victims to invest more. The perpetrators would then steal the victim’s funds.»
  • U.S. Cyber Agency Uses Mythos to Audit Government Code – Reuters reported that the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is using Anthropic’s AI model Mythos to audit government software for defects that could potentially offer a pathway for foreign spies and cybercriminals, citing three people familiar with the matter.

🔧 Cybersecurity Tools

  • VisionSec → It is an open-source, self-hosted threat intelligence platform that combines domain monitoring, phishing detection, exposed-service scanning, GitHub secret discovery, breach checks, email security assessments, and Telegram alerts in a modular Docker-based deployment. The project remains at an early stage, with no published releases at the time of writing.
  • owLSM → It is an open-source Linux security agent that uses eBPF LSM to run stateful Sigma rules inside the kernel, block malicious activity, correlate events across multiple probes, and provide detailed context for security monitoring and response.

Disclaimer: This is strictly for research and learning. It hasn’t been through a formal security audit, so don’t just blindly drop it into production. Read the code, break it in a sandbox first, and make sure whatever you’re doing stays on the right side of the law.

Conclusion

That is the week: exposed systems, weak checks, old tools, and attackers moving faster than patch cycles.

Review what applies, fix the obvious gaps first, and assume anything public has already been tested.

Linux Flaws, Defender 0-Days, Router Botnets, and Supply Chain Chaos – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

Monday recap. Same mess, new week.

A sketchy dev tool got people pwned, old bugs came back from the dead, and security products somehow needed protecting from themselves. A bunch of companies spent the week checking old boxes and forgotten servers they should’ve patched years ago. Good times.

Phishing crews are getting smarter too – less obvious scam junk, more targeted stuff that actually looks real. Meanwhile, botnets are grabbing anything exposed to the internet like it’s free candy. The Internet’s still a dumpster fire.

Let’s get into it.

⚡ Threat of the Week

GitHub Breached via Nx Console VS Code Extension—GitHub officially confirmed that the breach of its internal repositories was the result of a compromise of an employee device involving a poisoned version of the Nx Console Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension. The attack is said to have allowed the threat actor, a cybercriminal group known as TeamPCP, to exfiltrate about 3,800 repositories. GitHub said it has taken steps to contain the incident and rotated critical secrets, adding it’s continuing to monitor the situation for follow-on activity. The Nx team revealed that the extension, nrwl.angular-console, was breached after one of its developers’ systems was hacked in the wake of the recent TanStack supply chain attack. Other companies that were impacted by the TanStack compromise include OpenAI, Mistral AI, and Grafana Labs. Grafana Labs was also the target of an extortion attempt, but the company said it refused to pay the hackers who had threatened to release the company’s codebase. The incidents are just some examples of the long tail of downstream victims emerging from the Mini Shai-Hulud campaign. This, coupled with TeamPCP’s public release of the Shai-Hulud code, marks a significant evolution in software supply chain threats, as it gives attackers a ready-made blueprint for fleshing out similar worms targeting open-source repositories and developer environments.

🔔 Top News

  • Microsoft Took Down Fox Tempest—Microsoft has cracked down on Fox Tempest, a cyber threat actor that fueled Rhysida ransomware attacks and other infections involving Oyster, Lumma Stealer, and Vidar. The group operates upstream in the malware and ransomware supply chain, acting as an enabler and providing tools for other threat actors to carry out attacks. This included a fraudulent code-signing service that let cybercriminals deploy malware «through the front door» without being detected. While bad actors have been known to resell code-signing certificates for at least a decade, Fox Tempest’s operation stood out because it provided a scalable service for extortion, phishing, SEO poisoning, or malware-laced advertising.
  • 9-Year-Old Linux Kernel Flaw Enables Root Command Execution—A new vulnerability disclosed in the Linux kernel remained undetected for nine years. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-46333 (CVSS score: 5.5), is a case of improper privilege management that could permit an unprivileged local user to disclose sensitive files and execute arbitrary commands as root on default installations of several major distributions like Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu. The issue was introduced in November 2016.
  • Microsoft Warned of Two Actively Exploited Defender Vulnerabilities—Microsoft has disclosed that a privilege escalation and a denial-of-service flaw in Defender have come under active exploitation in the wild. While CVE-2026-41091 could allow an attacker to gain SYSTEM privileges, CVE-2026-45498 relates to a case of denial-of-service. Although Microsoft has not formally confirmed, the vulnerability descriptions for CVE-2026-41091 and CVE-2026-45498 overlap with those of RedSun and UnDefend, two Defender zero-days that were disclosed by Chaotic Eclipse (aka Nightmare-Eclipse) last month.
  • Newly Disclosed Drupal Core Flaw Under Attack—A critical security flaw impacting Drupal Core has come under active exploitation within days of public disclosure. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2026-9082 (CVSS score: 6.5), an SQL injection vulnerability affecting all supported versions of Drupal Core. Drupal acknowledged that «exploit attempts are now being detected in the wild.» Thales-owned Imperva said it has observed over 15,000 attack attempts targeting almost 6,000 individual sites across 65 countries.
  • Claude Mythos AI Finds 10K High-Severity Flaws in Popular Software—Anthropic revealed that Project Glasswing has helped uncover more than 10,000 high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities across some of the most «systemically» important software across the world since the cybersecurity initiative went live last month. Of these vulnerabilities, 6,202 have been classified as high- or critical-severity flaws impacting more than 1,000 open-source projects. Subsequent analysis of these vulnerability candidates has identified that 1,726 are valid true positives. As many as 1,094 flaws are assessed to be either high- or critical-severity. In total, these efforts have led to 97 findings being patched upstream and 88 advisories being issued.
  • Cisco Patched CVSS 10.0 Secure Workload Flaw—Cisco rolled out updates for a maximum-severity security flaw impacting Secure Workload that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to access sensitive data. Tracked as CVE-2026-20223 (CVSS score: 10.0), the vulnerability arises from insufficient validation and authentication when accessing REST API endpoints. «An attacker could exploit this vulnerability if they are able to send a crafted API request to an affected endpoint,» Cisco said. «A successful exploit could allow the attacker to read sensitive information and make configuration changes across tenant boundaries with the privileges of the Site Admin user.»
  • Microsoft Released Mitigations for YellowKey—Microsoft released a mitigation for a BitLocker bypass vulnerability named YellowKey following its public disclosure last week. The zero-day flaw, now tracked as CVE-2026-45585, carries a CVSS score of 6.8. It has been described as a BitLocker security feature bypass. The issue impacts Windows 11 version 26H1 for x64-based Systems, Windows 11 Version 24H2 for x64-based Systems, Windows 11 Version 25H2 for x64-based Systems, Windows Server 2025, and Windows Server 2025 (Server Core installation). Microsoft noted that successful exploitation could permit an attacker with physical access to sidestep the BitLocker Device Encryption feature on the system storage device and gain access to encrypted data.

🔥 Trending CVEs

Bugs drop weekly, and the gap between a patch and an exploit is shrinking fast. These are the heavy hitters for the week: high-severity, widely used, or already being poked at in the wild.

Check the list, patch what you have, and hit the ones marked urgent first — CVE-2026-48172 (LiteSpeed User-End cPanel Plugin), CVE-2026-34926 (Trend Micro Apex One), CVE-2026-20223 (Cisco Secure Workload), CVE-2026-41091, CVE-2026-45498, CVE-2026-45584 (Microsoft Defender), CVE-2026-46333 (Linux Kernel), CVE-2026-9082 (Drupal Core), CVE-2026-45585 (Microsoft Windows BitLocker), CVE-2026-2743 (SEPPMail), CVE-2026-7301, CVE-2026-7302, CVE-2026-7304 (SGLang), CVE-2026-29205 (cPanel), CVE-2026-8178 (Amazon Redshift JDBC driver), CVE-2026-8053 (MongoDB), CVE-2026-45829 aka ChromaToast (ChromaDB), CVE-2026-8153 (Universal Robots PolyScope 5), CVE-2026-3102 (ExifTool), CVE-2026-9110, CVE-2026-9111, from CVE-2026-8511 through CVE-2026-8522 (Google Chrome), CVE-2026-45434 (Apache OFBiz), CVE-2026-33000, CVE-2026-34908, CVE-2026-34909, CVE-2026-34910, CVE-2026-34911 (UniFi OS), CVE-2026-45401 (Open WebUI), CVE-2026-9256, CVE‑2026‑8711 (F5 NGINX Plus and NGINX Open Source), CVE-2026-20239 (Splunk Enterprise and Splunk Cloud Platform), CVE-2026-46376 (FreePBX), CVE‑2026‑6637 (PostgreSQL), and CVE-2026-35194 (Apache Flink).

🎥 Cybersecurity Webinars

  • Learn How Attackers Use AI to Supercharge DDoS Efficiency (and How to Stop It) → Adversaries are weaponizing AI to exploit network blind spots, auto-generate evasion scripts, and bypass traditional defenses with surgical precision. This webinar bridges the gap between AI-driven exploitation and cloud resilience, offering data-driven insights into how attackers maximize DDoS success rates. Join us to move beyond theory, leverage AI for non-disruptive security testing (CTEM), and transition your team from reactive mitigation to automated, continuous resilience.
  • Beyond the Zero-Day: Hunting for Threats That Don’t Need an Exploit → Zero-day exploits are no longer the ultimate metric of cyber risk. Today, sophisticated adversaries bypass traditional defenses entirely by leveraging identity flaws, living-off-the-land techniques, and AI automation that don’t rely on unpatched software. This session moves beyond the zero-day obsession to expose how attackers operationalize modern post-compromise tactics—and how security teams can pivot from reactive patching to proactive, behavioral threat hunting.

📰 Around the Cyber World

  • Vulnerability Exploitation Overtakes Compromised Credentials in a Long Time —Vulnerability exploitation has overtaken compromised credentials for the first time in nearly two decades as the most common initial access vector for data breaches, per Verizon. Nearly a third (31%) of data breaches over the past year started with vulnerability exploitation, up from 20% in 2024. Credential abuse declined from 22% to 13%. What’s more, only 26% of critical vulnerabilities listed in the U.S. Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog were fully remediated by organizations in 2025, a drop from 38% the previous year. «The median time for full resolution went up to 43 days, almost two weeks more than the previous year’s 32 days,» the report said. «In the median case, organizations had 50% more critical vulnerabilities to patch in this year’s reporting dataset compared to the previous year.» Ransomware accounted for 48% of all breaches last year, up from 44% in 2024. But in a positive development, ransom payments have continued to decline, with the median payment sliding from $150,000 in 2024 to almost $140,000.
  • Attackers Go After India’s Education Ecosystem —Threat actors are abusing student data within India’s education ecosystem, spanning educational institutions, third-party vendors, and online services, for phishing, impersonation, social engineering, and financially motivated fraud operations. «Attackers commonly leverage exposed or misused student information to create highly convincing scams related to admissions, scholarships, internships, fee payments, and academic services,» CYFIRMA said. «In several instances, threat actors exploited trusted educational branding, fraudulent portals, and insider access to obtain credentials, financial information, or direct payments. Additionally, some cases indicated the misuse of student-linked bank accounts within broader fraud and mule account operations.»
  • RondoDox Adds ASUS Router Flaw to its Arsenal —The operators of the RondoDox botnet have incorporated CVE-2018-5999 (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical ASUS router flaw, to their arsenal, marking the first observation of in-the-wild exploitation of the vulnerability. The activity was first detected on May 17, 2026, against its honeypots. «The attack pattern: payloads that set the ateCommand_flag to 1, enabling the infosvr interface to accept arbitrary configuration changes,» VulnCheck CTO Jacob Baines said in a post on LinkedIn.
  • Fake Microsoft Teams Sites Deliver ValleyRAT —Fake Microsoft Teams distribution sites shared on X are being used to trick unsuspecting users into downloading a trojanized installer packaged as a ZIP archive, ultimately leading to the deployment of ValleyRAT, a malware associated with a Chinese cybercrime group called Silver Fox. «The delivered payload leverages a DLL sideloading chain via a legitimate executable (GameBox.exe) developed by Tencent, ultimately deploying a ValleyRAT variant,» K7 Labs said. «This malware campaign stands out for its clean execution chain, combining social engineering with staged payload delivery, in-memory decryption, and stealthy persistence mechanisms.»
  • Malicious Activity Targeting Malaysian Entities —An attacker-controlled infrastructure hosted on Microsoft Azure infrastructure in the Malaysia West region has been used to conduct a targeted intrusion campaign against multiple Malaysian organizations, per Oasis Security. «The operation demonstrates a high degree of operational planning, with the attacker developing purpose-built Python tooling for each target — covering internal network enumeration, database access, and external data exfiltration,» the company said. The infrastructure hosts target-specific Python scripts, webshell deployment tools, a Laravel remote code execution exploit chain, and source code for custom command-and-control (C2) components.
  • Texas Attorney General Sues Meta Over WhatsApp Encryption Claims —The Texas Attorney General has sued Meta over allegations that the company’s WhatsApp messenger doesn’t provide the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) it has long claimed. «Reports suggest that employees of WhatsApp have been able to access user communications,» the Office of the Texas Attorney General said. «Additional reporting and investigations indicate that message content can be pulled and viewed after the message has been sent. This is a complete and total misrepresentation of Meta’s privacy policies.» The lawsuit hinges on a report from Bloomberg from last month about how the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security had abruptly closed an investigation into allegations that Meta could access encrypted WhatsApp messages. Preliminary findings from the department claimed that «there is no limit to the type of WhatsApp message that can be viewed by Meta.» Meta has called the allegations «baseless.»
  • FIOD Arrests Two in Connection with Stark Industries —The Netherlands Fiscal Intelligence and Investigation Service (FIOD) arrested two men and seized 800 servers in connection with a web hosting company that enabled cyber attacks, interference operations, and disinformation campaigns. The arrested individuals included a 57-year-old man from Amsterdam and a 39-year-old man from The Hague. Although the name of the company was not explicitly mentioned, it is assessed to be Stark Industries, which was sanctioned by the E.U. in May 2025. Following the sanctions, a significant chunk of the technical infrastructure was transferred to a Dutch-based entity known as THE.Hostingaka WorkTitans. «This new company actually acts as a cover for the sanctioned entities,» FIOD said. «The director and (indirect) sole shareholder of this company is the 57-year-old suspect.» A second unnamed Dutch company is said to have played a facilitating role. «This company, of which the 39-year-old is a suspected director and sole shareholder, ensures that the servers of the former new company are connected to the internet,» FIOD added.
  • UNG0002 Targets Chinese Educational Sector —The Chinese educational sector has become the target of a new campaign conducted by UNG0002 as part of a spear-phishing campaign codenamed Operation Dragon Whistle. «What makes this campaign particularly effective is the precision of its social engineering,» Seqrite Labs said. «The threat actor did not use a generic lure — they specifically identified that Changzhou University conducts mandatory annual fitness assessments where failure directly impacts graduation eligibility. This creates an environment of urgency and compliance that significantly increases the probability of victim engagement.» The emails have been found to distribute ZIP archives that ultimately lead to the deployment of Cobalt Strike Beacon.
  • Void Botnet Uses Ethereum Smart Contracts for C2 —A new botnet malware called Void Botnet uses Ethereum smart contracts for seizure-resistant command-and-control (C2). It’s a Rust-based malware that’s advertised on cybercrime forums by a developer operating under the handle TheVoidStl. «Based on the seller’s documentation and panel screenshots, Void Botnet is a Rust-native loader with two command-and-control modes in the same binary,» Qrator Labs said. «The first mode routes commands through Ethereum smart contracts: the operator writes instructions to a contract, and infected machines check it at regular intervals, picking up new tasks within three to five minutes. The second mode connects machines directly to the operator’s web panel, with tasks completing in under thirty seconds. The operator switches between them at any time by updating the contract.» The botnet works by writing commands to smart contracts, bots polling public RPC endpoints, and C2 infrastructure that is hard to take down.
  • Proton Debuts AI Access Tokens in Proton Pass —Proton Pass, a secure, end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) password manager, has added credential sharing through AI access tokens, allowing users to give AI agents access to items it’s permissioned to and monitor their activity. «AI access tokens are our newest secure sharing option to bring password management into the age of agentic AI,» Proton said. «Every time an AI agent uses an access token, this is logged, and a reason for the access must be provided. For extra security, you can also set an expiration for each token, from one hour to one year, after which it can no longer be used.»
  • DevilNFC and NFCMultiPay Android NFC Relay Malware Spotted —Two new Android NFC relay malware families named DevilNFC and NFCMultiPay have been observed targeting European and LATAM banking customers. «These two NFC relay toolkits are being developed and operated outside the Chinese-speaking MaaS ecosystem: DevilNFC carries an exclusively Spanish-speaking attribution, while NFCMultiPay’s developer fingerprint is Portuguese (Brazilian),» Cleafy said. «Local groups are no longer buying access to Chinese platforms; they are building their own.» It’s assessed that the malware families may have been developed with assistance using generative artificial intelligence (AI). Both malware families are designed to collect the victim’s card PIN. «DevilNFC further locks the victim inside the malicious interface via Kiosk Mode, preventing any escape while the relay completes,» the Italian company said. «DevilNFC employs an asymmetric architecture in which a single APK serves both roles in a relay attack: a passive reader on the victim’s device and a system-level card emulator on the attacker’s rooted device, achieved via a hooking framework that intercepts NFC traffic below the Android API layer.» DevilNFC overlaps with an NGate variant documented by ESET last month. The malicious apps are distributed via SMS or WhatsApp messages, directing victims to fake landing pages impersonating Google Play Store listings. 
  • TAX#TRIDENT Uses Indian Income Tax Lures —A new campaign dubbed TAX#TRIDENT is using Indian Income Tax-themed lures to target Windows endpoints via three delivery paths. The campaign starts with fake tax assessment lures and then moves victims toward ZIP files, VBScript downloaders, or PHP-looking web endpoints that actually return script content,» Securonix said. «The first branch uses a ZIP file and a signed ClientSetup installer. Once executed, the installer creates a hidden client tree, adds service and driver persistence, and starts network communication. The second branch uses ‘Assessment_Order.vbs.’ The script shows a tax assessment decoy image, downloads the same ClientSetup payload, writes a new ‘YTSysConfig.ini,’ and runs the payload hidden. The third branch uses a PHP-looking endpoint that returns VBScript. That script downloads more stages from S3, disguises a VBS file as a PNG image, changes UAC prompt behavior, and silently installs a signed ManageEngine UEMS / Endpoint Central agent.» 
  • CISA Launches KEV Nomination Form to Report Exploited Bugs —The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has introduced an online Nomination Form that lets researchers, vendors, and industry partners submit known exploited vulnerabilities (KEVs) directly so as to «quickly identify, validate, and share KEVs, critical threat information.»
  • Exploitation of Four-Faith Router Flaw —Attackers are exploiting CVE-2024-9643 (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical authentication bypass flaw in Four-Faith F3x36 industrial cellular routers, as part of a large-scale campaign since mid-May 2026 to turn fold compromised devices into botnets for further campaigns. CrowdSec said it has observed 139 attacking IP addresses through May 18, 2026. «Exploitation was first observed on April 20 and escalated to the point of being reclassified as mass exploitation on May 12, a strong signal that attackers are operationalizing this flaw at scale,» it added.
  • Chinese-Language PhaaS Ecosystem Detailed —An analysis of a dozen current phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) offerings in the Chinese underground has found that they have shifted away from static password harvesting towards real-time interception and tokenization via live administration panels, allowing attackers to capture one-time passcodes (OTPs) and bypass multifactor authentication (MFA) instantly. The services, such as YY Lai Yu, primarily target non-Chinese entities, with advertisements regularly posted to Telegram rather than channels such as WeChat (Weixin) or Tencent QQ. A crucial aspect of these operations is their exploitation of digital wallet provisioning to monetize stolen payment details. Attackers have been found to leverage captured credentials and OTPs to provision the victim’s card into a digital wallet on an attacker-controlled device. Once tokenized, the card can be used for high-value transactions, contactless payments, and ATM withdrawals. «Instead of simply gaining account access, these operations focus on exploiting digital wallet provisioning to transform stolen payment data into tokenized assets within ecosystems,» Google said. «This shift—combined with the use of encrypted delivery channels like RCS and iMessage to bypass traditional carrier security filters on SMS messages—represents an emerging development where the goal is no longer just a login, but securing direct, unauthorized control over a victim’s financial accounts.»

🔧 Cybersecurity Tools

  • Bumblebee → It is an open-source security tool for macOS and Linux designed to find software supply-chain vulnerabilities on developer computers. It acts as a lightweight, read-only scanner that audits metadata files, manifests, and configurations rather than executing code. This allows it to safely check local language packages, web browser extensions, text editor add-ons, and AI tool configurations for known security exposures without running potentially malicious install scripts.
  • Claude-BugHunter → It is an open-source add-on that configures Anthropic’s Claude Code command-line tool into a specialized security assistant. It equips the AI with pre-built vulnerability patterns, attack techniques, and reporting templates, automating the process of finding and documenting security flaws during authorized testing.

Disclaimer: This is strictly for research and learning. It hasn’t been through a formal security audit, so don’t just blindly drop it into production. Read the code, break it in a sandbox first, and make sure whatever you’re doing stays on the right side of the law.

Conclusion

Patch the easy stuff before it becomes a bigger problem next week. The old bugs everyone ignored? Attackers didn’t ignore them. They never do.

Right now, the internet feels held together with tape and luck. Every week, there’s a new mess, a new scam, or some old box getting dragged into a botnet. See you next Monday.

Edge Plaintext Passwords, ICS 0-Days, Patch-or-Die Alerts and 25+ New Stories – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

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.

That’s the week. Same internet, new fires.

Patch what you can, double-check what you install, and don’t trust random ads pretending to be tools. See you next ThreatsDay.

Chrome 0-Days, Router Botnets, AWS Breach, Rogue AI Agents & More – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

Some weeks in security feel normal. Then you read a few tabs and get that immediate “ah, great, we’re doing this now” feeling.

This week has that energy. Fresh messes, old problems getting sharper, and research that stops feeling theoretical real fast. A few bits hit a little too close to real life, too. There’s a good mix here: weird abuse of trusted stuff, quiet infrastructure ugliness, sketchy chatter, and the usual reminder that attackers will use anything that works.

Scroll on. You’ll see what I mean.

⚡ Threat of the Week

Google Patches 2 Actively Exploited Chrome 0-Days — Google released security updates for its Chrome web browser to address two high-severity vulnerabilities that it said have been exploited in the wild. The vulnerabilities related to an out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the Skia 2D graphics library (CVE-2026-3909) and an inappropriate implementation vulnerability in the V8 JavaScript and WebAssembly engine (CVE-2026-3910) that could result in out-of-bounds memory access or code execution, respectively. Google did not share additional details about the flaws, but acknowledged that there exist exploits for both of them. The issues were addressed in Chrome versions 146.0.7680.75/76 for Windows and Apple macOS, and 146.0.7680.75 for Linux. 

🔔 Top News

  • Meta to Discontinue Instagram E2EE in May 2026 — Meta announced plans to discontinue support for end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for chats on Instagram after May 8, 2026. In a statement shared with The Hacker News, a Meta spokesperson said, «Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we’re removing this option from Instagram in the coming months. Anyone who wants to keep messaging with end-to-end encryption can easily do that on WhatsApp.»
  • Authorities Disrupt SocksEscort Service — A court-authorized international law enforcement operation dismantled a criminal proxy service named SocksEscort that enslaved thousands of residential routers worldwide into a botnet for committing large-scale fraud. «The malware allowed SocksEscort to direct internet traffic through the infected routers. SocksEscort sold this access to its customers,» the U.S. Justice Department said. The main thing to note here is that SocksEscort was powered by AVrecon, a malware written in C to explicitly target MIPS and ARM architectures via known security flaws in edge network devices. The malware also featured a novel persistence mechanism that involved flashing custom firmware, which intentionally disables future updates, permanently transforming SOHO routers into SocksEscort proxy nodes to blindside corporate monitoring.
  • UNC6426 Exploits nx npm Supply Chain Attack to Gain AWS Admin Access in 72 Hours — A threat actor known as UNC6426 leveraged keys stolen following the supply chain compromise of the nx npm package in August 2025 to completely breach a victim’s AWS environment within 72 hours. UNC6426 used the access to abuse the GitHub-to-AWS OpenID Connect (OIDC) trust and create a new administrator role in the cloud environment, Google said. Subsequently, this role was abused to exfiltrate files from the client’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets and perform data destruction in their production cloud environments.
  • KadNap Enslaves Network Devices to Fuel Illegal Proxy — A takedown-resistant botnet comprising more than 14,000 routers and other network devices has been conscripted into a proxy network that anonymously ferries traffic used for cybercrime. The botnet, named KadNap, exploits known vulnerabilities in Asus routers (among others), leveraging the initial access to drop shell scripts that reach out to a peer-to-peer network based on Kademlia for decentralized control. Infected devices are being used to fuel a proxy service named Doppelganger that, for a fee, tunnels customers’ internet traffic through residential IP addresses, offering a way for attackers to blend in and make it harder to differentiate malicious traffic from legitimate activity.
  • APT28 Strikes with Sophisticated Toolkit — The Russian threat actor known as APT28 has been observed using a bespoke toolkit in recent cyber espionage campaigns targeting Ukrainian cyber assets. The primary components of the toolkit are two implants, one of which employs techniques from a malware framework the threat actor used in 2010s, while the other is a heavily modified version of the COVENANT framework for long-term spying. COVENANT is used in concert with BEARDSHELL to facilitate data exfiltration, lateral movement, and execution of PowerShell commands. Also alongside these tools is a malware named SLIMAGENT that shares overlaps with XAgent.

‎️‍🔥 Trending CVEs

New vulnerabilities show up every week, and the window between disclosure and exploitation keeps getting shorter. The flaws below are this week’s most critical — high-severity, widely used software, or already drawing attention from the security community.

Check these first, patch what applies, and don’t wait on the ones marked urgent — CVE-2026-3909, CVE-2026-3910, CVE-2026-3913 (Google Chrome), CVE-2026-21666, CVE-2026-21667, CVE-2026-21668, CVE-2026-21672, CVE-2026-21708, CVE-2026-21669, CVE-2026-21671 (Veeam Backup & Replication), CVE-2026-27577, CVE-2026-27493, CVE-2026-27495, CVE-2026-27497 (n8n), CVE-2026-26127, CVE-2026-21262 (Microsoft Windows), CVE-2019-17571, CVE-2026-27685 (SAP), CVE-2026-3102 (ExifTool for macOS), CVE-2026-27944 (Nginx UI), CVE-2025-67826 (K7 Ultimate Security), CVE-2026-26224, CVE-2026-26225 (Intego X9), CVE-2026-29000 (pac4j-jwt), CVE-2026-23813 (HPE Aruba Networking AOS-CX), CVE-2025-12818 (PostgreSQL), CVE-2026-2413 (Ally WordPress plugin), CVE-2026-0953 (Tutor LMS Pro WordPress plugin), CVE-2026-25921 (Gogs), CVE-2026-2833, CVE-2026-2835, CVE-2026-2836 (Cloudflare Pingora), CVE-2026-24308 (Apache ZooKeeper), CVE-2026-3059, CVE-2026-3060, CVE-2026-3989 (SGLang), CVE-2026-0231 (Palo Alto Networks Cortex XDR Broker VM), CVE-2026-20040, CVE-2026-20046 (Cisco IOS XR Software), CVE-2025-65587 (graphql-upload-minimal), CVE-2026-3497 (OpenSSH), CVE-2026-26123 (Microsoft Authenticator for Android and iOS), and CVE-2025-61915 (CUPS).

🎥 Cybersecurity Webinars

  • Stop Guessing: Automate Your Defense Against Real-World Attacks → Learn how to move beyond basic security checklists by using automation to test your defenses against real-world attacks. Experts will show you why traditional testing often fails and how to use continuous, data-driven tools to find and fix gaps in your protection. You will learn how to prove your security actually works without increasing your manual workload.
  • Fix Your Identity Security: Closing the Gaps Before Hackers Find Them → This webinar covers a new study about why many companies are struggling to keep their user accounts and digital identities safe. Experts share findings from the Ponemon Institute on the biggest security gaps, such as disconnected apps and the new risks created by AI. You will learn simple, practical steps to fix these problems and get better control over who has access to your company’s data.
  • The Ghost in the Machine: Securing the Secret Identities of Your AI Agents → As artificial intelligence (AI) begins to act on its own, businesses face a new challenge: how to give these «AI agents» the right digital IDs. This webinar explains why current security for humans doesn’t work for autonomous bots and how to build a better system to track what they do. You will learn simple, real-world steps to give AI agents secure identities and clear rules, ensuring they don’t accidentally expose your private company data.

📰 Around the Cyber World

  • Fake Google Security Check Drops Browser RAT — A web page mimicking a Google Account security page has been spotted delivering a fully featured browser-based surveillance toolkit that takes the form of a Progressive Web App (PWA). «Disguised as a routine security checkup, it walks victims through a four-step flow that grants the attacker push notification access, the device’s contact list, real-time GPS location, and clipboard contents—all without installing a traditional app,» Malwarebytes said. «For victims who follow every prompt, the site also delivers an Android companion package introducing a native implant that includes a custom keyboard (enabling keystroke capture), accessibility-based screen reading capabilities, and permissions consistent with call log access and microphone recording.»
  • Forbidden Hyena Delivers BlackReaperRAT — A hacktivist group known as Forbidden Hyena (aka 4B1D) has distributed RAR archives in December 2025 and January 2026 in attacks targeting Russia that led to the deployment of a previously undocumented remote access trojan called BlackReaperRAT and an updated version of the Blackout Locker ransomware, referred to as Milkyway by the threat actors. BlackReaperRAT is capable of running commands via «cmd.exe,» uploading/downloading files, spawning an HTTP shell to receive commands, and spreading the malware to connected removable media. «It carries out destructive attacks against organizations across various sectors located within the Russian Federation,» BI.ZONE said. «The group publishes information regarding successful attacks on its Telegram channel. It collaborates with the groups Cobalt Werewolf and Hoody Hyena.»
  • Chinese Hackers Target the Persian Gulf region with PlugX — A China-nexus threat actor, likely suspected to be Mustang Panda, has targeted countries in the Persian Gulf region. The activity took place within the first 24 hours of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East late last month. The campaign used a multi-stage attack chain that ultimately deployed a PlugX backdoor variant. «The shellcode and PlugX backdoor used obfuscation techniques such as control flow flattening (CFF) and mixed boolean arithmetic (MBA) to hinder reverse engineering,» Zscaler said. «The PlugX variant in this campaign supports HTTPS for command-and-control (C2) communication and DNS-over-HTTPS (DOH) for domain resolution.»
  • Phishing Campaign Uses SEO Poisoning to Steal Data — A phishing campaign has employed SEO poisoning to direct search engine results to fake traffic ticket portals that impersonate the Government of Canada and specific provincial agencies. «The campaign lures victims to a fake ‘Traffic Ticket Search Portal’ under the pretense of paying outstanding traffic violations,» Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said. «Submitted data includes license plates, address, date of birth, phone/email, and credit card numbers.» The phishing pages utilize a «waiting room» tactic where the victim’s browser polls the server every two seconds and triggers redirects based on specific status codes.
  • Roundcube Exploitation Toolkit Discovered — Hunt.io said it discovered a Roundcube exploitation toolkit on an internet-exposed directory on 203.161.50[.]145. It’s worth noting that Russian threat actors like APT28, Winter Vivern, and TAG-70 have repeatedly targeted Roundcube vulnerabilities to breach Ukrainian organizations. «The directory included development and production XSS payloads, a Flask-based command-and-control server, CSS-injection tooling, operator bash history, and a Go-based implant deployed on a compromised Ukrainian web application,» the company said, attributing it with medium to high confidence to APT28, citing overlaps with Operation RoundPress. The toolkit, dubbed Roundish, supports credential harvesting, persistent mail forwarding, bulk email exfiltration, address book theft, and two-factor authentication (2FA) secret extraction, mirroring a feature present in MDAEMON. One of the primary targets of the attack is mail.dmsu.gov[.]ua, a Roundcube webmail instance associated with Ukraine’s State Migration Service (DMSU). Besides the possibility of a shared development lineage, Roundish introduces four new components not previously documented in APT28 webmail activity, including a CSS-based side-channel module, browser credential stealer, and a Go-based backdoor that provides persistence via cron, systemd, and SELinux. The CSS injection component is designed to progressively extract characters from Roundcube’s document object model (DOM) without injecting any JavaScript into the victim’s page. The technique is likely used for targeting Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) tokens or email UIDs. Central to the Roundish toolkit is an XSS payload that’s engineered to steal the victim’s email address, harvest account credentials, redirect all incoming emails to a Proton Mail address, export mailbox data from the victim’s Inbox and Sent folders, and gather the victim’s complete address book. «The combination of hidden autofill credential harvesting, server-side mail forwarding persistence, bulk mailbox exfiltration, and browser credential theft reflects a modular approach designed for sustained access,» Hunt.io said. «From a defensive perspective, password resets alone are not sufficient in cases like this. Mail forwarding rules, Sieve filters, and multi-factor authentication secrets must be audited and reset.»
  • Phishing Campaign Targeting AWS Console Credentials — An active adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) phishing campaign is using fake security alert emails to steal AWS Console credentials, per Datadog. «The phishing kit proxies authentication to the legitimate AWS sign-in endpoint in real time, validating credentials before redirecting victims and likely capturing one-time password (OTP) codes,» the company said. «This campaign does not exploit AWS vulnerabilities or abuse AWS infrastructure.» Post-compromise console access has been observed within 20 minutes of credential submission. These efforts originated from Mullvad VPN infrastructure.
  • Malicious npm Packages Deliver Cipher stealer — Two new malicious npm packages, bluelite-bot-manager and test-logsmodule-v-zisko, were found to deliver via Dropbox a Windows executable designed to siphon sensitive data, including Discord totems, credentials from Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, and Yandex browsers, and seed files from cryptocurrency wallet apps like Exodus. from compromised hosts using a stealer named Cipher stealer. «The stealer also uses an embedded Python script and a secondary payload downloaded from GitHub,» JFrog said.
  • GIBCRYPTO Ransomware Detailed — A new ransomware called GIBCRYPTO comes with the ability to capture keystrokes and corrupt the Master Boot Record (MBR) so that any attempt to restart the system will cause the system to run into an error. The ransomware uses the Salsa20 algorithm for encryption. It’s suspected to be part of Snake Keylogger, indicating the malware authors’ attempts to diversify beyond information theft. The development comes as Sygnia highlighted SafePay’s OneDrive-based data exfiltration technique during a ransomware attack after breaching a victim by leveraging a FortiGate firewall flaw and a misconfigured administrative account. «SafePay gained initial access by exploiting a firewall misconfiguration, which enabled them to obtain local administrative credentials,» the company said. «They rapidly escalated discovery and enumeration activities to identify high-value targets for lateral movement, demonstrating a structured and methodical approach to mapping the environment. Within a matter of hours, SafePay escalated to domain administrator access.» The attack culminated in the deployment of ransomware, encrypting more than 60 servers.
  • Fraudulent Account Registration Activity Originating from Vietnam — A sprawling cybercrime ecosystem based in Vietnam has been linked to a cluster of fraudulent account registration activity on platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. In these attacks, attributed to O-UNC-036, the threat actors rely on disposable email addresses in order to execute SMS pumping attacks, also called International Revenue Sharing Fraud (IRSF). «In this scheme, malicious actors automate the creation of puppet accounts in a targeted service provider,» Okta said. «Fraudsters use these account registrations to trigger SMS messages to premium rate phone numbers and profit from charges incurred. This activity can prove costly for service providers who use SMS to verify registration information in customer accounts or to send multi-factor authentication (MFA) security codes.» O-UNC-036 has also been linked to a cybercrime-as–a-service (CaaS) ecosystem that provides paid infrastructure and services to facilitate online fraud. The web-based storefronts are hosted in Vietnam and specialize in the sales of web-based accounts.
  • Hijacked AppsFlyer SDK Distributes Crypto Clipper — The AppsFlyer Web SDK was briefly hijacked to serve malicious code to steal cryptocurrency in a supply chain attack. The clipper malware payload came with capabilities to intercept cryptocurrency wallet addresses entered on websites and replace them with attacker-controlled addresses to divert funds to the threat actor. «The AppsFlyer Web SDK was observed serving obfuscated malicious JavaScript instead of the legitimate SDK from websdk.appsflyer[.]com,» Profero said. «The malicious payload appears to have been designed for stealth and compatibility, preserving legitimate SDK functionality while adding hidden browser hooks and wallet-hijacking logic.» The incident has since been resolved by AppsFlyer.
  • Operation CamelClone Targets Government and Defense Entities — A new cyber espionage campaign dubbed Operation CamelClone has targeted governments and defense entities in Algeria, Mongolia, Ukraine, and Kuwait using malicious ZIP archives that contain a Windows shortcut (LNK) file, which, when executed, delivers a JavaScript loader named HOPPINGANT. The loader then delivers additional payloads for establishing C2 and exfiltrating data to the MEGA cloud storage service. «One interesting aspect of this campaign is that the threat actor does not rely on traditional command-and-control infrastructure,» Seqrite Labs said. «Instead, the payloads are hosted on a public file-sharing service, filebulldogs[.]com, while stolen data is uploaded to MEGA storage using the legitimate tool Rclone.» The activity has not been attributed to any known threat group.
  • How Threat Actors Exfiltrate Credentials Using Telegram Bots — Threat actors are abusing the Telegram Bot API to exfiltrate data via text messages or arbitrary file uploads, highlighting how legitimate services can be weaponized to evade detection. Agent Tesla Keylogger is by far the most prominent example of a malware family that uses Telegram for C2. «In general, Telegram C2s appear to be most popular among information stealers, possibly due to Telegram’s technically legitimate nature and because information stealers typically only need to exfiltrate data passively rather than provide complex communications beyond simple message or file transfers,» Cofense said.
  • Microsoft Launches Copilot Health — Microsoft has become the latest company after OpenAI and Anthropic to launch a dedicated «secure space» called Copilot Health that integrates medical records, biometric data from wearables, and lab test results to give personalized advice in the U.S. «Copilot Health brings together your health records, wearable data, and health history into one place, then applies intelligence to turn them into a coherent story,» the company said. Like OpenAI and Anthropic, Microsoft emphasized that Copilot Health isn’t meant to replace professional medical care.
  • Rogue AI Agents Can Work Together to Engage in Offensive Behaviors — According to a new report from artificial intelligence (AI) security company Irregular, agents can work together to hack into systems, escalate privileges, disable endpoint protection, and steal sensitive data while evading pattern-matching defenses. What’s notable is that the experiment did not rely on adversarial prompting or deliberately unsafe system design. «In one case, an agent convinced another agent to carry out an offensive action, a form of inter-agent collusion that emerged with no external manipulation,» Irregular said. «This scenario demonstrates two compounding risks: inter-agent persuasion can erode safety boundaries, and agents can independently develop techniques to circumvent security controls. When an agent is given access to tools or data, particularly but not exclusively shell or code access, the threat model should assume that the agent will use them, and that it will do so in unexpected and possibly malicious ways.»

🔧 Cybersecurity Tools

  • Dev Machine Guard → It is a free, open-source tool that scans your computer to show you exactly what developer tools and scripts are running. It creates a simple list of your AI coding assistants, code editor extensions, and software packages to help you find anything suspicious or outdated. It is a single script that works in seconds to give you better visibility into the security of your local coding environment.
  • Trajan → It is an automated security tool designed to find hidden vulnerabilities in «service meshes,» which are the systems that manage how different parts of a large software application talk to each other. Because these systems are complex, it is easy for engineers to make small mistakes in the settings that allow hackers to bypass security or steal data. Trajan works by scanning these configurations to spot those specific errors and helping developers fix them before they can be exploited.

Disclaimer: For research and educational use only. Not security-audited. Review all code before use, test in isolated environments, and ensure compliance with applicable laws.

Conclusion

There’s a lot packed in here, and not in a neat way. Some of it is the usual recycled chaos, some of it feels a little more deliberate, and some of it has that nasty “this is going to show up everywhere by next week” energy.

Anyway — enough throat-clearing. Here’s the stuff worth your attention.