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admin Noticias, Trending Banking Critical CYBERDEFENSA.MX firewall Flaws PDF Rented Stories Theft token Trojans weaponized

Critical Firewall Flaws, Banking Trojans Rented, Weaponized PDF, Token Theft + 26 More Stories – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

Some attacks take real skill. Others just need someone to leave a door open. This week has both. Exposed passwords, old bugs still getting exploited, and trusted software doing things it shouldn’t.

There’s a strange mix of clever tricks and careless mistakes. Hackers are borrowing trust from familiar apps, websites, and AI tools. Some are using AI to speed things up. Others are leaving their own attack files exposed. Not exactly careful work.

Different stories, familiar weak spots. Here’s what showed up this week.

The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

PHP2Shell attacks persist

WordPress security company Wordefence said it’s not aware of any WordPress site compromised through PHP2Shell (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619) as of October 28, 2026. «We continue to see PHP2Shell-related requests across the more than 5 million sites we protect,» it said. «Those requests show ongoing scanning and exploitation attempts; they do not show whether an attempt succeeded. Our site-cleaning and incident response teams have not handled a WordPress compromise attributed to these vulnerabilities.»

40,573 secrets exposed

Hudson Rock’s investigation into the FortiBleed credential harvesting campaign has uncovered 975 newly identified domains and 40,573 exposed secrets, including 37,076 local-user records and 1,576 Active Directory LDAP bind records. The data comes from newly obtained 1,703 FortiGate source files associated with 1,689 host identifiers. «The configuration material dates to around February 2026, earlier than the likely May/June material examined in the first investigation,» Hudson Rock said. The latest discovery has been codenamed FortiBleed 2.0.

Institutional DNS hijacked

Threat actors have used domain shadowing to place illegal gambling content beneath legitimate school and government domains in two unrelated operations. «In both cases, an unauthorized party appears to have gained access to DNS administration and created records that the original domain owners may not have noticed,» Infoblox said. «Because the resulting hostnames sat within established institutional namespaces, they provided especially useful infrastructure for search-engine optimization (SEO) and traffic acquisition.» One cluster, linked to a threat actor called Hidden Hawk, has been found to add individual CNAME records that mapped institutional hostnames to gambling pages hosted largely on Cloudflare Pages. The second campaign exploiting an Indian government domain «delegated entire subzones to third-party authoritative nameservers and used a wildcard, allowing many hostnames to be managed outside the victim’s DNS environment.» Put differently, the unauthorized DNS access creates new institutional hostnames, which resolve to infrastructure serving illegal gambling doorway pages. The pages also leverage the established reputation of school and government namespaces to ensure that the malicious URLs show up prominently in search engine results.

AI banking credential warning

Bank of America is reminding customers not to share banking credentials with AI agents. In an email blast to customers titled «Protecting your finances in the AI World,» the financial institution urged customers to never share their username and password with another person or an outside service, «including an AI-enabled tool or agent that offers to act on your behalf.»

Android tightens contact access

Google has announced that an upcoming Android release will no longer be able to directly write to contacts with the WRITE_CONTACTS permission. «Instead, you can use the standard contact intents (ACTION_INSERT, ACTION_EDIT, and ACTION_INSERT_OR_EDIT),» Google said. «Currently, if your app needs to save even one contact, you might be requesting WRITE_CONTACTS. But that permission grants broad access, allowing an app to make widespread changes to contacts across the device in the background, even without user interaction. Most apps don’t need such broad permission.»

Critical Fortinet fixes released

Fortinet has released a «coordinated set of security updates for FortiOS, FortiManager, and FortiAnalyzer» to address critical and high-severity flaws that were flagged using an AI-assisted vulnerability discovery approach. Details of the issues are being kept under wraps until November 10, 2026. With Fortinet devices becoming a favorite target for attackers, it’s essential that users move quickly to apply the fixes.

Zero-permission token theft

Details have emerged about a now-patched flaw in Microsoft Authenticator (CVE-2026-80097 aka AuthMask) that could be exploited by installing and running a malicious application on an affected Android device and convincing the user to complete an authentication flow in the app by claiming to be a trusted app and getting the corresponding tokens. The flaw could be exploited to take over work accounts without requiring additional permissions. «Successful exploitation could allow the attacker to obtain authentication tokens and access resources as the affected user,» Microsoft said. According to Enclave, «an unprivileged Android app with zero permissions could impersonate any installed Microsoft first-party app and have the Microsoft Authenticator broker hand it that app’s tokens. The setup is a device with Authenticator installed and one work account signed into it.»

32 fake AI bots hunt secrets

Attackers are disguising themselves as AI agents to steal credentials. Cequence said it has tracked a single actor running AI agent impersonation at scale by posing as about 32 different AI bots, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, while searching for passwords, API keys, and cloud credentials. «The malicious scanner runs from a major cloud provider and rotates through about 32 AI bot identities, spanning crawlers and assistants from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Perplexity, and others,» Will Glazier said. «It ignores web pages and requests files that commonly store secrets, including .env configuration files, cloud credential files, private SSH keys, and server environment data, working from a list of roughly 90 file paths. Each address sends a short burst of 50 to 190 requests in about eight seconds and then moves on. The scanner works through targets one at a time, around the clock, and first sends random nonsense paths to find websites that answer every request, a common scanning technique. It hit organizations in financial services, retail, telecommunications, energy, and software, and stayed active from at least late September through late October.»

China-linked network intrusion

The U.S. Embassy in Fiji has revealed that hackers linked to China broke into a regional organization based in Suva between July and August 2026. «Hackers with links to China maintained access to the organization’s network over several days,» it said. The embassy did not name the threat actor. Nor did it disclose what data the attackers may have accessed.

Camera software weaponized

Attackers have been breaking into enterprise networks via camera management software, according to new research from security firm Huntress, which observed multiple incidents in September and October 2026 and traced them back to a compromised application. Source code artifacts point to a Korean company selling analog and IP cameras and digital and network video recorders. The activity abuses the legitimate «WpcMon.exe» binary to sideload DLLs that establish outbound connections to a remote server. «This activity demonstrates how attackers can blend malicious code with trusted Windows components to evade detection,» Huntress said.

68 GB government data breach

In a major operational security blunder, an unknown threat actor stole 68 GB from a Philippine government agency, maintained a detailed log of the transfer, then left that log open on the internet at 13.163.205[.]35:80. «The copy finished in under 24 minutes on September 6, 2026,» Hunt.io said. «The transfer log records 27 SQL Server backups whose filenames correspond to the case-management systems of a Philippine overseas-employment and migrant-worker administration. Beside the log sat the operator’s toolkit, a rebranded GodPotato build, a PowerShell stager, two payloads and a full Impacket environment.»

AI model data exfiltration concerns

Canadian AI company Cohere has claimed that it caught Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Flash-Next model unsuccessfully attempting to send data to China from its evaluation sandbox as part of a prompt instructing the LLM to detect malicious file download and execution by monitoring for curl processes downloading bash scripts to /tmp followed by bash execution. «Asked to write a defensive detection rule, Qwen3.8-Flash-Next ignored instructions and inventoried the machine it was running on and then tried to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud storage bucket in Beijing,» Cohere said. «We cannot answer whether this is deliberate or a leftover glitch from training.» Cohere has also released a dataset containing the model trace and corresponding raw token IDs in connection with the behavior. «The exact output is not guaranteed all the time, and many trials may be required to reproduce the behavior,» Cohere said, adding «there are similarly unexpected URLs that the model also tends to output, most containing aliyunc.» However, the findings have also led to social media chatter that the company is resorting to geopolitical fearmongering and that they are an attempt to clamp down on open-weights models.

Post-quantum migration roadmap

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released guidelines that detail the timelines for transitioning away from quantum-vulnerable algorithms to quantum-resistant standards. «The report describes different use cases and says why one migration might take longer than another,» said NIST mathematician Dustin Moody, who heads the PQC standardization project. «We understand there’s not one strategy that fits all use cases, and we want to help people handle their migration while staying abreast of what’s changing.»

AI-powered ransomware operation exposed

SOCRadar has uncovered the live workspace (i.e., open directory) of a threat actor tied to the n0n ransomware group, which exposed the operation’s full workflow as of September 2026. The directory at 185.157.161[.]148 includes an AI coding agent configured with about 150 models to produce hundreds of attack scripts, with more than $7,216 in usage costs. «Entry points included a credential stuffing campaign against 305 FortiGate SSL-VPN devices, exposed AWS keys, weak RDP/WinRM credentials, and compromised hosting management portals,» SOCRadar said. At least 23 organizations across 14 countries are said to have been identified in the workspace, including a U.S. sports retailer, a cloud provider, a teachers’ union, a Venezuelan ISP, an Argentine ministry and a pharmaceutical subsidiary.

Government AI access restricted

The Swedish government has barred employees from accessing browser-based versions of ChatGPT or Claude on their work computers over security concerns relating to the processing of sensitive data. «Officials were concerned that entering sensitive information into these models without an agreement setting out how to protect and secure the data could lead to it being fed into the model and stored for training,» Euro News reported.

42 repositories hijacked

JFrog and SafeDep have uncovered a campaign in which threat actors hijacked third-party 42 GitHub repositories across 11 owners to deploy payload blobs large enough «to evade the GitHub search and API paths normally used to find this kind of compromise.» JFrog said, «The repositories contain execution hooks for AI coding assistants and IDEs, plus 12.9 to 13.7 MB polymorphic wrappers that all decode to the same hidden CI-publisher payload.» The activity is assessed to be related to a Miasma-family npm worm propagated under various packages ending with «testmetest.» According to SafeDep, the worm «shares code with Miasma ‘Phantom Gyp’ from June 2026 and adds the token-revocation wiper from Mini Shai-Hulud. The malicious versions steal credentials, spread to other packages and repositories, and install a wiper that deletes the home directory when the victim revokes the stolen GitHub token.» Unsuspecting developers who installed the packages had their data stolen and repositories compromised with malicious code to produce further malicious testmetest releases and run shellpanel workflows targeting cPanel systems through CVE-2026-41940, overlapping with a prior campaign detailed by Socket in July 2026.

Android banking malware-as-a-service

A new Android malware operation called MR ROBOT is targeting customers of Indian banks and transforming banking fraud into a subscription business, with cybercriminals renting customized banking trojans to steal OTPs, card details, UPI PINs and credentials while secretly forwarding calls to bypass security checks. «It is not a single-actor campaign but a rented crimeware platform: a master operator leases access to affiliates, who use a Telegram bot (‘APK Shield) and a web control panel (v7.0) to build personalized banking trojans on demand and distribute them through fake Play-Store-style pages and messaging-app lures,» CloudSEK said. The kit impersonates around 36 lure apps, including banks, utility providers, and government services. One affiliate is estimated to have intercepted 5407 text messages from 153 infected devices.

MDM platforms abused for remote access

Threat actors are abusing legitimate mobile device management (MDM) platforms, like Hexnode and Rippling, by using social engineering to enroll devices or install management agents, per Huntress. «Once established, MDM provides a trusted, privileged path for malicious activity, such as deploying rogue RMM tools and maintaining remote access,» it said.

Critical Gotenberg RCE exploited

Threat actors are exploiting CVE-2026-42589 (CVSS score: 9.8), a critical remote code execution flaw in Gotenberg, to deliver a Go-based reverse shell called «cache_base.» The flaw was patched in May 2026. According to VulnCheck, the activity originated from a residential Japanese IP address in early October 2026. «The execution flow is straightforward: acquire a lock, collect host information, connect to C2, register the victim, and open a shell,» VulnCheck said. Over the past 30 days, the vulnerability has recorded 1,358 exploitation events from 128 unique source IP addresses.

Discord discussions go public

Discord has announced it will allow search engines to index discussions in Discoverable Servers and make them accessible on the web to users outside the platform without an account or invitation, starting mid-December 2026. «Discussions in Discoverable Servers will soon be easier to find when you search the web, so you can find the answer you’re looking for and step straight into the conversation on Discord,» it said. The changes apply only to Discoverable Servers and do not extend to private servers and direct messages.

800+ ransomware victims claimed

The Gentlemen ransomware operation has claimed more than 800 victims across multiple regions and sectors, with most attacks targeting organizations in the U.S. and Europe. «The group supports multiple platforms, with ransomware variants targeting Windows, Linux, NAS, and BSD systems, allowing its affiliates to target a broad range of enterprise environments,» Acronis said. «The group’s operations include the use of EDR-killing tools. In a recent incident, a custom dropper was observed deploying vulnerable Safetica ProcessMonitorDriver [CVE-2025-70795] and Lenovo BootRepair.sys drivers to terminate security processes.»

AI model loading RCE risk

Pillar Security has disclosed an arbitrary-code-execution vulnerability in Unsloth’s core model-loading path (CVE-2026-93348, CVSS score: 8.6). It has been fixed in unsloth_zoo 2026.8.14. «An attacker-controlled model configuration could cause Python code to execute during loading,» researcher Ariel Fogel said. «The affected code ran inside the model-loading process, with access to whatever that process could read, modify, or authenticate to. In an AI development environment, that can include proprietary datasets, model artifacts, Hugging Face tokens, and cloud credentials. Exploitation required an affected loading path to process an attacker-controlled configuration.»

Unauthenticated root-level RCE

XBOW said it identified an unauthenticated, critical-severity remote code execution bug in a public web application belonging to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). «The vulnerable application was a resource/logistics calculator, not a voting machine or voter registration system,» XBOW researcher Ariel Walter Garcia said. «The flaw allowed an unauthenticated attacker to execute code as root inside the backend container, with access to locally protected resources and outbound network connectivity, a privileged foothold reachable via a crafted unauthenticated web request.»

Session-hijacking RAT emerges

A new remote access trojan called DarkCore comes with a dedicated browser that could let attackers access Gmail, WhatsApp, and MediaFire accounts using stolen sessions, while giving the impression that the activity is originating from the victim’s own IP address. DarkCore was first advertised on cybercrime forums in August 2026. «The seller describes a browser that reuses those sessions to access work mailboxes, instant messaging apps, cloud storage and other services through the infected machine’s IP address,» BlackFog said. «The purpose is to make the access look like legitimate activity from the user.»

AI-powered malware framework

Cisco Talos has disclosed details of a new AI-integrated command-and-control (C2) framework called NIK C2. The implant features surveillance, theft, lateral movement, and evasion capabilities, including credential dumping, RDP session hijacking, process hollowing, and a C2-driven screen lock ransomware module. «NIK C2 contains a Windows implant, using which, an actor can dump credentials, stream the victim’s keystrokes to collect the targeted victim’s sensitive data, and instruct an integrated AI model to analyze the harvested data, all within the compromised session,» Talos said. «In this framework, the actor has abused the OpenAI Chat Completions application programming interface (API), which is an HTTP endpoint that enables ChatGPT-style conversations programmatically. In addition to the features that enable theft, an actor can also deploy desktop screen-locking ransomware via the NIK C2 implant onto the victim machine, leading to a ransom demand in Bitcoin or USDT cryptocurrencies.» Three different versions of the malware have been identified to date since August 12, 2026. Talos said NIK C2 alters adversary tradecraft by collapsing collection and exploitation into a single continuous session.

Malicious PDF delivers backdoor

A phishing email using a FedEx tax invoice lure and containing a ZIP archive with a PDF has been observed triggering a multi-stage infection process to deliver a previously undocumented variant of the Sirius Backdoor. «The PDF abuses /OpenAction and /Launch objects to trigger an embedded Base64-encoded PowerShell command upon opening,» Trellix said. «Execution relies on social engineering to trick the user into approving the PDF reader’s security confirmation prompt. The PowerShell stager decrypts and reflectively loads a .NET assembly in memory. This loader performs process hollowing into legitimate Windows processes such as msbuild.exe, svchost.exe, etc., allowing the malware to operate under trusted process contexts.» The final payload is SIRIUS, a Microsoft Visual C++ based backdoor with extended remote access capabilities.

AI reshapes ransomware economics

A new analysis from Flare has revealed that threat actors are building a mixed AI toolkit, combining commercial models with local, open-weight, and jailbroken alternatives, as well as leaning on stolen AI credentials to shift costs to victims. «Where AI can help is with understanding systems, writing tools and troubleshooting. The threat actor still needs access, decisions and a way to obtain payment,» Flare said. «If AI helps an affiliate write a working data-export script without hiring a specialist, the affiliate may avoid that specialist’s fee and the wait for their help. AI makes expertise cheaper to obtain only when the cost of using and checking its work is lower than the cost of the specialist help it replaces.»

Emerging data-extortion threat

A recently observed cyber-extortion actor named ScarlettGroup is publicly advertising alleged data compromises and uses negotiation deadlines and threatened disclosures to pressure targeted organizations. The group’s dark web site listing includes victims from technology, education, government, and entertainment sectors. «ScarlettGroup demonstrates characteristics associated with financially motivated data-extortion operations, including public victim claims, deadline-based pressure, and underground forum activity,» Foresiet said. «Its dedicated leak-site infrastructure and structured disclosure mechanism indicate an organized approach to promoting alleged compromises and exerting reputational pressure.»

Infostealers evolve into RATs

Following its disruption in June 2026 as part of Operation Endgame, StealC has returned four months later as Stadia. «This time it’s not a stealer: it’s a full remote access trojan,» Varonis said. «The RAT’s features include hidden desktop control, a live command shell, a file explorer, a process manager and an in-memory loader, with StealC’s stealer welded on as one module among six. The actor behind Stadia is working hard to win back original StealC customers: every former StealC customer is offered a free month on the top ($900) tier.» The development comes as Moonlock Lab revealed that the Icarus macOS stealer has similarly evolved from a smash-and-grab crypto and data stealer to a malware with remote-access capabilities. The new iteration is called ICMacOS. «The stealer is actively advertised on cybercrime forums by a Russian-speaking actor operating under the handle GlowComa, with feature updates regularly announced via Telegram,» SOCRadar said. «GlowComa promotes ICMacOS alongside Icarus ClickFix, a companion panel designed to deliver payloads using malicious copy-and-paste terminal commands. The infection chain relies on initial dropper scripts to detect the host architecture and harvest administrator passwords using fake system dialogs before delivering the primary payload.» Another macOS-focused stealer is Aokigahara, which goes beyond browsers, VPN clients, cryptocurrency wallets, FTP/SFTP clients, password managers, and email applications to also target AI applications and development tools. «The stealer collects authentication files, session data, and configuration files associated with Claude, ChatGPT Desktop, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, and other tools,» Check Point said. «Stolen AI credentials could offer opportunities for monetization. Usable credentials or session tokens could enable unauthorized access to paid AI services or the resale of compromised accounts.»

That’s the week’s mess. Some attacks were clever, some were painfully simple, and a few attackers made life easier for the people investigating them. The common problem? Too much trust in things nobody was watching closely.

AI is adding new tricks, but the old ones aren’t going anywhere. Stolen credentials, weak access controls, and forgotten bugs still get plenty of work done. New tools, familiar mistakes.

The useful part is knowing where those mistakes keep showing up. That’s usually where the next problem starts.

10 SEP 2026

admin Noticias, Trending 119K Android BrowserBuilt CYBERDEFENSA.MX Flaws Phishing Scam Shops Stories

200 Android Flaws, Browser-Built Phishing, 119K Scam Shops + 23 More Stories – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

A lot of this week’s security news has the same awkward answer to one question: “Why was that allowed to work?”

An extension asks for access and takes too much. A trusted service becomes part of a phishing chain. An old bug still gets results. An exposed system stays exposed. A package looks useful right up until it isn’t. Different stories, same basic problem: the path in was often already there.

Nothing here needed magic. Mostly access, trust, weak edges, and someone willing to keep poking. That’s the week.

The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

Malicious extensions steal crypto data

A set of four malicious Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox extensions has been found to target Axiom Trade and Padre users to steal session tokens and wallet data. The extensions are J7Tracker (Chrome), VREO (Chrome and Firefox), and Orbit Tracker (Firefox). While the first three contain the same Axiom and Padre collection module, the fourth implements a different collector but targets the same data, while retaining some artifacts from J7Tracker. «The module is byte-identical across all three analyzed extensions. It automatically retrieves authenticated user information, wallet-related bundle data, Firebase access tokens, and application state, then sends the information to threat actor-controlled Vercel deployments,» Socket said. The same Chrome publisher has been traced back to two earlier extensions, GhostApe and GhostApe Color, impersonating the MockApe trading add-on.

AI agents automate cyber intrusions

A Chinese-speaking operator has been observed using Anthropic Claude Code, Alibaba Qwen, and DeepSeek to automate intrusions against government and financial systems in Afghanistan, Thailand, Taiwan, and the U.S. Some of the targets included Taiwan’s Kuomintang Party History Archives, Indonesia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, government and education systems in mainland China, and industrial hosts in Da Nang, Vietnam. The attacker is said to have used SecFlow, an AI orchestration framework, to convert «campaign objectives into tasks for specialized AI agents» and supply them with tools, target information, shared storage, and network routes, Hunt.io said, adding the tool «split reconnaissance, exploitation, collection, and reporting among specialist workers.» Some of the vulnerabilities exploited by the threat actor are Shellshock, Spring4Shell, Ghostcat, Shiro deserialization, Log4Shell, Grafana and Nexus path traversals, and a Nacos authentication bypass. The exploitation is followed by the deployment of web shells, which are generated through a dedicated GLUTTON capability, and used to facilitate follow-on actions, like reconnaissance, privilege escalation, credential theft, and custom implant deployment. One such backdoor is SecBox, a Go-based remote-access and network-pivot framework. Details of the campaign first came to light in July 2026.

Shadow AI exposes sensitive data

The U.K.’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) has warned that employees using unapproved AI tools can expose sensitive corporate data and create security risks that organizations may struggle to detect and manage. «Providing shadow AI access to company or customer data likely increases the risk of data breaches, intellectual property loss and failure to meet regulatory requirements,» NCSC said. «Employees who transfer sensitive or proprietary information to consumer AI services will likely reduce the organization’s visibility and control over that information. AI agents are complex pieces of software that can have critical security vulnerabilities. If an attacker successfully exploits a vulnerability, they can gain access to the same data, services, and privileges that the agent has legitimate access to.»

Fake M&A deals drive wire fraud

Attackers are masquerading as executives and tricking targets in legal teams into moving conversations to WhatsApp and personal email with an aim to initiate international wire transfers using forged acquisition documents as part of a merger and acquisition scam. «The attackers presented the acquisition as a tightly controlled transaction coordinated by a reputable adviser, with only a small group involved and an announcement approaching fast,» Gen Digital said. «The organizations and professions varied. The targets included senior people in private equity, industrial finance, sales, mining and energy. For each of them, an acquisition or strategic investment narrative would have been credible enough to justify initial engagement. Despite the different branding, the documents followed substantially the same sequence of sections and reused the same legal language. They all imposed confidentiality, directed communications towards WhatsApp and personal email, and introduced a short period between the NDA date and the supposed public announcement.»

Windows adds privacy-preserving age checks

Microsoft is adding new age-awareness APIs called the Windows Age API to Windows 11 that will allow apps to determine whether a user is a child, teenager, or adult without exposing their exact date of birth. «Apps receive only the age-related signal needed for the experience and not sensitive personal data such as full date of birth,» Microsoft said. «By making age awareness available as a platform capability, Windows helps developers build safeguards into experiences from the start rather than placing the burden on children and families to manage protections app by app.»

119K domains power fake shops

A massive operation dubbed DoppelCart is using more than 119,000 domains to run a network of fake e-commerce shops that steal payment card details. The sites mimic legitimate businesses by copying product catalogs, descriptions, branding, and images, sometimes even loading assets directly from the real company’s servers. In all, the shops mimic 44,182 different brands, with a median of two clones for each. «Each copies a real brand’s photos and page text, then undercuts its prices,» Netby said. «Each also republishes the brand’s own support address, so the people who get charged complain to the brand, not the shop.»

Chrome accelerates security releases

Google has officially shifted to a two-week cadence for major Chrome milestones, with weekly security updates, in response to a shifting cybersecurity landscape in the AI era. The shift is driven by LLM-assisted vulnerability discovery approaches, which have increased the volume of patches and updates across the software ecosystem. «While this dramatic change in software security brought about by LLMs might be startling, an increase in bugs found and fixed is not a sign of failure,» Google said. «Every bug found and fixed is one less foothold for an attacker. But discovering and fixing a bug is only half the battle — we must also ship the fix and apply the update for users faster than adversaries can exploit the bug.» The idea, therefore, is to shrink the window between pushing a fix in a public codebase and getting that fix to end users before it can be exploited. A shorter release cycle would reduce the patch gap – the time frame between when a security vulnerability is known and when it gets addressed. Google moved to a four-week release cycle for Chrome in 2021, down from six weeks. Similar moves have been adopted by other browser makers like Microsoft, Mozilla, and Brave.

200 Android flaws patched

Google has released patches for 200 vulnerabilities as part of the September 2026 Android security updates. This includes a number of critical and high-severity vulnerabilities, including those that could allow attackers to remotely execute code without user interaction. One of the flaws worth highlighting is CVE-2026-28662, a critical Wi-Fi-related bug that could potentially allow an attacker to achieve remote code execution. «Most concerning from this list is CVE-2026-28662 because it’s a Wi-Fi-related memory corruption flaw,» Adam Boynton, enterprise strategy manager at Jamf, said. «If left unpatched, it could enable attackers to execute code remotely, without any additional privileges or user interaction, potentially allowing privilege escalation. This vulnerability will only continue to pose a risk if devices are left unpatched. It’s crucial that organizations issue the updates across their device fleet as soon as possible.»

Singpass scheme tied to 170 victims

Singapore police officials have arrested two male Chinese Malaysians, aged 25 and 47, for their alleged involvement in a coordinated scheme that compromised the Singpass accounts of Singapore citizens and work permit holders. «Investigations revealed that the two men were employees of a mobile phone shop located in Singapore,» authorities said. «They allegedly exploited opportunities arising from their work to access customers’ Singpass accounts. In one such occasion, when a customer was purchasing a new SIM card, one of the men allegedly offered to help update the mobile number linked to the customer’s Singpass account, before using this opportunity to create a LiquidPay account without the customer’s knowledge.» Investigations have uncovered over 170 Singapore citizens and foreign workers whose Singpass accounts were linked to the same activity. The fraudulent Singpass accounts were then used to register for more than 160 additional LiquidPay accounts.

Email breach fuels wallet phishing

Cryptocurrency hardware wallet maker Trezor has warned customers to be on the lookout for phishing attacks after its third-party email provider Brevo was breached. The incident impacted 120 Brevo accounts, including Trezor’s. «Please be aware that the email named ‘Critical Security Alert: STM32 Entropy Vulnerability’ is not coming from us, and it’s a phishing attempt,» it said. Do not click on any link. The incident affected our opt-in newsletter database, roughly 347,000 email addresses. These addresses might be potentially used for other phishing attacks in the future.» The Brevo account has been suspended to prevent the threat actors from abusing it to send phishing emails. The phishing email sent from the account contained a malicious link that instructed users to download an app that asked them to enter their wallet backup. The domain has since been taken down.

EtherRAT chain ends in ransomware

An attack campaign that installs EtherRAT via a malicious MSI installer masquerading as a Sysinternals tool has been found to deliver an AI-generated malware framework called TukTuk and GoTo Resolve. Using the access provided by the remote access software, the threat actor is said to have successfully exfiltrated data to a cloud service and deployed The Gentlemen ransomware. «TukTuk can use Arweave as a dead-drop resolver,» the DFIR Report said. «In this mode, the implant queries the Arweave blockchain for a specific Drive-Id, then retrieves an encrypted configuration blob. That blob contains the credential pool for all supported C2 transports. After execution of TukTuk, the threat actor began hands-on-keyboard activity, Kerberoasting operations, and credential discovery targeting administrative accounts. Next, the threat actor leveraged compromised service account credentials to deploy GoTo Resolve remote management tooling laterally across multiple systems, including servers and domain controllers.»

CISA refreshes insider threat guidance

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released an updated version of its Insider Threat Mitigation Guide to highlight the «growing impact insider threats have on critical infrastructure, the dynamic and evolving operational landscape, and provide new use cases to help organizations address new challenges.» Some of the key updates relate to emerging workplace trends such as increased hybrid and remote work, the use of AI for manipulation and deception, access control, and visitor screening.

AI abuse leads to 15-year sentence

James Strahler II, 37, of Columbus, has been sentenced in the U.S. to 15 years in prison for using both real and AI-generated sexually explicit images and intimidating victims with threats of violence. «Strahler had installed more than 24 AI platforms and more than 100 AI web-based models on his phone,» the Justice Department said. «The defendant used telephone calls, voicemails, text messages and web postings to engage in a campaign of harassment against his victims. From December 2024 until June 2025, Strahler sent harassing messages to at least six adult female victims. These messages included nude images of the victims, both real and AI-generated. Strahler also posted online AI-generated obscenities he created of children.» The defendant is said to have created more than 700 images of both real victims and animated persons and posted them to a website dedicated to child sexual abuse. He was arrested in June 2025.

Bank takeover suspect extradited

Sergei Anatolyevich Filimonov, 36, a Russian national and web developer, has been extradited to the U.S. in connection with a transnational cyber-fraud conspiracy responsible for large-scale bank account takeover attacks. «Filimonov and his co-conspirators executed a sophisticated scheme involving spoofed domains that mimicked the websites of federally insured financial institutions,» the Justice Department said. «The conspirators purchased sponsored search-engine links to divert unsuspecting banking customers to fraudulent login pages, where victims entered their credentials. The conspirators used the stolen credentials to access bank accounts, review account balances, and initiate unauthorized wire transfers to steal bank account funds.» Filimonov is also accused of developing and maintaining online infrastructure supporting the operation, including interactive databases storing more than 5,000 stolen login credentials and software designed to harvest and transmit sensitive authentication data. One of the backend domains linked to the scheme was seized by U.S. authorities in December 2025. Filimonov has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

$245M crypto theft ringleader pleads guilty

Malone Lam (aka Anne Hathaway, $$$, and King Greavy), 22, a citizen of Singapore and recent resident of Miami, has pleaded guilty in the U.S. for their role as a «ringleader of an international cybercrime conspiracy» that used social engineering to steal and launder cryptocurrency valued at more than $245 million. «The criminal enterprise began no later than October 2023 and continued through at least May 2025,» the Justice Department said. «The scheme developed through connections made on online gaming platforms and was comprised of individuals based in California, Connecticut, New York, Florida, and abroad. The RICO conspiracy used social engineering and occasional home break-ins to obtain information that allowed the conspirators to drain their victims’ cryptocurrency wallets.» Lam is accused of organizing the enterprise, identifying target victims, and coordinating with different co-conspirators. The stolen assets were used to purchase nightclub services, luxury handbags, high-end watches and clothing, rental homes, private jet rentals, a team of private security guards, and a fleet of exotic cars.

Teams to obscure external QR codes

Microsoft said it will provide additional protection for QR codes shared by external users in team messages. «Images containing QR codes from external senders will be obscured by default and require users to reveal them before viewing or scanning,» the company said. «This helps reduce the risk of phishing and fraud by encouraging more deliberate interaction with QR code content.» The feature is expected to start rolling out next month.

Google services abused as phishing relay

A newly discovered phishing campaign has been observed routing «victims through a deliberate chain of legitimate Google services before landing them on credential harvesters or deploying remote access tools,» according to KnowBe4 Threat Lab. What’s unusual about the attack is that it abuses six distinct Google properties (Meet, Search, DoubleClick, Programmable Search Engine, Image Search, and Tag Manager) across a multi-hop redirection path to bypass email security filters. «The page pulls live company logos from Clearbit, real-time website screenshots from a third-party screenshot API, and uses Google’s public DNS to validate the victim’s corporate email domain,» it added. Recent phishing campaigns have also increasingly exploited .vu, Vanuatu’s country-code top-level domain, for setting up malicious infrastructure. KnowBe4 said it recorded a 159% increase in phishing sites, 1,660 unique domains, and over 28,000 malicious emails from April through July 2026. «Security vendors have historically seen almost no .vu traffic, so there is no TLD-level risk signal built into most threat feeds,» the company said. Another «iCloud Sign-In Alert» phishing attack has been found to detect the operating system and serve a remote access tool for Windows users and a credential harvesting page for Apple users. «Everyone else gets walked through a fake Microsoft login while a human operator watches the credentials arrive in Telegram in real time,» KnowBe4 said.

Smart TV privacy claims spark scrutiny

LG is drawing criticism over claims from YouTube channel Gamers Nexus that its smart TVs gather extensive information about users and their surroundings to fuel its advertising business. The channel crew said it observed the TV capturing IP addresses, location data, and the names, signal strengths, and channel numbers of nearby Wi-Fi networks. The consumer hardware also enumerated devices on the local network that were not paired with it, including smartphones, watches, routers, thermostats, air purifiers, server baseboard management controllers, and PCs. The move has been described as «an egregious invasion of privacy.» In a statement shared with The Register, the company said the allegations are not true. «LG TVs process voice data only when the voice button on the remote control is pressed and held, or when a wake word such as ‘Hi LG’ is recognized after the user has activated the Far-Field voice recognition feature,» the company said. Other than these instances, the TVs do not collect or record ambient conversations. If the wake word is not recognized, no voice data is transmitted to the server; wake word detection is processed locally on the device and immediately deleted. Additionally, to provide smart TV functionalities, LG TVs feature the ability to scan for and connect to nearby devices on the same network. This is a standard function commonly available on smart TVs and smart home devices.»

Malicious npm packages compromise wallets

A set of 13 malicious wallet packages have been discovered on the npm registry. According to InstallSafe, their names reference wallets, signing, analytics, Solana, Base, or mobile components. «Any computer that has this package installed or running should be considered fully compromised,» GitHub warns in an advisory. All secrets and keys stored on that computer should be rotated immediately from a different computer. The package should be removed, but as full control of the computer may have been given to an outside entity, there is no guarantee that removing the package will remove all malicious software resulting from installing it.

Blob URLs hide phishing pages

Barracuda has disclosed details of a DocuSign-themed attack campaign that replaces the traditional phishing site with a phishing page generated inside the victim’s browser using blob URLs. «Victims are routed through legitimate Microsoft services, making the attack appear trustworthy and reducing common warning signs,» the cybersecurity company said. «Because the page exists only within that browser session, there is no persistent phishing URL for security tools to retrieve, analyze, or blocklist in advance. Because the visible navigation remains within trusted Microsoft services, users and automated scanners may be less likely to identify the activity as malicious.»

5,400 hacked sites fuel EtherHiding

More than 5,400 compromised websites have been used for carrying out EtherHiding attacks. «The compromised websites have little in common beyond being small businesses (clinics, plumbers, e-commerce shops) with no shared industry, region, or owner,» Netskope said. «These compromised sites include either an inline script or a spoofed package that calls the BSC testnet and downloads a ClickFix overlay as the next step of the attack, which instructs visitors to run a command on their PC.» Another variant of the attack has been found to open a covert WebRTC data channel for command-and-control (C2) instead of serving the ClickFix overlay and use it to receive and execute arbitrary JavaScript code.

Executive SSNs flood dark web markets

Rapid7 said it has identified 476 instances of compromised Social Security numbers (SSNs) across 395 unique corporate personnel since early 2026. «Over 73% of these exposures directly targeted top-level leadership, with C-suite executives comprising 44.6% of affected profiles and Presidents making up another 28.6%,» it said. «Unsurprisingly, given the geographical nature of SSNs, 95.6% of these leaks stemmed from U.S.-headquartered organizations, concentrated heavily in high-value sectors like Financials (over 25%) and Industrials (17%).» Marketplaces like Xilo, Bankom, and PeopleFinder together account for 81.5% of all executive SSN leaks present in its dataset, led by Xilo at 40.8%, Bankom at 21.8%, and PeopleFinder at 18.9%.

MCP tools expose high-impact attack paths

An analysis of 33,563 published MCP server builds containing 475,865 tools has found that 2 in 5 server builds include a tool that can access sensitive data or take consequential action and 1 in 13 server builds contain a code or command-execution primitive. «When an MCP host makes a tool available to a model, the tool’s description can enter the model’s context,» Island said. «After the tool is called, its returned text can enter that context too. The model may interpret either as guidance, not just documentation. An attacker may not need a malicious binary. A paragraph of natural language can be enough.» This makes the «instruction supply chain» a critical attack surface, allowing bad actors to embed covert instructions in tool descriptions and prompts that a model may read and trigger unintended actions without requiring malicious executable code. «Security teams need a control plane that governs a tool from discovery to execution: inspect its code and instructions, constrain its capabilities, verify configuration changes, and evaluate each action in runtime context,» Island said. «Approval cannot be a one-time package score; it must account for the tool version, the agent and user invoking it, the destination, the data in scope, and the action being attempted.»

MFA-bypassing PhaaS hits 40+ countries

Hundreds of organizations across more than 40 countries have been targeted by BigBear 2.0, a rebranded Evilginx2-based Microsoft 365 phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) operation. The stolen records are tied to 461 organizations. CloudSEK, which was able to gain admin access to the threat actor panel, said the operation has «exfiltrated 5,137 credential records — including 474 complete MFA-bypassed authentications, 1,032 plaintext passwords, and 4,148 session cookies — affecting 3,331 unique victim IPs across 40+ countries.» The multi-user PhaaS panel has been leased to at least five affiliate operators so far. «The core technique employed is adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) phishing,» CloudSEK said. «Unlike classical phishing that only captures passwords, Evilginx2’s reverse proxy relays the entire session.»

FBI unveils first cyber strategy

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has outlined its first-ever cyber strategy, stating it «will detect shifts in adversary intent and capability, disrupt their ability to profit or operate safely, expose their tradecraft and enablers, bring offenders to justice with domestic and international partners, and provide the evidence and intelligence that underpin sanctions, diplomatic action, and partner law enforcement actions.» The agency also aims to attribute malicious cyber activity with confidence, support victims following intrusions, share actionable intelligence, and partner with U.S. allies and the private sector to increase impact. Furthermore, the agency said it will «adopt agentic AI in ways that securely scale defense and disruption, and will implement AI-enabled tools to detect, divert, and deceive threat actors where operationally appropriate.»

The lesson this week is smaller than “patch faster.” Stop giving ordinary things unlimited trust. Extensions, packages, redirects, sessions, AI tools, exposed services — most of the trouble begins when something familiar is allowed to do too much.

Security still breaks at the boring handoffs: what gets access, what stays exposed, what gets inherited, and what nobody checks twice. Attackers do not need every door open. One lazy hinge is enough. That is probably the part worth remembering after the headlines disappear.

03 SEP 2026

admin Noticias, Trending Account CEO CYBERDEFENSA.MX Dropbox Hacks Kits OAuth Phishing Stories Traps

CEO Phishing Kits, 5K Dropbox Account Hacks, OAuth Traps + 17 More Stories – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

The worst part is how normal these attacks look. A call from IT. A shared file. A trusted app. A simple request to click “Allow.” Why break in when someone might open the door?

That idea runs through this edition. Attackers use real tools, fake login pages, old account links, and software guides that point to unsafe downloads. One wrong letter in a web address can be enough.

There is also ransomware, stolen ID data, hidden attack servers, and weak settings that should have been fixed long ago. Here’s the full list.

The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

Fake IT, Real Access

Microsoft has warned of a human-operated intrusion campaign that leverages Microsoft Teams external collaboration to impersonate IT or help desk personnel and socially engineer users into granting an interactive remote session. «Once remote control is established via RMM tools, the threat actor uses PowerShell to download and silently install a malicious MSI package, which in turn stages a portable Node.js runtime and an obfuscated JavaScript implant that provides persistent command execution and command and control (C2),» the tech giant said. «After the implant is deployed, the threat actor performs extensive host and Active Directory reconnaissance, periodically captures screenshots of the victim’s desktop, executes follow-on payloads through trusted Windows binaries, and pivots across the enterprise over Windows Remote Management (WinRM) toward high-value assets such as domain controllers.» Microsoft has described the «intrusion pattern» as high-impact as it grants an external operator interactive access to internal infrastructure.

Teams Vishing at Scale

In more Teams-related abuse, a coordinated social engineering operation dubbed Spring Ring has been observed leveraging external Microsoft Teams accounts to masquerade as IT help desk personnel to target more than 150 employees across at least 10 companies in various industries between January and April 2026. «What seems like a benign chat is in fact a voice phishing (vishing) call, during which adversaries try to coerce victims into executing remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools or custom malware,» Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said. «In a more advanced variant, attackers transitioned from a vishing call to a full-blown Microsoft NT LAN Manager (NTLM) relay attack aimed at an organization’s domain controller (DC).» As many as 26 distinct attacker identities have been identified behind the chat and call attempts.

Ransomware Affiliate Playbook

In a new report, Sophos revealed that The Gentlemen ransomware operation, which it tracks as Gold Sherwood, has claimed a total of 683 victims by the end of July 2026. In July alone, the group is said to have added 169 victims. «The Gentlemen ransomware intrusions […] demonstrate a repeatable affiliate playbook that combines opportunistic initial access, rapid privilege escalation, legitimate remote access mechanisms, tool staging in trusted system paths, targeted data exfiltration, aggressive defense evasion, backup disruption, and ransomware deployment,» Sophos said. «Affiliates are operationally flexible: they use native Windows utilities, commercial and open-source tools, BYOVD-based EDR killers, and backup service tampering to adapt to victims’ environments and maximize impact before encryption.»

PhaaS Survives Takedown

The Outsider phishing-as-a-service (PaaS) platform has continued to be a resilient threat in the face of law enforcement action that took down a number of domains related to the service. The kit is operated by a threat actor known as «ChenLun.» Group-IB said it has identified over 700 new phishing pages created using the kit within a month after Google filed a civil lawsuit against its operators, indicating that affiliates are continuing to use the service. The campaigns are delivered via SMS. «What was once a technically demanding operation has been reduced to a subscription and a Telegram channel,» Group-IB said. «The phishing kits are distributed via a dedicated Telegram ecosystem. Operators used a WebSocket connection for live keylogging and to manipulate MFA challenges.»

Signed Software, Hidden Payload

A government-themed tax notice campaign is targeting recipients through U.A.E.- and India-themed tax assessment lures to persuade them to open a malicious disc image. «The disc image contains a legitimate, validly signed commercial executable alongside a hidden, unsigned malicious DLL,» iZOOlogic said. «This makes abuse of software trust and DLL sideloading the central mechanism of the campaign. The malicious DLL acts as a loader and establishes multiple execution and persistence mechanisms. The loader contains three encrypted payloads. Two decrypt to legitimately signed kernel drivers from unrelated commercial products, while the third is a persistence script.» The attack chain paves the way for a Registry-resident second stage, which connects to an external server over UDP.

Executive Phishing as a Service

ZeroBEC has disclosed details of a turnkey phishing service called BlueKit that’s being used to target CEOs of financial-industry groups to facilitate credential theft using a browser-in-the-middle (BitM) infrastructure. The campaign uses document-sharing lures to trigger the attack chain and employs ZeroBot to screen bots. «The campaign did not stop at credential or session theft,» ZeroBEC said. «After a BlueKit browser-in-the-middle flow, selected victims were moved into a fake document-viewer workflow that delivered a legitimate ScreenConnect client configured for an attacker-used ScreenConnect cloud instance.» The service advertises access at $250 for seven days, $480 for 14 days, and $940 for 30 days, placing it at the higher end of the current PhaaS market, in comparison to Tycoon 2FA, Greatness, and Forg365, which cost approximately $350, $289, and $400 per month.

Dormant Domains, Ready C2

Cybersecurity researchers have analyzed the infrastructure powering the operations of Prince of Persia (aka Indy), a little-known Iranian hacking group known for deploying malware families, Foudre and Tonnerre, to profile victims and harvest sensitive data from high-value targets. According to Whisper Security’s Kaveh Azarhoosh, the backend is self-authoritative, with each live C2 server also running the nameservers for its own domains. Also identified is a dormant reserve of 58 domains that are registered and delegated to the group’s own nameservers, but none of which currently points at any server. «They’re staged, not live: the moment any one of them gains an address record, a new command server has gone live — and it’s visible before the server does anything at all,» Azarhoosh told The Hacker News via email.

Remote-Controlled Rubber Ducky

Intezer has detailed a fake «privacy browser» downloaded from a counterfeit site («www.mxsetuplogi.com») that turns remote attacker commands into simulated mouse and keyboard input on a victim’s machine. The site is surfaced via a sponsored search result on Google, in this case after the victim mistyped the domain name («www.mxsetup.logi.con») on the address bar. The cybersecurity company described it as a USB Rubber Ducky attack delivered over the internet. «This attack evades EDR and sits at zero to two detections on VirusTotal,» it said in a statement. «The infection began with one simple mistyped letter during routine mouse setup that routed the victim through a malvertising network into an MSIX installer signed through Microsoft’s own infrastructure.» The campaign has been tracked back to a similar operation from January 2016, indicating that the activity has been active for at least a decade.

153 Million IDs for Sale

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is investigating a new ID theft service called Nexus, which claims to have digital scans of over 153 million driver’s licenses from people in the U.S. and Canada. According to independent security journalist Brian Krebs, the service is said to be siphoning images collected by a widely used identity verification company called IDScan.net based in Louisiana. The service, launched on the dark web on August 31, 2026, also boasts of more than 10 million identification cards, more than three million travel documents and/or international IDs, and at least 579,000 medical cards. Each record can be unlocked for $100. Shortly after the exposé was published, Nexus went offline. IDscan.net is said to be investigating the incident on its end.

AI Instructions Become a Trap

A scan of 6,214 live domains belonging to defense contractors, Fortune 500, and Big Tech companies has uncovered llms.txt or llms-full.txt that are being placed at the root of their websites, alongside robots.txt. «The file is not a sitemap and it is not a disclaimer,» an Israeli stealth startup said. «It is a curated instruction set for AI agents: what to read, which APIs to call, which packages to install, which domains to trust. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google publish their own.» Of the 8,265 llms.txt and llms-full.txt files surfaced from the scan, 120 of them, each on a different site, featured install instructions pointing to PyPI or npm package names and domains that had never been registered. «We selected a small set of package names that appeared in the llms.txt files of companies you have definitely heard of, and registered them on PyPI and npm,» Alon Hertz, one of the researchers said. «Into each one we embedded a single phone-home — a minimal beacon that reported the fact of installation back to infrastructure we controlled. The first callback arrived in under four minutes.» What’s troubling here is that at least one active attack has already exploited this misconfiguration, in which authentication vendor Clerk’s llms.txt included a reference to an npm package named «clerk-next-fix-auth-protection» instead of referencing its scoped package, @clerk/eslint-plugin. An unknown threat actor registered a public package with the same name. The package contained code to transmit the installer’s username, machine name, working directory, and timestamp to an external server. Clerk has since addressed the issue.

AI Defenders Sound the Alarm

A coalition of over 100 companies, including Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, Perplexity, and others, has published an open-leet calling for improvements to cybersecurity as AI continues to compress compress cyberattack timelines, as well as accelerate the speed and scale of cyber attacks, leaving defenders with an ever-shortening window to address security issues before they are exploited. The signatories noted that current approaches to cybersecurity are not equipped to deal with the incoming surge in AI-enabled attacks, and that threat actors can rely on AI tools to target longstanding vulnerabilities, excessive permissions, misconfigurations, insecure and unpatched software, weak authentication, and technical debt in legacy systems. «In the coming months, AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable,» the letter warns. «The companies and public services our communities depend on – from hospitals to water treatment plants to the infrastructure that powers the internet – are at risk. Today’s AI advances are already giving defenders new ways to fix weaknesses that have accumulated for years. If we act decisively, we can use the defenders’ window to make our digital world much more secure.»

Legacy Login Exposes 5K Accounts

Dropbox has disclosed that about 5,000 accounts were compromised last month, allowing threat actors to view and download content stored on the cloud-storage ‌ platform. The company told Reuters that it «identified unauthorized access affecting accounts linked to a Lenovo ID that did not have its two-factor authentication enabled,» adding it terminated all sessions authenticated through a Lenovo ID. Lenovo said the issue is related to a «legacy ⁠integration» between Lenovo ID and Dropbox that «could be used to improperly authenticate certain Dropbox accounts.»

Kernel Protection by Default

Microsoft has announced that it will expand memory integrity protection across eligible devices starting October 2026, to help users benefit from «stronger kernel-level protection from sophisticated attacks by default with little or no additional configuration.» The company continued: «This change reduces security complexity while helping you establish a stronger security baseline across your environment. Built on Virtualization-based Security (VBS), memory integrity helps protect critical parts of Windows from tampering. It forms a foundation for modern security innovations such as hotpatch updates that improve user experience and productivity, as well as protection.»

Pro-Ukraine Ransomware Rebrand

A new ransomware group named VantaCore has targeted at least seven Russian companies with a proprietary ransomware strain and demanding millions of dollars in ransom. The threat actor is assessed to be a rebranding of a known pro-Ukrainian group tracked as Thor, F6 said. Also put to use in the attacks are VantaCoreLoader, to distribute the ransomware and other malicious programs, VantaCoreRAT, a backdoor that can harvest information about infected systems and execute commands, and SnowKiller, which can terminate security software using the BYOVD technique.

Sextortion Suspects Face Life

Two Nigerian nationals, Adebola Festus Adekunle, 26, and Mudasiru Afeez Olawale, 24, have been extradited to the U.S. to face prosecution in two separate cases for the financially-motivated sextortion of minors that led to the death of minors in both the Northern District of Mississippi and the Middle District of North Carolina. Both of them face a maximum penalty of life in prison and mandatory minimum prison sentences, with the child exploitation resulting in death charge carrying a minimum penalty of 30 years in prison.

Hardware-Backed Digital IDs

Google said it’s expanding the Android Ready SE initiative to bring together silicon vendors, device manufacturers, wallet developers, and government issuers to streamline compliance and scale certified hardware security across the mobile ecosystem. The development is seen as a way to scale high-assurance, tamper-resistant digital identity amid accelerating global demand for securely storing national electronic IDs (eIDs) and mobile driver licenses (mDLs) in hardware-backed mobile wallets.

OAuth Access Outlives Passwords

The FBI has warned that malicious cyber actors have been targeting prominent victims, their family members, and personal acquaintances by directly messaging personal accounts with malicious links leveraging a technique called OAuth consent phishing to gain access to their accounts. The activity has targeted government officials, media, and other publicly known personalities on a commercial messaging application (CMA), urging them to access a malicious link under the guise of a file-sharing service through an application under the malicious actor’s control. «Previous phishing campaigns have also impersonated event coordinators and planners, who sent malicious links to targets under the guise of an invitation to an event and the need to verify the target’s identity through a malicious application under the actor’s control,» the FBI said. Authorities did not provide any details about how many people may have been compromised by these attacks, or who is behind them.

Electron Apps Hide a Stealer

Trojanized Electron desktop applications impersonating legitimate software are being used to distribute a Windows information stealer called RevStealer. The applications are shared via GitHub repositories and game-cheat-themed sites, including a fake Claude Opus 5 Free Desktop project. «It is delivered by an Electron loader that hides an AES-encrypted native payload inside an application resource, attempts to add the user’s AppData folder to Microsoft Defender’s exclusion list, and launches the payload with no visible window,» Morphisec said. The malware also runs a series of anti-analysis and anti-VM checks before unpacking the main payload. «If the primary C2 is unreachable, RevStealer reads a fallback address from a smart contract on the Polygon blockchain, letting operators rotate infrastructure without rebuilding the malware,» the company said. What’s notable about the malware is that it’s not designed for persistence. Rather, it prioritizes capturing as much data as possible in a single run, exfiltrates it in encrypted typed records, and then deletes itself.

Trusted Tool, Rogue Access

Threat actors are weaponizing Faronics Deploy, a legitimate endpoint management platform, to run attacker-controlled PowerShell after phishing victims install the software. Huntress said it observed more than 457 endpoints encountering Faronics-related lures. «In observed cases, threat actors chained Faronics Deploy to ScreenConnect, blending malicious remote access activity into trusted software workflows,» it said. «The delivery method varies between scripts, with observed examples using curl or MSHTA to retrieve additional content, while others invoke msiexec to install payloads hosted on attacker-controlled infrastructure. These scripts are subsequently used to install ScreenConnect, establishing an additional remote access mechanism on the compromised endpoint.»

ClickFix Goes Cross-Platform

Cybersecurity researchers have described CRPx0 as a ClickFix-delivered ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation that employs lures related to Windows and macOS update prompts and reCAPTCHA checks to trick victims into running a copied command. «On Windows, it starts a multi-stage DLL chain. On macOS, it downloads the Python payload directly,» the Ransom-ISAC Research Team said. «The final payload is a cross-platform Python ransomware that exfiltrates data before encryption, encrypts files with AES-128-CBC via Fernet, wraps the per-victim key with an embedded RSA-4096 public key, attempts lateral movement, and drops ransom notes demanding Bitcoin or Monero payment within 48 hours.» The RaaS program first appeared on June 7, 2026. As of late August, the group has advertised the operation on a clearnet site («crpx0[.]su/v3.txt») as an offensive control panel to manage compromised machines, harvest files and credentials, monitor stolen cryptocurrency artifacts, run remote commands, and launch ransomware manually.

One point is easy to miss: changing a password may not shut every door. A bad app approval or remote session can give attackers access without the password. Recovery should also end open sessions, remove unknown app access, and check remote tools.

Better security settings are slowly becoming the default, which helps. But old account links, weak sign-in options, and trusted software still give attackers room to work. The safest rule this week is simple: check what already has access before adding anything new.

06 AGO 2026

admin Noticias, Trending Backdoor CYBERDEFENSA.MX Fight iCloud Odysseus OneClick RCE Samsung Stories Takeover

Odysseus RCE, Samsung One-Click Takeover, iCloud Backdoor Fight + 27 More Stories – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

Apparently, opening the thing is now enough. A repo can run before the first prompt, a package can hide among hundreds, and a harmless-looking PDF can finish the job.

This week runs on cheap leverage: exposed servers, recycled bugs, poisoned agent instructions, remote-access tools dressed as support software, and trusted defaults doing attackers a favor.

Nothing here is especially mystical. Just ordinary systems trusting slightly too much, slightly too early. The full list follows.

The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

ClickOnce phishing chain

The threat actor known as SideWinder has adopted a new multi-stage attack chain that abuses ClickOnce application files delivered via phishing PDF documents to deliver Rust-based backdoors. The implants can establish persistence via registry modification, collect host intelligence, and accept remote commands over external servers hosted on free serverless platforms such as Cloudflare Workers.

npm supply chain attack

An active malicious package campaign, dubbed «Flooding Dropper,» has disclosed a large-scale campaign involving 846 software components. «The attacker appears to be automating parts of the npm account and package creation process, combining terms such as bigops and bnpl with other words and recurring version patterns, such as releases in the 35.x.y range,» Sonatype said. «When installed, the packages download and execute a second-stage payload, using multiple delivery methods to improve the attack’s chances of success. The packages also contain slightly modified payloads. While syntactically different, for example using different URL functions and variable names, the packages all execute the same behavior. Those changes can reduce the effectiveness of detections that depend on exact signatures, even when the underlying behavior remains closely related.» The packages deliver a first-stage JavaScript loader that identifies the host operating system and delivers a compatible Windows, Linux, or macOS payload from a randomized set of hard-coded remote hosts and runs it as a detached background process. On Windows, the downloaded binary is another loader that performs checks for sandboxed and virtual environments, patches Event Tracing for Windows and Antimalware Scan Interface functions, establishes persistence via a scheduled task, and downloads and executes an encrypted payload.

Coding agent execution risk

New research from Datadog has found that «Trusting a repository in a coding agent can allow repository-controlled code to run before you send the first prompt,» causing seemingly harmless tasks like cloning a repository to be an attack vector. «Codex MCP configuration and Claude Code project environment settings created automatic code-execution paths without a model response or shell-command approval,» Datadog said. «Treat project trust like running code. Open unfamiliar repositories in disposable environments without sensitive credentials, even if a quick manual review looks clean.» Earlier this May, Datadog also highlighted the risks associated with Claude Code skills. «Agentic skills package instructions and context for coding agents,» it said. «They are useful for repeatable workflows, but they also create a path for attacker-controlled instructions to enter a trusted agent session. The important detail is not only that a malicious skill can ask an agent to do something dangerous. It is that dynamic context commands run before the model sees the skill at all. When that happens, model-level prompt injection defenses never get a chance to intervene.»

AI-powered cyber attack

A DeepSeek AI agent attacked the network of Tel Aviv-based AI cybersecurity firm Jesta Security in early July 2026 as part of an LLM-managed cyber attack campaign for proxyjacking and other follow-on attacks. The development is the latest example of how threat actors are relying on AI agents to break into third-party networks. «During our research on defense against AI attackers, we took our lab and stood it up in the field, behind US-based infrastructure,» security researcher Lior Finkelshtein said. «We opened a port and waited for attackers to come to us. Within a week, we had logged over 300,000 attempts to break in: botnets, credential stuffing, the usual internet noise. And then something surfaced that did not fit the pattern.» The activity has been linked to a Chinese threat actor. Jesta said it managed to steer the AI agent into extracting its own target list, identifying over 1,200 victim hosts that had been targeted in a similar manner. «The goal was proxyjacking: install a small SOCKS5 proxy, open it to the internet, and quietly turn a weakly secured rented server into an exit node for someone else’s traffic and attacks,» Jesta said.

macOS malware upgrade

A new version of the XCSSET malware (version 40) is targeting thousands of macOS users through compromised Xcode projects and GitHub repositories. «This version’s advanced architecture hides its core logic in memory space, reducing its digital footprint,» Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said. «V40 further enhances its detection evasion capabilities by combining polymorphic payload generation with fileless persistence and dynamic in-memory execution, while weakening a number of security mechanisms on the affected machine.» The malware author, per Unit 42, has enhanced the ability of the malware to spread through open-source projects on GitHub and upgraded its worming capabilities. It can now infect all existing Xcode projects on a compromised system for maximum impact. The malware supports browser hijacking (specifically targeting Google Chrome) to inject JavaScript that can intercept web traffic, credential theft, clipboard monitoring, and data exfiltration capabilities. A new addition is a Telegram trojanizer that deletes the legitimate Telegram Desktop application on infected systems and replaces it with a malicious version with an intent to siphon victims’ communications. The new version has been observed in two distinct attack waves in mid-April and in early May 2026.

LLM pentesting lessons

Novee Security has published its learnings from training large language models (LLMs) for pentesting. This includes handling silent failures, having a weight-sync strategy, and how prefix breaks can cascade into performance drops in AI workloads. «An RL [Reinforcement Learning] pipeline is a complex system with many moving parts. And all of them are moving fast: the models, the harnesses, the frameworks, and the long tail of bugs in libraries we don’t even own,» it said. «Each lesson cost us real time and real money.»

One-click device compromise

A set of vulnerabilities affecting Samsung devices (CVE-2025-21079 and CVE-2025-58486) could be chained to result in remote system-level compromise triggered by clicking on a link delivered via an ad or a messaging application. «What distinguishes this entry from previous submissions is its focus on design oversights in Samsung’s virtual assistant, Bixby, that enabled privilege escalation through a single auto-granted Android permission,» researchers Dimitrios Valsamaras and Ken Gannon said. «Because this permission is implicitly approved in many Samsung applications, exploiting just one of them allowed us to issue unauthorized commands to Bixby.» Because Bixby maintains interprocess communication channels with a wide range of applications, including system components, the issues could be exploited to force the agent to relay arbitrary commands to privileged services, effectively turning it into a bridge between unprivileged and system domains. The pair first demonstrated the vulnerabilities at the Pwn2Own Ireland hacking competition in October 2025, where they earned $50,000. The issues were fixed by Samsung late last year.

App Store removal attack

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has blamed an extortionist planting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in a public chat to get the app briefly removed from Apple’s App Store earlier this week. «Because Telegram quickly removes illegal content from public groups using all kinds of moderation tools, the attacker had to resort to a technical trick,» Durov said. «He inserted AI-modified illegal content by editing an old message in an active group chat. As a result the content was effectively hidden from the group’s members, preventing them from seeing/reporting it.» The attacker is said to be someone who «demands ransom from group owners in exchange for not targeting their communities,» with Durov stating these threat actors «use automated accounts to plant illegal content in public groups and then report it directly to Apple, attempting to trigger the removal of legitimate communities whose owners refused to pay them.»

AI bug report flood

Apple has enforced caps on the number of open bug-bounty reports researchers can submit after being flooded with low-quality and sometimes entirely fabricated vulnerabilities hallucinated by AI. «While Apple now has a cap on the number of open submissions a researcher can have, researchers can request an increase to make sure Apple’s security team doesn’t miss a critical vulnerability,» Financial Times reported.

Domain takeover flaws

Two new Active Directory privilege escalation vulnerabilities, dubbed KerberLoss (CVE-2026-25177) and ResetNightmare (CVE-2026-27912), can cause identity confusion on domain controllers (DCs), with the latter enabling a low-privileged user to instantly gain Domain Admin privileges. Microsoft patched both flaws in March and April 2026. «Other than patches, organizations should stick to the principle of least privilege and monitor for abnormal additions of non-default permissions,» Semperis said. «Tighter permissions can make these vulnerabilities more difficult to abuse.»

AI-powered scam farms

An off-the-shelf, AI-enhanced scam phone farm can be acquired for a few thousand dollars, allowing aspiring three actors to design, launch, and automate common scams, including romance and adult-content scams, pig-butchering scams, and astroturfed social media accounts. «These scams are operated on phone farms sold as kits on open and dark web marketplaces, the farms are automated with AI interfaces, and the scams often use AI in their design and operation, significantly lowering the barrier to entry for would-be threat actors and commoditizing cybercrime,» HUMAN Security said. The activity has been codenamed FunFoneFarm. A similar alert was issued by Group-IB earlier this March. The danger with such offerings is that they can enable low-cost scalable fraud operations. «It’s an ecosystem, assembled from parts that are individually legal, openly sold, and often genuinely useful: commodity hardware, device-management software, cloud infrastructure, and general-purpose AI,» it added.

CTV ad fraud ring

In a related development, HUMAN also detailed a connected TV (CTV) device-spoofing ring called NewsJunkie that’s disguised as premium local news content on major CTV platforms. The operation involved two spoofing vectors: SSAI CTV device spoofing and residential proxy CTV device spoofing. «At its peak, it accounted for hundreds of millions to nearly two billion invalid CTV bid requests per day per seller,» it said. «One particular local news app generated more than 42.2 billion bid requests, approximately 360 times the volume of the next-highest regional news app, with only 185 reviews on the app store.»

Fake bank phishing chain

An active phishing campaign impersonating Bank of America (BoA) aims to trick Windows users into installing ScreenConnect remote access software and then making it harder to uninstall it. To evade detection, the malware disguises ScreenConnect as a service called Windows Security. «The subsequent phishing page delivers an AccountGuard.zip with a .vbs file that contains a large chunk of base64-encoded data,» Huntress said. «The next phase of the attack then involves a complex chain of decoding scripts, and ends in the execution of arbitrary commands (with escalated privileges) in PowerShell. The goal of all this complexity is to download a Microsoft installer (.msi) for a custom ScreenConnect client and execute/install it with Administrator privileges without prompting the user for elevation. Additional payload components conceal the installed ScreenConnect client and remove the user’s ability to uninstall or disable it easily.» The development comes as the cybersecurity company warned of threat actors exploiting an SQL injection vulnerability to install a post-exploitation toolkit called khunt via a Java Source directly within an Oracle database. «A Java Source (a code-object that’s stored directly in Oracle’s database engine) allows developers to store and run Java code in the database as schema objects, but the threat actor abused this as a way to upload the toolkit directly into the database,» Huntress said. «The toolkit included several objects, including khuntCmd and khuntHash, which essentially acted as purpose-built tools that were compiled and stored in the database, and enabled malicious functionalities like running OS commands and writing usernames/password data to a file. Threat actors used khunt to perform several malicious measures, including attempting to exfiltrate SAM, SECURITY, and SYSTEM registry hives.»

AI memory poisoning

Forcepoint has called attention to the growing risk of persistent memory poisoning, calling it an emerging attack class against AI assistants and agentic systems that store long-term memory items, user preferences, task history, or operational context across sessions. «Unlike normal prompt injection attacks that usually die when the session ends, memory poisoning survives,» Forcepoint said. «The attacker’s goal is to inject misleading or malicious memory items into an assistant’s persistent memory layer so that an agent later retrieves and trusts these malicious items to perform unrelated future tasks.»

AI abuse tactics

Speaking of AI systems, threat actors are increasingly misusing AI tools to create code with malicious capabilities, scale criminal operations and campaigns, and bug bounty or vulnerability research. While no novel encoding or evasion techniques have been observed, evidence shows that attackers are sticking to tried and tested methods to evade model guardrails. «We also found a lot of successful instances of actors using the Capture the Flag (CTF) or bug bounty labeling,» Cisco Talos said. «This unlocked models to a variety of tasks, including vulnerability hunting and subsequent exploitation, without requiring any significant follow-up or additional vetting. Additionally, we saw actors leveraging task decomposition — splitting risky actions across multiple sessions and files — as an effective avenue to bypass guardrails. Building the components slowly and working through malicious components in a deliberate manner, breaking them apart sufficiently to evade the models’ protections.»

AI workspace RCE

A critical flaw (CVSS score: 9.9) in Odysseus, a privacy-focused AI workspace that provides an interface to talk to LLMs, can allow an authenticated non-admin user to execute OS commands with the privileges of the Odysseus process by smuggling an admin-only shell action onto a scheduled task across two ordinary API requests.» The security flaw has been addressed in version 1.0.2. The process holds the application’s data and credentials, including user password hashes and TOTP secrets, stored provider API keys, the database, and the SSH keys Odysseus uses to reach the remote machines it manages. «On any instance with self-service signup or a second user, one account became a foothold — API keys to spend, a mailbox to send from, and SSH keys to the machines Odysseus manages, plus a scheduler to persist in,» Manifold Security said. There is no evidence the issue was exploited before the fix.

Router takeover flaws

Forescout’s Vedere Labs discovered a set of 15 security flaws impacting the zero-touch provisioning (ZTP) system in TP-Link Omada routers and other devices that could facilitate client-side code execution, information disclosure, device hijacking and spoofing, and compromise of encrypted communications. «Some vulnerabilities extend beyond Omada to other TP-Link products and services, including IP cameras, smart home IoT devices, mobile apps, and cloud accounts,» the cybersecurity company said. «Findings include a chain of trust compromise from hard-coded cryptographic keys, sensitive information disclosures, and remote code execution.» When combined with two previously disclosed vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-7850 and CVE-2025-7851), they can be weaponized by attackers to infiltrate networks through controllers and client devices. Besides applying the patches released by TP-Link, it’s advised to avoid using the same password across all devices during provisioning, change device credentials and use strong, unique passwords, modify TP-Link ID credentials and enable multi-factor authentication where available, and rotate VPN keys and credentials that may have been exposed.

Initial access broker exposed

CloudSEK has exposed the operations of a Russian-speaking initial access broker, thanks to a publicly accessible server, revealing their targeting of internet-facing infrastructure across multiple sectors. «The operator exploited internet-facing appliances across a dozen-plus countries, harvesting credentials and achieving full Active Directory compromise across education, healthcare, finance, telecommunications, and government victims,» CloudSEK said. In multiple confirmed cases, ransomware groups claimed the same organizations within weeks of the operator’s access, indicating the operator supplies access upstream of extortion rather than conducting it directly.» The threat actor has also been observed deploying the Sliver C2 framework against Ukrainian defense and aerospace targets and stealing source repositories and harvesting imagery from thousands of exposed IP cameras and RDP sessions.

Bug bounty milestone

Microsoft has announced that between July 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026, the company had paid more than $20 million in bug bounties to 562 researchers. There were 2,531 eligible vulnerability reports. The biggest reward was $200,000. «Every vulnerability reported through our bounty programs represents an opportunity to address risk before it can be exploited against customers,» Microsoft said. The work of the research community plays a critical role in helping Microsoft stay ahead of emerging threats while strengthening the security of cloud services, AI systems, enterprise platforms, and consumer technologies. We also saw a notable increase in submission volume during the second half of the year, reflecting both strong engagement from the research community and the growing use of AI to support security research.»

AI insider threat

Barracuda Networks has demonstrated a proof-of-concept (PoC) that shows how a compromised AI-enabled account can help «attackers discover sensitive information, identify targets, craft convincing communications, and advance an attack using access the victim already possesses.» A single compromised employee account can escalate into CEO compromise and wire-transfer fraud using an AI agent like Copilot that’s embedded into enterprise environments and connected to various Microsoft applications.

Ransomware memory theft

An Interlock ransomware intrusion in March 2026 involved the use of the legitimate IR memory analysis tool Volatility3, underscoring how bad actors continue to leverage legitimate tools in attacks. The victim is said to have been infected via a ClickFix lure following a drive-by compromise, ultimately leading to the deployment of a RAT payload using PowerShell. The attackers then established persistence, conducted discovery operations, performed privilege escalation, and moved laterally across the network. The use of Volatility3 has been linked to attempts to extract domain credentials, as well as NTLM hashes and user account information from memory. «Interlock has evolved since mid-2024 into a multi-skilled threat increasingly willing to adapt its techniques and seek large targets,» Sophos said. «The operators have been fairly aggressive about incorporating new techniques and abusing fresh vulnerabilities – evidence shows Interlock was making use of the CVE-2026-20131 Cisco zero-day a full two weeks before Cisco acknowledged it. The adoption of legitimate tools such as Volatility3 and WinPmem shows that this threat’s evolution continues.»

NuGet key hardening

Microsoft has announced it’s reducing the lifetime of new NuGet.org API keys issued starting August 17, 2026, from 365 days to 30 days. All existing API keys created before that date are scheduled for expiry on November 1, 2026, after which developers will need to generate new keys or switch to NuGet Trusted Publishing. The changes have been framed as a way to secure the NuGet ecosystem and follow similar moves by other package managers over the past year, as bad actors exploit API keys and Personal Access Tokens (PATs) in attacks.

Smart contract C2 malware

An affiliate of The Gentlemen ransomware operation has been observed deploying EtherRAT on Windows hosts. The malware uses the EtherHiding technique to read its C2 information from an Ethereum contract. «EtherRAT has no fixed command set. Any C2 response over ten characters is run as JavaScript inside a Node.js runtime, giving the operator arbitrary code execution and letting them extend capabilities without replacing the implant,» Hunt.io said. The threat intelligence firm said it identified an exposed open directory at 193.233.202[.]17 that offered an insight into affiliate activities, including setting up a Windows domain for persistent access, credential theft, and lateral movement. «Lateral movement ran through remote scheduled tasks that downloaded and executed MSI payloads,» it added. «Those installed EtherRAT, a persistent implant that pulls its C2 domains from an Ethereum smart contract instead of hardcoding them, while Sliver and Go reverse-shell binaries gave the operator additional command channels.»

AI prompt exfiltration

Mitiga has outlined a stealthy security threat called PromptLogger where malicious natural-language instructions are hidden inside AI coding assistant configuration files (like .cursorrules or CLAUDE.md) to steal user prompts, environment variables, and sensitive credentials. PromptLoggers, similar to keyloggers, are instruction files that quietly record the prompts, responses, environment variables, tokens, and deployment details flowing through a coding agent, and then ship them to an attacker without the need for specialized malware. «There’s no malware in any of this and nothing to detect on the endpoint,» Mitiga said. «The agent already has the access, the context, and the network reach. The instruction file just tells it what to collect and where to send it.»

Encryption backdoor fight

Apple last month filed a new legal complaint with the U.K. Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) over the British government’s legal demand for access to encrypted iCloud backups belonging to users in the country, according to the Financial Times. The iPhone maker has long argued that building any such backdoors would weaken security for all its customers.

Credential theft shift

CrowdStrike’s 2026 Threat Hunting Report has revealed that it tracked a 15-fold increase in device code phishing attempts in the past six months, indicating a shift in how attackers steal credentials to take over victim accounts. Although the technique was first documented in late 2020, it didn’t catch the attention of threat actors until August 2024, when a Russian nation-state threat actor tracked as Storm-2372 began to incorporate the method.

ClickFix malware lures

A «single PDF factory» has staged more than 12,700 fake CAPTCHA documents on Webflow’s content delivery network (CDN) that are disguised as upgrade guides to deliver malware. «Each document is a doorway into a traffic-distribution system (TDS) that sorts visitors and routes those that qualify to multiple buyers, malware distributors, and scam operators,» Netskope said. «The operation has been running for more than 14 months, from the earliest sample we can date to lure domains registered this month, and it is still active.» Users looking for upgrade guides on search engines or AI assistants are the target of these attacks. The campaign primarily targeted English-speaking users in the United States, India, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada. An early version of the campaign highlighted by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 in March 2025 lured users into installing an MSI for Legion Loader malware.

Coldcard phishing lure

A new opportunistic phishing campaign is exploiting public interest in the recently disclosed Coldcard wallet vulnerability and the suspected $130 million Bitcoin theft to trick users into installing ScreenConnect. «Emails impersonate Coldcard and purport to highlight a security audit relating to the incident,» Proofpoint said. «Messages contain a URL that leads to a site impersonating Coldcard with a ‘Start Hardware Audit’ button.» Once clicked, the button leads to a batch file hosted on GitHub, which drops an MSI file and ultimately installs ScreenConnect. «The site also features a ‘Customer Service’ chat box,» the enterprise security company said. «If a user messages, a threat actor responds and walks through the steps to install ScreenConnect. Based on the chats we’ve examined, a real person (not AI) is likely operating the chat to instruct users on malware install.» The incident underscores how threat actors continue to employ topical social engineering lures, in this case preying on people’s fear to persuade them to take risky steps. As for the digital robberies themselves, at least a dozen different hackers are said to be targeting Bitcoin owners who use the Coldcard wallet. According to TRM Labs, there have been 207 hacks targeting cryptocurrency companies in the first six months of 2026, with a total loss of more than $950 million.

The useful lesson is not that attackers suddenly became brilliant. It is that trust keeps accumulating in quiet places: package managers, project files, assistants, provisioning tools, remote access software, and forgotten systems nobody planned to revisit.

Security still breaks at the handoff. Before the prompt. After the patch. Inside the default. Somewhere between “trusted” and “probably fine.” That gap is where this week lived, and it will be there next week too.

30 JUL 2026

admin Noticias, Trending AIPowered attacks Chrome CYBERDEFENSA.MX DNS Flaws Hacking Hijacking SonicWall Stories

AI-Powered Hacking, 370 Chrome Flaws, SonicWall Attacks, DNS Hijacking + 22 More Stories – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

A lot of security still comes down to trusting the wrong screen.

This week, that screen might be a login page, an install guide, a recruiter call, or a familiar service behaving slightly wrong. Behind it: reused credentials, exposed systems, quiet loaders, abused trust, and exploit paths that should have been harder.

Some defenses improved. The loose parts still got found first. Anyway, here’s the mess.

The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

Phishing delivers XWorm

A cybercrime group known as xplogs22 has been observed targeting Russia and other CIS countries with phishing emails that deliver Xworm. The group, per F6, is believed to have been active since November 2023. Prior attacks mounted by the threat actors leveraged Formbook and Snake Keylogger, before switching to XWorm around July 2025. In recent months, Russian customers of the banking sector have also been targeted by an Android trojan called LunaSpy as part of social engineering attacks. LunaSpy can capture camera streams, record audio and the screen, and collect sensitive data. The malware is disguised as an antivirus application to evade detection.

Custom ransomware targets Russia

The financially motivated extortion group known as Toy Ghouls (aka Bearlyfy and Labubu) has targeted organizations in the Russian Federation, primarily in the manufacturing, financial services, retail, and technology sectors, with a custom ransomware family called GenieLocker since March 2026. According to Kaspersky, the group previously relied on third-party encryptors like RedAlert, LockBit, and Babuk. «GenieLocker, apparently a custom design, upgrades their toolkit and reduces their reliance on third-party software,» Kaspersky said. In at least one case, initial access to the target environment was obtained via an OpenVPN connection originating from an external partner’s network, with the attackers likely exploiting the trusted relationship to breach the target, conduct reconnaissance, deliver additional tools for credential harvesting, and perform lateral movement via RDP and SSH to reach other Windows and Linux hosts. «During the impact phase, the attackers encrypted files on the compromised Windows machines with the PE version of the GenieLocker ransomware,» Kaspersky said. «On the compromised Linux and ESXi servers, they stopped active virtual machines and encrypted their disks using the ELF version of GenieLocker.» Details of the activity were first highlighted by F6 in March 2026.

Crypto-stealing payloads deployed

The malware loader known as CastleLoader, which has been previously used to deliver CastleStealer and a Python-based remote access trojan (RAT) via ClickFix-style lures, has now been used to distribute two payloads tied to the Needle Stealer framework: a Rust-based desktop wallet spoofer, and a Golang-based malicious browser extension installer. Arctic Wolf said it also identified a new shellcode loader variant spreading via digitally signed installers. The campaign has been codenamed Noidret. The introduction of these new tools is seen as an attempt to focus on cryptocurrency-specific targeting and establish browser-level persistence.

Fileless WebDAV execution

Speaking of ClickFix, CyberProof said it tracked a ClickFix variant that involves tricking victims into pasting a single command into the Windows Run dialog, which then communicates with a WebDAV endpoint and uses rundll32.exe to load a remote, non-DLL payload and call its first export by ordinal without having to leave any artifacts on disk. «The payload (gc.key, j.pm, or goog.ct) is a file served from the attacker WebDAV share and is not a standard DLL by extension,» CyberProof said. «It is invoked by rundll32.exe through ordinal #1, which runs its primary routine while keeping the export name off the command line.»

Fake Claude guide spreads malware

Victims searching Google for how to install Claude on a Mac are being served sponsored results that lead them to a weaponized claude.ai/share conversation dressed up as an Apple Support install guide. The «guide» instructs them to open Terminal and paste a single curl command, ultimately leading to execution of MacSync Stealer. «MacSync is a six-stage kill chain, not a smash-and-grab,» Huntress said. «The components are a thin zsh loader, a server-side AppleScript stealer that keeps the valuable logic off the endpoint and behind an api-key gate, a native Mach-O RAT for hands-on access, a separately signed helper built to steal a single TCC permission (Screen Recording), and a set of wallet-app trojans. Each stage sets up the ones that follow.»

Malware, intrusions, and influence ops

A Russian-speaking threat group is said to be behind an active campaign called Operation STANDOFF that combines commodity-malware distribution, a proxy-botnet that conscripts victims into relay infrastructure, targeted hands-on-keyboard intrusion of enterprise networks, and an AI-driven, multi-channel influence and engagement-manipulation capabilities under one roof. «The operation is materially more than a botnet,» VMRay Labs said. «It couples automated, scaled cybercrime with hands-on-keyboard, targeted intrusion and a coordinated influence capability, all on the same infrastructure and built by a common development team.» The influence apparatus uses networks of fake Telegram accounts and AI-generated personas to artificially boost the visibility of content, push commercial promotions, and drive traffic to gambling and fraud-adjacent services. The activity uses a pay-per-install (PPI) loader masquerading as software installers that delivers Raccoon Stealer, RedLine, Amadey, SmokeLoader, Socelars, Glupteba, and XMRig cryptocurrency miner, while a second, targeted operations layer relies on a bespoke, multi-operator command-and-control console through which human operators conduct hands-on-keyboard intrusions of selected victims.

Fleet takeover flaw exposed

Security researcher Eaton Zveare has disclosed details of a vulnerability in My Eicher, a fleet management system developed by the Volvo Group and Eicher Motors for Indian commercial vehicle customers, that enabled the discovery of unauthenticated internal and. admin APIs that could be exploited to gain high-level access to systems and even enable account takeover. «Account takeover made it possible to gain control over a person’s (or company’s) entire fleet, which could consist of hundreds of vehicles,» Zveare said. Following responsible disclosure on November 3, 2025, the issue was addressed at some point by November 20.

AI agents automate exploitation

A Chinese-speaking threat actor has been carrying out an AI-enabled autonomous hacking campaign, targeting infrastructure using seven vulnerabilities in Langflow (CVE-2026-33017), n8n (CVE-2026-21858, CVE-2025-68613), Citrix NetScaler (CVE-2026-3055), Apache Tomcat (CVE-2026-34486), Marimo Notebook (CVE-2026-39987), Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS (CVE-2026-0300), and Microsoft Windows IKE Extensions (CVE-2026-33824). The actor, operating under the aliases knaithe and KnYuan, has leveraged DeepSeek, via the Hermes Agent framework, as their autonomous offensive operator, while orchestrating the operation through Telegram to enumerate targets, source exploit tools, and initiate attacks without human intervention. «Hermes Agent provided orchestration (terminal access, Telegram-based command and control, and the skills system) while DeepSeek served as the reasoning engine for code generation, vulnerability assessment, target selection and decision-making,» Unit 42 said. Additionally, the threat actor is said to have used Claude Code, Codex, and Qwen Code in a limited capacity. «When initial exploitation failed due to the target environment’s restrictive configurations, their Hermes Agent autonomously conducted searches for known critical-severity Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs),» Unit 42 said. «It initially surveyed 10 product families, scanning GitHub for trending proofs of concept (PoCs) and prioritizing vulnerabilities by attack surface.»

Trusted access fuels cryptomining

Details have emerged about a covert Linux XMRig campaign that exploits trusted access, and weaponizes Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) to create a forensic smokescreen and deploy a highly customized XMRig botnet implant. «Initial access was achieved by exploiting a trusted third-party relationship, highlighting critical supply chain risks,» Group-IB said. «The threat actor escalated to root access, but weaponised the pam_rootok policy to seamlessly impersonate multiple low-privileged users to create a forensic smokescreen designed to confuse incident responders and establish a ‘hydra-like’ redundant persistence across unmonitored accounts.» The campaign is characterized by efforts to actively suppress system visibility by disabling logging services and removing authentication logs to blind standard file-based monitoring. The campaign was first observed in March 2026.

Fake recruiter delivers stealer

Threat actors are masquerading as recruiters and trucking victims into installing a malicious application disguised as an AI meeting tool called Relay. The malware targets both macOS and Windows users, and attempts to steal sensitive data including browser credentials, wallet-related information, Keychain data, and Telegram sessions, per SlowMist.

900,000 customers affected

Australian energy company Origin Energy said it completed the initial phase of its review into a security incident that took place earlier this month, finding that «the information of approximately 900,000 current and former customers was accessed.» The information accessed may include name, address, date of birth, phone number, last four digits of a credit card, or the BSB and last three digits of a bank account, and account details.

Healthcare SaaS accounts targeted

Health-ISAC is warning of an increase in successful attacks conducted by ShinyHunters. «The group appears to prioritize identity compromise and SaaS access over traditional ransomware deployment,» it said. «The operational pattern described in recent incident reporting aligns to a repeatable chain: vishing (voice social engineering) → helpdesk/MFA reset or device re-enrollment → Microsoft Entra (or Okta/Google) SSO account takeover → pivot into connected SaaS platforms → rapid data exfiltration for extortion leverage. Even when victim statements indicate limited operational impact, the described tradecraft is the key defensive lesson. SSO is the control plane, and ShinyHunters’ leverage is created through data theft at cloud scale.»

Supply chain defenses tightened

GitHub has laid out the various steps it has taken to harden the supply chain at various stages and combat attacks that target weaknesses in package repositories and CI/CD systems for malware propagation. Some of these include: (1) npm adding preventive account protection for high-impact accounts, (2) safer pull_request_target defaults for GitHub Actions checkout, (3) better controls over who and what triggers GitHub Actions workflows, (4) read-only Actions cache for untrusted triggers, (5) support for CircleCI in npm trusted publishing, (6) Action workflow network firewall, (7) staged publishing for npm, (8) default package cooldown for Dependabot version updates, (9) self-service credential revocation for incident response, and (10) expanded credential revocation API support.

Seven critical Chrome flaws fixed

In an update released on July 29, 2026, Google shipped patches to address 370 flaws in its Chrome browser, including seven that are rated critical in severity (from CVE-2026-17650 through CVE-2026-17656). Of these, 349 flaws were reported by Google itself, with the tech giant noting that the bugs were detected using AddressSanitizer, MemorySanitizer, UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer, Control Flow Integrity, libFuzzer, or AFL. None of the patched vulnerabilities have been flagged as actively exploited. The fixes are available in versions 151.0.7922.71/.72 for Windows and Mac and 151.0.7922.71 for Linux. Google has addressed over 1,800 vulnerabilities in Chrome since the beginning of the year.

Edge devices need forensic visibility

The U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has urged network device manufacturers to help incident response teams by making it easier to gather evidence after a compromise. «Forensic observability is particularly important for edge devices such as firewalls, VPN gateways and other network appliances,» NCSC said. «These systems often sit at trust boundaries and are increasingly targeted by sophisticated threat actors. Forensic observability means giving defenders reliable ways to understand what a device is doing, what it has done and whether it can still be trusted after an incident. This includes telemetry, logging, configuration state, and the ability to collect forensic data from both memory and data at rest. Manufacturers should provide supported mechanisms for gathering the evidence needed to investigate incidents, assess impact, and restore trust in affected systems.»

Phishing pages built in real time

Barracuda has revealed that LogoKit has evolved from a standard phishing kit into a «real-time deception platform» capable of building customized phishing pages for each victim. «LogoKit has moved beyond static fake login pages, such as pre-built replicas of popular brands, to the creation and use of real-time, highly personalized phishing experiences,» it said. «The platform uses legitimate commercial web services to recreate a victim’s corporate login experience, making phishing attacks more convincing and harder to detect. Every victim effectively receives a uniquely branded phishing page, making generic indicators of compromise harder to identify.» This involves capturing a real-time screenshot of the victim’s legitimate website and building phishing pages tailored to them. LogoKit uses the commercial Thum.io service to «create full, legitimate website screenshots for the phishing background and Clearbit to add legitimate brand logos.» The attackers also rely on legitimate services, including Google Favicon, ImageKit and Microlink APIs, to dynamically load authentic logos and website imagery in real-time. LogoKit campaigns use phishing emails bearing warnings about passwords or delivery failures and timesheet updates to direct victims to the fake pages.

Exploitation accelerates in 2026

A new analysis from VulnCheck has revealed that despite a significant uptick in vulnerability discovery and disclosure, 23.43% of known exploited vulnerabilities (KEVs) showed evidence of exploitation on or before the day the CVE was published. «At the same time, vulnerabilities appear to be being exploited faster, with the median time from CVE publication to KEV falling from 120 days in 2025 to 80 days during the first half of 2026,» VulnCheck said. «Of 1,061 vulnerabilities attributed to AI-assisted discovery, only 14, or 1.3%, have been confirmed as exploited in the wild, roughly matching the overall exploitation rate of all vulnerabilities in the first six months of the year.» The top technology categories being targeted by exploitation activity include CMS systems, network edge devices, operating systems, server software, and AI infrastructure (e.g., Langflow, Majordomo, lollms, LiteLLM, and dify).

Credential stuffing hits SonicWall

An active, broad, and opportunistic credential stuffing campaign has been observed since July 25, 2026, resulting in successful unauthorized logins to SonicWall VPN and firewall accounts. To date, 92 unique user accounts across 30 organizations have been impacted. «The activity stems from five IPs and relies on infrastructure hosted on DigitalOcean to compromise numerous, seemingly unrelated organizations,» Huntress said. «Current telemetry indicates this is an automated credential validation attack, consistent with similar campaigns targeting SonicWall VPNs throughout 2025 and 2026.»

Threat actors get new names

Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said it will be rolling out a unified naming schema for tracking threat actors as part of its effort to standardize tracking across platforms and public reporting. «The new naming convention aligns with industry standard threat actor naming systems,» GTIG said. To that end, the new schema utilizes a cryptonym-based approach employing two-word combinations for each distinct threat actor, similar to those adopted by CrowdStrike (e.g., Mustang Panda) and Microsoft (e.g., Twill Typhoon). The first word is a term chosen to represent the specific actor, while the second word categorizes threat clusters by motivation, attribution, or activity type. Going forward, APT44 (aka Sandworm) will be referred to as Sandworm Relic, where Relic is the category name for threat actors of Russian origin. Similarly, those from China will be grouped under Castle, Iran under Ion, North Korea under Neptune, and cybercriminal gangs under Comet. GTIG said it will continue to use UNC (or uncategorized) for threat clusters that are still in the early stages of investigation.

Hidden desktop hijacks sessions

A new remote access trojan (RAT) called MedusaHVNC is being sold as malware-as-a-service (MaaS), per BlackFog. The malware embeds a hidden virtual network computing (HVNC) module that opens a browser on a separate Windows desktop that’s out of sight of the victim. «The browser still runs on the victim’s device, so it can load an existing profile, including cookies and session state,» BlackFog said. «This gives the operator access to live, logged-in sessions while the activity continues to come from the victim’s usual machine.» The seller lists Chrome, Edge, Brave, Firefox, and Telegram as supported applications. The malware uses a 5-stage infection chain. It begins when the legitimate «wscript.exe» binary executes a JavaScript launcher, which then sets off the subsequent steps, including dropping additional payloads and using AutoIT to decrypt and launch MedusaHVNC, which then communicates with an external server to exfiltrate data.

DNS hijack exposed credentials

CubePilot has announced an operational disruption stemming from a DNS hijacking attack. Unknown threat actors are said to have gained control of the cubepilot[.]org domain DNS settings on July 24, allowing them to intercept traffic intended for internal systems. The threat actors also obtained TLS certificates covering all cubepilot.org subdomains. «The certificates obtained by the attacker covered every cubepilot.org subdomain, so credentials entered on any of our services on 24 July may have been captured – the portal and the forum included,» CubePilot said. «If you used the same password anywhere else, change it there now.» CubePilot has since regained control of its domains and revoked the fraudulently issued certificates.

Spear-phishing delivers SpyGlace

The threat actor known as APT-C-60 has continued to target Japanese organizations with spear-phishing emails to deliver SpyGlace malware. «While several changes have been identified, such as a shift in infrastructure from Bitbucket to GitHub and updates to the malware itself, many characteristics remain consistent, including the abuse of legitimate services and the behavior of the malware,» JPCERT/CC said late last year. As of 2026, the spear-phishing emails contain a Proton Drive link to trick recipients into downloading a RAR archive containing a LNK file, which then deploys SpyGlace by downloading an intermediate payload from jsDelivr. «By using legitimate services, the threat actor may be attempting to make communications and downloads appear to be normal access,» JPCERT/CC said.

AI agent validates exploitable flaws

Google has launched a preview of CodeMender, an AI agent designed to scan codebases for security flaws, confirm they are exploitable and eliminate false positives, and generate fixes for developers to review. The tool supports C/C++, Go, Java, Python, Ruby, Rust, and TypeScript. «The agent goes beyond static code-pattern analysis by simulating an attack with exploit code it builds and runs in an isolated, customer-managed sandbox,» Google said. «The agent uses this proof-of-concept exploit to verify that the security flaw poses a legitimate risk. This critical verification phase allows your security practitioners and developers to prioritize validated risks by eliminating false positives.» CodeMender will add support for third-party frontier models later this year.

4,340 extremist URLs flagged

Europol said it supported an action targeting nihilistic violent extremist content online between June and July 2026 with an aim to disrupt The Com online ecosystem and restrict propaganda dissemination. The agency and its partners have flagged 4,340 «horrific» URLs linked to The Com for removal. Belgium, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden participated in the effort. «Groups affiliated with The Com recruit members and groom victims on social media, messaging apps, and gaming platforms to engage in self-harm, animal torture, violent attacks, and the production of child sexual abuse material,» Europol said. «They distribute propaganda on accessible platforms to attract young individuals, funnelling potential members and victims into private forums and chat rooms where radicalisation and victimisation occur. Victims are typically coerced into remaining under the perpetrators’ influence through (s)extortion.» Members of the loose-knit collective also participate in cybercrime, extortion, doxxing, swatting, real-life shootings, stabbings, and other physical violence.

Fake games deliver Amatera

Fake downloads of games, mods, cracks, and software are being used to spread RenPy Loader (aka RenEngine Loader). «Once installed, the loader starts a complex, multi-stage infection chain that abuses MSBuild and the EtherHiding technique before ultimately delivering Amatera Stealer,» Malwarebytes said. «RenPy Loader has also been observed delivering other malware, including Hijack Loader and Lumma Stealer, showing that the final payload can vary between campaigns.»

Most failures stay quiet until someone relies on them.

A login works. A partner is trusted. A tool behaves as expected. Then one assumption turns out to be doing all the security work.

That is the part worth checking before next week finds it first.

23 JUL 2026

admin Noticias, Trending Android attacks CYBERDEFENSA.MX Image Injection PLC Prompt Spyware Stories

Android Spyware, PLC Attacks, AI Image Prompt Injection + 12 More Stories – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

Most of this week’s trouble came dressed as something useful.

A package stole data. A fake extension opened remote access. A safety app became spyware. An image gave hidden orders to an AI agent. Other threats hid in open systems, weak code, and normal network traffic.

The threats change every week. Subscribe, and we’ll alert you when each new ThreatsDay Bulletin is out.

The danger was easy to miss because it looked ordinary. Here is the full list:

Support uploads face cutoff

GitHub has announced an upcoming security change that may affect GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) support bundle uploads. «Beginning August 18, 2026, GitHub will start rejecting command-line support bundle uploads from older GHES appliances that have not been updated with the required security patches,» GitHub said. «To avoid any disruption when submitting support bundles with ghe-support-bundle, ghe-cluster-support-bundle, or ghe-support-upload commands, please update your GHES instance to the latest patch release available for your current version line.» At minimum, the required patch versions are: 3.21.3, 3.20.5, 3.19.9, 3.18.12, and 3.17.18.

Npm install triggers stealer

An npm package named @copilot-mcp/apex has been found to act as a postinstall dropper that installs a macOS infostealer on any machine that runs npm install or npx @copilot-mcp/apex. The same payload is said to have been distributed via another dropper named @apexfdn/apex. «On macOS, the dropper’s second stage decrypts and runs an AppleScript payload through osascript,» SefeDep said. «The decrypted payload is a 707-line AMOS-family stealer: it phishes the login password through a fake system prompt, then harvests browser credentials, 20+ crypto wallets, SSH keys, AWS and Kubernetes credentials, the login Keychain, Telegram, and shell history into /tmp/osalogging.zip and uploads it over chunked HTTPS PUT to attacker infrastructure.» The malware also sets up a LaunchAgent that polls the attacker’s command-and-control server every 60 seconds to ensure that the infection outlives the initial exfiltration.

Fake extension opens backdoor

A Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) marketplace extension called «Markdown All Pro» («markdown.markdown-all-pro») has been found to impersonate the legitimate «Markdown All in One» extension with over 14 million downloads. Installing the rogue extension allows the machine’s details to be shipped to the attacker and opens a channel through which the operator can send any additional commands without having to touch the extension again. «On install, these beacon the machine’s username and hostname to a hardcoded IP over cleartext HTTP and fetch a remote file to disk, with no user interaction required,» Manifold Security said. «This one is small, but it deliberately misrepresents itself as a trusted tool, and the remote fetch it performs is a live delivery channel whose payload the operator can change at any time.» After the extension was removed by Microsoft, it reappeared under an identical name («MarkdownLinks.markdown-links-pro»). The second extension has since been taken down as well.

Old releases locked down

The Python Package Index (PyPI) has made a new security change that rejects new files being uploaded to releases that are older than 14 days. «This restriction was put in place to prevent old and long-stable releases from being poisoned in case publishing tokens or workflows of PyPI projects were compromised,» PyPI said. «As far as we are aware, this has not yet been abused, but there is no technical reason beyond that attackers weren’t aware it was possible.»

Phishing delivers banking malware

A new malware campaign is targeting Portuguese users through phishing emails impersonating financial and administrative communications to deliver the Lampion banking malware. First publicly documented in December 2019, the Brazilian banking malware family is derived from the ChePro lineage, and has consistently targeted Portugal and other Portuguese-speaking users. «Initial payloads are delivered through ZIP archives containing heavily obfuscated HTML files designed to evade static detection and analysis,» Acronis said. «The HTML stage retrieves and executes additional scripts from attacker-controlled infrastructure, leading to the deployment of a multistage VBS infection chain. Each stage employs extensive obfuscation techniques, including junk code, encrypted strings and dynamically generated scripts, significantly inflating file sizes while concealing core functionality. The infection chain is deliberately fragmented across multiple independent execution stages, complicating behavioral analysis and reducing the visibility of malicious activity.»

Call endings trigger ads

DoubleVerify has uncovered a growing wave of «AfterCall» apps that trick users into granting special permissions, which then display intrusive ads immediately after Android users end a phone call. The ad fraud scheme is assessed to be responsible for hundreds of millions of ad impressions. «The fraud works by tricking users into granting overlay permissions, allowing malicious apps to display ads outside their normal context,» DoubleVerify said. «The apps also use evasion techniques that make them difficult for users to identify and uninstall.»

Fake Claude app drops RAT

Huntress disclosed that between July 21 and July 22, 2026, at least 29 organizations fell victim to a malvertising campaign that redirected them to a malicious Claude Artifact publicly hosted on the legitimate Claude.ai domain. «The malicious Claude Artifact redirected users to an attacker-controlled domain, where they downloaded what looks like a legitimate Claude desktop app (ClaudeDesktop.exe),» Huntress said. «In reality, the executable led to the download of SectopRAT. The attackers used an array of anti-analysis techniques, including packaging the malware with VMProtect to make it difficult to reverse engineer and checking the graphics hardware on systems before deciding whether to actually execute the malicious payload as a way to suss out VMs.» The public Claude Artifact has been removed as of July 22, 2026. The campaign has been codenamed FakeAgent.

Image hides agent instructions

A new attack technique called GhostCommit employs a pull request that can steal a repository’s secrets by hiding the malicious instruction inside a PNG image that’s processed by an LLM reviewer. «The text rendered in that image names .env, tells the agent to read it byte-by-byte, to encode each byte as its ASCII codepoint, and ends with a self-check that must pass before commit: the decoded numbers have to equal the real .env,» the University of Missouri-Kansas City’s ASSET Research Group said. «The image is the only place in the entire pull request where any of this appears. Unfortunately, for a text-based reviewer, an image is a binary blob, so there is nothing to read.» Once the change is committed and merged, the payload just sits in the repository, dormant, until the trap springs itself when a victim prompts the coding agent in an unrelated session. «The developer asks the coding agent for something ordinary, say a token-tracking module,» the researchers said. «The agent reads the merged AGENTS.md at startup, follows the pointer to build-spec.png, reads the procedure rendered inside, opens .env, and writes the requested module with a provenance constant near the top.»

Iran-linked actors target PLCs

The U.S. government has issued an update to an advisory published in April 2026 to warn organizations of ongoing Iranian-affiliated cyber activity targeting internet-connected operational technology (OT) devices. «The update provides new guidance to detect malicious changes in reusable code modules used within Rockwell Automation PLC programs and adds more recommended mitigations,» the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said. «It also expands the manufacturer scope to include observed targeting of Schneider Electric, Siemens, and possible other PLC manufacturers. The additional manufacturers being targeted emphasize the importance for OT owners and operators to restrict direct internet access and ensure secure PLC deployment.» The authoring agencies said the Iranian-affiliated activity has disrupted PLCs across several U.S. critical infrastructure sectors by attempting to download malicious project files and manipulate data on human machine interface (HMI) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) displays. Targets include Water and Wastewater Systems, Energy, and Government Services and Facilities. The federal advisory does not mention any specific hacking groups.

Fake alert app enables surveillance

Dream has disclosed details of an Android app that masquerades as a Bahraini Civil Defense «BH Alert» siren app but embeds a malware called OctagonPanel to hoover sensitive data from a compromised device. «It is distributed through a network of look-alike domains that clone the Google Play Store and official Bahraini government sites, complete with fake install animations and ad-tracking pixels, and it deploys a four-stage surveillance platform capable of harvesting lockscreen credentials, SMS and one-time codes, contacts, and screenshots, running banking-app overlays, and taking full remote control of the device,» Dream said. «It relies on social engineering and the abuse of legitimate Android permissions, delivered under a public-safety brand at a moment when users are primed to install it.» Earlier this March, the cybersecurity vendor highlighted another phishing campaign that distributed a trojanized version of the Israeli «Red Alert» app to silently collect valuable data.

Fake apps deliver surveillance RAT

An Iran-nexus threat actor tracked as TAG-182 has been observed disseminating MarkiRAT malware in support of Iranian government surveillance operations. «It is highly likely that TAG-182 is targeting Iranians living inside and outside the country using different lures, including free download tools and fake VPN applications,» Recorded Future said. «The group’s operations are highly likely active across social media platforms like Instagram.» The malware is distributed through fake Android applications masquerading as legitimate services such as VPNs and media tools to collect intelligence from Iranian targets. «The MarkiRAT sample identified during this research shares notable tradecraft overlaps with historical variants, including the use of the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS), suggesting a credible relationship between TAG-182 and activity previously attributed to Ferocious Kitten,» the cybersecurity company added.

AI-built apps expose critical flaws

An analysis of 28 vibe-coded apps has uncovered 434 unique and validated vulnerabilities. «The most common bug in AI-generated code overall is missing rate-limiting and DoS controls (such as unbounded pagination, no rate limits, or synchronous blocking work),» Xint said. «When we narrow our focus to the most critical bugs, a different picture emerges. Secret exposures made up the largest share of the most critical bugs in AI-generated code. These are hard-coded or default secrets that allow an attacker to forge sessions or tokens. Authorization and IDOR bugs – a type of flaw where a user gets access to data beyond their permissions – were more common in larger apps.»

AI guardrails become attack tools

An enterprising Russian-speaking threat actor known as Trim has «spent the better part of 2026 systematically dismantling the guardrails on publicly available frontier AI models and rebuilding them as offensive tools,» Cato Networks said. «What started in March as a knowledge-sharing post on a Russian cybercrime forum detailing how to break Claude Opus into writing malware, had evolved by June into a fully productized, commercially marketed AI-powered penetration testing platform.» Trim has also outlined six techniques for jailbreaking Claude Opus: Context Warming, which involves opening with innocent professional queries before slipping in a malicious request; Black Box Principle, which strips the model of the ability to reason by instructing it via system prompt to analyze only code structure; Ghost Reset, which involves gaslighting the model mid-session by deleting an ongoing chat, reopening it, telling Claude that the internet dropped, and feeding it a softened version of the refused request; Model Cascading, which falls back to alternative AI models if one refuses to comply; Local Uncensored Models, which uses self-hosted or locally run AI models with few or no safety guardrails when commercial models block requests; and Gray-Market API Access, which obtains low-cost API keys from underground resellers to access commercial AI models. The findings once again demonstrate that frontier AI safety controls can be bypassed by a determined and technically literate adversary, and how quickly threat actors can capitalize on generative AI.

DNS traffic conceals TrickBot C2

A new version of the TrickBot malware has been observed using DNS tunneling to communicate with its command-and-control (C2) servers. «To protect itself from static analysis, TrickBot employs several obfuscation techniques,» Fortinet said. «This TrickBot maintains persistence on the victim’s computer by leveraging the Windows Task Scheduler. TrickBot wraps its command-and-control request packets in encrypted DNS query packets.» While normal DNS response packets typically contain the IP addresses associated with the queried domain, TrickBot uses it to hide the malicious data within the IP addresses of these responses. This, in turn, allows the malware to fetch commands to be executed on the machine or download and run additional modules.

AI models pinpoint vulnerable code

Cisco has unveiled Antares, which it frames as a «family of security small language models (SLMs) purpose-built for one of the hardest, most time-consuming and expensive problems in security: pinpointing where known vulnerabilities exist within a codebase.» The network equipment company further noted that «Antares follows an iterative search pattern that resembles how a human investigator works through a repository. Each model starts from a vulnerability description, searches for relevant code patterns, reads candidate files, incorporates new evidence, changes direction when a path is unhelpful, and narrows toward the files most likely to matter. The goal is not to replace expert judgment, but rather to help make the first stages of source-code vulnerability triage faster, more repeatable, and easier to review.»

The common thread was not advanced hacking. It was borrowed trust. Each threat used something people already accept: an install, a permission, a familiar name, or a normal system feature.

That changes the job. The question is no longer only «Is this safe?» It is also «What can this do if it is not?» The smaller the action looks, the tighter its limits should be.

16 JUL 2026

admin Noticias, Trending 24Hour Cheat Chrome CYBERDEFENSA.MX Game ransomware Spyware Stalking Stories Sync

Game Cheat Spyware, 24-Hour Ransomware, Chrome Sync Stalking + 12 More Stories – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

A lot of this week’s trouble starts with something that looks close enough.

A familiar repo. A useful installer. A harmless sync setting. Then the handoff goes bad, the box starts talking to someone else, and the damage moves faster than the explanation.

Old bugs are back, weak defaults are earning their keep, and some attack paths are so plain they barely feel like research. Here’s the mess.

Game cheats drop spyware

Cybersecurity researchers 11 malicious NuGet packages published as .NET command-line tools that present themselves as game utilities, bots, and «panels,» each of which act as a first-stage downloader responsible for fetching and executing a second-stage Python payload named «pepesoft.exe» from GitHub Releases and Hugging Face paths under the username «pepegit666,» along with a dormant BitTorrent fallback mechanism built into it. «The recovered payloads use downloader-supplied AWS-style key material to retrieve remote configuration, authenticate to Google Sheets, bind activations to hardware, and honor a remote HWID/UUID ban-list,» Socket said. «In the three direct-bytecode payloads, the larger game-automation application also exposes Telegram bot commands that can send screenshots back to the configured chat.»

Fake installers deploy RATs

UAT-11795, a sophisticated, Russian-speaking, financially motivated adversary, has been observed conducting a malicious campaign targeting users in the U.S. and Europe since at least June 2025. The activity delivers a Python-based remote access tool (RAT) dubbed Starland RAT and a command-and-control (C2) memory implant known as WLDR agent using trojanized installer lures for software like developer tooling, IT administration utilities, enterprise collaboration platforms, and consumer gaming applications (e.g., MobaXterm, WebEx, Zoom, DBeaver, and FaceIT). «The WLDR agent is a sophisticated PowerShell-based C2 memory implant that features encrypted beaconing, task queuing, and a Runspace execution engine for executing additional payloads,» Cisco Talos said. Alternatively, UAT-11795 has been linked to the deployment of CastleStealer and Remcos RAT. The malware is designed to target victims’ credentials and cryptocurrency wallet assets, harvest Active Directory information, and establish a persistent connection to the victims’ machines from the C2 server, likely with an aim to deliver and execute further payloads. The majority of the infections are in the U.S., with fewer potential impacts recorded in Germany, Romania, and Venezuela. The attack chain makes use of ClickFix lures to distribute HTA scripts, which then download and run trojanized installers to deliver Starland RAT, which then uses «curl.exe» to execute a PowerShell stager for decrypting and running WLDR agent. In recent weeks, ClickFix has also served as a conduit for TELEPUZ, a modular malware, and ClickLock Stealer, a macOS-focused information and cryptocurrency wallet stealer targeting users in Europe, North America, and MEA. «ClickLock Stealer targets data from 8 browsers, 31 crypto wallet browser extensions, 7 password manager extensions, 8 desktop wallet applications, extracts blockchain addresses across 6 chains, macOS Keychain, shell history, and FTP credentials,» Group-IB said.

Network encrypted within hours

An IT services company in South Asia was targeted by a previously undocumented ransomware family called Spirals in June 2026. «The Rust-based payload is either a new ransomware threat or one purpose-built for this attack,» Broadcom’s Symantec and Carbon Black Threat Hunter Team said. «Less than 24 hours after the initial breach, the ransomware payload was being pushed to machines on the network.» The attacker is said to have obtained initial access by compromising an internet-facing IIS web server and uploading an ASP.NET web shell. Over the next three hours, they established persistent access, conducted reconnaissance, uninstalled endpoint security software, dumped the Security Account Manager (SAM) hive, and set up covert remote access prior to deploying the payload across the network using PsExec. The ransom note seeks to apply pressure by threatening to publish stolen data after six days if a ransom is not paid and directs victims to a Tor portal for negotiations. The actor behind the attack remains unknown.

Actively exploited flaws

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added CVE-2026-46817, an improper privilege management vulnerability in Oracle E-Business Suite, and CVE-2023-4346, an overly restrictive account lockout mechanism vulnerability in KNX Association KNX Protocol Connection Authorization Option 1, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, requiring federal agencies to apply the fixes by July 18 and 29, 2026, respectively. Reports about active exploitation of CVE-2026-46817 emerged late last month. It’s currently not known how the KNX Protocol flaw is being abused and by whom.

New rules for vulnerability reports

CISA, in partnership with the National Security Agency (NSA), Japan Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (JPCERT/CC), Netherlands’ National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NL), and United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-UK), has published joint guidance to «helps software manufacturers and online service providers collaborate effectively with security researchers who identify weaknesses in software, networks, and hardware in a structured, transparent framework.» The agency said a «well-defined coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD) program enables software manufacturers and online service providers to better assess potential risk, improve their vulnerability management processes, and make informed decisions that improve product security for their customers.»

700-person scam network dismantled

Authorities from the Netherlands have arrested a 46-year-old man with Israeli and Polish citizenship, who is alleged to be behind an international criminal organization with more than 700 employees who were employed at about 20 fraudulent call centers. These individuals posed as financial advisors to conduct investment fraud. «By maintaining regular contact, sometimes over a period of months, these scammers build a bond of trust with their victims,» the Dutch police said. «The initial deposit is always a relatively small amount that yields an immediate profit. The online platform where victims can view their investments is indistinguishable from the real thing, yet in reality, no actual investments are being made. Scammers use a friendly approach and cunning tactics to manipulate victims into depositing ever-larger sums. The money – often cryptocurrency – that victims believe they are investing ends up in the scammers’ pockets.» The operation has also led to the arrest of four «financial advisors.»

€140M fraud network disrupted

Spanish National Police have disrupted a cybercrime network accused of stealing and laundering about €140 million through fake investment platforms, CEO fraud, invoice fraud, and adversary-in-the-middle attacks across Europe. Four people have been apprehended in connection with the operation: two in Portugal, one in Spain, and one in Panama. «The suspects established and managed a network of over 800 bank accounts to receive substantial sums of illicit money swindled from numerous victims; these funds were immediately dispersed and concealed across another network of accounts, creating a chain of transactions that safeguarded the criminal proceeds and allowed the vast amounts of defrauded money to be hidden and laundered through ‘money mule’ accounts in third countries,» police said. «To create the complex web of accounts used for money laundering, the group utilized an extensive network of money mules – European citizens who had arrived in Spain from other countries – to set up companies and subsequently open bank accounts across Spanish territory.»

Windows bind links evade EDR

Bitdefender Labs has demonstrated three attack techniques in which Windows’ bind links can be misused to evade endpoint detection and response (EDR) products. «Windows includes a file-system virtualization feature that can redirect one local path to another without modifying the original file or leaving a persistent filesystem artifact,» Bitdefender’s Martin Zugec said. «It is implemented by bindflt.sys, the Bind Filter minifilter driver, and used legitimately by Store apps, Windows Sandbox, and Windows containers.» The techniques can be leveraged by an attacker running as a local administrator to bypass EDR sensors and built-in Windows defenses such as AMSI and AppLocker. The techniques include: File-Binding, Process-Binding, and Silo-Binding, each of which shadow a trusted file or DLL path, a trusted executable path, and a user-defined Windows silo. Microsoft has assessed the findings as low severity because it requires administrator access.

290 fake repos spread infostealer

A financially-motivated threat actor has set up more than 290 fake GitHub repositories impersonating trusted software and security tooling vendors, including Arctic Wolf, to distribute a Windows infostealer that shares the same codebase as BoryptGrab. The 292 impersonated repositories span security tooling, fintech and personal finance, cryptocurrency wallets and exchanges, developer and productivity tools, secure email providers, macOS utilities, and gaming software. «The payload is a pure smash-and-grab in-memory infostealer, with a 41-entry cryptocurrency wallet path table and 19+ targeted browser names for broad, financially driven credential collection,» Arctic Wolf said. «Stolen data is packaged into a ZIP archive and exfiltrated to a C2 with an IP residing in Russia, on a hosting provider repeatedly associated with malware operations.» The malware does not set up persistence on the host and is instead designed to collect as much data as possible in a single execution. The brandjacking campaign is said to be the work of a Russian-speaking operator.

$62M cybercrime indictment

The U.S. Justice Department has unsealed a December 2024 indictment charging three Russian nationals and two related bulletproof hosting companies for their roles in cybercrimes against U.S. victims, causing tens of millions of dollars in losses. The charges are against Alexander Alexandrovich Volosovik, Kirill Andreevich Zatolokin, Yulia Vladimirovna Pankova, Media Land LLC, and ML.Cloud LLC. In tandem, the U.S. Department of State’s Rewards for Justice (RFJ) program has announced its offering a reward of up to $10 million and possible relocation for actionable information on foreign government-linked associates of Pankova, Volosovik, and Zatolokin, their malicious cyber activities, or foreign government-linked use of Media Land or ML.Cloud. The defendants and the companies were sanctioned by the U.S., the U.K., and Australia in November 2025. Earlier this week, the Council of the European Union also levied sanctions against Media Land, ML.Cloud, and Volosovik, as part of the first joint cyber sanctions package issued against Russia in collaboration with the U.K.

Chrome Sync becomes spyware

A legitimate Chrome sync technique meant for user convenience is being misused by stalkers to gain broad access to a device owner’s private information. «Chrome’s sync feature exists to make life easier,» Certo said. «Sign in with a Google account, and Chrome will keep your bookmarks, open tabs, browsing history, autofill data, and saved passwords in step across every device you use — your phone, tablet, laptop, whatever you’re signed into.» However, this can be turned into a surveillance tool in a simple step. All a digital intruder has to do is gain brief physical access to a victim’s phone, open the Chrome app and add a Google account under their control, and ensure sync is switched on for that account. «The victim carries on using their phone as normal,» Certo explained. «From this point, their browsing activity is copied to the attacker’s Google account in the background. The attacker opens the same Google account on their own device and reviews the victim’s browsing history whenever they choose, from anywhere with an internet connection.»

eCards deliver remote access

A sustained phishing campaign dubbed SeasonalInvite has been observed deploying and abusing commercial Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) tools since at least January 2026 by making use of social engineering themes tied to the seasonal calendar in attacks targeting both Windows and macOS users. The attacks involve the abuse of ConnectWise ScreenConnect, LogMeIn Resolve, Kaseya, and O&O Syspectr. The bogus pages are likely distributed via phishing emails and poisoned search results. Forescout said it identified 959 eCard-themed domains and a traffic distribution system (TDS) using 2,658 gate pages to route victims to phishing pages while blocking automated security scanners. «The phishing pages are generated by a kit and contain indicators of likely AI-generated code, suggesting the threat actor used a large language model (LLM) to assemble delivery pages and rapidly retool the campaign,» it noted.

OAuth codes bypass MFA defenses

Cybersecurity researchers have identified a new AI-powered device code phishing toolkit called Jalisco, along with a credential harvester codenamed OmegaLord that captures phone numbers alongside passwords to intercept multi-factor authentication (MFA) codes. «Jalisco is a device code phishing toolkit that provisions fresh OAuth codes in real time, defeating the time-based controls defenders rely on and pairing naturally with AI-powered kits like ‘EvilTokens,’» ReliaQuest said. «OmegaLord, by contrast, is a JavaScript-based credential harvester that impersonates a PDF reader and collects phone numbers alongside credentials—a deliberate step toward intercepting or hijacking MFA.» The development comes amid a surge in device code phishing attacks in 2026 that employ purpose-built tools to run such campaigns at scale. «Once inside a compromised Microsoft 365 account, attackers establish persistence by pairing multiple attacker-controlled devices to the victim’s Entra ID tenant, then move quickly to exfiltrate sensitive data from software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms for extortion,» the company added. In some cases, threat actors have been observed enrolling more than five devices to a single compromised account in an attempt to extend the window for exfiltration.

3,900 threat servers mapped

A new analysis from Hunt.io has uncovered more than 3,900 threat activities enabling servers across 302 Eastern European infrastructure providers within the past 3 months. «Keitaro leads Eastern European threat activity enablement with 1,277 unique threat activity enabling IPs, followed by Tactical RMM (232) and Acunetix (173),» the threat intelligence company said. «Cloud Atlas APT infrastructure was observed across multiple Eastern European providers, confirming the group’s continued reliance on Eastern European hosting. Proton66 OOO was linked to active exploitation of CVE-2026-35273, a critical Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day attributed to the ShinyHunters group, with threat activity enabling infrastructure directly traceable to this Russian provider.»

One infection, two revenue streams

A financially motivated campaign has been observed delivering Vidar stealer and the XMRig cryptocurrency miner to consumer and small- and medium-sized business victims worldwide. The campaign was detected in April 2026. «Attackers lure victims via malvertising to pages for downloading files that impersonate cracked versions of copyright-protected software,» Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said. «Upon execution, the loader drops and runs both Vidar stealer and XMRig. Vidar stealer targets information like browser credentials, cookies, and crypto wallets. XMRig mines Monero cryptocurrency.» The loader binaries use the Factory-v3 framework, which refers to a malware-as-a-service (MaaS0 builder used for different families of stealer malware. «The tag X3D MINER appears in Telegram operator notifications sent for every new victim infection,» Unit 42 added. «The operator behind this campaign runs a dual-monetization scheme. Criminals sell credentials and session cookies stolen by Vidar stealer on criminal log markets, while XMRig provides passive income from hijacked victim CPU cycles.»

The lesson is not “trust nothing.” It is to stop granting trust in bulk. Check the repo, the installer, the account, the exposed service. Small shortcuts keep turning into full attack paths.

And when a bug looks old, awkward, or too simple to matter, assume someone has already found a use for it. Patch the boring stuff. Tighten the defaults. Watch the handoffs.

09 JUL 2026

admin Noticias, Trending Bucket Bust Chain Cloud CYBERDEFENSA.MX Fraud global Hijacking LPE Stories Windows

Cloud Bucket Hijacking, Windows LPE Chain, Global Fraud Bust + 17 More Stories – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

Most security mess starts as admin work. A link gets clicked. A tool gets trusted. A bucket name gets reused. A setting stays loose because nobody wants to touch it.

This week is full of that kind of damage. Not loud. Not clever. Just small gaps doing big jobs. The worst part is how normal it all looks until the bill arrives.

The full ThreatsDay list is below.

Global fraud bust

A global anti-fraud operation involving 97 countries and territories has resulted in the arrest of 5,811 individuals and the interception of $293 million in illicit assets as part of an operation codenamed First Light 2026 that took place between January 15 and April 30, 2026, to tackle social engineering scams and associated money laundering activities. «Over 142,000 victims globally were identified during Operation First Light 2026, highlighting the extent to which social engineering scams and fraud have escalated into a major transnational threat, affecting individuals, businesses, and governments,» INTERPOL said. More than 23,000 cases were solved, and 15,606 suspects have been identified. In Eswatini, authorities arrested 82 people and dismantled a criminal network running illegal online gambling, money laundering, and elaborate impersonation scams. The Thai police made two arrests and uncovered a money laundering scheme that converted illicit funds from romance scams into various cryptocurrencies, using cross-chain token swaps to obscure the financial trail.

Payment SDK typosquats

A cluster of 17 malicious npm and PyPI packages have been found to typosquat Paysafe, Skrill, and Neteller SDKs to steal system information and developer secrets, and exfiltrate them to an Ngrok endpoint. The malware skips machines that have less than two CPU cores, and the hostname or username contains sandbox, analyzer, cuckoo, virus, malware, vmware, or vbox. «The threat actor targeted payment app SDKs, which might indicate a financial motive or the desire to monetize using payment app accounts,» Socket said. «The threat actor used their obfuscator ‘properly.’ They did not re-use the same obfuscation key across versions or packages, which is intended to prevent signatures from tracking this malware by the same key. This resulted in different hashes for each file.»

Stealthy code injection

Cybersecurity researchers have outlined a technique called Process Parameter Poisoning (P³) that can be used to code in foreign processes without raising any security alarms. «P³-Shellcode Loader is a loader that implements a code injection technique which leverages the Process Parameters structure (Process Parameter Poisoning) as an execution and staging location for shellcode injection into remote processes, without triggering common detection mechanisms,» researchers Max Hirschberger and Ogulcan Ugur said. «One major advantage of this technique is that no processes are created in a suspended state and no threads or processes are suspended during its execution.»

Unauthenticated file access

A critical security flaw in Esri ArcGIS Server 12.0 and prior (CVE-2026-9181, CVSS score: 9.8/7.5) could be exploited to access sensitive files on the system without requiring valid credentials by sending crafted path parameters. «The vulnerability exists in the ArcGIS Server REST Uploads resource, where insufficient validation of crafted path parameters allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to traverse outside the intended directory boundary,» Horizon3.ai said.

Ransomware tooling overlap

A new analysis of the Interlock (aka Hive0163) ransomware operation has identified links with TAG-124 (aka KongTuke and Landupdate808). The threat actor is known to employ a variety of mostly custom malware, including NodeSnake, Interlock RAT, JunkFiction downloader (aka Dormouse), Supper (aka SocksShell and WINDYTWIST), and JunkFiction cryptor. IBM X-Force said it has discovered strong overlaps between NodeSnake, ModeloRAT, JunkFiction downloader, Interlock RAT, and Supper malware variants, indicating a shared original codebase or possibly common developers. Rhysida, on the other hand, often uses Endico downloader, Broomstick (aka Oyster or CleanUpLoader), Supper, and Tomb cryptor (aka Textshell or pkr_mtsi). Evidence indicates a relationship with IceNova (aka Latrodectus) operators and ITG23 (aka TrickBot). Early versions of JunkFiction date back to May 2024, with the downloader being used to Supper, which then delivers CrossTec Remote Control, a legitimate remote administration tool. «The fact that both ModeloRAT and NodeSnake were deployed by TAG-124/KongTuke, possessed overlaps with other malware families belonging to the Interlock toolkit and used the same exploit during their operations, supports the theory that these activities may be linked,» IBM X-Force said.

Claude data warning

China’s National Vulnerability Database (CNVDB) is urging developers to uninstall recent Claude Code versions over concerns that they can gather sensitive user data without consent. The «backdoor code» can collect details such as a user’s location and identity, and forward them to remote servers. The agency said the alert only applies to Claude Code versions 2.1.91 (April 2) to 2.1.196 (June 29). «It is recommended that relevant units and users immediately conduct a comprehensive investigation,» CNVDB said. «For development terminals with the above-mentioned affected versions installed, immediately uninstall or upgrade to the latest secure version with the relevant backdoor code removed; strengthen the control of external access permissions and traffic monitoring of development tools within core business network segments to prevent the unauthorized transmission of sensitive data.» The disclosure comes shortly after a report that Claude contained covert code designed to prevent Chinese AI companies from extracting details about its inner workings. Anthropic subsequently said it was an experiment to protect against model distillation.

Teams support lure

A social engineering campaign has combined email phishing with a fake IT support scam abusing Microsoft Teams calls to deliver EtherRAT. «The attack lures the victim with a fake ‘Employee Survey’ email and PDF, then pivots to a Microsoft Teams call from an actor impersonating a ‘System Administrator,’» Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 said. «The actor abuses Teams remote control (give/request control) to control the victim’s machine, then guides the victim to install different remote RMM tools to establish persistence – HopToDesk and AnyDesk. The actor uses cmd.exe > curl.exe to download a malicious MSI (v7.msi) from camorreado[.]click and execute it. The MSI is a multi-stage loader that downloads a legitimate Node.js runtime, decrypts an embedded payload through a multi-step cipher chain, and runs EtherRAT.»

Scattered Spider link

The notorious cybercrime group known as Scattered Spider is called by various names, including Octo Tempest, Muddled Libra, and UNC3944. Group-IB, which designated the term 0ktapus to a social engineering attack campaign targeting Twilio in August 2022, said Scattered Spider can be best described as a decentralized cybercrime collective analogous to The Com, with 0ktapus acting as a sub-cluster within the group. Scattered Spider comprises smaller clusters that are united by the use of shared tradecraft and English as a common language, but act separately. «Physical device theft activity from mobile carrier stores has been observed in at least one subcluster, for SIM swapping purposes,» Group-IB said. «Subclusters target all kinds of sectors, either as end-targets for direct exploitation or as stepping stones to gather intelligence or tools for future attacks.» The end goal of these attacks is cryptocurrency theft and ransomware, leading to extortion.

LINE espionage scheme

Taiwanese authorities have charged two local businessmen with allegedly assisting Chinese government-linked hackers carry out a sprawling espionage campaign targeting politicians, academics, journalists, and civil society groups. The suspects are believed to have run a company that collected and leased accounts for the LINE messaging app to operators linked to China’s cyber forces. The accounts were then used to impersonate international journalists and build trust with targets and ultimately deliver malware designed to compromise their computers. The LINE accounts were rented by a Chinese firm named Xiamen Empress Information Technology.

Meta phishing abuse

An unknown threat actor is manipulating Meta’s Business Account Manager to send spam emails that bypass email filters since at least November 2025 and trick victims into providing their Meta account details to the attacker on attacker-controlled web pages. The emails were sent from a Meta business account. «Starting in June, they modified their phishing lure to incorporate a chatbot, run through a fraudulent account on Facebook Messenger, and began sending credentials to a private Telegram channel,» Huntress said. «The phishing campaign appears to target businesses and attempts to capture credentials, MFA codes, business and personal phone numbers, email addresses, and an image of the target’s ID or passport.» Meta has since taken steps to plug the attack method.

Windows LPE chain

In August 2025, SafeBreach researcher Ron Ben Yizhak disclosed details of an issue (CVE-2025-49760) in Microsoft’s Windows Remote Procedure Call (RPC) communication protocol that could be abused by an attacker to conduct spoofing attacks and impersonate a known server. Then, in October 2025, Microsoft addressed another vulnerability tracked as CVE-2025-59200, which has been described as a spoofing flaw in the Data Sharing Service Client. «By exploiting a vulnerability in the Data Sharing Service (DsSvc) – tracked as CVE-2025-59200 – an attacker can spoof an RPC server, then send a hotkey that bypasses User Interface Privilege Isolation (UIPI) to start a scheduled task,» Ben Yizhak said. «The task sends an RPC request to the spoofed server of the attacker and the response injects an XML into a toast notification to elevate privileges from low to medium integrity.»

Kernel driver flaws

Multiple vulnerabilities have been disclosed in RtsPer.sys, an SD card reader driver developed by Realtek. These vulnerabilities enable non-privileged users to leak the contents of the kernel pool and kernel stack, write to arbitrary kernel memory, and read and write physical memory from user mode via the DMA capability of the device, per a security researcher who goes by the name «zwclose.» The issues impact many OEMs, including Dell, Lenovo, and possibly other laptops equipped with an SD card reader manufactured by Realtek. The issues have been assigned the CVEs: CVE-2022-25477, CVE-2022-25478, CVE-2022-25479, CVE-2022-25480, CVE-2024-40431, and CVE-2024-40432. The complete set of fixes was released by Realtek in August 2024.

New ransomware behavior

Ransomware attacks that deploy WhiteLock involve the locker communicating with external servers during the encryption process and terminating Services related to remote access tools, such as AnyDesk and TeamViewer, to prevent victims from responding remotely. «After registering an infected device, WhiteLock checks whether AnyDesk and TeamViewer are installed on the victim’s device,» AhnLab said. «If these tools are present, it terminates the relevant Services in subsequent stages. This behavior is interpreted as an attempt to prevent security personnel or administrators from isolating the infected system or responding in real time through remote access tools.» Another new ransomware entrant is Prinz Eugen, which was first detected in May 2026. «The encryptor is freshly built, written in Go, and more technically deliberate than many first-wave ransomware samples,» Threatdown said. «It performs recursive encryption, prioritizes recently modified files, uses ChaCha20-Poly1305 with integrity checks, and leaves no ransom note on disk.» The ransomware is advertised by a threat actor named ROOTBOY on underground forums, who has previously engaged in data sale and extortion activity between July and November 2025. The development comes as the Bumblebee malware loader, deployed via SEO poisoning through a trojanized installer for ManageEngine OpManager, has been leveraged by threat actors to drop AdaptixC2, which then acts as a conduit for Akira ransomware deployment.

Chrome extension hijack

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new browser-based threat dubbed GhostChrome-X that uses Google Chrome to establish and maintain access to compromised hosts. «Two aspects in particular make GhostChrome-X noteworthy. First, the malware directly targets Chrome’s extension trust model by modifying protected configuration files and forging the integrity metadata required for Chrome to accept an attacker-controlled extension as a legitimate browser component,» Rubrik Zero Labs said. «Second, rather than functioning solely as a data-stealing extension, GhostChrome-X integrates browser-based access with operating system-level command execution, enabling the browser to serve as a persistent platform for ongoing attacker operations.» Once active, the malware establishes persistence using scheduled tasks and Registry Run keys, while communicating with an external server to collect browser cookies, browsing history, and submitted form data. It also supports remote command execution on the infected system and «monitors WebAuthn activity and enables attacker-controlled interactions with WebAuthn-enabled websites from within the victim’s browser session.»

Tax refund RAT lure

A phishing and malware campaign is using Indian Income Tax Return (ITR) refund lures to deliver a multi-stage AutoIt infection chain that leads to the deployment of AsyncRAT. The campaign has targeted financial and technology organizations. «The operation is notable for the way it combines credible email delivery, compromised web infrastructure, Dropbox-hosted payloads, password-protected archives, AutoIt staging, sandbox-aware execution, persistence, process injection, and a final .NET RAT payload,» ZeroBEC said. «More recent samples shifted to LX RAT, a commercially marketed remote access trojan protected by the LX Crypter / LX Protector ecosystem.» Fraudulent tax assessment notifications have also been used to distribute a trojan-like payload to targeted users using DLL side-loading techniques. The rogue DLL features persistence mechanisms, system information discovery, user activity monitoring, dynamic payload execution, and encrypted command-and-control (C2) communication. «The observed capabilities — including modular payload loading, encrypted communication, persistence mechanisms, and remote execution functionality — indicate that the campaign is designed to establish unauthorized access to and maintain control over compromised hosts,» CYFIRMA said.

Fileless Remcos loader

Another campaign targeting India, this time using GST-themed ZIP archive lures to deliver a variant of the Remcos RAT malware family. «One notable characteristic of this infection chain was its reliance on in-memory execution techniques / fileless malware and Steganography,» K7 Labs said. «By avoiding disk-based artifacts, the threat reduces forensic evidence and increases its ability to evade traditional security tools and signature-based detection methods.»

Teams access phish

An active phishing campaign is using Microsoft Teams-themed lures to distribute a legitimate remote access tool configured for unauthorized access. «Victims are directed to convincing landing pages that impersonate collaboration and productivity services, where they are prompted to download software presented as a meeting transcript viewer, recording utility, or document-related application,» CYFIRMA noted. «The use of compromised business websites provides reputational legitimacy, while dedicated infrastructure enables rapid deployment and campaign scalability. The operation demonstrates active maintenance, with the majority of identified infrastructure observed within the last three to six months, indicating continued development and operational investment.»

ADFS token forgery risk

Google-owned Mandiant has revealed that «when ADFS certificates are manually rotated, configuration drift can silently leave active signing keys exposed in Machine DPAPI,» adding «in environments where AutoCertificateRollover is disabled, and certificates are manually rotated, the database often becomes a ‘ghost’—a record that still exists, still decrypts successfully, but references a certificate no longer used for token signing by the ADFS service.» The tech giant has warned that the technique could be exploited by bad actors to forge high-privilege SAML tokens.

Cloud exfiltration controls

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has emphasized the need for a layered strategy for egress security and to prevent data exfiltration. «Without egress controls in place, that outbound traffic can flow freely, and the unauthorized access might go unnoticed until a compliance audit, customer complaint, or incident notification forces discovery,» AWS said. The risk is compounded by agentic AI systems, in which an unauthorized party can manipulate an autonomous agent’s objectives to silently exfiltrate data and achieve code execution. «As organizations deploy AI agents with access to tools, APIs, and code interpreters, these agents become high-value targets, and their outbound network activity must be constrained with the same rigor as any other workload,» AWS said.

Cloud data rerouting

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 has identified a bucket hijacking technique that impacts major cloud service providers. It has been described as a fundamental architectural flaw. «An attacker can silently compromise an organization’s active data streams by rerouting data into an external storage bucket,» Unit 42 said. «Because a storage bucket name is globally unique, an attacker can simply delete the bucket and then recreate it under the attacker’s own account using the same name. This, therefore, creates a global namespace risk. This bucket hijacking reroutes critical logs and sensitive data directly to the attacker’s environment.» A similar attack method, dubbed Bucket Monopoly, was detailed by Aqua Security in 2024. There is no evidence that the attack technique has been abused in the wild. In recent weeks, Unit 42 has also warned that: (1) insecure default configurations and overly permissive enrollment rights in Active Directory Certificate Services (AD CS) can be exploited for privilege escalation, unauthorized identity impersonation, and persistence; (2) Kubernetes identities can be abused in combination with exposed attack surfaces to escalate privileges from initial access to sensitive backend cloud infrastructure; (3) multi-agent AI systems can introduce new pathways for exploitation through inter-agent communication and orchestration via prompt injection due to a model’s inability to reliably differentiate between developer-defined instructions and adversarial user input, and a lack of agent capability scoping and tool input sanitization; (4) Amazon Bedrock AgentCore’s Code Interpreter sandbox network isolation mode can be bypassed to allow sending and receiving of data from external endpoints via DNS tunneling by taking advantage of a lack of session token enforcement; and (5) AgentCore starter toolkit’s auto-create logic generates identity and access management (IAM) roles that grant privileges broadly across the AWS account, rather than being scoped to individual resources, effectively introducing what’s called an Agent God Mode that makes it possible to escalate privileges and compromise every other AgentCore agent within the AWS account.

The useful lesson this week is not “watch for weird behavior.” Weird is late. By then the fake support call has a session, the package has run, the bucket is gone, and the quiet process already has somewhere to send data.

Watch the normal paths instead. Names that look almost right. Tools asking for slightly too much. Services that still trust old state. Traffic that should have had nowhere to go. Most of the damage here did not need magic. It needed permission, habit, and nobody looking closely enough.

02 JUL 2026

admin Noticias, Trending Apple BlueHammer Compute CYBERDEFENSA.MX Email Flaw Hijacking ransomware Stories

AI Compute Hijacking, Apple Email Flaw, BlueHammer Ransomware + 14 Stories – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

This week’s security news is mostly about weak spots.

Browsers, bots, sandboxes, AI systems, and email flows all show the same problem in different ways. Everything looks normal until someone tests a small gap and finds a way through.

This is not one big break. It is small permissions, weak checks, open systems, and normal tools doing things they were allowed to do. That same pattern runs through the stories below.

Ransomware phishing lure

A phishing campaign is targeting small businesses across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the U.S. with fake investigation emails impersonating law enforcement officials. «The emails claim to contain evidence of suspicious company activity and pressure recipients into opening a password-protected archive,» Bitdefender said. «Recipients are directed to a Proton Drive-hosted file that ultimately delivers ransomware. The ransomware appears to be a custom-built payload rather than a known ransomware family.»

Sandbox root escape

New research from Armadin has discovered an attack chain affecting Claude Cowork on Windows. The attack allows an attacker with local code execution to plant a malicious file in Claude Desktop’s application directory, hijacking a trusted process to communicate with Cowork’s underlying VM service. «An attacker with local code execution could run arbitrary commands as root in Claude Cowork’s sandbox without network egress restrictions,» the company said. The exploit takes advantage of two unvalidated parameters in the service’s interface that allow the attacker to run commands as root and bypass network filtering entirely, thereby allowing sensitive data to be exfiltrated to attacker-controlled infrastructure. Following responsible disclosure on May 29, 2026, Anthropic said it does not consider it to be a security issue because exploitation requires pre-existing local code execution on the host.

Email privacy flaw

A vulnerability has been disclosed in Apple’s Hide My Email service that allows users’ real email addresses to be unmasked. Tyler Murphy, the researcher who found the bug, said that he reported the issue to Apple over a year ago and that it continues to remain unpatched. «We don’t know the full scope of the issue, but in our limited tests with volunteers, 100% of Hide My Email addresses were exploitable,» Murphy told 404 Media. Exact details surrounding the vulnerability have been withheld to avoid potential exploitation concerns.

China-linked RAT activity

A customized version of the open-source DCRat framework dubbed BeepRAT has been identified as distributed via a Chinese phone number management utility packaged within a ZIP archive, per Rubrik Zero Labs. «The archive contained a .NET application named HFY.exe alongside several third-party libraries commonly associated with database-driven applications,» Rubrik said. «Although the application appeared to function as a telephone number management tool, further analysis revealed a sophisticated multi-stage infection chain that ultimately deployed the customized BeepRAT payload.» The malware establishes persistence on the host via scheduled tasks, and resolves the command-and-control infrastructure using DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) requests. It then beacons a packet containing information about the compromised host, after which a persistent communication channel is opened to receive incoming commands that allow the malware to transfer files between the host and the server, launch interactive command prompt sessions, issue commands to it, launch PowerShell sessions, enumerate running processes and available storage drives, terminate a specified process, perform file system operations, record through webcam, log keystrokes, take screenshots, list active network connections, download and run .NET assemblies in memory, and launch a proxy. It’s assessed that BeepRAT operates within the China-nexus espionage ecosystem.

AI cyber benchmark

An evaluation of OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol on real-world offensive security benchmarks by AI security lab Irregular has found the model to perform slightly better than GPT-5.5, while continuing to struggle with well-defended targets and complete end-to-end attacks. «GPT-5.6 Sol demonstrated capabilities relevant to offensive cyber misuse, including finding and exploiting high-impact zero-day vulnerabilities across multiple real systems,» it said. «These capabilities were demonstrated on sensitive, widely used classes of systems, including mobile operating systems and database systems. Despite these capabilities, GPT-5.6 Sol continued to show clear limitations against hardened targets and in orchestration, operationalization, and operational security. Performance also degrades when tasks require sustained logical coherence over long horizons or quick, time-sensitive decision-making.»

Platform-aware phishing

Cofense said it’s observing a «clear shift in phishing operations» where threat actors are moving beyond broad, one-size-fits-all campaigns to adopt platform-aware delivery that adapts to the victim’s device, browser, and environment. Phishing campaigns have been found to deliver Itarian RAT or the ConnectWise tool via Ninite Loader on Windows, while serving credential harvesting phishing pages when URLs are visited from macOS or Android. The operating system-specific payloads are delivered by fingerprinting victims through User-Agent data. «What began as simple Windows-focused malware distribution campaigns has evolved into more sophisticated campaigns that can selectively deliver credential phishing, remote access tools, or malware across Windows, MacOS, and Android,» it said. «This trend reflects a broader strategic change in the threat landscape, one that is designed to increase the likelihood of compromise, expand target coverage, and improve threat actor return on investment.»

Russian hacker reward

The U.S. State Department is offering a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to the identification or location of threat actors associated with UNC5792, a malicious cyber group associated with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Border Guards and UNC4221, a malicious group of cyber actors working on behalf of the Russian military services. UNC5792 has been linked to widespread phishing campaigns targeting Signal and WhatsApp accounts of U.S. government officials, military leadership, and allied personnel with an aim to gain unauthorized access. «Although these malicious cyber activities did not exploit any security vulnerability in the platforms’ encryption protections, they have compromised thousands of individual commercial messaging application accounts,» the State Department said.

LLM role confusion

New research from a group of academics has revealed that machine learning models cannot reliably distinguish between authorized and unauthorized input, leaving them susceptible to a persistent problem called prompt injection. «LLMs see the world as a single stream of text, partitioned into roles like or ,» the researchers said. «We trace prompt injection to role confusion: models perceive the source of text from how it sounds, not its labeled role. A command hidden in a web page hijacks an agent simply because it sounds like text, despite its label.» The attack, dubbed CoT Forgery, involves injecting fabricated reasoning into user prompts and tool outputs, causing the models to mistake the forgery for their own thoughts and act on them, yielding 60% attack success against frontier models. The attack essentially exploits the trust a model places in its own thinking.

Covert tracking rollback

Anthropic said it plans to remove the hidden code it added to Claude Code several months ago to detect unauthorized distillation efforts. The relevant code checks Claude Code’s base URL environment variable that’s used to route API requests to a proxy or gateway. If the base URL has been overridden, the code snippet checks the system time zone and whether the hostname matches any entry in a list of known Chinese companies, account resellers, and gateway domains. «This is an experiment we launched in March that was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation,» Anthropic’s Thariq Shihipar said. «The team has landed stronger mitigations since then and we’ve actually been meaning to take this down for a while.»

Clipboard attack defense

Opera has introduced Paste Protect, a new security feature designed to block ClickFix-style attacks that deceive users into executing malicious commands through social engineering techniques. «Paste Protect helps identify situations where malicious websites attempt to either replace something you copied with a malicious version or place potentially harmful commands on your clipboard and later trick you into pasting them onto a terminal,» the browser maker said. «When any kind of suspicious clipboard activity is detected, Opera’s Paste Protect warns users before dangerous content can be executed.» The development comes as ClickFix continues to be a popular initial access vector for threat actors. According to Huntress, ClickFix was responsible for over 53% of all malware loader activity in 2025. Data from ReliaQuest for the period between March 1 and May 31, 2026, ClickFix remained the dominant delivery method during this period and targeted both Windows and macOS systems. One notable trend observed during the period was that ClickFix activity appeared to shift from delivery via compromised websites to emailed links. «ClickFix demonstrates that the human element remains one of the most effective attack vectors, especially when combined with legitimate system functionality and trusted binaries,» security researcher Bert-Jan Pals said.

Gmail phishing operation

A spear-phishing attack orchestrated by UNC1151 (aka Ghostwriter) targeting Belarusian pro-democracy politician Yury Hubarevich has been assessed to be part of a much broader credential phishing operation. The activity involved sending emails from Gmail accounts claiming to have detected suspicious activity on targets’ Google accounts, urging them to click on a link to verify their account. The catch here was that entering the credentials on the phishing page harvested the victim’s login information and exfiltrated it to the attacker-controlled infrastructure. Attack surface management platform Censys has since uncovered additional domains impersonating the I.UA email portal, suggesting the activity also likely targeted Ukrainians.

FTC enforcement action

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has fined Amazon $2.25 million to settle claims that the company failed to help customers who fell victim to identity theft. Consumers who contacted Amazon to report fraud were told by its customer service agents that they could not provide the application and business transaction records about fraudulent transactions made in their names for «security» or «privacy» reasons. «Amazon often puts identity theft victims through a Kafkaesque ordeal by demanding they identify the thief who stole their information before Amazon would release the records the law entitles them to – records that could help victims protect themselves and recover from the fraudulent conduct,» said Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.

Telegram RAT surge

A remote access trojan (RAT) named Millennium RAT has undergone an architectural shift from .NET to native C++, while still relying on the Telegram Bot API for command-and-control (C2). The malware is attributed to a developer named ShinyEnigma, who is also behind DotStealer and was first seen in September 2023. It is offered as malware-as-a-service (MaaS) for $50 for the first month, $10 for subsequent months, or a one-time $90 lifetime purchase. «As a full-featured remote access trojan, Millenium RAT 4.* is designed to compromise Windows machines,» Group-IB said. «It enables threat actors to exfiltrate sensitive browser and system data, capture screenshots and audio, perform keylogging, and download and run arbitrary executables.» Exploitation campaigns involving the malware are carried out by a threat actor cluster codenamed Y2K Operators. The threat actor has been active since May 2025, using social engineering as a way to trick users into executing malicious payloads by masquerading them as legitimate software or cracked applications. As of writing, 62,289 devices have been infected with the Millenium RAT 4.* versions, with more than 16,000 infections reported in the month of March 2026 alone. In an interesting twist, the attackers even target other cybercriminals. «They take popular RATs, builders, and exploit kits, add a backdoor, and redistribute them — so the would-be attacker downloads a working tool and gets infected at the same time,» Group-IB said.

Search hijack extension

Microsoft said it discovered a malicious Chromium-based extension that impersonates the AI-powered answer engine Perplexity AI to trick unsuspecting users into installing it. The extension, named «Search for Perplexity ai» (ID: flkebkiofojicogddingbdmcmkpbplcd), has since been taken down by Google, but not before it attracted 10,000 installs. «We assess its primary objective to be search traffic interception and data collection, which might enable downstream use cases such as profiling, targeted advertising, or other forms of misuse depending on operator intent,» the tech giant said. «However, unlike traditional search hijackers that rely primarily on aggressive monetization or visible redirection, this extension combines Manifest Version 3 (MV3) capabilities with intermediary infrastructure and declarativeNetRequest (DNR) rules to transparently intercept Omnibox queries while preserving the appearance of legitimate search results.» The attacks illustrate how threat actors continue to capitalize on the popularity of AI tools to abuse them as a social engineering vector.

Meeting bot controls

Microsoft said it’s introducing «smarter bot protection» features to tackle scenarios where bots connected to a third-party service attend meetings as AI tools become more common in enterprise setups. «Unexpected participants in a meeting can create security and privacy risks, particularly when sensitive information is being discussed,» it said. «That’s why we’re introducing a new Teams admin policy designed to give organizations more visibility and control over external bots in their meetings. This new experience helps organizers identify bots, and adds safeguards before they’re admitted, giving organizations greater confidence that only the intended participants and tools will be present.» As part of this effort, Microsoft intends to clearly distinguish between bots and human participants, give organizers more visibility when bots join a meeting, and issue warnings when organizers choose Admit all and bots are included. With these new safeguards rolling out, Microsoft plans to retire the existing CAPTCHA verification experience.

Defender zero-day abuse

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has confirmed that the now-patched Microsoft Defender vulnerability known as BlueHammer (aka CVE-2026-33825) was exploited in ransomware attacks. BlueHammer was first disclosed as a zero-day by an anonymous researcher named Chaotic Eclipse (aka Nightmare-Eclipse) in April 2026. It’s unclear which ransomware group has exploited the flaw.

Stolen AI compute abuse

Threat actors have been observed using a misconfigured Ollama model server as the reasoning engine for an automated, multi-stage offensive security tool called the VAPT framework, according to findings from Sysdig. The development marks a new evolution of LLMjacking, which refers to a form of resource hijacking attack in which malicious actors steal API keys, cloud credentials, or non-human identities to hijack an organization’s Large Language Model (LLM) resources. The unauthorized access is then abused to run heavy AI workloads or sell access to third-parties, leaving the legitimate account holder to pay the usage bills. «The actor was not chatting with the model or reselling access,» Sysdig’s Michael Clark said. «Instead, they wired access to the AI tool into a software pipeline that scans a target, matches it to known vulnerabilities, writes proof-of-concept exploits, and attempts to break into a victim’s environment — with the model making the decisions at every step.»

The lesson this week is simple: attackers do not need the front door when the side door is already open. A copied command, an exposed server, a trusted bot, a weak check. Small things become entry points when nobody treats them like one.

So read the list with that in mind. The loud part is the breach. The useful part is the quiet mistake that made it possible. Until next ThreatsDay.

25 JUN 2026

admin Noticias, Trending 24Year Bug Crime cURL CYBERDEFENSA.MX Forums Proxyware Smart Stories

Smart TV Proxyware, 24-Year curl Bug, AI Crime Forums + 13 More Stories – CYBERDEFENSA.MX

It’s dumb out there again.

This week has the usual smell of prod on fire and nobody wanting to admit who left the door open — old creds still working, trusted apps doing sketchy crap, browser tricks jumping the fence, and “normal” workflows turning into phishing pipes because apparently email was not enough hell already.

The worst part is how cheap some of it feels. Not elite. Not cinematic. Just stale secrets, fake updates, lazy trust, and random boxes quietly becoming someone else’s infrastructure. Same internet, fresh headache. Let’s get into it.

Privacy-first bot defense

Cloudflare has teamed up with Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox to create a privacy-preserving protocol that websites can use to separate desirable web traffic from undesirable network requests. This involves the use of Private Access Control Tokens (PACT), which allow websites to issue anonymous tokens that assert a given browsing session is being run by a human. «A user’s browser can then provide these tokens to other sites to prove that a human is in the loop, reducing the need for annoying and clunky captchas or invasive tracking,» Cloudflare said. «PACT is designed so that sites cannot leverage it to track or identify users or their browsing history.»

Six curl CVEs

AISLE said it discovered six vulnerabilities in curl, which range from «classic memory-lifetime issues to logic bugs in how libcurl decides whether a connection, credential, or host identity is still valid.» One of the notable vulnerabilities is CVE-2026-8932, which allows the library to «reuse a previously created connection even when some mTLS config-related option had been changed that should have prohibited reuse.» AISLE described it as the oldest curl vulnerability reported so far, adding that it has been shipped in releases since curl version 7.7, which was released on March 22, 2001. The identified flaws have been addressed in version 8.21.0.

Unauthenticated takeover

A critical security flaw has been disclosed in self-hosted versions of Hoppscotch(CVE-2026-50160, CVSS score: 10.0), an open source API platform, that can result in complete compromise. Offgrid Security’s autonomous AI security agent, Kiro, has been credited with discovering the bug. «The POST /v1/onboarding/config endpoint allows an unauthenticated attacker to inject arbitrary InfraConfig keys — including JWT_SECRET and SESSION_SECRET — into the database via mass assignment,» the project maintainers said. «These keys are not declared in the SaveOnboardingConfigRequest DTO, but because the NestJS ValidationPipe does not strip extra properties, they pass through to the service layer, where Object.entries(dto) iterates all keys without restriction.» A successful exploitation leads to full server compromise and persistent access that survives password resets. OffGrid Security told The Hacker News that four independent weaknesses are combined to allow an unauthenticated attacker to overwrite the JWT signing key in a single HTTP request, and the exploit requires no credentials. The issue has been fixed in hoppscotch-backend version 2026.5.0.

Proxyware in smart TVs

A new report from Spur Intelligence has revealed that more than one-third of LG and Samsung smart TV apps it reviewed contain proxyware that can relay third-party traffic through the TV owner’s internet connection with users’ consent. The company said it scanned 6,038 apps across LG webOS and Samsung Tizen and found 2,058 that contain residential proxy software. This includes clocks, screensavers, games, fish tanks, and other low-utility apps. On LG webOS, 42.5% of apps carried such code. On Samsung Tizen, the rate was 26.9%. Across both platforms, it reached 34.1%. Bright Data, Massive, and Oxylabs take up the top three SDK providers for webOS and Tizen. «Smart TVs are almost ideal proxy hosts. They sit on the same home network as everything else, but they do not feel like computers, so people rarely audit them like computers,» Spur said. «There is no battery drain to notice, no cellular bill to spike, no app switcher full of suspicious background activity. A TV can stay plugged in, signed in, and online for years while the user thinks of it as furniture.» The threat intelligence firm said this dynamic also changes the consent equation, as users may not realize what it actually means to sell access to their residential IP address. «Technically, these applications are compliant with gaining consent based on how they inform the user,» Spur CTO Alastair Parr told The Hacker News. «However, there is often no verification that the user is either of age or authorized to provide consent on the device. The reality is that there are likely many smart TVs scattered across office spaces and residential homes, quietly part of these networks, without the responsible owners’ awareness or consent.» Amazon’s Device and System Abuse Policy explicitly bars apps that facilitate proxy services for third parties. Similar protections have been enabled by Roku as well. However, LG and Samsung are yet to enforce an equivalent policy.

Edgecution via Teams

An initial access broker (IAB) affiliated with Payouts King ransomware has been observed masquerading as IT personnel in social engineering attacks conducted via Microsoft Teams to deliver a malicious Microsoft Edge browser extension dubbed Edgecution. «The technique utilizes a malicious Microsoft Edge browser extension that exploits the Chrome native messaging protocol to interact with host-native applications beyond the confines of the browser sandbox,» Zscaler ThreatLabz said. «By abusing this interface, the attackers gain direct host access, enabling them to manipulate the local filesystem, launch processes, and execute arbitrary code on the compromised host.» The malware has two components: a Microsoft Edge browser extension named «Edge Monitoring Agent» that beacons to a command-and-control (C2) server and relays host-based commands to a Python-based backdoor, which can collect system information, enumerate running processes, provide filesystem access, and execute arbitrary Python code and shell commands. The extension will be invisible to a user as it’s loaded in a headless Microsoft Edge browser. A similar attack chain involving a Chromium-based extension codenamed SNOWBELT was detailed by Google-owned Mandiant in April 2026.

Legacy credential breach

Competitive intelligence company Klue has revealed that a credential dating back to 2022, which was used as part of a limited pilot, was exploited by the Icarus extortionists to steal Salesforce data from its corporate customers, including several cybersecurity companies. In a statement shared with TechCrunch, the company said the credential was «originally provided to a third-party in 2022, for a limited pilot.» Klue did not share specifics about the purpose of the pilot, the duration for which it ran, or the identity of the third-party to whom the company gave the credentials. It’s also unclear why the credential wasn’t revoked immediately, assuming the pilot had concluded. Questions remain about how the attackers managed to acquire this legacy credential in the first place. A number of companies have come forward to confirm they have had limited Salesforce information stolen during the attack, including 8×8, BeyondTrust, Gong, Jamf, HackerOne, Insurity, LastPass, OneTrust, Pendo, Recorded Future, Snyk, Sprout Social, and Tanium.

State-crime convergence

NCC Group said it has found growing evidence of nation-state actors increasingly leveraging tools and tactics traditionally associated with financially motivated cybercrime to disguise their espionage and intelligence-gathering operations, blurring the line between the two sets of activities. «Historically, organisations could draw a relatively clear distinction between ransomware attacks driven by financial gain and nation-state operations designed to support strategic objectives. That distinction is becoming increasingly difficult to make,» Matt Hull, VP of Cyber Intelligence and Response at NCC Group, said. «What we’re seeing is a convergence of criminal and state-backed activity. Threat actors are sharing infrastructure, adopting common tooling and, in some cases, deliberately operating behind established ransomware brands to obscure attribution and delay response efforts.»

Admin reset alerts

Google said it’s expanding the existing «Super Admin password reset» alert into a broader Admin password reset alert in Alert Center. «Previously, this rule only triggered alerts when a super admin’s password was changed,» the company said. «With this update, the alert will now cover password resets for all administrator roles within your organization. This update provides admins with better visibility and control over the security of their organization’s privileged accounts. Monitoring password changes for all admin roles provides a higher level of oversight to respond more quickly to potential account compromises or unauthorized changes.» The change is applicable to all Google Workspace customers.

ClickFix targets macOS

A new ClickFix campaign has been observed tricking users into copying malicious commands and pasting them to the Terminal app that silently downloads and mounts a malicious DMG file. The disk image file contains a self-signed information stealer that can harvest a user’s system password, data from web browsers, wallets, messaging apps, and Keychain, exfiltrate the data, set up LaunchAgent persistence, and tamper with Ledger Live and Trezor Suite installations by replacing legitimate components to hijack cryptocurrency wallet information. The stealer is assessed to belong to the Atomic macOS Stealer (AMOS) lineage, particularly a variant called Odyssey, per Palo Alto Networks Unit 42. The development comes as the cybersecurity company detailed another multi-step ClickFix attack that employs techniques like brandsquatting to deliver a cross-platform trojan with browser-credential stealing, remote shell, live screen streaming, keylogger, file manager, and SSH tunneling capabilities.

TfL hackers convicted

Thalha Jubair, 20, from East London, and Owen Flowers, 18, from Walsall, have been convicted in the U.K. for orchestrating a cyber attack on Transport for London (TfL) in 2024, costing $38.2 million in losses. The two defendants, who were members of the online criminal collective known as Scattered Spider, were arrested last September but pleaded not guilty to their crimes during a court appearance in November 2025. They are now scheduled for sentencing on July 16, 2026. «Scattered Spider is a prolific criminal group that engages in data extortion and other criminal activities, utilizing social engineering techniques and SIM swap attacks, to obtain credentials, install remote access tools, and/or bypass multi-factor authentication,» the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said.

Marketplace admin extradited

Abdellah Belmili (aka Dila Belmili or SPOX), a 26-year-old Algerian national, has been arrested, charged, and extradited from Spain to the U.S. on charges of conspiracy to commit bank fraud. SPOX is alleged to have acted as an administrator for a cybercrime marketplace («www.market0day[.]com») as well as created phishing kits that have been used to compromise major U.S. financial institutions. «Between September and November 2020, Belmili advertised the marketplace and facilitated some of the customer support for the marketplace on his personal Telegram channel @SpoxCoder,» the U.S. Justice Department said. «In late December 2020, after several customers complained that they had not received their purchases from www.market0day[.]com, Belmili replied that he was no longer the administrator, and instead had opened up a new marketplace – www.spoxy[.]us, advertising the new marketplace – www.spoxy.us, advertising the new marketplace as a ‘new store for bulk SMS.’ ‘Bulk SMS’ typically refers to sending phishing or other fraudulent messages via text message.» Approximately 5,600 U.S. and international victims have been identified.

Collaboration phishing

A new phishing campaign is abusing Outlook Groups and Microsoft 365 collaboration features to «make malicious activity appear routine,» Fortra said. The attack involves adding targets to an attacker-controlled Microsoft 365 group and then using the group mailbox, shared files, or fake calendar invites (aka CalPhishing) to facilitate credential theft, token capture, or malware delivery. «The technique shifts malicious intent away from a single phishing email into a trusted productivity workflow,» the company said. «A user may see what looks like a normal group addition, internal update, shared resource, or calendar item before being pushed toward an action.»

AI in cybercrime

A new analysis from Sophos has revealed that AI has emerged as a hot button topic in underground communities, as threat actors debate its potential for malware and tool development, while some express concerns about the technology reducing work opportunities. This includes posts selling API keys for generative AI tools, advertising solutions that can enhance social engineering, AI-enabled malware (e.g., ApexAI, Metatron, and PolyEngine), discussing jailbreaks for public AI models to bypass censorship and other safeguards using techniques like role-play framing, multi-stage prompting, and contextual manipulation, and offers to hire or partner with prompt engineers. Threat actors have also discussed the use of public AI assistants for intrusion activity, as well as marketed a tool called Leak Bazaar that claims to use AI to triage and sift through mountains of stolen data before it can be packaged and exchanged with other threat actors. Not all have embraced AI with open arms, however, with some outlining skepticism and worries about how the rise of AI could «reshape roles, pricing, and competitive advantage within the cybercrime economy.»

8,500 REDCap instances

Censys has uncovered just over 8,500 REDCap instances globally as of June 16, 2026, with most of them located in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and Australia. REDCap, short for Research Electronic Data Capture, is a web application used by research institutions globally to hold clinical trial data, participant records, and other sensitive research information. Last week, Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) attributed a year-plus espionage campaign against North American academic, medical, and military research institutions to UNC6508, a China-nexus actor. The intrusion set leveraged internet-facing REDCap servers as an initial access vector to deploy a backdoor called INFINITERED to exfiltrate sensitive data. Exactly how these servers are hacked is unconfirmed. The earliest known compromise dates to September 2023.

Surveillance export gaps

A report from Human Rights Watch has revealed that a Bulgaria-based surveillance technology firm named Circles sold its tools to countries that were likely to use them for repression or to commit serious human rights violations. Documents describe licenses for exports of Circles’ technology to Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Brazil, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Ghana, Guatemala, Israel, Jordan, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Panama, Serbia, and the U.A.E. Clients included intelligence services, military and police bodies, regional governments, and private companies, Human Rights Watch said. That said, it’s currently not known whether the technology was actually exported. «Nonetheless, issuing the licenses demonstrates a major flaw in how individual governments implement E.U. export controls for surveillance technology,» the non-profit said. «The controls are intended to limit exports of surveillance technology to destinations where there is a likelihood it could be used to violate rights, and to provide transparency about what exports take place.»

BitB malware lures

A campaign that impersonates popular software brand names has leveraged the Browser-in-the-Browser (BitB) technique to distribute malicious payloads by means of a reusable phishing kit. It makes use of a draggable pop-up with a spoofed URL to serve a fake software update warning. «The campaign uses social engineering to trick victims into downloading and manually executing a malicious installer (e.g., an .exe payload),» Unit 42 said. «The pages simulate a stalled document load and present an ‘out of date’ software error.» Earlier this month, Unit 42 disclosed details of a second BitB campaign involving at least 10 unique domains that was used to steal Microsoft 365 credentials using a draggable, OS/browser-fingerprinted pop-up with a spoofed OAuth URL. In this attack, victims who click a Microsoft sign-in button are presented with what appears to be a standard login page designed to harvest credentials.

If there’s a theme here, it’s that attackers do not need magic when the boring crap still works — forgotten creds, lazy trust, fake updates, loose admin paths, and users getting nudged into doing the dangerous part themselves. The future is here, somehow, and it still smells like a misconfigured staging box.

Patch what you can. Revoke what you forgot. Maybe glance at the devices you’ve been treating like furniture. See you next ThreatsDay, assuming the internet hasn’t found an even dumber way to catch fire by then.

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