With the 2026 FIFA World Cup just weeks away, Group-IB researchers have uncovered six distinct fraud schemes, four independent threat actors, and over 4,300 fraudulent domains impersonating FIFA's official web presence — including a sophisticated phishing operation run by the Chinese-speaking threat actor GHOST STADIUM, whose campaign could cause losses reaching billions of dollars.
Tycoon 2FA is currently the most prolific Phishing-as-a-Service (PhaaS) platform among AiTM phishing kits. First observed in August 2023 and attributed to Storm-1747 (per Microsoft Threat Intelligence), the kit provides turnkey adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) capabilities that bypass multi-factor authentication and steal authenticated session tokens from Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace accounts. At its peak, Tycoon 2FA accounted for roughly 62% of phishing attempts blocked by Microsoft,…
TrendAI™ Research analyzed an intrusion where threat actors used the EtherHiding technique to route ClearFake payload delivery through smart contracts on the BNB Smart Chain testnet. The attack chain ended with two simultaneously deployed stealers, SectopRAT and ACRStealer alongside an on-chain execution tracker that confirmed each victim compromise in real time.
Elastic Security Labs's prior coverage of REF6598 documented an intrusion set whose Windows toolchain landed via Obsidian plugin abuse, escalated via an in-memory PE loader (PHANTOMPULL), and finished with a RAT (PHANTOMPULSE). That post focused on delivery. This post analyzes the final stage: PHANTOMPULSE, an implant that ships three process-injection techniques, resolves its C2 through Ethereum/Base/Optimism transaction inputs, and bypasses UAC via the public schuac technique. The analysis…
In this blog entry, researchers from the TrendAI™ MDR team discuss how they mapped the full end-to-end operation of SHADOW-WATER-063’s Banana RAT banking malware by analyzing server-side artifacts and victim-side data.
Threat actors are actively targeting your security tools. Learn how threat actors disable antivirus and EDR through vulnerable drivers, tampering attacks, and malicious firewall rules, and how Huntress detects.
ESET researchers uncovered new activities attributed to FrostyNeighbor, updating its compromise chain to support the group’s continual cyberespionage operations
The EtherRAT malware family was first reported by Sysdig back in December 2025. At that time, the initial access vector was exploitation of CVE-2025-55182 (React2Shell) targeting Linux servers. In March 2026, a Windows variant campaign was reported by Atos, with their investigation showing evidence of activity going back to the previous December. In April, we […] The post Flash Alert: EtherRat and TukTuk C2 End in The Gentleman Ransomware appeared first on The DFIR Report.
TrendAI™ Research has identified two emerging threat campaigns—SHADOW-AETHER-040 and SHADOW-AETHER-064—that use agentic AI to drive intrusion operations against government and financial organizations in Latin America, marking these among the first cases we have observed of AI agents executing attacks from initial access to data exfiltration.
Executive Summary SentinelLABS has identified PCPJack, a credential theft framework that worms across exposed cloud infrastructure and removes artifacts associated with TeamPCP, a threat actor persona who claimed several high-profile supply chain intrusions throughout early 2026. The toolset harvests credentials from cloud, container, developer, productivity, and financial services, then exfiltrates the data through attacker-controlled infrastructure while attempting to spread to additional…
ESET researchers uncovered fraudulent apps on Google Play that claim to provide the call history “for any number” and had been downloaded more than seven million times before being taken down
Elastic Security Labs identified a new Brazilian banking trojan that we are tracking as TCLBANKER, a malware family we assess is a major update of the MAVERICK/SORVEPOTEL family. The campaign, tracked as REF3076, features a loader with robust anti-analysis capabilities that deploys two embedded .NET Reactor-protected modules: a full-featured banking trojan and a worm module for self-propagation. The banking trojan monitors the victim's browser address bar via UI Automation, targeting 59…
ESET researchers have investigated an ongoing attack by the ScarCruft APT group that targets the Yanbian region via backdoor-laced Windows and Android games
TrendAI™ Research breaks down Quasar Linux (QLNX), a previously undocumented sophisticated Linux RAT with low detection rates. In this blog, we examine a full-featured Linux threat incorporating a rootkit, a PAM backdoor, credential harvesting, and more, revealing how this malware enables stealthy access, persistence, and potential supply-chain attacks.
Preamble In 2025 and 2026, we watched a pattern play out across the industry. Attackers stopped going after production servers directly and started targeting the automation that deploys to them. Compromised developer credentials, a modified workflow file, and suddenly every secret in a CI/CD environment is streaming to an attacker-controlled endpoint. We saw this play out across incidents involving major open-source projects, Fortune 500 companies, and critical infrastructure tooling. The…
Key Takeaways We identified an exposed server that provided unusual visibility into a large-scale, multi-victim exploitation and collection operation. Artifacts on the host showed that Claude Code and OpenClaw were embedded in the operator’s day-to-day workflow, supporting troubleshooting, orchestration, and refinement of the collection pipeline. This AI-assisted workflow resulted in the modular platform Bissa scanner […] The post Bissa Scanner Exposed: AI-Assisted Mass Exploitation and…
Attackers are building workflows around AI—fake tools, spoofed answers, and machine-speed phishing. See how Huntress is tracking this shift and what it means for defenders.
Introduction Over the past few years, we have observed a significant evolution in the capabilities of LLMs to be productive and to carry out various tasks that address real-world problems, such as program synthesis, malware research, or vulnerability research. Specifically in the context of reverse engineering, LLMs are particularly effective given the right tools because they are very good at reading source code even without symbols. Not only that, thanks to their knowledge, they are capable…
A Linux user recently tried to respond to potentially malicious behavior on their machine using OpenAI’s Codex coding agent, before installing the Huntress agent. What ensued shows the unexpected impacts of this AI use case on DFIR investigations.
VPN misconfiguration is behind 70% of intrusions. See real Huntress SOC incidents and learn the simple steps to close your biggest open door before attackers walk through it.
A follow-up publication will provide a deeper technical analysis of PHANTOMPULSE itself, covering its injection engines, persistence internals, and C2 protocol in greater detail. Preamble Elastic Security Labs has identified a novel social engineering campaign that abuses the popular note-taking application, Obsidian, as an initial access vector. The campaign, which we track as REF6598, targets individuals in the financial and cryptocurrency sectors through elaborate social engineering on…
Where to begin. For the fourth consecutive year, Elastic has had the privilege of serving as a trusted industry partner on Exercise Defence Cyber Marvel - the UK Ministry of Defence's flagship cyber exercise series. DCM26 was, without question, the most ambitious iteration yet, and we're chuffed to bits to finally be able to talk about what we built, how we built it, and what we learnt along the way. What is Defence Cyber Marvel? For those unfamiliar, Defence Cyber Marvel (DCM) is the largest…
Preamble Last Monday night I was working late and a Slack alert came in from a monitoring tool I had built three days earlier. Axios compromised; one of the most popular npm packages in the world. My heart started racing, I knew every second mattered to respond and limit the damage. But honestly it was so crazy that I thought it must be a false positive. I checked and rechecked everything a few times even though it seemed very obviously malicious. It wasn't a false positive. It was one of the…
Introduction In part one, we examined how Linux rootkits work: their evolution, taxonomy, and techniques for manipulating user space and kernel space. In this second part, we turn to detection engineering. We begin by showing why static detection is often unreliable against Linux rootkits, even when binaries are only trivially modified, and then move on to behavioral and runtime signals that defenders can use instead. From shared object abuse and LKM loading to eBPF, io_uring, persistence, and…
Attackers route malicious traffic through ordinary home internet connections — and to a reputation feed, the source IP is indistinguishable from a legitimate user's connection. GreyNoise analyzed 4 billion sessions over 90 days and found that 39% of unique IPs targeting the edge come from residential address space. 78% vanish after just 1–2 sessions, before any reputation system can flag them. The report documents why detection must shift from where the traffic comes from to what it is doing.
Elastic Security Labs released initial triage and detection rules for the Axios supply-chain compromise. This is a detailed analysis of the RAT and payloads. Introduction Elastic Security Labs identified a supply chain compromise of the axios npm package, one of the most depended-upon packages in the JavaScript ecosystem with approximately 100 million weekly downloads. The attacker compromised a maintainer account and published backdoored versions that delivered a cross-platform Remote Access…
Elastic Security Labs is releasing an initial triage and detection rules for the Axios supply-chain compromise. We have released a detailed analysis on the Axios compromise RAT and payloads. Elastic Security Labs filed a GitHub Security Advisory to the axios repository on March 31, 2026 at 01:50 AM UTC to coordinate disclosure and ensure the maintainers and npm registry could act on the compromised versions. Introduction We are currently tracking a supply chain attack involving malicious Axios…
Introduction Elastic Security Labs has been tracking a financially motivated operation, designated REF1695, that has been active since at least late 2023. The operator deploys a combination of RATs, cryptominers, and custom XMRig loaders through fake installer packages. Across all observed campaigns, the infection chains share a consistent packing technique, overlapping C2 infrastructure, and common social engineering patterns, linking them to a single operator. Beyond cryptomining, the threat…
Key takeaways A South Asian financial institution was targeted with two custom malware components: a modular backdoor (BRUSHWORM) and a keylogger (BRUSHLOGGER) BRUSHWORM features anti-analysis checks, AES-CBC encrypted configuration, scheduled task persistence, modular DLL payload downloading, USB worm propagation, and broad file theft targeting documents, spreadsheets, email archives, and source code The keylogger masquerades as libcurl via DLL side-loading, capturing system-wide keystrokes…
Introduction During a recent investigation, we came across a data dump containing source code, compiled binaries, and deployment scripts for the kernel rootkit components of VoidLink, a cloud-native Linux malware framework first documented by Check Point Research in January 2026. Check Point's analysis revealed VoidLink to be a sophisticated, modular command-and-control framework written in Zig, featuring cloud-environment detection, a plugin ecosystem of over 30 modules, and multiple rootkit…
This blog discusses the steganography, cloud abuse, and email-based backdoors used against the Ukrainian defense supply chain in the latest Pawn Storm campaign that TrendAI™ Research observed and analyzed.
The BuddyBoss campaign (Parts 1 & 2) represents a full-spectrum software supply chain attack against the WordPress ecosystem, where the threat actor compromised the BuddyBoss plugin/theme distribution pipeline and leveraged it to infect hundreds of downstream websites. The ini...
Introduction Elastic Security Labs is observing malicious campaigns delivering a multi-stage infection involving a previously undocumented loader. The infection begins when users are diverted to a Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA page under the guise of a digital invitation. After the link is clicked, a VBScript file is downloaded to the machine. Upon execution, the script retrieves C# source code, which is then compiled and executed in memory using PowerShell. The final payload observed in these…
Huntress’ AI-Centric SOC recently stopped a MacSync infostealer attack on a macOS device. The malware attempted to scrape credentials, browser cookies, and crypto wallets, but Huntress contained the threat before any data was sent to the attacker. Learn how we did it.
Get an insider look at how the Huntress SOC stopped an unsecured VPN based ransomware attack. Learn why your business needs more than just software to stay secure.
Huntress has identified and detailed a full timeline of an intrusion in a customer environment that aligns with what others have identified as MuddyWater (Iranian-linked APT).
GreyNoise analyzed 2.97 billion malicious sessions over 162 days — and the patterns challenge assumptions about where edge defenses are strongest. From VPN targeting to infrastructure concentration to attackers rapidly rotating through fresh IPs, new research quantifies where the gaps are and what to do about it. Read the full findings.