In this article Attack chain overviewCampaign scope and targetingMitigation and protection guidanceReferencesLearn more Microsoft Defender Experts is tracking an active malware campaign that uses counterfeit software-download websites to impersonate trusted vendors and distribute malicious installers. The campaign has targeted users looking to download popular software and has resulted in compromises across multiple organizations and industries, primarily affecting China-based operations of…
New regulations, data exfiltration tactics, and shifting premiums are reshaping cyber insurance. Our 2026 report reveals what businesses need to know now.
We’ve seen scam sites built around Grand Theft Auto VI (GTA 6) targeting visitors in three different ways this year. In June, we looked at sites selling GTA 6 “early access” for hundreds of dollars in cryptocurrency. You paid, got nothing, and could not reverse the payment. In August, we found fake Extended Look and demo sites delivering an infostealer instead of a game. The site we examined this week looks like a GTA 6 fan countdown site but offers to sell a leaked copy of the game. It loads a…
Fileless execution on Linux has moved from niche tradecraft into real-world intrusion chains. By executing payloads from memory or anonymous file descriptors, attackers can reduce on-disk artifacts and weaken controls that rely heavily on file inspection.In our own analysis of VoidLink, we observed how fileless execution can be paired with a rootkit. The loader scans for processes running from memfd and passes their PIDs to the rootkit, allowing an already running fileless implant to be hidden…
Healthcare organizations and banks handle highly personal information. But a new Huntress survey shows many threat actors frequently target these companies.
In a report published Tuesday, Kaspersky said it first discovered NodeRabbit on a system in Afghanistan and later identified variants on systems in Egypt and Ethiopia.
Microsoft has published details about a Windows malware campaign it calls TerminalFix. The social engineering used to infect people is very similar to what we’ve seen in ClickFix campaigns. A website visitor is presented with a fake Cloudflare CAPTCHA which, when clicked, secretly copies a malicious command to their clipboard. Then they receive instructions on what they need to do to “prove they are human,” when in reality they are being instructed to execute the malicious command. After…
While monitoring Mirage Kitten activity, we uncovered a previously undocumented malware family that we dubbed NodeRabbit. We identified the first sample on a system in Afghanistan. Further threat hunting revealed two additional, more advanced, variants: one on a system in Egypt and another on a system in Ethiopia. NodeRabbit is a cross-platform remote access trojan (RAT) built with Node.js. It targets Windows, Linux, and macOS. Its operators deliver it through spear-phishing messages on…
Four years after the Kaseya supply chain attack, a recent incident shows how threat actors still successfully target MSPs’ downstream customers through RMM software.
Introduction Beginning in 2024 Mandiant investigated a string of compromises affecting Brazilian financial services, retail, and eCommerce organizations. Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) tracks this activity as BREEZE COMET (formerly UNC5669), a financially motivated threat actor specializing in manipulating payment systems and banking software in Brazil to conduct fraudulent transfers. This activity overlaps with operations publicly reported as Plump Spider and SHADOW-AETHER-064. In…
Introduction On Monday 2026-08-31, I used a link from a malicious Brazilian Portuguese email to infect a Windows host in my lab. This was a Guildma (Astaroth) malware infection. The link from the email is geofenced for Brazil, meaning that it would only deliver the malware if I checked it from a Brazil-based IP address. Otherwise, it would send a legitimate installer (in this case for Android Studio) and not the malware. Furthermore, my web browser and operating system needed to use Brazilian…
Cadence uses JetBrains TeamCity to orchestrate cloud workloads, and the affected server, api.cadence.jetbrains.com, remained vulnerable to CVE-2026-63077 despite having been intended for patching. Threat actors exploited the vulnerability beginning on August 8 to gain unauthor...
The attacker gained unauthorized access to Coder’s Cloudflare infrastructure and added attacker-controlled IP addresses to the pool serving Coder’s module registry. These servers hosted modified registry artifacts containing malicious code designed to discover credentials and ...
Analysis of 15 intrusions revealed tradecraft used by GOLD SHERWOOD affiliatesCategories: Threat ResearchTags: ransomware as a service, The Gentlemen, GOLD SHERWOOD, Ransomware
One of my internet-exposed inference honeypots was discovered, relabeled with sought-after model names, and incorporated into infrastructure apparently used to provide "free" LLM backends. It then received a real coding-agent session — history, filesystem output, working paths, and the agent's local tool manifest. The honeypot did not request or cause any tool execution; what the request exposed is what a malicious operator in that position could do. Chasing the "free API key" is not new. What…
The researchers discovered Fire Ant's new tactic after finding an active GRE (Generic Routing Encapsulation) tunnel interface on a Cisco IOS XR router that could not be explained by a running configuration or commit history. [...]
Research by: hasherezade Key Points Since early 2025, Check Point Research has been tracking JSCeal, a sophisticated cryptocurrency-focused stealer with broader credential-theft, surveillance, and traffic-interception capabilities, delivered as compiled V8 bytecode (JSC files). The payloads are protected with javascript-obfuscator, using multiple techniques including RC4-protected strings, control-flow flattening, proxy functions, and operation wrappers. Our goal was to recover the code to a…
Learn how the Spring Ring campaign abuses Microsoft Teams and voice phishing to deploy malware and target enterprise domain controllers. The post Spring Ring: An Inside Look at Voice Phishing Campaigns in Microsoft Teams appeared first on Unit 42.
Attackers typically try to pass off malware as legitimate applications or as potentially unwanted programs that users deliberately search for and download, such as cheats or cracks. They often rely on ad and affiliate networks to deliver their creations to victims’ devices. This post examines a less conventional case: a well-known backdoor distributed under the guise of adware. The attackers may have chosen this distribution method because the adware was signed by the developer. On top of that,…
Group-IB uncovers BraZetsu, a new Python-based Windows malware that serves as a master toolkit for Initial Access Brokers and powers a unique, AI-enhanced underground marketplace for commercializing compromised Iberian and Latin American targets.
Multiple extensions for Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge delivered a malware framework that deployed modules to steal cryptocurrency, sensitive data, and browser history, as well as inject ClickFix lures. [...]
In this article Attack chain overviewMitigation and protection guidanceLearn more Microsoft Threat Intelligence has observed a TerminalFix campaign, a variant of ClickFix, targeting organizations across multiple industries. The campaign uses compromised websites to display a fake Cloudflare CAPTCHA verification overlay that tricks users into copying and executing a malicious PowerShell command. While traditional ClickFix campaigns direct victims to the Windows Run dialog, TerminalFix campaigns…
New research reveals that AI safety refusal lives in a thin neural layer, highlighting the critical need for external, multi-layered security. The post Perturbation Probing: A New Diagnostic for the Fragility of LLM Safety appeared first on Unit 42.
When quantum computers become generally available, they’ll be able to crack current public-key cryptographic algorithms, putting digitally stored and transmitted data at risk. But the threat already exists, as attackers use the "harvest now, decrypt later" tactic. Discover why building a comprehensive cryptographic inventory and executing a phased operational strategy are critical for protecting your data against quantum computing attacks.Key takeawaysQuantum computing risks are an operational…
AI is accelerating vulnerability discovery, putting pressure on systems built to enrich, prioritize, and remediate flaws at a slower pace. Action1 explains why defenders increasingly need to correlate multiple intelligence sources and turn vulnerability data into faster remediation. [...]
The hacking incident involving OpenAI evaluation agents and Hugging Face offers an unusually concrete look at what advanced AI-assisted intrusion can mean in practice: not a single clever exploit, but thousands of automated decisions, rapid experimentation, lateral movement, credential theft, persistence, and attempts to evade detection. The OpenAI–Hugging Face incident began during internal cybersecurity evaluations using ExploitGym, a benchmark designed to test whether AI agents can identify…
During my last FOR610 session, a student asked me if I had some statistics in mind about the compilers used to generate malicious PE files? A couple of months ago, I shared some stats about the trend in 64bits VS. 32bits malware[1]. Can we go a bit further? I (vibe-)coded a Python script based on the pefile library[2] to extract some info from the PE headers. Indeed, the PE file format contains a lot of metadata! They can be accessed using a lot of tools, like Detect It Easy: Note: When you…
Elastic Defend 9.5.0 detects dynamic link library (DLL) search-order hijacking [1] in a single field. Writing that rule before 9.5.0 took about 88 lines, covering approximately 2,600 named libraries, 10 excluded Windows system paths, signature checks, and a drop-to-load time window. It now takes one: dll.Ext.defense_evasions: "DLL Hijack: Masquerading".DLL search-order hijacking, which Defend labels Masquerading, runs attacker code inside a legitimate process by abusing the order that Windows…
On August 28, starting at approximately 2000 UTC eight malicious versions of the @7nohe/openapi-react-query-codegen package were published on npm and were available for approximately three hours. These malicious versions were trojanized with an updated version of the miasma ma...
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Hello, everyone. Long time reader, first time writer here at the Threat Source newsletter! I wanted to start out by introducing myself. My colleague and friend Mick Baccio set the bar pretty high last week, so I was planning to tell you all about myself, including: How I did my first real IR under the influence of The Cuckoo’s Egg while an undergraduate (and failed) My pre-bug bounty flirtation with vulnerability research,…
Discover how Tenable’s shift to an AI-driven exposure management program helped Tenable’s CSO, Robert Huber, overcome tool sprawl, unify data silos, mitigate the risk of rapid AI adoption, and shift from presenting granular, technical metrics to communicating business risk that the C-suite and the board can understand.Key takeawaysSecurity tool sprawl and data silos make it difficult for CISOs to holistically and accurately assess their organizations’ cyber risk.An exposure management program…
IntroductionDespite modern verification controls, identity theft remains one of the most pervasive threats to both individuals and enterprise organizations. U.S. Federal Trade Commission statistics show over 1 million identity theft reports annually, with related fraud and imposter scams accounting for billions in financial losses each year. While stolen credit cards enable rapid, short-term monetization, Social Security numbers (SSNs) represent a far more permanent and dangerous tier within…
In this article AI workloads are becoming high-value control pointsCase study 1: LiteLLM gateway compromiseCase study 2: RAGFlow compromiseCase study 3: Kestra compromiseMitigation and protection guidanceMITRE ATT&CK techniques observedReferencesLearn more AI is creating a new layer of enterprise infrastructure. Gateways, retrieval platforms, orchestration services, and containerized runtimes now sit between users, applications, data, and models. These systems concentrate credentials, data…
A phase-by-phase detection mapping of the first publicly documented autonomous agent intrusion against production infrastructure — including the phases where no product in our category sees anything at all. Executive Summary On July 9, 2026, an autonomous AI agent running inside an OpenAI capability evaluation escaped its sandbox and launched a multi-day intrusion against Hugging Face’s Kubernetes environment. Across roughly 17,600 actions, it moved from third-party infrastructure into the…
A joint Tenable-SentinelOne analysis of 93 CVE-actor attribution pairs reveals that both state-sponsored actors and cybercriminals independently converge on the same edge infrastructure. Special thanks to SentinelOne® Incident Readiness & Response for their contributions to this publication.It is the shared attack surface where state-sponsored threat actors and financially motivated criminal groups independently converge — not the province of a single adversary category, and not exclusively a…
Selecting a model for your security operations center (SOC) and digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) tasks is important, but selecting the best one is more involved than you might think. SOC tasks rely on a combination of model efficacy, analysis time, cost, and consistency of results. Cisco Talos tested 66 model and reasoning combinations across offerings from both Anthropic and OpenAI on a log analysis task to see if we could identify a clear winner. Instead, we found a repeatable…
Huntress analyzed several incidents involving DPRK remote workers (Famous Chollima) in partner environments. Learn key indicators to detect and prevent North Korean threats.
GreyNoise is observing automated scanners posing as the web crawlers of OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek, and Fortune 500 companies, using forged user agents while requesting the files where misconfigured web servers frequently leak secrets and credentials.
Group-IB expone una operación mexicana de PhaaS dirigida a más de 20 instituciones financieras, con capacidades de phishing en tiempo real, vishing con IA y RAT para dispositivos móviles.
Executive Summary ShieldBreak (CVE-2026-69414) is a zero-day elevation-of-privilege vulnerability in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine used by Microsoft Defender, allowing a low-privilege local attacker to escalate to SYSTEM. A public PoC was released on August 12, 2026, and Microsoft assigned the CVE on August 14, and no patch is available yet. Qualys VMDR provides detection across Windows environments, and Qualys TruRisk Eliminate offers a mitigation that teams can apply now, with…
AI verdict correctness in our security operations center (SOC) is 92%, up from 60%, but we didn't switch models to get there. What we changed is the context the agents get before they decide anything, including the detection rule's investigation guide and user risk data from Workday, along with the closure reasons from 30 days of past cases on that same rule. This post covers how the agentic SOC pipeline is built in Elastic Workflows and Elastic Agent Builder, down to the prompts and the…
AI verdict correctness in our security operations center (SOC) is 92%, up from 60%, but we didn't switch models to get there. What we changed is the context the agents get before they decide anything, including the detection rule's investigation guide and user risk data from Workday, along with the closure reasons from 30 days of past cases on that same rule. This post covers how the agentic SOC pipeline is built in Elastic Workflows and Elastic Agent Builder, down to the prompts and the…
Key Takeaways The DFIR Report Offerings Check out our Products here and our Services here. Want a demo, more information on our services, pricing or just want to chat? Get in Touch Contact us today for pricing or a demo! Case Summary In March 2026, our team identified an SEO poisoning campaign leading to malware deployment […] The post BengalSEO Part 1: Anatomy of the Operation appeared first on The DFIR Report.
Researchers have uncovered ToxicPanda 2.0, an Android banking Trojan and remote-access tool designed for account takeover and “on-device fraud.” Not only does ToxicPanda 2.0 have a much larger target list of banks and e-wallets, it has also expanded its capabilities by combining banking overlays, remote access, PIN capture, Android accessibility abuse, and attempted Wireless Debugging automation. Together, those functions can help operators turn a compromised phone into a platform for account…
Aikido AI Code Audit found 8 more vulnerabilities than Claude Security with Mythos at less than half the cost. How harness design drives coverage per dollar. Category: News
UAT-10147 is a highly capable Chinese-speaking intrusion actor operating a multi-platform post-exploitation ecosystem targeting IIS and Linux servers, combining search engine optimization (SEO) fraud monetization with advanced persistence and defense evasion techniques. The newly identified SPECTRE implant represents a significant evolution in commodity intrusion tooling, integrating cross-platform command-and-control (C2) operations, process injection, credential theft, anti-analysis…
We identified a network of 41 websites impersonating popular games and Windows software, all designed to push visitors towards the same Download Studio installer. The sites advertise everything from Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Fallout, Roblox, PUBG, and The Witcher to VLC, 7-Zip, Paint.NET, VMware, Total Commander, and Foxit PDF. They go to surprising lengths to look convincing, using accurate product information, genuine developer resources, and even real download links. But the link you see…
Huntress researcher uncovers post-Black Hat & DEF CON phishing campaign using X DMs & malicious documents to deliver AMOS, NetSupport RAT, and other malware.
Scammers are creating fake crypto wallet-checking sites that promise to tell you whether a wallet is linked to suspicious activity. Instead, they try to trick you into giving them access to your crypto. What real AML checking looks like AML stands for anti-money laundering. These are rules that require banks and other regulated businesses to screen customers for ties to crime. It’s designed to prevent cybercriminals from hiding or moving illegally obtained money. In the crypto world, this…
Most wrong-number texts are harmless. Some are the first step in a carefully planned scam. By replying, you may be confirming that your number is active and that you’re willing to engage with strangers, making you a more valuable target for future fraud. Here’s why a polite response can be worth money to cybercriminals. The politeness trap Sunday night. You’re on the couch, half-watching Netflix, when your phone buzzes. “Hey! Are we still on for dinner tomorrow? Don’t forget the wine ” You…
<p>A year of MDR casework shows attackers repeatedly exploiting demand for AI tools</p>Categories: Threat ResearchTags: AI, malvertising, infostealer, Sophos X-Ops
In this article Activity overview Discovery of additional rotating infrastructure Attack chain overviewMitigation and protection guidanceReferencesLearn more MacSync Stealer is a macOS-focused information stealer that relies on changing infrastructure to deliver payloads, communicate with compromised devices, and exfiltrate data. Earlier reporting by RST Cloud identified the threat through a limited set of domains and documented rapid command-and-control (C2) replacement after public disclosure…
Written by: Alex Tselevich, Michael Maturi Introduction Adversarial misuse of AI has increased the risk of data theft and extortion events, because when proprietary source code is exposed, defenders must scramble to identify and patch vulnerabilities while attackers deploy machine-speed AI tools against them. By structuring the analysis process, enforcing skeptical validation steps, and injecting domain-specific human expertise directly into the pipeline, we’ve achieved a leap in efficacy.…
Research by: Jaromír Hořejší (@JaromirHorejsi) Key points StopAndProtect is a newly identified operation that combines file encryption with data theft. The criminals abuse thousands of hacked WordPress websites as their infrastructure – using them to spread the malware, control infected machines, and store stolen documents, screenshots, and activity logs (records created by malware to track its actions, progress, or status during execution). Operational security (OPSEC) failures by the…
You can’t patch everything. So what do you fix first? Findings in Q2 2026 have changed traditional answers.The latest Quarterly Threat Landscape Report from Rapid7 Labs shows vulnerability disclosures still surging while attackers use automation and AI-assisted tooling to compress the time between disclosure and exploitation. The gap that patch cycles were built to fill is closing. Speed and volume are overwhelming security teams that have relied on traditional patch cycles and reactive…