Executive Summary Since the release of our May 2026 report detailing adversarial misuse of artificial intelligence (AI), Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) has observed forward leaning adversaries transition from basic prompting to agentic AI workflows and AI-enabled automation. In these operations, human-in-the-loop latency is dramatically reduced, compressing the traditional window for defenders to respond. In Q2 2026, GTIG observed threat actors compromise a cloud resource, then plan,…
OverviewWhile conducting research into a recent N-able N-central authentication bypass vulnerability (CVE-2026-18577), Rapid7 Labs discovered two new vulnerabilities affecting the latest version of N-central. When chained together, these two vulnerabilities allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to bypass authentication and create a new attacker-controlled System administrator account on an affected server.CVE IDDescriptionCWECVSSv4CVE-2026-86206Semicolon/Forwarded access-control bypassCWE…
Cisco Talos began an investigation after observing a DLL named "verification.google" executing from WebDAV at a Ukrainian government organization. We assess with moderate confidence that the attacks are not targeted at a particular organization, but are a part of a cryptocurrency and credentials-stealing operation using the Amatera stealer as the primary payload. Pivoting around the similar WebDAV behavior led to a second loader named "pf.ch" and allowed us to reconstruct its earlier delivery…
Cisco Talos is tracking a cryptocurrency-stealing campaign that abuses the Google Visualization API for command and control (C2), retrieving obfuscated JavaScript from a publicly published Google Sheets document and injecting it into the victim's browser session. The actors use a variation on ClickFix social engineering. Instead of convincing targets to run commands against the operating system, they convince targets to paste JavaScript into the Chrome address bar or install it into the…
Active Directory Rights Management Services still ships in Windows Server 2025, years after Microsoft began steering customers to the cloud, and it remains fully supported on-premises. Part 1 maps the AD RMS trust model (the Server Licensor Certificate, the license flow, the SOAP surface) and shows how to discover an RMS deployment, fingerprint an AD RMS-protected file, and trace the path to that certificate's private key.
Group-IB's 2026 data shows ransomware accelerating across APAC. See where response plans fail, and the 5-pillar framework built to hold under pressure.
This week on the Lock and Code podcast… Crooks are taking a holiday. They’re counting on you to fund it. For decades, cybercriminals have stolen roughly the same types of data. Biographical and personal details—like Social Security numbers, birthdates, addresses, and phone numbers—can be stolen to commit identity fraud. Credit card numbers, expiration dates, and CVC codes can be stolen to make fraudulent purchases. Usernames and passwords can, in the wrong hands, let a cybercriminal impersonate…
Smart TVs are internet-connected computers with microphones, app stores, advertising systems, and access to the same home networks used by your family’s phones, laptops, printers, and smart-home devices. In the past, we reported on Samsung settling a lawsuit with the Texas Attorney General over how its smart TVs collect and monetize viewing data using Automated Content Recognition (ACR). ACR technology samples what appears on or is heard through a TV, creates a digital fingerprint, and compares…
A known Shai-Hulud worm payload sat dormant for 111 days, then republished to npm, right past the malware scanning meant to catch it. Category: Research
In a recent post, we looked at reports of League of Legends players receiving suspicious friend requests shortly after matches. The accounts quickly steered the conversation toward Discord, where they promoted paid adult-content pages. At the time, one unanswered question was how much of those conversations was automated. Were people working from scripts behind the accounts? Were they conventional, rules-based chatbots following a limited decision tree? Or were they using generative AI to…
Most of the work that keeps a security product trustworthy is invisible. Users see a scan complete, a threat blocked, an update applied overnight. They don’t see the platform underneath. Runtimes, managed libraries, native drivers, and Windows requirements must all stay current and work together across millions of endpoints. Our migration to .NET 10 is one example of how we keep that platform moving and our focus in this article. It would be easy to call these upgrades maintenance tasks and…
In its first annual assessment, published Friday, the City of London Police said victims reported losing £6.3 million ($8.5 million) to account hacks in the year ending March 31, up from £1.2 million ($1.6 million) a year earlier.
Passkeys eliminate many password-based attacks, but researchers have documented 39 methods for compromising authentication built around them. Token explains how attackers can abuse authentication prompts, synced credentials, enrollment, recovery, and other trust boundaries without breaking FIDO2 cryptography. [...]
OverviewA new Linux toolkit, identified by Rapid7 Labs, has been targeting organizations across South Korea’s automotive and media industries with minimal detection. The campaign made use of a HAProxy instance named “ted backdoor”, alongside trojanized versions of crond, agetty, atd, sshd, and polkitd. This previously undocumented framework enabled threat actors to execute remote commands on compromised servers, inject malicious scripts into web traffic, perform credential harvesting, and…
Introduction We continue tracking the activity of Toy Ghouls (also known as Bearlyfy, Laboo.boo, and Feral Wolf), a financially motivated group that has been targeting Russian organizations since 2025. The attackers initially relied exclusively on tools pulled from public GitHub repositories along with leaked Babuk and LockBit ransomware builders, later shifting to their own custom ransomware, GenieLocker. In early July 2026, we observed the group using a custom backdoor for the first time. We…
Národní úřad pro kybernetickou a informační bezpečnost (NÚKIB) upozorňuje na cílené phishingové kampaně zaměřené na uživatele komunikační aplikace Signal.
“Free” movies and TV could cost you your privacy, bandwidth, and control of your home network. We’ve warned about illegal streaming and modded Amazon Fire TV Sticks in the past. Now, researchers have found that certain SuperBox devices and apps could quietly enroll a household connection into a proxy network, allowing third parties to route traffic through it. An earlier report identified CyberFlix TV, available through SuperBox’s custom app store, as containing Popanet proxy functionality that…
A malicious advertising campaign promoting a fake free TV-streaming service reached roughly 570,000 Meta users. The researchers who discovered the campaign found that its streaming-themed ads were aimed at Spanish-speaking users, with most observed victims located in Spain. One Meta campaign ran from June 11 through July 3, 2026, and the same banners were also used to distribute the malware through TikTok. The available data shows the ads’ reach, not the number of downloads or infections, but…
In this article What is ASCII smuggling?Writing a practical ASCII-smuggling signatureWhat we observed: ASCII smuggling repurposed for phishingWhat is known and what is newIs there a detection gap?Mitigation and protection guidanceReferencesLearn More Microsoft researchers observed a high-volume phishing campaign using invisible Unicode tag characters, a technique popularized in AI prompt injection research as ASCII Smuggling. Instead of using these characters to hide instructions from people…
Explore how attackers targeting Latin American entities use AI for data exfiltration and how basic OpSec errors allow defenders to disrupt operations. The post Attackers Expose Ongoing AI Tool Use Targeting Organizations in Latin America appeared first on Unit 42.
Huntress is tracking a pattern across multiple customer environments where rogue ScreenConnect clients repeatedly spawn the Windows Script Host to execute a series of four VBScript files.
This blog provides a deep-dive into the phishing kit created by Chenlun known as the Outsider Phishing Kit. It is a well established kit in the Chinese community with over 267 ready-made phishing templates targeting over 54 countries worldwide.
We found a second delayed RCE in MECCHA CHAMELEON: a malicious custom map could write files anywhere on your system and run code after a restart. Now patched in 4.0.0. Category: Vulnerabilities & Threats
In this article Risk to enterprise environmentsAttack chain overviewMitigation and response recommendationsLearn more Microsoft Threat Intelligence has observed a human-operated intrusion campaign that abuses Microsoft Teams external collaboration to impersonate IT or helpdesk 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…
Key Takeaways Modern AD attacks use legitimate protocols end-to-end, no malware, no exploit, nothing for signature tools to fingerprint. The evidence is already in the logs; what is missing is the narrative linking five benign-looking Windows events into a single attack. A full domain takeover can be completed in 54 minutes, from the first password spray to the forged Golden Ticket, with each individual event appearing normal. Detection catches the move; posture management explains why it was…
Scammers are becoming more strategic about where they target people. Nine in ten toll scams—the fake unpaid-toll messages that threaten fines or license suspension—arrive by email or text, while roughly six in ten romance scams show up first on social media. That’s no coincidence. Rather than blasting the same message everywhere, criminals are tailoring different scams to the platforms where they’re most likely to succeed. This finding comes from Malwarebytes’ own threat research systems and…
Research by: Amit Yardeni Key Points A Chinese-speaking actor is now targeting Brazil. Check Point Research has uncovered a sustained campaign against Brazilian organizations, primarily government and educational institutions since mid-2025. We dubbed this group Gambling Goblin: a Chinese-speaking cybercrime cluster connected to a previously documented group, Earth Berberoka, that targeted gambling sites across Asia. It marks a shift from Brazil’s usual home-grown banking-trojan threats to a…
A new dark web platform called Nexus claimed to be selling 153 million driver’s license scans and millions of other identity and medical cards. According to reports, the collection included more than 153 million driver’s licenses, 10 million ID cards, 3 million travel documents, and 579,000 medical cards, including marijuana dispensary cards. The trove of driver’s license scans reported by KrebsOnSecurity is a sharp reminder that identity verification is not a harmless box-ticking exercise. The…
Using autonomous AI agents, an attacker breached an enterprise network in a matter of hours. Understand how to address and defend against agentic attacks. The post An AI-Assisted Cyber Attack: Inside a Unit 42 Investigation appeared first on Unit 42.
Elastic Security Labs is tracking an emerging infostealer, REVSTEALER, under REF2859. This family has gained momentum in recent months, with higher distribution volume, and has emerged as a formidable threat, featuring a comprehensive credential harvester, an embedded sandbox scoring system, and a Polygon blockchain-based dead drop for resilience. Beyond credential theft, REVSTEALER targets gaming platforms for additional monetization; the developer clearly understands that victim accounts on…
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…
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…