Unit 42 details recent threat intelligence, highlighting cyberespionage, financial extortion, and the rapid adoption of AI across offensive workflows. The post Unit 42 Threat Intelligence Highlights - Nov. 2, 2026 appeared first on Unit 42.
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Phishing remained the leading initial access technique, appearing in slightly over one-third of all Cisco Talos Incident Response (Talos IR) engagements — a decrease from over 50 percent last quarter. In addition to traditional phishing links and attachments, we observed numerous threat actors conducting voice phishing (vishing) in tandem with IT desk impersonation to socially engineer the victim into allowing remote access via a legitimate remote monitoring and management (RMM) tool.…
KEV ✓ EPSS 1.00 CVE-2023-20198 Cisco Microsoft Anthropic telekomunikace US
Cisco Talos observed a new AI-integrated command-and-control (C2) framework in the wild called “NIK C2.” 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. In this framework, the actor has abused the OpenAI Chat Completions application programming interface (API), which is a HTTP…
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The GOLD OGRE threat group has used AI extensively to develop tools and to orchestrate and execute ransomware operations Categories: Threat Research Tags: AI, Ransomware, Aur0ra
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Unit 42 explores key peak shopping season retail cyber threats, from ransomware to AI attacks, and shares how to defend operations and customer trust. The post Unwrapping Retail Peak Season Cyber Threats appeared first on Unit 42.
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Key Takeaways Teams are remediating more than ever, but exposure from the vulnerabilities that matter is still rising faster than they can keep up with. Mean time to exploitation is about −7 days. Mean time to remediate sits around +30 days. Qualys research: closures rose from 73M (2022) to 473M (2025) – 6× – while critical findings still open at day seven rose from 56% to 63%. Less than 1% of vulnerabilities are actively exploited. A volume-and-CVSS program spends most of its effort on the…
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Group-IB researchers analyze KGB RAT, a Windows Remote Access Trojan advertised on underground forums as being fully undetectable, featuring a built-in crypter, HVNC, credential theft, ransomware, and an unusual set of psychological harassment capabilities.
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In leaked chats, members track dozens of victims, haggle over multimillion-dollar payments and direct operatives based in the United States whom they call “agents.”
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How Huntress researchers reconstructed an Akira ransomware attack using Registry artifacts, Akira logs, and other post-compromise evidence.
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Higher education faces a difficult security equation. Universities hold large volumes of sensitive student, financial, health, and research data while supporting open networks, distributed users, legacy infrastructure, and increasingly complex cloud environments. Attackers have taken notice, and the pressure on security teams continues to grow.In Q2 2025, universities faced an average of 4,388 cyberattacks per organization per week, up 24% from the same period in 2024. Nine in ten universities…
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In this article Attack overviewTechnical analysisMitigation and protection guidanceReferencesLearn More Microsoft Security Research has identified malicious cloud activity associated with JADEPUFFER, a threat actor discovered by Sysdig in July 2026 and reported to be the first documented agentic ransomware operation. Our investigation found an extensive Azure-focused resource destruction activity using compromised service principals and cloud credential collection that could be used to…
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In this article Who is Storm-2570?Storm-2570 attack chain: From initial foothold to impactWhat Storm-2570 activity means for defendersMitigation and protection guidanceMicrosoft Defender detectionsHunting queries Activity associated with Storm-2570, a ransomware affiliate linked to multiple ransomware payloads, illustrates how tracking and responding to ransomware attacks by payload alone can obscure the affiliates carrying out intrusions and the recurring behaviors that defenders can use to…
Huntress analysts reconstructed a three-week INC ransomware attack from endpoint data, uncovering a 17-day lull despite missing process telemetry.
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Executive summary In April 2026, we at Kaspersky’s Global Emergency Response Team (GERT) responded to a security incident at a manufacturing organization in the Middle East. The threat actor obtained domain admin-equivalent control of the organization’s Active Directory environment and authored a malicious Group Policy Object (GPO) named PAYLOAD, linking it at the domain root. Through that single object, the actor delivered ransom notes, hijacked the desktop wallpaper and lock screen, enforced…
Key Takeaways Periodic audits provide a point-in-time assessment, but they cannot demonstrate whether controls remain effective between audit cycles. Qualys platform data shows 10.5 billion configuration findings across customer environments but only 1.6% represent meaningful exposure and under 1% are prioritized, business-critical findings. Verizon’s 2026 DBIR found the median time to resolve weak passwords and misconfigured permissions is about 8 months. Across 1 billion misconfiguration…
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The defining development of the period came not from attackers but from the AI labs themselves, whose models broke out of controlled evaluations and reached real systems. In the wild, the criminal and state use of AI continued to mature along the lines tracked in earlier editions: models now act as attack operators, an underground market supplies the access, and AI systems have themselves become a target. The substantial distance between what the strongest models demonstrated under evaluation…
Huntress has recently seen two incidents involving Settra, a ransomware variant that was first publicly reported in June 2026.
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Compared with the same period last year, ransomware incidents in Japan increased slightly by approximately 4.7%, indicating that ransomware continues to pose a significant threat.In Japan, The Gentlemen was the most active ransomware group in the first half of 2026.Attackers continue to primarily target small- and medium-sized enterprises, with organizations capitalized at less than JPY 1 billion accounting for approximately 80% of the total — an increase of around 13% from the previous year…
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Attackers exploit Volume Shadow Copy for credential theft and ransomware defense evasion. See how Huntress spots the difference from routine IT activity.
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A new Android malware strain called Mantax Otax combines ransomware and spyware capabilities to encrypt files, steal sensitive data, and spam and harass victims. [...]
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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Ask anybody in this industry what the work does to the health of the people who do it and you get one word back: burnout. It's a fine word, in and of itself. It’s easy to reach for, understandable to everyone… and it's the wrong one, most of the time. So, story time. Last year I gave an interview with the amazing Hazel Burton about VPNFilter, and my run-in with burnout. I was a manager during that time, and it took a toll on me and…
KEV ✓ · ransomware EPSS 0.89 CVSS 10.0 CVE-2026-20079 CVE-2026-20316 Cisco US
Threat actors are exploiting GTA6 hype with fake leaked downloads spread via SEO poisoning, packed with RATs, infostealers, and wiper ransomware. Here’s what Huntress found.
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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.
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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…
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Analysis of 15 intrusions revealed tradecraft used by GOLD SHERWOOD affiliatesCategories: Threat ResearchTags: ransomware as a service, The Gentlemen, GOLD SHERWOOD, Ransomware
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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…
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…
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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…
CVSS 7.0 Microsoft veřejná správa finance zdravotnictví výroba a průmysl US
Learn how Tenable One Cloud Exposure helps you unmask the sophisticated tactics of cybercrime group Storm-0501, which carries out Azure-based cloud ransomware campaigns. Tenable One Cloud Exposure uses AI-powered threat stories to expose Storm-0501 TTPs, backed by precision-engineered threat detection alerts.Key takeawaysStorm-0501 demonstrates that cloud-first ransomware groups have shifted from simple endpoint encryption to the total hijacking of cloud tenants.Storm-0501 systematically…
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Upozorňujeme na dvojici zranitelností ve WordPress Core označovaných jako wp2shell (CVE-2026-63030 a CVE-2026-60137), které mohou při kombinovaném zneužití vést ke vzdálenému spuštění kódu (RCE) bez nutnosti přihlášení.
KEV ✓ EPSS 0.11 CVSS 9.0 CVE-2026-60137 CVE-2026-63030 WordPress CZ US AT FR
For the past year, the ransomware conversation has centered on concentration: a handful of dominant RaaS operations controlling most of the damage, and a shrinking pool of active groups fighting over the same territory. The State of Ransomware Q2 2026 report from Check Point Research shows that picture starting to shift. The leaders are still winning, but the road to joining them has gotten a great deal shorter. Key observed findings The ecosystem stayed concentrated even as its tail widened…
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In this article Pre-encryptionEncryptionPost-encryptionDefending against DeadLock ransomwareIndicators of compromise Microsoft Threat Intelligence tracks DeadLock ransomware as an emerging financially motivated operation distinguished by its use of decentralized infrastructure to support victim communications and data leak operations. Its recovery ecosystem combines the Session messaging network with blockchain-backed services that store and deliver resources used throughout the extortion…
In this article What is device isolation?Case study: QNETAttack chain overviewMITRE ATT&CK techniques observedReferencesLearn more Microsoft Defender’s attack disruption now includes device isolation, a new response action that extends autonomous protection directly to compromised endpoints. At QNET, an attacker initiated a multi-stage attack using a legitimate Windows tool on a compromised endpoint to retrieve a malicious remote payload–a classic living-off-the-land (LOL) technique that often…
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. For my fianceé’s 30th birthday, I took her on a weekend trip to Shenandoah National Park – a favorite of ours since we went to a wedding there several years back. We’ve done several incredible hikes over the years, but one in particular had always loomed over my head: Old Rag, a 9.3 mile circuit hike that’s largely considered the most difficult in Virginia. I've always been warned that at the beginning and end, you hate Old Rag.…
An AI agent has run a ransomware intrusion on its own for the first time, from break-in to data destruction. The autonomous attacks TrendAI™ Research predicted are beginning to arrive, and defending against them shifts from blocking known indicators to detecting behavior.
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The ransomware economy has been rewired. Meet the eight ransomware groups driving the shift, from affiliate breakaways to AI-assisted attacks based on Group-IB Threat Intelligence.
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Cisco Talos has discovered a new Rust-based remote access trojan (RAT) we call “msaRAT” attributed to the Chaos ransomware group. The name is derived from the binding names found in the binary: “msaOpen,” “msaClose,” “msaError,” and “msaMessage”.msaRAT is implemented using the Tokio asynchronous runtime, with primary capabilities of browser-leveraged remote code execution and covert tunneling to establish command-and-control (C2) communications.This RAT never touches the network directly — it…
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Key Takeaways This case was first reported to customers in a threat brief released in July 2025 and in a public flash alert in August 2025 in partnership with Swisscom B2B CSIRT, which observed another intrusion tied to the same campaign. This report contains data from both intrusions. We plan to release a DFIR Labs […] The post From Bing Search to Ransomware: Bumblebee and AdaptixC2 Deliver Akira appeared first on The DFIR Report.
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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.
KEV ✓ · ransomware EPSS 1.00 CVE-2025-55182 US
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.
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