Introduction Last week, Google and industry partners dismantled the XCPE backdoor which enrolled more than 1.3 million set-top boxes into a botnet. We assess with high confidence that the backdoor and botnet were intentionally developed, deployed, and operated for financial gain by Videostrong Technology Co., an Android Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) and Original Device Manufacturer (ODM). Videostrong monetized the backdoor by selling access to criminal affiliates and loading those…
VOLTA is a mature stealer implant with an optional AI-integration layer. After stealing credentials, sessions, and cryptocurrency wallets, VOLTA sends a structured evidence bundle to an LLM to rank the victim’s assets by monetization value. If a model refuses to perform the target assessment, VOLTA fails over to a three-model chain, implying a direct engineering effort and expectation of hitting model guardrails. This stealer is self-deleting, and there is no attacker-owned infrastructure. The…
Ads promoted browser extensions as tools to find manuals, convert PDFs, or make searches safer. But many of these extensions sent users’ search queries through servers controlled by their operators. Socket researcher John Tuckner identified 319 extensions with an estimated 13.4 million installs over a decade. The extensions hijacked users’ default search settings and routed their searches through servers controlled by the operators before sending them to Yahoo or Bing. This gave the operators…
Une vulnérabilité a été découverte dans Stormshield Management Center. Elle permet à un attaquant de provoquer une exécution de code arbitraire à distance.
Wiz identified threat actors hijacking Google Cloud Platform (GCP) billing accounts via search-ad phishing to fund unauthorized Gemini API usage. By stealing corporate credentials and MFA tokens, attackers gain access, dismantle IAM domain restrictions, and link external GCP p...
Last month, Volexity published two blog posts in its Mind the (Patch) Gap series. The series details Volexity’s discovery of multiple Chinese threat actors simultaneously using zero-day exploits in Google Chrome and Microsoft Windows in campaigns that, if successful, would download and run malware on an exploited system. Those posts covered technical details of the exploits and malware Volexity observed, along with general detection methods for each case. Behind those findings was one of the…
Your streaming box might not look like much of a computer. But connect enough inexpensive devices together, and they can run an AI model. Researchers at Anthropic demonstrated this by running a Google Gemma model across 15 off-brand Android TV boxes. They warn that small models could soon spread across vulnerable internet-of-things (IoT) devices, including smart ovens and TV boxes, stating: “Our experiments suggest that small AI models may be months away from being capable enough to self…
In this article Uncovering the shadow world of a phishing kit ecosystem Storm-3119: YAM Store, the power broker Storm-2990: The Iron Man System phishing kit Downstream activity from Storm-2990 phishing kits Mitigation and protection guidance Microsoft Defender detections Over the past year, Microsoft uncovered a Chinese-language cybercriminal ecosystem, an interconnected network of phishing kit operators, developers, and an illicit marketplace selling tools and infrastructure for large-scale…
We found a wave of websites posing as Calendly booking pages for job interviews at Meta. Visitors pick a slot for a 30-minute phone call with a recruiter, fill in their details, and pass what looks like a CAPTCHA. Then the page asks them to log in to Facebook. The interview is fake. The pages are designed to steal the visitor’s Facebook login details, including the two-factor authentication (2FA) codes meant to protect the account. Visitors are then asked to sign in to their Google account too,…
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Threat Source newsletter. My name is Pierre Cadieux, and I’ll be helping contribute to these newsletters. A little about me: I’ve been working in the cybersecurity industry in many roles over the past 20+ years, first focusing on endpoint security, policies, and firewalls, then moving to risk management and compliance, disaster recovery, and investigations. I spent about 15 years as a consultant working across many well-known consultancy firms and…
Cisco Talos identified an advanced persistent threat (APT) spear-phishing campaign against individuals affiliated with Taiwan research organizations. The operation leveraged legitimate public event themes and impersonated reputable academic and policy institutions to establish credibility. The phishing emails exhibited highly consistent structure, rhetoric, and personalization patterns, suggesting the threat actor likely used AI-assisted content generation to rapidly customize invitation lures…
A Kubernetes user with limited permissions can potentially gain control of an entire Google Cloud organization by exploiting the authority granted to Google Kubernetes Config Connector. Varonis explains how this confused deputy problem can turn a single Kubernetes YAML file into a path to organization-wide privilege escalation. [...]
Phishing follows whatever people want at the moment, and right now that includes AI subscriptions they don’t have to pay for. We recently uncovered a new variation on this theme: A fake Claude Max giveaway that uses a convincing Google sign-in window to steal login information.Claude’s paid plans start at $20 a month and cost considerably more for higher usage limits, while free accounts have stricter limits. That makes the promise of a free upgrade an attractive lure.Microsoft reported in June…
CERT Polska uncovered a toll fraud operation targeting Polish users through deceptive Meta advertisements and malicious applications distributed via Google Play. We preserved 1235 ads, linked 852 to 17 applications through code or infrastructure, reconstructed the complete execution chain, and observed live premium SMS and carrier billing tasking.
On September 9, 2026, Volexity published a blog post detailing the simultaneous use of multiple chained zero-day exploits in Google Chrome (CVE-2026-85046, CVE-2026-87491) and Microsoft Windows (CVE-2026-85880) by two different Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) actors. Shortly after that blog post was published, Volexity discovered additional campaigns—this time from a third Chinese threat actor, tracked by Volexity under the alias UTA0565—that used the same chained exploits on September…
Google says one of its Gemini models accessed systems belonging to three real companies during a cybersecurity evaluation in May. The model reportedly guessed credentials in one case, while finding exposed credentials in public repositories in two others. Google says Gemini stopped once it recognized that it had reached real infrastructure and that the affected organizations were notified. Gemini was participating in an evaluation run by Irregular, a third-party AI cybersecurity testing firm.…
Researchers at Zimperium’s zLabs have analyzed an Android Trojan that uses an automated, multi-stage infection process. What’s new is that RatHat gives a live AI assistant the keys to the accessibility tree of the infected device and uses it to determine where to tap or scroll, rather than following a hardcoded script. The variable attack path makes it harder for signature- and rule-based mobile security tools to detect this Trojan. It also abuses Android Debug Bridge (ADB), a legitimate tool…
Elastic Security Labs has tracked REF9334, a Brazilian banking malware operation, since May 2025. Its toolkit is called KREMLIN (as named by the malware author, Kr3mlin4rt1st), though nothing about the operation is Russian. Lures impersonate twelve Brazilian banks; error messages and code comments are written in Portuguese, and the operators' Ethereum transactions cluster during São Paulo working hours. Over 15 months and seven campaigns, they built a malicious browser extension that installs…
BlueMoon, a shared Chrome and Windows exploit kit, shows why “patch later” is becoming a dangerous gamble. Security updates are easy to put off. The browser still opens, Windows still works, and choosing to relaunch your browser or restart your computer later can feel harmless. But a newly documented exploit kit called “BlueMoon” shows how quickly patching delays can become dangerous. Proofpoint Researchers found four espionage groups using the same exploit chain against Chrome browsers running…
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…
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…
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. [...]
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…
Researchers at Group-IB have discovered a new NFC relay malware family, purpose-built to capture live card data via NFC and forward it in real time to attackers. They dubbed it “WindRelay.” NFC (Near Field Communication) is wireless technology that allows devices such as smartphones, payment cards, and payment terminals to communicate when they’re very close together. So, instead of stealing your physical bank card, the attackers capture NFC activity on an infected mobile phone and relay it in…
Written by: Corné de Jong Introduction Mandiant security assessments frequently identify publicly exposed serverless applications that lack authentication, often as a result of specific business requirements. Serverless deployments typically run custom-developed code that incorporates third-party packages, making them targets for a wide range of application-level attacks, including: Local and Remote File Inclusion (LFI/RFI) Command Injection Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities can…
A previously undocumented Windows loader tracked as OXLOADER is delivering the CASTLESTEALER infostealer via malicious Google Ads, with low detection rates across static engines and sandbox detonations. The loader uses several obfuscation layers (control-flow flattening, opaque predicates, mixed Boolean-Arithmetic), self-modifying decryption stubs, and abuses the Windows .reloc section to stage shellcode. Elastic Security Labs identified OXLOADER in an active campaign targeting one of our…
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,…
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