Cybersecurity Center
Cybersecurity News
- (Saturday May 10, 2025)
Google has agreed to pay the U.S. state of Texas nearly $1.4 billion to settle two lawsuits that accused the company of tracking users' personal location and maintaining their facial recognition data without consent. The $1.375 billion payment dwarfs the fines the tech giant has paid to settle similar lawsuits brought by other U.S. states. In November 2022, it paid $391 million to a group of 40 (HackerNews) - (Saturday May 10, 2025)
Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (aka Bundeskriminalamt or BKA) has seized the online infrastructure and shutdown linked to the eXch cryptocurrency exchange over allegations of money laundering and operating a criminal trading platform. The operation was carried out on April 30, 2025, authorities said, adding they also confiscated 8 terabytes worth of data and cryptocurrency assets (HackerNews) - (Friday May 09, 2025)
A joint law enforcement operation undertaken by Dutch and U.S. authorities has dismantled a criminal proxy network that's powered by thousands of infected Internet of Things (IoT) and end-of-life (EoL) devices, enlisting them into a botnet for providing anonymity to malicious actors. In conjunction with the domain seizure, Russian nationals, Alexey Viktorovich Chertkov, 37, Kirill Vladimirovich (HackerNews) - (Friday May 09, 2025)
The North Korean threat actors behind the Contagious Interview campaign have been observed using updated versions of a cross-platform malware called OtterCookie with capabilities to steal credentials from web browsers and other files. NTT Security Holdings, which detailed the new findings, said the attackers have "actively and continuously" updated the malware, introducing versions v3 and v4 in (HackerNews) - (Friday May 09, 2025)
Cybersecurity researchers are warning of a new campaign that's targeting Portuguese-speaking users in Brazil with trial versions of commercial remote monitoring and management (RMM) software since January 2025. "The spam message uses the Brazilian electronic invoice system, NF-e, as a lure to entice users into clicking hyperlinks and accessing malicious content hosted in Dropbox," Cisco Talos (HackerNews) - (Friday May 09, 2025)
AI agents are changing the way businesses work. They can answer questions, automate tasks, and create better user experiences. But with this power comes new risks 鈥� like data leaks, identity theft, and malicious misuse. If your company is exploring or already using AI agents, you need to ask: Are they secure? AI agents work with sensitive data and make real-time decisions. If they鈥檙e not (HackerNews) - (Friday May 09, 2025)
The Vulnerability Treadmill The reactive nature of vulnerability management, combined with delays from policy and process, strains security teams. Capacity is limited and patching everything immediately is a struggle. Our Vulnerability Operation Center (VOC) dataset analysis identified 1,337,797 unique findings (security issues) across 68,500 unique customer assets. 32,585 of them were distinct (HackerNews) - (Friday May 09, 2025)
Cybersecurity researchers have flagged three malicious npm packages that are designed to target the Apple macOS version of Cursor, a popular artificial intelligence (AI)-powered source code editor. "Disguised as developer tools offering 'the cheapest Cursor API,' these packages steal user credentials, fetch an encrypted payload from threat actor-controlled infrastructure, overwrite Cursor's (HackerNews) - (Friday May 09, 2025)
Google on Thursday announced it's rolling out new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered countermeasures to combat scams across Chrome, Search, and Android. The tech giant said it will begin using Gemini Nano, its on-device large language model (LLM), to improve Safe Browsing in Chrome 137 on desktops. "The on-device approach provides instant insight on risky websites and allows us to offer (HackerNews) - (Friday May 09, 2025)
A China-linked unnamed threat actor dubbed Chaya_004 has been observed exploiting a recently disclosed security flaw in SAP NetWeaver. Forescout Vedere Labs, in a report published Thursday, said it uncovered a malicious infrastructure likely associated with the hacking group weaponizing CVE-2025-31324 (CVSS score: 10.0) since April 29, 2025. CVE-2025-31324 refers to a critical SAP NetWeaver flaw (HackerNews) - (Thursday May 08, 2025)
Cybersecurity researchers have exposed what they say is an "industrial-scale, global cryptocurrency phishing operation" engineered to steal digital assets from cryptocurrency wallets for several years. The campaign has been codenamed FreeDrain by threat intelligence firms SentinelOne and Validin. "FreeDrain uses SEO manipulation, free-tier web services (like gitbook.io, webflow.io, and github.io (HackerNews) - (Thursday May 08, 2025)
61% of security leaders reported suffering a breach due to failed or misconfigured controls over the past 12 months. This is despite having an average of 43 cybersecurity tools in place. This massive rate of security failure is clearly not a security investment problem. It is a configuration problem. Organizations are beginning to understand that a security control installed or deployed is not (HackerNews) - (Thursday May 08, 2025)
SonicWall has released patches to address three security flaws affecting SMA 100 Secure Mobile Access (SMA) appliances that could be fashioned to result in remote code execution. The vulnerabilities are listed below - CVE-2025-32819 (CVSS score: 8.8) - A vulnerability in SMA100 allows a remote authenticated attacker with SSL-VPN user privileges to bypass the path traversal checks and delete an (HackerNews) - (Thursday May 08, 2025)
Threat actors with ties to the Qilin ransomware family have leveraged malware known as SmokeLoader along with a previously undocumented .NET compiled loader codenamed NETXLOADER as part of a campaign observed in November 2024. "NETXLOADER is a new .NET-based loader that plays a critical role in cyber attacks," Trend Micro researchers Jacob Santos, Raymart Yambot, John Rainier Navato, Sarah Pearl (HackerNews) - (Thursday May 08, 2025)
The nation-state threat actor known as MirrorFace has been observed deploying malware dubbed ROAMINGMOUSE as part of a cyber espionage campaign directed against government agencies and public institutions in Japan and Taiwan. The activity, detected by Trend Micro in March 2025, involved the use of spear-phishing lures to deliver an updated version of a backdoor called ANEL. "The ANEL file from (HackerNews) - (Thursday May 08, 2025)
The Russia-linked threat actor known as COLDRIVER has been observed distributing a new malware called LOSTKEYS as part of an espionage-focused campaign using ClickFix-like social engineering lures. "LOSTKEYS is capable of stealing files from a hard-coded list of extensions and directories, along with sending system information and running processes to the attacker," the Google Threat (HackerNews) - (Thursday May 08, 2025)
Cisco has released software fixes to address a maximum-severity security flaw in its IOS XE Wireless Controller that could enable an unauthenticated, remote attacker to upload arbitrary files to a susceptible system. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-20188, has been rated 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system. "This vulnerability is due to the presence of a hard-coded JSON Web Token (JWT) on an (HackerNews) - (Wednesday May 07, 2025)
A Texas firm recently charged with conspiring to distribute synthetic opioids in the United States is at the center of a vast network of companies in the U.S. and Pakistan whose employees are accused of using online ads to scam westerners seeking help with trademarks, book writing, mobile app development and logo designs, a new investigation reveals. (KrebsOnSecurity) - (Wednesday May 07, 2025)
Europol has announced the takedown of distributed denial of service (DDoS)-for-hire services that were used to launch thousands of cyber-attacks across the world. In connection with the operation, Polish authorities have arrested four individuals aged between 19 and 22 and the United States has seized nine domains that are associated with the now-defunct platforms. "The suspects are believed to (HackerNews) - (Wednesday May 07, 2025)
A second security flaw impacting the OttoKit (formerly SureTriggers) WordPress plugin has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-27007 (CVSS score: 9.8), is a privilege escalation bug impacting all versions of the plugin prior to and including version 1.0.82. "This is due to the create_wp_connection() function missing a capability check and (HackerNews) - (Wednesday May 07, 2025)
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed multiple security flaw in the on-premise version of SysAid IT support software that could be exploited to achieve pre-authenticated remote code execution with elevated privileges. The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2025-2775, CVE-2025-2776, and CVE-2025-2777, have all been described as XML External Entity (XXE) injections, which occur when an attacker is (HackerNews) - (Wednesday May 07, 2025)
Security Service Edge (SSE) platforms have become the go-to architecture for securing hybrid work and SaaS access. They promise centralized enforcement, simplified connectivity, and consistent policy control across users and devices. But there's a problem: they stop short of where the most sensitive user activity actually happens鈥攖he browser. This isn鈥檛 a small omission. It鈥檚 a structural (HackerNews) - (Wednesday May 07, 2025)
Threat actors with links to the Play ransomware family exploited a recently patched security flaw in Microsoft Windows as a zero-day as part of an attack targeting an unnamed organization in the United States. The attack, per the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, part of Broadcom, leveraged CVE-2025-29824, a privilege escalation flaw in the Common Log File System (CLFS) driver. It was patched by (HackerNews) - (Wednesday May 07, 2025)
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malicious package on the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that masquerades as a seemingly harmless Discord-related utility but incorporates a remote access trojan. The package in question is discordpydebug, which was uploaded to PyPI on March 21, 2022. It has been downloaded 11,574 times and continues to be available on the open-source registry. (HackerNews) - (Wednesday May 07, 2025)
A federal jury on Tuesday decided that NSO Group must pay Meta-owned WhatsApp WhatsApp approximately $168 million in monetary damages, more than four months after a federal judge ruled that the Israeli company violated U.S. laws by exploiting WhatsApp servers to deploy Pegasus spyware, targeting over 1,400 individuals globally. WhatsApp originally filed the lawsuit against NSO Group in 2019, (HackerNews) - (Tuesday May 06, 2025)
Threat actors have been observed actively exploiting security flaws in GeoVision end-of-life (EoL) Internet of Things (IoT) devices to corral them into a Mirai botnet for conducting distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The activity, first observed by the Akamai Security Intelligence and Response Team (SIRT) in early April 2025, involves the exploitation of two operating system command (HackerNews) - (Tuesday May 06, 2025)
Cybersecurity researchers have lifted the lid on two threat actors that orchestrate investment scams through spoofed celebrity endorsements and conceal their activity through traffic distribution systems (TDSes). The activity clusters have been codenamed Reckless Rabbit and Ruthless Rabbit by DNS threat intelligence firm Infoblox. The attacks have been observed to lure victims with bogus (HackerNews) - (Tuesday May 06, 2025)
It wasn't ransomware headlines or zero-day exploits that stood out most in this year's Verizon 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) 鈥� it was what fueled them. Quietly, yet consistently, two underlying factors played a role in some of the worst breaches: third-party exposure and machine credential abuse. According to the 2025 DBIR, third-party involvement in breaches doubled (HackerNews) - (Tuesday May 06, 2025)
Microsoft has warned that using pre-made templates, such as out-of-the-box Helm charts, during Kubernetes deployments could open the door to misconfigurations and leak valuable data. "While these 'plug-and-play' options greatly simplify the setup process, they often prioritize ease of use over security," Michael Katchinskiy and Yossi Weizman from the Microsoft Defender for Cloud Research team (HackerNews) - (Tuesday May 06, 2025)
Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) is the backbone of modern identity management, enabling secure access to the applications, data, and services your business relies on. As hybrid work and cloud adoption accelerate, Entra ID plays an even more central role 鈥� managing authentication, enforcing policy, and connecting users across distributed environments. That prominence also (HackerNews) - (Tuesday May 06, 2025)
Google has released its monthly security updates for Android with fixes for 46 security flaws, including one vulnerability that it said has been exploited in the wild. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-27363 (CVSS score: 8.1), a high-severity flaw in the System component that could lead to local code execution without requiring any additional execution privileges. "The most severe of (HackerNews) - (Tuesday May 06, 2025)
A recently disclosed critical security flaw impacting the open-source Langflow platform has been added to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-3248, carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10.0. "Langflow contains a missing (HackerNews) - (Monday May 05, 2025)
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a series of now-patched security vulnerabilities in Apple's AirPlay protocol that, if successfully exploited, could enable an attacker to take over susceptible devices supporting the proprietary wireless technology. The shortcomings have been collectively codenamed AirBorne by Israeli cybersecurity company Oligo. "These vulnerabilities can be chained by (HackerNews) - (Monday May 05, 2025)
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added a maximum-severity security flaw impacting Commvault Command Center to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, a little over a week after it was publicly disclosed. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-34028 (CVSS score: 10.0), a path traversal bug that affects 11.38 Innovation Release, from versions (HackerNews) - (Monday May 05, 2025)
What if attackers aren't breaking in鈥攖hey're already inside, watching, and adapting? This week showed a sharp rise in stealth tactics built for long-term access and silent control. AI is being used to shape opinions. Malware is hiding inside software we trust. And old threats are returning under new names. The real danger isn鈥檛 just the breach鈥攊t鈥檚 not knowing who鈥檚 still lurking in your (HackerNews) - (Monday May 05, 2025)
Let鈥檚 be honest: if you're one of the first (or the first) security hires at a small or midsize business, chances are you're also the unofficial CISO, SOC, IT Help Desk, and whatever additional roles need filling. You鈥檙e not running a security department. You are THE security department. You're getting pinged about RFPs in one area, and reviewing phishing alerts in another, all while sifting (HackerNews) - (Monday May 05, 2025)
The threat actors known as Golden Chickens have been attributed to two new malware families dubbed TerraStealerV2 and TerraLogger, suggesting continued development efforts to fine-tune and diversify their arsenal. "TerraStealerV2 is designed to collect browser credentials, cryptocurrency wallet data, and browser extension information," Recorded Future Insikt Group said. "TerraLogger, by contrast (HackerNews) - (Saturday May 03, 2025)
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered three malicious Go modules that include obfuscated code to fetch next-stage payloads that can irrevocably overwrite a Linux system's primary disk and render it unbootable. The names of the packages are listed below - github[.]com/truthfulpharm/prototransform github[.]com/blankloggia/go-mcp github[.]com/steelpoor/tlsproxy "Despite appearing legitimate, (HackerNews) - (Saturday May 03, 2025)
An Iranian state-sponsored threat group has been attributed to a long-term cyber intrusion aimed at a critical national infrastructure (CNI) in the Middle East that lasted nearly two years. The activity, which lasted from at least May 2023 to February 2025, entailed "extensive espionage operations and suspected network prepositioning 鈥� a tactic often used to maintain persistent access for future (HackerNews) - (Saturday May 03, 2025)
The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Thursday announced charges against a 36-year-old Yemeni national for allegedly deploying the Black Kingdom ransomware against global targets, including businesses, schools, and hospitals in the United States. Rami Khaled Ahmed of Sana'a, Yemen, has been charged with one count of conspiracy, one count of intentional damage to a protected computer, and one (HackerNews) - (Friday May 02, 2025)
Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) on Friday fined popular video-sharing platform TikTok 鈧�530 million ($601 million) for infringing data protection regulations in the region by transferring European users' data to China. "TikTok infringed the GDPR regarding its transfers of EEA [European Economic Area] User Data to China and its transparency requirements," the DPC said in a statement. " (HackerNews) - (Friday May 02, 2025)
Run by the team at workflow orchestration and AI platform Tines, the Tines library features pre-built workflows shared by security practitioners from across the community - all free to import and deploy through the platform鈥檚 Community Edition. A recent standout is a workflow that automates monitoring for security advisories from CISA and other vendors, enriches advisories with CrowdStrike (HackerNews) - (Friday May 02, 2025)
The malware loader known as MintsLoader has been used to deliver a PowerShell-based remote access trojan called GhostWeaver. "MintsLoader operates through a multi-stage infection chain involving obfuscated JavaScript and PowerShell scripts," Recorded Future's Insikt Group said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The malware employs sandbox and virtual machine evasion techniques, a domain (HackerNews) - (Friday May 02, 2025)
A year after Microsoft announced passkeys support for consumer accounts, the tech giant has announced a big change that pushes individuals signing up for new accounts to use the phishing-resistant authentication method by default. "Brand new Microsoft accounts will now be 'passwordless by default,'" Microsoft's Joy Chik and Vasu Jakkal said. "New users will have several passwordless options for (HackerNews) - (Friday May 02, 2025)
A employee at Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company xAI聽leaked a private key on GitHub that for the past two months could have allowed anyone to query private xAI large language models (LLMs) which appear to have been custom made for working with internal data from Musk's companies, including SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter/X, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. (KrebsOnSecurity) - (Thursday May 01, 2025)
Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a new campaign targeting WordPress sites that disguises the malware as a security plugin. The plugin, which goes by the name "WP-antymalwary-bot.php," comes with a variety of features to maintain access, hide itself from the admin dashboard, and execute remote code. "Pinging functionality that can report back to a command-and-control (C&C) server (HackerNews) - (Thursday May 01, 2025)
Security Operations Center (SOC) teams are facing a fundamentally new challenge — traditional cybersecurity tools are failing to detect advanced adversaries who have become experts at evading endpoint-based defenses and signature-based detection systems. The reality of these “invisible intruders” is driving a significant need for a multi-layered approach to detecting threats, (HackerNews) - (Thursday May 01, 2025)
Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic has revealed that unknown threat actors leveraged its Claude chatbot for an "influence-as-a-service" operation to engage with authentic accounts across Facebook and X. The sophisticated activity, branded as financially-motivated, is said to have used its AI tool to orchestrate 100 distinct personas on the two social media platforms, creating a (HackerNews) - (Thursday May 01, 2025)
For over a decade, application security teams have faced a brutal irony: the more advanced the detection tools became, the less useful their results proved to be. As alerts from static analysis tools, scanners, and CVE databases surged, the promise of better security grew more distant. In its place, a new reality took hold鈥攐ne defined by alert fatigue and overwhelmed teams. According to OX (HackerNews) - (Thursday May 01, 2025)
Russian companies have been targeted as part of a large-scale phishing campaign that's designed to deliver a known malware called DarkWatchman. Targets of the attacks include entities in the media, tourism, finance and insurance, manufacturing, retail, energy, telecom, transport, and biotechnology sectors, Russian cybersecurity company F6 said. The activity is assessed to be the work of a (HackerNews) - (Thursday May 01, 2025)
Enterprise data backup platform Commvault has revealed that an unknown nation-state threat actor breached its Microsoft Azure environment by exploiting CVE-2025-3928 but emphasized there is no evidence of unauthorized data access. "This activity has affected a small number of customers we have in common with Microsoft, and we are working with those customers to provide assistance," the company (HackerNews) - (Thursday May 01, 2025)
SonicWall has revealed that two now-patched security flaws impacting its SMA100 Secure Mobile Access (SMA) appliances have been exploited in the wild. The vulnerabilities in question are listed below - CVE-2023-44221 (CVSS score: 7.2) - Improper neutralization of special elements in the SMA100 SSL-VPN management interface allows a remote authenticated attacker with administrative privilege to (HackerNews) - (Wednesday April 30, 2025)
A 23-year-old Scottish man thought to be a member of the prolific Scattered Spider cybercrime group was extradited last week from Spain to the United States, where he is facing charges of wire fraud, conspiracy and identity theft. U.S. prosecutors allege Tyler Robert Buchanan and co-conspirators hacked into dozens of companies in the United States and abroad, and that he personally controlled more than $26 million stolen from victims. (KrebsOnSecurity) - (Wednesday April 23, 2025)
A whistleblower at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleged last week that denizens of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) siphoned gigabytes of data from the agency's sensitive case files in early March. The whistleblower said accounts created for DOGE at the NLRB downloaded three code repositories from GitHub. Further investigation into one of those code bundles shows it is remarkably similar to a program published in January 2025 by Marko Elez, a 25-year-old DOGE employee who has worked at a number of Musk's companies. (KrebsOnSecurity) - (Tuesday April 22, 2025)
A security architect with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleges that employees from Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) transferred gigabytes of sensitive data from agency case files in early March, using short-lived accounts configured to leave few traces of network activity. The NLRB whistleblower said the unusual large data outflows coincided with multiple blocked login attempts from an Internet address in Russia that tried to use valid credentials for a newly-created DOGE user account. (KrebsOnSecurity) - (Wednesday April 16, 2025)
A critical resource that cybersecurity professionals worldwide rely on to identify, mitigate and fix security vulnerabilities in software and hardware is in danger of breaking down. The federally funded, non-profit research and development organization MITRE warned today that its contract to maintain the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program -- which is traditionally funded each year by the Department of Homeland Security -- expires on April 16. (KrebsOnSecurity) - (Tuesday April 15, 2025)
President Trump last week revoked security clearances for Chris Krebs, the former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) who was fired by Trump after declaring the 2020 election the most secure in U.S. history. The White House memo, which also suspended clearances for other security professionals at Krebs's employer SentinelOne, comes as CISA is facing huge funding and staffing cuts. (KrebsOnSecurity) - (Thursday April 10, 2025)
China-based purveyors of SMS phishing kits are enjoying remarkable success converting phished payment card data into mobile wallets from Apple and Google. Until recently, the so-called 鈥淪mishing Triad鈥� mainly impersonated toll road operators and shipping companies. But experts say these groups are now directly targeting customers of international financial institutions, while dramatically expanding their cybercrime infrastructure and support staff. (KrebsOnSecurity) - (Wednesday April 09, 2025)
Microsoft today released updates to plug at least 121 security holes in its Windows operating systems and software, including one vulnerability that is already being exploited in the wild. Eleven of those flaws earned Microsoft's most-dire "critical" rating, meaning malware or malcontents could exploit them with little to no interaction from Windows users. (KrebsOnSecurity) - (Friday April 04, 2025)
A Minnesota cybersecurity and computer forensics expert whose testimony has featured in thousands of courtroom trials over the past 30 years is facing questions about his credentials and an inquiry from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Legal experts say the inquiry could be grounds to reopen a number of adjudicated cases in which the expert's testimony may have been pivotal. (KrebsOnSecurity)
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