A suspected China-based cyber espionage operation has targeted Southeast Asian military organizations as part of a state-sponsored campaign that dates back to at least 2020.
Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 is tracking the threat activity under the moniker CL-STA-1087, where CL refers to cluster, and STA stands for state-backed motivation.
"The activity demonstrated strategic operational patience and
Meta has announced plans to discontinue support for end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for chats on Instagram after May 8, 2026.
"If you have chats that are impacted by this change, you will see instructions on how you can download any media or messages you may want to keep," the social media giant said in a help document. "If you're on an older version of Instagram, you may also need to update the
INTERPOL on Friday announced the takedown of 45,000 malicious IP addresses and servers used in connection with phishing, malware, and ransomware campaigns, as part of the agency's ongoing efforts to dismantle criminal networks, disrupt emerging threats, and safeguard victims from scams.
The effort is part of an international law enforcement operation that involved 72 countries and territories.
Microsoft has disclosed details of a credential theft campaign that employs fake virtual private network (VPN) clients distributed through search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning techniques.
"The campaign redirects users searching for legitimate enterprise software to malicious ZIP files on attacker-controlled websites to deploy digitally signed trojans that masquerade as trusted VPN clients
Disclaimer: This report has been prepared by the Threat Research Center to enhance cybersecurity awareness and support the strengthening of defense capabilities. It is based on independent research and observations of the current threat landscape available at the time of publication. The content is intended for informational and preparedness purposes only.
Read more blogs around threat
Google on Thursday released security updates for its Chrome web browser to address two high-severity vulnerabilities that it said have been exploited in the wild.
The list of vulnerabilities is as follows -
CVE-2026-3909 (CVSS score: 8.8) - An out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the Skia 2D graphics library that allows a remote attacker to perform out-of-bounds memory access via a crafted HTML
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed multiple security vulnerabilities within the Linux kernel's AppArmor module that could be exploited by unprivileged users to circumvent kernel protections, escalate to root, and undermine container isolation guarantees.
The nine confused deputy vulnerabilities have been collectively codenamed CrackArmor by the Qualys Threat Research Unit (TRU). The
A court-authorized international law enforcement operation has dismantled a criminal proxy service named SocksEscort that enslaved thousands of residential routers worldwide into a botnet for committing large-scale fraud.
"SocksEscort infected home and small business internet routers with malware," the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said. "The malware allowed SocksEscort to direct internet
Veeam has released security updates to address multiple critical vulnerabilities in its Backup & Replication software that, if successfully exploited, could result in remote code execution.
The vulnerabilities are as follows -
CVE-2026-21666 (CVSS score: 9.9) - A vulnerability that allows an authenticated domain user to perform remote code execution on the Backup Server.
CVE-2026-21667 (
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new banking malware targeting Brazilian users that's written in Rust, marking a significant departure from other known Delphi-based malware families associated with the Latin American cybercrime ecosystem.
The malware, which is designed to infect Windows systems and was first discovered last month, has been codenamed VENON by Brazilian
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a suspected artificial intelligence (AI)-generated malware codenamed Slopoly put to use by a financially motivated threat actor named Hive0163.
"Although still relatively unspectacular, AI-generated malware such as Slopoly shows how easily threat actors can weaponize AI to develop new malware frameworks in a fraction of the time it used to take
Phishing has quietly turned into one of the hardest enterprise threats to expose early. Instead of crude lures and obvious payloads, modern campaigns rely on trusted infrastructure, legitimate-looking authentication flows, and encrypted traffic that conceals malicious behavior from traditional detection layers. For CISOs, the priority is now clear: scale phishing detection in a way that helps
Another Thursday, another pile of weird security stuff that somehow happened in just seven days. Some of it is clever. Some of it is lazy. A few bits fall into that uncomfortable category of βyeahβ¦ this is probably going to show up in real incidents sooner than weβd like.β
The pattern this week feels familiar in a slightly annoying way. Old tricks are getting polished. New research shows how
The most dangerous phishing campaigns arenβt just designed to fool employees. Many are designed to exhaust the analysts investigating them. When a phishing investigation takes 12 hours instead of five minutes, the outcome can shift from a contained incident to a breach.
For years, the cybersecurity industry has focused on the front door of phishing defense: employee training, email gateways that
Apple on Wednesday backported fixes for a security flaw in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS Sonoma to older versions after it was found to be used as part of the Coruna exploit kit.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-43010, relates to an unspecified vulnerability in WebKit that could result in memory corruption when processing maliciously crafted web content. The iPhone maker said the issue was
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered half-a-dozen new Android malware families that come with capabilities to steal data from compromised devices and conduct financial fraud.
The Android malware range from traditional banking trojans like PixRevolution, TaxiSpy RAT, BeatBanker, Mirax, and Oblivion RAT to full-fledged remote administration tools such as SURXRAT.
PixRevolution, according to
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday added a critical security flaw impacting n8n to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-68613 (CVSS score: 9.9), concerns a case of expression injection that leads to remote code execution. The security shortcoming was patched
Agentic web browsers that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to autonomously execute actions across multiple websites on behalf of a user could be trained and tricked into falling prey to phishing and scam traps.
The attack, at its core, takes advantage of AI browsers' tendency to reason their actions and use it against the model itself to lower their security guardrails, Guardio
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of two now-patched security flaws in the n8n workflow automation platform, including two critical bugs that could result in arbitrary command execution.
The vulnerabilities are listed below -
CVE-2026-27577 (CVSS score: 9.4) - Expression sandbox escape leading to remote code execution (RCE)
CVE-2026-27493 (CVSS score: 9.5) - Unauthenticated
Meta on Wednesday said it disabled over 150,000 accounts associated with scam centers in Southeast Asia as part of a coordinated effort in partnership with authorities from Thailand, the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Korea, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and Indonesia.
The effort also led to 21 arrests made by the Royal Thai Police, the company said. The action builds upon
SAP has released security updates to address two critical security flaws that could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution on affected systems.
The vulnerabilities in question listed below -
CVE-2019-17571 (CVSS score: 9.8) - A code injection vulnerability in SAP Quotation Management Insurance application (FS-QUO)
CVE-2026-27685 (CVSS score: 9.1) - An insecure deserialization
βYou knew, and you could have acted. Why didnβt you?βΒ
This is the question you do not want to be asked. And increasingly, itβs the question leaders are forced to answer after an incident.
For years, many executive teams and boards have treated a large vulnerability backlog as an uncomfortable but tolerable fact of life: βweβve accepted the risk.β If youβve ever seen a report showing
Microsoft on Tuesday released patches for a set of 84 new security vulnerabilities affecting various software components, including two that have been listed as publicly known.
Of these, eight are rated Critical, and 76 are rated Important in severity. Forty-six of the patched vulnerabilities relate to privilege escalation, followed by 18 remote code execution, 10 information disclosure, four
A threat actor known as UNC6426 leveraged keys stolen following the supply chain compromise of the nx npm package last year to completely breach a victim's cloud environment within a span of 72 hours.
The attack started with the theft of a developer's GitHub token, which the threat actor then used to gain unauthorized access to the cloud and steal data.
"The threat actor, UNC6426, then used this
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered five malicious Rust crates that masquerade as time-related utilities to transmit .env file data to the threat actors.
The Rust packages, published to crates.io, are listed below -
chrono_anchor
dnp3times
time_calibrator
time_calibrators
time-sync
The crates, per Socket, impersonate timeapi.io and were published between late February and early March
Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new campaign where threat actors are abusing FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) appliances as entry points to breach victim networks.Β
The activity involves the exploitation of recently disclosed security vulnerabilities or weak credentials to extract configuration files containing service account credentials and network topology
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new malware called KadNap that's primarily targeting Asus routers to enlist them into a botnet for proxying malicious traffic.
The malware, first detected in the wild in August 2025, has expanded to over 14,000 infected devices, with more than 60% of victims located in the U.S., according to the Black Lotus Labs team at Lumen. A lesser number of
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed nine cross-tenant vulnerabilities in Google Looker Studio that could have permitted attackers to run arbitrary SQL queries on victims' databases and exfiltrate sensitive data within organizations' Google Cloud environments.
The shortcomings have been collectively named LeakyLooker by Tenable. There is no evidence that the vulnerabilities were exploited in
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer just a tool we talk to; it is a tool that does things for us. These are called AI Agents. They can send emails, move data, and even manage software on their own.
But there is a problem. While these agents make work faster, they also open a new "back door" for hackers.
The Problem: "The Invisible Employee"
Think of an AI Agent like a new employee who has
You can't control when the next critical vulnerability drops. You can control how much of your environment is exposed when it does. The problem is that most teams have more internet-facing exposure than they realise. Intruder's Head of Security digs into why this happens and how teams can manage it deliberately.
Time-to-exploit is shrinking
The larger and less controlled your attack surface is,
The Russian state-sponsored hacking group tracked as APT28 has been observed using a pair of implants dubbed BEARDSHELL and COVENANT to facilitate longβterm surveillance of Ukrainian military personnel.
The two malware families have been put to use since April 2024, ESET said in a new report shared with The Hacker News.
APT28, also tracked as Blue Athena, BlueDelta, Fancy Bear, Fighting Ursa,
Salesforce has warned of an increase in threat actor activity that's aimed at exploiting misconfigurations in publicly accessible Experience Cloud sites by making use of a customized version of an open-source tool called AuraInspector.
The activity, per the company, involves the exploitation of customers' overly permissive Experience Cloud guest user configurations to obtain access to sensitive
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Monday added three security flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation.
The vulnerability list is as follows -
CVE-2021-22054 (CVSS score: 7.5) - A server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in Omnissa Workspace One UEM (formerly VMware Workspace One UEM) that
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a malicious npm package that masquerades as an OpenClaw installer to deploy a remote access trojan (RAT) and steal sensitive data from compromised hosts.
The package, named "@openclaw-ai/openclawai," was uploaded to the registry by a user named "openclaw-ai" on March 3, 2026. It has been downloaded 178 times to date. The library is still available for
The North Korean threat actor known as UNC4899 is suspected to be behind a sophisticated cloud compromise campaign targeting a cryptocurrency organization in 2025 to steal millions of dollars in cryptocurrency.
The activity has been attributed with moderate confidence to the state-sponsored adversary, which is also tracked under the cryptonyms Jade Sleet, PUKCHONG, Slow Pisces, and
Another week in cybersecurity. Another week of "you've got to be kidding me."
Attackers were busy. Defenders were busy. And somewhere in the middle, a whole lot of people had a very bad Monday morning. That's kind of just how it goes now.
The good news? There were some actual wins this week. Real ones. The kind where the good guys showed up, did the work, and made a dent. It doesn't always
Mid-market organizations are constantly striving to achieve security levels on a par with their enterprise peers. With heightened awareness of supply chain attacks, your customers and business partners are defining the security level you must meet.
What if you could be the enabler for your organization to remain competitive β and help win business β by easily demonstrating that you meet these
Two Google Chrome extensions have turned malicious after what appears to be a case of ownership transfer, offering attackers a way to push malware to downstream customers, inject arbitrary code, and harvest sensitive data.
The extensions in question, both originally associated with a developer named "akshayanuonline@gmail.com" (BuildMelon), are listed below -
QuickLens - Search Screen with
High-value organizations located in South, Southeast, and East Asia have been targeted by a Chinese threat actor as part of a years-long campaign.
The activity, which has targeted aviation, energy, government, law enforcement, pharmaceutical, technology, and telecommunications sectors, has been attributed by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 to a previously undocumented threat activity group dubbed
OpenAI on Friday began rolling out Codex Security, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered security agent that's designed to find, validate, and propose fixes for vulnerabilities.
The feature is available in a research preview to ChatGPT Pro, Enterprise, Business, and Edu customers via the Codex web with free usage for the next month.
"It builds deep context about your project to identify
Anthropic on Friday said it discovered 22 new security vulnerabilities in the Firefox web browser as part of a security partnership with Mozilla.
Of these, 14 have been classified as high, seven have been classified as moderate, and one has been rated low in severity. The issues were addressed in Firefox 148, released late last month. The vulnerabilities were identified over a two-week period in
The Pakistan-aligned threat actor known as Transparent Tribe has become the latest hacking group to embrace artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding tools to strike targets with various implants.
The activity is designed to produce a "high-volume, mediocre mass of implants" that are developed using lesser-known programming languages like Nim, Zig, and Crystal and rely on trusted services like
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a multi-stage malware campaign that uses batch scripts as a pathway to deliver various encrypted remote access trojan (RATs) payloads that correspond to XWorm, AsyncRAT, and Xeno RAT.
The stealthy attack chain has been codenamed VOID#GEIST by Securonix Threat Research.
At a high level, the obfuscated batch script is used to deploy a second
Scaling cybersecurity services as an MSP or MSSP requires technical expertise and a business model that delivers measurable value at scale.
Risk-based cybersecurity is the foundation of that model. When done right, it builds client trust, increases upsell opportunities, and drives recurring revenue. But to deliver this consistently and efficiently, you need the right technology and processes.
New research from Broadcom's Symantec and Carbon Black Threat Hunter Team has discovered evidence of an Iranian hacking group embedding itself in several U.S. companies' networks, including banks, airports, non-profit, and the Israeli arm of a software company.
The activity has been attributed to a state-sponsored hacking group called MuddyWater (aka Seedworm). It's affiliated with the Iranian
A China-linked advanced persistent threat (APT) actor has been targeting critical telecommunications infrastructure in South America since 2024, targeting Windows and Linux systems and edge devices with three different implants.
The activity is being tracked by Cisco Talos under the moniker UAT-9244, describing it as closely associated with another cluster known as FamousSparrow.
It's worth
Microsoft on Thursday disclosed details of a new widespread ClickFix social engineering campaign that has leveraged the Windows Terminal app as a way to activate a sophisticated attack chain and deploy the Lumma Stealer malware.
The activity, observed in February 2026, makes use of the terminal emulator program instead of instructing users to launch the Windows Run dialog and paste a command
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added two security flaws impacting Hikvision and Rockwell Automation products to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation.
The critical-severity vulnerabilities are listed below -
CVE-2017-7921 (CVSS score: 9.8) - An improper authentication vulnerability affecting
Cisco has disclosed that two more vulnerabilities affecting Catalyst SD-WAN Manager (formerly SD-WAN vManage) have come under active exploitation in the wild.
The vulnerabilities in question are listed below -
CVE-2026-20122 (CVSS score: 7.1) - An arbitrary file overwrite vulnerability that could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to overwrite arbitrary files on the local file system.
Some weeks in cybersecurity feel routine. This one doesnβt.
Several new developments surfaced over the past few days, showing how quickly the threat landscape keeps shifting. Researchers uncovered fresh activity, security teams shared new findings, and a few unexpected moves from major tech companies also drew attention.
Together, these updates offer a useful snapshot of what is happening
Most organizations assume encrypted data is safe.
But many attackers are already preparing for a future where todayβs encryption can be broken. Instead of trying to decrypt information now, they are collecting encrypted data and storing it so it can be decrypted later using quantum computers.
This tacticβknown as βharvest now, decrypt laterββmeans sensitive data transmitted today could become
A suspected Iran-nexus threat actor has been attributed to a campaign targeting government officials in Iraq by impersonating the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs to deliver a set of never-before-seen malware.
Zscaler ThreatLabz, which observed the activity in January 2026, is tracking the cluster under the name Dust Specter. The attacks, which manifest in the form of two different
Organizations typically roll out multi-factor authentication (MFA) and assume stolen passwords are no longer enough to access systems. In Windows environments, that assumption is often wrong. Attackers still compromise networks every day using valid credentials. The issue is not MFA itself, but coverage.Β
Enforced through an identity provider (IdP) such as Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, or
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new Russian cyber campaign that has targeted Ukrainian entities with two previously undocumented malware families named BadPaw and MeowMeow.
"The attack chain initiates with a phishing email containing a link to a ZIP archive. Once extracted, an initial HTA file displays a lure document written in Ukrainian concerning border crossing appeals
Tycoon 2FA, one of the prominent phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) toolkits that allowed cybercriminals to stage adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) credential harvesting attacks at scale, was dismantled by a coalition of law enforcement agencies and security companies.
The subscription-based phishing kit, which first emerged in August 2023, was described by Europol as one of the largest phishing
A joint law enforcement operation has dismantled LeakBase, one of the world's largest online forums for cybercriminals to buy and sell stolen data and cybercrime tools.
The LeakBase forum, per the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), had over 142,000 members and more than 215,000 messages between members as of December 2025. Those attempting to access the forum's website ("leakbase[.]la") are now
Cybersecurity researchers have warned of a surge in retaliatory hacktivist activity following the U.S.-Israel coordinated military campaign against Iran, codenamed Epic Fury and Roaring Lion.
"The hacktivist threat in the Middle East is highly lopsided, with two groups, Keymous+ and DieNet, driving nearly 70% of all attack activity between February 28 and March 2," Radware said in a Tuesday
Google said it identified a "new and powerful" exploit kit dubbed Coruna (aka CryptoWaters) targeting Apple iPhone models running iOS versions between 13.0 and 17.2.1.
The exploit kit featured five full iOS exploit chains and a total of 23 exploits, Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said. It's not effective against the latest version of iOS. The findings were first reported by WIRED.
"The
As AI becomes the central engine for enterprise productivity, security leaders are finally getting the green light β and the budget β to secure it. But thereβs a quiet crisis unfolding in the boardroom: many organizations know they need "AI Governance," but they have no idea what they are actually looking for.
The CISOβs Dilemma: You Have the AI Budget, but Do You Have the Requirements?
As AI
Cybersecurity researchers have flagged malicious Packagist PHP packages masquerading as Laravel utilities that act as a conduit for a cross-platform remote access trojan (RAT) that's functional on Windows, macOS, and Linux systems.
The names of the packages are listed below -
nhattuanbl/lara-helper (37 Downloads)
nhattuanbl/simple-queue (29 Downloads)
nhattuanbl/lara-swagger (49 Downloads)
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an advanced persistent threat (APT) group dubbed Silver Dragon that has been linked to cyber attacks targeting entities in Europe and Southeast Asia since at least mid-2024.
"Silver Dragon gains its initial access by exploiting public-facing internet servers and by delivering phishing emails that contain malicious attachments," Check Point said
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added a recently disclosed security flaw impacting Broadcom VMware Aria Operations to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, citing active exploitation in the wild.
The high-severity vulnerability, CVE-2026-22719 (CVSS score: 8.1), has been described as a case of command injection that could allow an
Threat hunters have called attention to a new campaign as part of which bad actors masqueraded as fake IT support to deliver the Havoc command-and-control (C2) framework as a precursor to data exfiltration or ransomware attack.
The intrusions, identified by Huntress last month across five partner organizations, involved the threat actors using email spam as lures, followed by a phone call from
Every CISO knows the uncomfortable truth about their Security Operations Center: the people most responsible for catching threats in real time are the people with the least experience. Tier 1 analysts sit at the front line of detection, and yet they are also the most vulnerable to the cognitive and organizational pressures that quietly erode SOC performance over time.
The Paradox at the Gate:
The threat actor behind the recently disclosed artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted campaign targeting Fortinet FortiGate appliances leveraged an open-source, AI-native security testing platform called CyberStrikeAI to execute the attacks.
The new findings come from Team Cymru, which detected its use following an analysis of the IP address ("212.11.64[.]250") that was used by the suspected
The Rise of MCPs in the Enterprise
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is quickly becoming a practical way to push LLMs from βchatβ into real work. By providing structured access to applications, APIs, and data, MCP enables prompt-driven AI agents that can retrieve information, take action, and automate end-to-end business workflows across the enterprise. This is already showing up in production
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new phishing suite called Starkiller that proxies legitimate login pages to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA) protections.
It's advertised as a cybercrime platform by a threat group calling itself Jinkusu, granting customers access to a dashboard that lets them select a brand to impersonate or enter a brand's real URL. It also lets