All news in category "Threat and Trends Reports"

Atroposia RAT Kit Lowers Barrier for Cybercriminals

⚠️ Researchers at Varonis have identified a turnkey remote access trojan called Atroposia, marketed on underground forums with subscription tiers starting at $200 per month. The kit combines advanced features — hidden remote desktop takeover, encrypted C2 channels, UAC bypass for persistence, an integrated vulnerability scanner, clipboard capture, DNS hijacking and bulk exfiltration — into a low‑skill, plug‑and‑play package. Enterprises should prioritize behavioral monitoring, rapid containment, multi‑factor authentication, restricted admin access and rigorous patching to detect and mitigate attacks enabled by such commoditized toolsets.

Investment Scams Mimicking Crypto and Forex Surge in Asia

🔍 Group-IB's research warns of a rapid rise in fake investment platforms across Asia that mimic cryptocurrency and forex exchanges to defraud victims. Organized, cross-border groups recruit via social media and messaging apps, deploying polished trading interfaces, automated chatbots and complex back-end systems to extract payments. The report maps two analytical models — Victim Manipulation Flow and Multi-Actor Fraud Network — and urges banks and regulators to monitor reused infrastructure and tighten KYC controls.

Building Data Security from the Inside Out: Hybrid Focus

🛡️ Cybersecurity Awareness Month underscores that protecting organizational data requires attention to internal handling as well as external threats. Fortinet’s 2025 Insider Risk Report found 77% of organizations experienced insider-related data loss in the past 18 months, with nearly half of incidents tied to simple negligence. The report highlights mounting GenAI concerns and recommends a layered approach combining visibility, behavioral analytics, and real-time coaching to prevent accidental and malicious loss.

BiDi Swap: Bidirectional Text Trick Makes Fake URLs Look Real

🔍 Varonis Threat Labs highlights BiDi Swap, a technique that exploits Unicode bidirectional rendering to make malicious URLs appear legitimate. By mixing Right-to-Left and Left-to-Right scripts, attackers can visually move parameters, paths, or subdomains into the apparent host name to facilitate phishing and spoofing. Browser defenses vary — some highlight domains or flag lookalikes while others leave gaps — so the report urges user caution and vendor improvements.

Privileged Account Monitoring and Protection Guide Overview

🔐 This article outlines Mandiant's practical framework for securing privileged access across modern enterprise and cloud environments. It emphasizes a three-pillar approach—Prevention, Detection, and Response—and details controls such as PAM, PAWs, JIT/JEA, MFA, secrets rotation, and tiered access. The post highlights detection engineering, high-fidelity session capture, and SOAR automation to reduce dwell time and blast radius, and concludes with incident response guidance including enterprise password rotations and protected recovery paths.

Atroposia RAT Adds Local Vulnerability Scanner, UAC Bypass

🛡️ Atroposia is a new malware-as-a-service platform offering a modular remote access trojan for a $200 monthly subscription, combining persistent access, stealthy remote desktop, data theft, and a built-in local vulnerability scanner. Researchers at Varonis say the RAT can bypass UAC, perform host-level DNS hijacks, capture credentials and clipboard data, and compress and exfiltrate targeted files with minimal traces. Its vulnerability-audit plugin identifies missing patches and outdated software so attackers can prioritize exploits, making it particularly dangerous in corporate environments. Users should download only from official sources, avoid pirated software and torrents, and refrain from executing unfamiliar commands found online.

A Framework for Measuring Internet Resilience Nationwide

🔍 This post introduces a reproducible, data-driven framework to quantify Internet resilience, motivated by the July 8, 2022 Rogers outage that affected millions. It defines resilience as the ability of a national or regional ecosystem to maintain diverse, secure routing and rapidly recover from failures. The framework combines public sources (RouteViews, RIPE RIS, traceroutes, IXPs, submarine cable maps) and focuses on measurable metrics such as RPKI, ROV, IXP distribution, submarine cable diversity, AS path diversity, and impact-weighted assessments.

Major Milestone: Majority of Human Traffic Uses PQ TLS

🔒 Cloudflare reports that, as of late October 2025, the majority of human-initiated traffic through its network is protected with post‑quantum key agreement, reducing the risk of harvest‑now/decrypt‑later attacks. The post summarizes progress since the last update 21 months earlier: NIST standardization, broad adoption of ML‑KEM hybrids, Google's Willow milestone, and Craig Gidney's optimizations that materially moved Q‑day closer. It explains why migrating key agreement was urgent and relatively straightforward, why signature/certificate migration remains the harder challenge, and what organizations and regulators should prioritize now.

Quarter of Scam Victims Report Considering Self-Harm

⚠️ A new 2025 Consumer Impact Report from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) finds identity fraud is driving severe mental and financial harm, with one quarter of surveyed consumers saying they seriously considered self-harm after an incident. The figure rises to 68% among self-identified victims but falls to 14% for those who contacted the ITRC, underscoring the value of professional support. The study of 1,033 general consumers also highlights rising repeat victimisation, large monetary losses — including more than 20% losing over $100,000 and 10% losing at least $1m — social media account takeovers as the most common crime, and widespread concern that AI will be a major battleground for identity security.

Q3 2025 Internet Disruptions: Causes and Observations

🌐 In Q3 2025 Cloudflare observed a wide range of Internet disruptions affecting governments, carriers, and infrastructure worldwide. Incidents included government-directed shutdowns in Sudan, Syria, Iraq, Venezuela, and Afghanistan; submarine and terrestrial cable cuts; power outages; a major earthquake; a targeted cyberattack; and technical failures such as Great Firewall anomalies and Starlink outages. The post synthesizes observed traffic losses using Cloudflare Radar metrics.

Early Threat Detection: Protecting Growth and Revenue

🔎 Early detection turns cybersecurity from a reactive cost into a business enabler. Investing in continuous visibility, threat intelligence, and rapid detection reduces incident costs, preserves uptime, and protects revenue and reputation. Solutions such as ANY.RUN's Threat Intelligence Feeds and TI Lookup deliver real-time IOCs, context-enriched analyses, and STIX/TAXII-ready integrations so SOCs can prioritize and act faster, lowering MTTR and operational burden.

Recruitment red flags: spotting faux job applicants

🔍 Organizations are facing a growing threat from applicants who pose as legitimate job seekers but are in fact operatives tied to overseas actor networks. Recent cases — including a July 2024 incident at KnowBe4 and longer running campaigns tracked as WageMole and DeceptiveDevelopment — show perpetrators use stolen identities, deepfakes and remote infrastructure to gain employment. The article outlines practical detection cues for recruitment teams and containment steps to limit insider risk.

Herodotus Android malware mimics human typing behavior

🛡️ Herodotus is a newly observed Android malware family offered as a MaaS that deliberately mimics human input timing to evade behavior-based detection. Threat Fabric says operators likely linked to Brokewell are distributing a dropper via smishing targeting Italian and Brazilian users. The installer requests Accessibility access and uses deceptive overlays to hide permission flows while a built-in "humanizer" inserts randomized 0.3–3s delays between keystrokes to imitate human typing. Users should avoid sideloading APKs, enable Play Protect, and promptly review or revoke Accessibility permissions for unfamiliar apps.

Cybersecurity Becomes Top Challenge for Financial Sector

🔒 A recent PPI survey of 50 banks and 53 insurers in Germany reports a sixfold rise in cyberattacks compared with 2021. Sixty-four percent of respondents now view cyberattacks as the sector's top challenge, ahead of digitization, credit quality and regulation. Firms cite low employee awareness and difficulty with real-time detection; malware installation and IT disruption are the most frequent attack types.

Move Beyond the SOC: Adopt a Risk Operations Center

📡 The Resilience Risk Operations Center (ROC) reframes cyber defense by fusing technical, business and financial intelligence into a single operating environment. Rather than relying solely on a traditional SOC that reacts to alerts, the ROC prioritizes threats using actuarial and claims data to show potential financial impact and guide urgent decisions. Inspired by the US Air Force AOC, it co-locates multidisciplinary experts to anticipate attacks and accelerate response. Early use, including response to an April 2024 VPN zero-day, showed faster mitigation and reduced losses.

Internal Conflicts Often Worse Than Cyberattacks for CISOs

🛡️ Roughly 70% of senior security leaders say internal conflicts during a cyber crisis cause more disruption than the attack itself, according to the Cytactic 2025 State of Cyber Incident Response Management (CIRM) Report. The survey of 480 US cybersecurity executives highlights blurred authority, poor communication, and unrehearsed roles that delay response. Experts recommend demonstrating security's business value, reducing operational friction with passwordless controls, and aligning incentives with lines of business.

Rethinking Service Provider Risk: A CISO Imperative

🔍 As organizations outsource more critical systems and security functions to managed service providers, the complexity and frequency of third-party incidents are rising — 47% of organizations reported a third-party breach in the 12 months to mid-2025. Security leaders must balance rigorous, standards-based assurance (for example ISO 27001 or SOC 2) with relationship-driven vetting that fosters transparency and shared responsibility. Experts from media company Advance, the University of Queensland and vendor advisors argue that questionnaires alone are insufficient: meaningful dialogue, selective disclosure (summaries of pen tests rather than full reports), contractual clarity, and AI-aware controls are all needed to assess and manage evolving risks.

Ransomware Payments Plunge as Victims Stop Paying Ransoms

🔒 Coveware reports ransomware payment rates have fallen to a record low — just 23% of victims paid in Q3 2025, continuing a multi-year decline from 28% in Q1 2024. Over 76% of incidents now involve data exfiltration, and theft-only cases see payments drop to 19%. Average and median ransoms fell to $377,000 and $140,000, respectively, as attackers pursue more targeted victims.

Europol Raises Alarm Over Caller ID Spoofing Crisis

🚨 Europol has issued a Position Paper warning of a rising wave of caller ID spoofing, where criminals falsify numbers to impersonate banks, government bodies or relatives. The agency estimates global losses around €850m annually and reports spoofing now underpins roughly 64% of phone- and SMS-related fraud. Europol calls for harmonized technical standards, stronger cross-border cooperation and regulatory convergence to make spoofing harder to perpetrate and easier to investigate.

Exposure Management in 2025: Trends, Risks, and Response

🔒 Intruder’s 2025 Exposure Management Index analyzes scans from over 3,000 small and midsize businesses to show defenders adapting under mounting pressure. High-severity vulnerabilities rose nearly 20% year‑on‑year, even as 89% of resolved critical flaws were remediated within 30 days (up from 75% in 2024). The report highlights AI-driven exploit development, growing attack surfaces from cloud, shadow IT and supply‑chain risk, and faster remediation at smaller firms.