All news with #telegram tag

Sturnus Android Trojan Steals Messages and Controls Devices

🔒Sturnus is a new Android banking trojan discovered by ThreatFabric that can capture decrypted messages from end-to-end encrypted apps like Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram. It abuses Accessibility services and on-screen capture to read message content and deploys HTML overlays to harvest banking credentials. The malware also supports real-time, AES-encrypted VNC remote control and obtains Android Device Administrator privileges to resist removal while targeting European financial customers with region-specific overlays.

Fantasy Hub: Android RAT sold on Telegram as MaaS service

🔒 Cybersecurity researchers disclosed a new Android remote access trojan, Fantasy Hub, marketed on Russian-speaking Telegram channels under a Malware-as-a-Service model. The MaaS offers turnkey builders, bot-driven subscriptions, custom trojanized APKs and a C2 panel to manage compromised devices and exfiltrate SMS, contacts, media and call logs. Sellers provide fake Google Play landing pages and instruction to abuse the default SMS handler and deploy overlays to intercept banking 2FA and harvest credentials.

Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$, and ShinyHunters: SLH Collective

🕸 The nascent Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters (SLH) collective — a merging of Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$, and ShinyHunters — has repeatedly recreated its Telegram presence, cycling channels at least 16 times since August 8, 2025. The group markets an extortion-as-a-service offering to affiliates, targets organizations including those using Salesforce, and has teased a custom ransomware family called Sh1nySp1d3r. Trustwave SpiderLabs assesses SLH as blending financially motivated crime with attention-seeking hacktivism and sophisticated brand management.

Privacy rankings of popular messaging apps — 2025 Report

🔒 Incogni's Social Media Privacy Ranking 2025, summarized by Kaspersky, evaluates 15 platforms across 18 criteria to compare messaging apps on privacy and data handling. Overall scores place Discord, Telegram and Snapchat near the top, but a subset of practical criteria ranks Telegram first, followed by Snapchat and Discord. The analysis highlights default settings, data collection by mobile apps, handling of government requests, and encryption differences, noting that only WhatsApp provides end-to-end encryption for all chats by default.

Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters: Recent Activity and Risks

🚨 Unit 42 observed renewed activity from Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters in early October 2025, including leaked data claims, a defaced clearnet leak site, and announcements of an extortion-as-a-service offering. The actors set a self-imposed ransom deadline of Oct. 10, 2025 and claimed to have released data allegedly from six victim companies across aviation, energy and retail. Unit 42 recommends organizations prepare EaaS incident playbooks and engage third-party responders.

Cavalry Werewolf Targets Russian Public Sector with RATs

🚨 BI.ZONE warns of a campaign dubbed Cavalry Werewolf that has targeted Russian state agencies and critical industrial sectors using FoalShell and StallionRAT. Attackers used spear-phishing with spoofed Kyrgyz government emails and RAR attachments to deploy lightweight reverse shells and a RAT that exfiltrates data via a Telegram bot. Observed tooling and Telegram commands indicate organized post-compromise operations and use of socks proxies for lateral movement. BI.ZONE links the activity to groups including Tomiris and YoroTrooper, suggesting possible Kazakhstan ties.

Dutch Teenagers Arrested Over Alleged Pro-Russian Spying

🔎 Two 17-year-olds in the Netherlands were arrested after allegedly being recruited via Telegram by pro‑Russian hackers to map Wi‑Fi networks near government targets. Reports say the youths walked areas of The Hague close to Europol, Eurojust and several embassies while using a Wi‑Fi sniffer; the Canadian embassy was reportedly targeted. The domestic intelligence service tipped off police, who carried out raids and seized evidence. One teenager remains in custody while the other has been electronically tagged and placed under house arrest as the probe continues.

Malicious Go Module Poses as SSH Brute-Force Tool, Steals

🔒 Researchers identified a malicious Go module that masquerades as an SSH brute-force utility but secretly exfiltrates credentials to a threat actor via a hard-coded Telegram bot. The package, golang-random-ip-ssh-bruteforce, published on June 24, 2022 and still accessible on pkg.go.dev, scans random IPv4 addresses, attempts concurrent logins from a small username/password list, and disables host key verification. On the first successful login it sends the IP, username and password to @sshZXC_bot, which forwards results to @io_ping, allowing the actor to centralize harvested credentials while distributing scanning risk.

Gamaredon 2024: Enhanced Spearphishing vs Ukrainian Targets

🔍 ESET Research describes Gamaredon’s 2024 shift to exclusively target Ukrainian government institutions, significantly increasing spearphishing scale and frequency while adopting new delivery techniques such as malicious hyperlinks and LNK files served from Cloudflare domains. The group introduced six new PowerShell and VBScript-based tools and upgraded existing implants with improved obfuscation, registry-based persistence, and stealth features. Operators have largely hidden C2 infrastructure behind Cloudflare tunnels and increasingly rely on third-party platforms and DoH for resilience.