All news with #threat actor tag

🔍 The Atlantic Council’s second annual report, Mythical Beasts, maps the global spyware market and documents a substantial uptick in US-based investors in 2024, which made the United States the largest investor in this sampled dataset despite ongoing policy actions. The authors also emphasize the opaque, central role of resellers and brokers, whose intermediary activity obscures vendor–buyer ties and complicates oversight. Overall, the report highlights a clear enforcement and transparency gap and urges targeted research and coordinated policy responses.

🔁 In May 2025 the EU sanctioned Moldova-based PQ Hosting and its owners, the Neculiti brothers, for alleged links to Kremlin hybrid warfare. Recorded Future and KrebsOnSecurity reporting show Stark Industries quickly rebranded to the[.]hosting under Dutch WorkTitans BV on 24 June 2025 while key address space and assets moved to PQ Hosting Plus S.R.L. Netherlands-based MIRhosting appears to host and manage the new entities, suggesting the sanctions achieved little lasting disruption.

🔌The article profiles DSLRoot, a long-running residential proxy operator that pays U.S. residents to host laptops and mobile devices and then leases those IPs as dedicated proxies. It traces the service's origins on underground forums and links multiple aliases, domains and registration records to a small network operator. The piece highlights technical risks, including vendor-targeted exploits, remote device control and WiFi enumeration, and warns of potential misuse by nation-state actors and criminal groups.

🛡️ Mandiant observed a campaign using the ClickFix social‑engineering lure to trick victims into copying and running PowerShell commands via the Windows Run dialog, yielding initial access tracked as UNC5518. That access is monetized and used by other groups to deploy a versatile backdoor, CORNFLAKE.V3, in PHP and JavaScript forms. CORNFLAKE.V3 supports HTTP-based payload execution, Cloudflare-tunneled proxying and registry persistence; researchers recommend disabling Run where possible, tightening PowerShell policies and increasing logging and user training to mitigate the risk.