All news with #threat report tag

🔒 Chainalysis reports that total ransomware cryptocurrency payments fell 8% year-on-year to $820m in 2025, even as the number of victims surged 50% to make 2025 the most active year on record. Payment rates dropped from 63% in 2024 to 29% in 2025, while the median ransom rose 368% to $59,556. The firm attributes these shifts to improved incident response, global disruption of infrastructure and laundering networks, cryptographic flaws in strains like VolkLocker, and fragmentation of ransomware-as-a-service into numerous smaller groups.

🔍 Chainalysis reports ransomware actors collected $820 million in 2025, a 28% decline from 2024 despite a roughly 50% rise in reported attacks year-over-year. Analysts attribute the drop to broader adherence to guidance discouraging ransom payments and to legal risks associated with payouts. At the same time, the average ransom payment jumped 368% to nearly $60,000, suggesting individual victims who do pay are settling for much larger sums to prevent data resale or exposure.

🔎 Europol-led Operation Compass has resulted in 30 arrests and linked 179 suspects to The Com, a decentralized cybercrime collective that targets children and teenagers. Launched in January 2025 and coordinated with law enforcement from 28 countries, the action identified 62 victims and directly safeguarded four. Investigators mapped multiple subgroups—Offline Com, Cyber Com, and (S)extortion Com—that facilitate violence, intrusions, and sexual exploitation.

🛡️ Royal Hansen, VP Engineering at Google, outlines how Google Cloud is confronting emergent cybersecurity risks as AI reshapes the threat landscape. He emphasizes AI-powered malware, supply-chain and training-data poisoning, and governance challenges tied to loss-of-control of AI infrastructure. Google is advancing controls—tamper-proof provenance, model-level protections, Identity and Access Management, and treating prompts like code—while rolling out agentic workflows to augment SOC teams. The post also consolidates recent threat intelligence, incident responses, and practitioner resources.

🔎 APT37 has launched the 'Ruby Jumper' campaign using removable-media infection tools to compromise air‑gapped systems, researchers at Zscaler ThreatLabz found. The actor abused malicious .LNK shortcuts to run a PowerShell stager that extracts multiple embedded payloads and deploys a new implant, Restleaf, which uses Zoho WorkDrive for C2. Additional undocumented tools—SnakeDropper, ThumbSBD, VirusTask and FootWine—enable in‑memory execution, USB propagation and staged exfiltration.

🔒 In December 2025, Zscaler ThreatLabz exposed the Ruby Jumper campaign linking North Korea's ScarCruft to a novel multi-stage intrusion that abuses cloud storage and removable media. The attack begins with a malicious LNK that launches PowerShell to extract an embedded decoy document and multiple payloads, including the in-memory loader RESTLEAF. RESTLEAF uniquely leverages Zoho WorkDrive for C2 to fetch shellcode and stage follow-on components, while SNAKEDROPPER, THUMBSBD, and VIRUSTASK enable persistence, surveillance, and propagation to air-gapped systems via USB.

🎮 Microsoft Threat Intelligence warns that threat actors are distributing trojanized gaming utilities via browsers and chat platforms to deliver a Java-based remote access trojan (RAT). A malicious downloader stages a portable Java runtime and executes a jd-gui.jar, leveraging PowerShell and LOLBins like cmstp.exe for stealth and self-deletion while configuring Microsoft Defender exclusions. Persistence is achieved with a scheduled task and a startup script named world.vbs, and the final payload phones home to 79.110.49[.]15 for command-and-control.

⛓️ A newly discovered loader named Aeternum relocates botnet command-and-control onto the Polygon blockchain, researchers at Qrator Research Lab report. Infected machines retrieve instructions written as on-chain transactions and poll more than 50 RPC endpoints instead of contacting centralized servers or domains. The seller offers native C++ builds and a web dashboard that writes commands to smart contracts, creating a low-cost, resilient C2 channel that complicates traditional takedowns and shifts defensive emphasis to edge filtering and proactive DDoS mitigation.

📧 Darktrace detected more than 32 million high-confidence phishing emails in 2025, signaling a major escalation in identity-driven attacks and automated campaigns. Over 8.2 million of those targeted VIPs, while 1.6 million originated from newly created domains and 1.2 million included malicious QR codes. The vendor reported 70% of phishing passed DMARC, 41% were spear-phishing and 38% used novel social-engineering techniques, highlighting attackers’ growing sophistication and emphasis on credential compromise.

🔒 Chainalysis reports that the proportion of ransomware victims who paid extortionists fell to a record low of 28% in 2025, even as claimed attacks rose sharply. The blockchain intelligence firm says total on-chain ransomware receipts currently total $820 million and may approach or exceed $900 million as more events are attributed. While total payment counts remained relatively stable, the median ransom surged 368% to $59,556, and analysts flagged growing fragmentation and several high-impact breaches.

🔒 Chainalysis reports the ransomware victim payment rate fell to 28% in 2025, an all-time low, even as claimed attacks rose about 50% year-over-year. On-chain ransomware receipts totaled $820 million so far and may approach $900 million, while the median ransom jumped to $59,556, up 368% from 2024. Analysts point to improved incident response, regulatory scrutiny, law enforcement actions, and market fragmentation. The report also notes 85 active extortion groups and that initial access brokers earned roughly $14 million in 2025.

⚠️ A coordinated developer-targeting campaign uses fake Next.js repositories and job-assessment lures to trick engineers into executing attacker-controlled JavaScript at runtime. Microsoft and third-party researchers identified three execution paths — VS Code workspace tasks (runOn: "folderOpen"), dev-server builds, and backend startup — that all fetch loaders from staging services like Vercel. The in-memory payload profiles hosts, polls for an instanceId and executes server-supplied code to maintain persistent C2 while minimizing disk artifacts.

⚠ A malicious NuGet package, StripeApi.Net, was uploaded on February 16, 2026 and impersonated Stripe.net by reusing the official icon, a near-identical README and inflated download counts across hundreds of versions. The package implemented legitimate payment functions but altered key methods to capture and exfiltrate Stripe API tokens while leaving payment processing appearing to work normally. ReversingLabs discovered and reported the package and it was removed from NuGet before wide impact.

⚠️ Steaelite is a browser-based remote access trojan marketed on underground forums that consolidates remote access, credential harvesting, data exfiltration, and a planned ransomware module into a single management pane. Researchers at BlackFog say the toolkit includes live screen streaming, webcam and microphone access, password recovery, Defender-disable capabilities, and persistence options, and it’s been available since last November. The seller offers access as malware-as-a-service (about $200/month), and defenders are urged to prioritize stopping data exfiltration over relying solely on perimeter defenses.

🔍 This Fortinet analysis dissects a recent multi-stage campaign deploying Agent Tesla, which targets Windows users with credential theft and keylogging. The chain uses spearphishing with RAR attachments containing obfuscated JSE loaders that fetch encrypted PowerShell scripts and reflectively load .NET assemblies in memory. Operators leverage process hollowing, virtualization and sandbox checks, and SMTP-based exfiltration to minimize detection. Fortinet telemetry and cross-product protections are highlighted to help organizations mitigate the threat.

⚠️ CrowdStrike's Global Threat Report 2026 warns that AI-enabled cyber-attacks rose 89% in 2025 as adversaries used machine learning and LLMs to scale and refine phishing, disinformation and malware operations. Researchers observed LLMs producing multilingual, convincing phishing lures and automating campaign creation, while some actors embedded prompting into malware (eg, LameHug) for reconnaissance. CrowdStrike recommends strong identity controls, AI-focused awareness training and threat-intel monitoring to mitigate the accelerating threat.

🛡️ CrowdStrike reports that adversaries shifted in 2025 from expanding toolsets to prioritizing evasion, using AI to refine phishing, malware scripts, and reconnaissance while favoring malware-free techniques that blend with legitimate user activity. AI-enabled attacks rose 89% year over year and malware-free methods accounted for 82% of detections. Supply chain compromises, rapid zero-day weaponization, and cloud-focused intrusions amplified stealth, with big-game ransomware groups moving to remote encryption and credential abuse to minimize detection.

🔍 The CrowdStrike 2026 Global Threat Report reviews 2025 as the year of the evasive adversary, detailing how attackers shifted to subtle, trust-based techniques across endpoint, identity, SaaS, and cloud environments. Adversaries accelerated operations using AI and exploited AI systems themselves, while supply chain compromises and zero-day usage rose markedly. The report highlights rapid breakout times, a high rate of malware-free intrusions, and significant increases in state-nexus activity, offering prioritized insights for defenders.

🛡️ This weekly recap highlights high‑impact incidents and emerging trends across devices, cloud services, and supply chains. Key items include a Dell RecoverPoint zero‑day (CVE‑2026‑22769) actively exploited to install web shells and backdoors and PromptSpy, an Android malware that leverages Google Gemini and accessibility services for persistence. The report also calls out a near‑30 Tbps DDoS surge, malicious Docker Hub images, and deceptive "double‑tap" skimmers targeting e‑commerce. Review the prioritized CVEs and advisories and map mitigations to your environment.

🛡️ The FBI reports over 700 ATM jackpotting incidents in 2025 that cost banks more than $20 million, and notes nearly 40% of US attacks since 2020 occurred last year. Attackers commonly deploy malware such as Ploutus to exploit the XFS API, allowing direct hardware commands to dispense cash and bypass bank authorization. The agency details physical intrusion techniques—generic keys, hard-drive removal or replacement with preloaded devices—and urges layered defenses including improved physical locks and sensors, hardware whitelisting, robust logging, IP whitelisting and endpoint detection to detect and prevent rapid cash-outs.