All news with #threat report tag

⚠️ In three months the Aisuru botnet has been linked to more than 1,300 DDoS attacks, including a record peak of 29.7 Tbps in Q3 2025 that Cloudflare mitigated. The botnet, offered as a rental service, leverages an estimated 1–4 million compromised routers and IoT devices exploited via known vulnerabilities and weak credentials. The record incident lasted 69 seconds and used UDP carpet‑bombing across roughly 15,000 destination ports per second; Cloudflare reports a sharp rise in hyper‑volumetric attacks that can disrupt ISPs and critical services.

📈 The 23rd edition of Cloudflare’s Quarterly DDoS Threat Report reviews Q3 2025 data and spotlights the unprecedented Aisuru botnet, estimated at 1–4 million infected hosts. Aisuru launched routine hyper-volumetric attacks exceeding 1 Tbps and 1 Bpps, peaking at 29.7 Tbps and 14.1 Bpps, while Cloudflare mitigated 8.3 million DDoS events in the quarter. Network-layer attacks dominated the mix, and the report warns that short, high-volume strikes often outpace manual defenses, underscoring the need for global, automated mitigation.

🛡️Researchers at Koi Security uncovered a multi-year campaign by an actor dubbed ShadyPanda that abused trusted Chrome and Edge extensions to harvest browsing data, manipulate search results and traffic, and install a backdoor. The group amassed roughly 4.3 million infected browser instances by publishing legitimate-looking add-ons and later pushing malicious updates. Although many extensions have been removed from stores, infected browsers remain at risk because extensions auto-update and marketplaces generally review only at submission.

🔒 Today's low-cost AI services have industrialized cybercrime, enabling novice actors to produce highly convincing BEC and phishing content at scale. Tools such as WormGPT, FraudGPT, and SpamGPT remove traditional barriers by generating personalized messages, exploit code, and automated delivery that evade static filters. Defensive detection alone is insufficient when signatures continually mutate; organizations must protect identity and neutralize credential exposure. Join the webinar to learn targeted signatures and access-point controls to stop attacks even after a click.

🧭 Business leaders across 116 economies told the World Economic Forum that misinformation/disinformation, cyber insecurity and the adverse outcomes of AI rank among the top near-term threats to national stability. The WEF’s Executive Opinion Survey 2025 canvassed 11,000 executives, who placed technological risks alongside economic and societal concerns. Respondents flagged AI-driven deepfakes, model exploitation and AI-assisted cyber techniques as amplifiers of both disinformation campaigns and critical-system threats.

🔒 In 2025 threat actors increasingly used AI—deepfakes, automated scripts, and AI-generated lures—to scale ransomware, phishing, and data-exfiltration attacks, exposing gaps between siloed security and backup tools. Publicly disclosed ransomware victims rose sharply and phishing remained the dominant initial vector, overwhelming legacy protections. Organizations are moving to AI-driven automation and unified detection, response, and recovery platforms to shorten dwell time and streamline compliance.

🛡️ ESET researchers identified a MuddyWater campaign running from 30 September 2024 to 18 March 2025 that primarily targeted organizations in Israel and one confirmed technology victim in Egypt. Operators deployed newly observed custom tools — a reflective loader called Fooder and a C/C++ backdoor named MuddyViper — and abused RMM installers and reverse tunnels. The malware uses Windows CNG for AES-CBC encryption and communicates over HTTPS; operators deliberately minimized hands-on-keyboard activity to hinder detection.

🔒 IO's State of Information Security Report 2025 finds most UK and US cybersecurity professionals fear state-sponsored cyber-attacks, with 23% citing lack of preparedness for geopolitical escalation as their top concern. Surveying 3,000 security managers, IO reports 33% believe governments are not doing enough and many organisations worry about data loss, reputational harm and supply chain disruption. In response, 74% are investing in resilience and 97% are tailoring incident response, beefing up threat intelligence and securing supply chains.

🔒 CISOs face rising threats as adversaries weaponize AI — from deepfakes and sophisticated phishing to prompt-injection attacks and data leakage via unsanctioned tools. Vendors and startups are rapidly embedding AI into detection, triage, automation, and agentic capabilities; IBM’s 2025 report found broad AI deployment cut recovery time by 80 days and reduced breach costs by $1.9M. Before engaging vendors, security leaders must assess attack surface expansion, data protection, integration, metrics, workforce impact, and vendor trustworthiness.

🔍 ReversingLabs discovered legacy bootstrap code in Python packages that fetches and executes an installer from the unclaimed domain python-distribute.org. The zc.buildout bootstrap.py pulls distribute_setup.py, and because the domain is for sale an attacker could acquire it and serve malicious payloads. Packages including tornado and slapos.core still contain the script; it targets Python 2 and is not executed automatically during installation, but its presence increases the supply-chain attack surface if developers run it.

🔍 In his November roundup, ESET Chief Security Evangelist Tony Anscombe highlights major cybersecurity developments that warrant attention. He draws attention to Wiz's finding that API keys, tokens and other sensitive credentials were exposed in repositories at several leading AI companies, and to a joint advisory revealing the Akira ransomware group's estimated $244 million takings. Tony also flags privacy concerns around X's new location feature, outlines how Australia intends to enforce a proposed under‑16 social media ban, and notes a Europol/Eurojust operation that disrupted malware families including Rhadamanthys.

🔴 A seasonal surge and new alliances between ransomware groups drove a 41% month-on-month jump in attacks from September to October, NCC Group reports. Qilin was the most active actor, blamed for 170 of 594 incidents (29%), followed by Sinobi and Akira. The rise coincides with LockBit 5.0 realigning with DragonForce and Qilin, and the emergence of newcomers such as The Gentlemen. Organisations are urged to reinforce monitoring, staff awareness, and secure backups ahead of the peak threat season.

🔍 Dark Atlas has uncovered a growing cluster of fraudulent domains used by the Chinese-speaking Smishing Triad to impersonate major Egyptian and global service providers, including Fawry, Egypt Post and Careem. Analysts traced malicious infrastructure in AS132203 — linked to Tencent facilities — after examining HTTP headers and running targeted Shodan searches, which revealed additional spoofed pages for brands such as UnionPay and TikTok. The group advertises a configurable smishing kit on Telegram that automates deployment of multilingual phishing templates for delivery, telecom, government and payment services worldwide.

🧨 Check Point Research details the Shai-Hulud 2.0 campaign, a rapid and extensive npm supply-chain attack observed in November 2025. Between 21–23 November attackers compromised hundreds of npm packages and over 25,000 GitHub repositories by abusing the npm preinstall lifecycle script to execute payloads before installation completed. The report outlines techniques, scale, and practical mitigations to help organizations protect development pipelines.

🛡️ A BlueVoyant survey finds 97% of organizations were negatively impacted by a supply chain breach, up sharply from 81% in 2024. The State of Supply Chain Defense: Annual Global Insights Report 2025, published 20 November, shows many firms are maturing TPRM programs and shifting oversight into cyber or IT teams. Despite increased maturity, respondents report persistent issues such as lack of executive buy-in, compliance-first approaches, limited integration with enterprise risk frameworks, and a trend of adding vendors faster than they add visibility or remediation capacity.

🔍 Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) details a three-year espionage campaign by APT24 deploying the obfuscated BADAUDIO downloader to deliver AES-encrypted payloads, including Cobalt Strike beacons. The actor evolved from broad strategic web compromises to targeted supply-chain abuse of a Taiwanese digital marketing firm and spear-phishing lures. BADAUDIO uses DLL search order hijacking, control-flow flattening, and cookie-based beaconing to retrieve decrypted payloads in memory. GTIG added related domains and files to Safe Browsing, issued victim notifications, and published IOCs and YARA rules to support detection and mitigation.

🛡️ This week's ThreatsDay Bulletin highlights a surge in espionage, zero-day exploits, and organized crypto laundering across multiple countries. MI5 warned that Chinese operatives are using LinkedIn profiles and fake recruiters to target lawmakers and staff, while researchers disclosed critical flaws like a pre-auth RCE in Oracle Identity Manager and a resource-exhaustion bug in the Shelly Pro 4PM relay. The bulletin also details malicious browser extensions, new macOS stealer NovaStealer, high-profile arrests and sanctions, and continued pressure on crypto-mixing services. Patch, update, and verify identities to reduce exposure.

🔒 PlushDaemon, a China-linked APT, has deployed a network implant called EdgeStepper to hijack DNS on compromised routers and redirect update traffic to attacker-controlled servers, according to ESET. The MIPS32 Go-built implant modifies iptables to forward UDP port 53 to a local proxy that substitutes legitimate update IPs with malicious ones. Using the hijacked channel, a downloader chain (LittleDaemon, DaemonicLogistics) delivers the espionage backdoor SlowStepper, enabling credential theft, document exfiltration and audio/video capture.

🔍 Google filed a court complaint alleging a "cybercriminal group in China" sold branded "Lighthouse" phishing kits that let unsophisticated fraudsters run large-scale SMS and e-commerce scams. The kits bundle hundreds of fake-website templates, domain setup tools, and subscription licenses offered weekly, monthly, seasonal, annual, or permanent. Campaigns often begin with texts about overdue tolls or package redelivery and sometimes appear as ads (including ads that persisted until Google suspended accounts). Victims who click are redirected to fraudulent sites that solicit passwords, credit card numbers, or payments purportedly accepted via wallets such as Google Pay.

🔒 Check Point Research reports a significant increase in Black Friday–themed domain registrations, with about 1 in 11 newly registered domains classified as malicious. Brand impersonation is a primary tactic: roughly 1 in 25 new domains referencing marketplaces like Amazon, AliExpress, and Alibaba are flagged. Attackers create convincing fake storefronts that copy logos, layouts, and imagery to harvest credentials and payment data, with recent campaigns impersonating HOKA and AliExpress demonstrating active phishing tied to seasonal promotions.