All news with #threat report tag

🔍 Check Point found a 124% rise in hacktivism and ransomware across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland in 2025, with Germany accounting for roughly 82% of incidents. Defacement and DDoS drove the volume—66% of events—while ransomware comprised nearly 30%, led by Akira, Qilin, and Safepay. The report highlights identity weaknesses, exposed remote services, and insufficient patching as primary enablers, and recommends MFA, patch discipline, credential monitoring, and reduced public attack surface.

🔒 At Pwn2Own Berlin (May 14–16), researchers uncovered 47 zero-day vulnerabilities and shared almost $1.3 million in prize money, with Devcore taking $505,000. The enterprise-focused competition targeted AI databases, coding agents, LLM toolchains and NVIDIA products. Notable wins included exploits against VMware ESXi, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and a sandbox escape on Microsoft Edge. ZDI will disclose the findings to vendors, who have 90 days to patch.

🔐 The Tycoon2FA phishing kit now exploits OAuth device-code flows and misuses Trustifi click-tracking URLs to hijack Microsoft 365 accounts. eSentire found the kit rebuilt after a March takedown, adding obfuscation layers, a 230-vendor blocklist, and extensive anti-analysis checks to evade detection. Attackers trick victims into pasting device codes at microsoft.com/devicelogin, granting OAuth tokens and full access to email, calendar and cloud storage.

🔒 Ransomware campaigns are increasingly paired with explicit threats of physical harm, with a Semperis study finding 40% of incidents involved intimidation and 46% in the US. Reported tactics include threatening notes left at homes, phone calls reciting staff addresses and identity details, and extortionists recruiting local actors to carry out violence. The FBI and vendors warn of a growing pattern — described as violence-as-a-service — and advise organisations to treat employee data as critically sensitive and update incident response plans to manage physical-threat scenarios.

📈 April 2026 saw a sharp rebound in global cyber activity, with organizations averaging 2,201 weekly attacks — a 10% month‑over‑month rise and 8% year‑over‑year. Check Point Research attributes the surge to automation, expanded cloud and GenAI exposures and attackers exploiting larger digital footprints. Education, Government and Telecommunications were among the hardest hit. Ransomware incidents and GenAI data leakage risks intensified across regions.

🛡️ Google disclosed detection of an unknown threat actor using a zero-day exploit likely developed with an AI model, marking the first observed malicious application of AI for vulnerability discovery and exploit generation. GTIG said the exploit was a Python script implementing a 2FA bypass in a widely used open-source web administration tool and contained hallmarks of LLM-generated code. Google worked with the vendor to patch the flaw, disabled malicious assets, and linked the activity to a broader set of AI-enabled abuse campaigns including the Android backdoor PromptSpy.

📡 ThreatFabric has identified a new Android banking trojan variant, TrickMo C, that shifts its command-and-control channel into The Open Network (TON) blockchain by resolving operator endpoints as .adnl identities. The malicious APK embeds a native TON proxy and routes its HTTP client through a loopback port, while any remaining clearnet queries are sent via DNS-over-HTTPS. This design makes conventional domain takedowns ineffective and helps conceal malicious traffic as legitimate TON application activity.

🔒 Ontinue detailed a campaign distributing a previously undocumented information stealer via fake Claude Code install pages that hijack Chromium browsers to bypass App-Bound Encryption and exfiltrate cookies, passwords and payment data from developer workstations. The lure substituted the canonical Anthropic host for an attacker-controlled domain while /install.ps1 returned a verbatim genuine installer, letting automated scanners see benign PowerShell. A native helper is reflectively injected into browser processes to invoke the IElevator2 COM interface and extract encryption keys, while the PowerShell layer handles persistence, collection and C2 communications. Defenders are urged to enforce constrained PowerShell, enable script block logging and block newly registered domains.

🔍 Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) reports a rapid shift from nascent AI-enabled operations to industrial-scale use of generative models by threat actors. Based on Mandiant incident response, Gemini telemetry, and GTIG research, the report documents AI-assisted zero-day exploit development, autonomous malware like PROMPTSPY, and advanced obfuscation techniques. It highlights supply chain targeting of AI environments, anonymized premium LLM access, and specific interest from PRC- and DPRK-linked clusters. The report also outlines mitigations and defensive AI uses.

🔍 Google’s Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) reports the first observed case of cybercriminals using AI to discover and weaponize a zero-day, targeting a popular open-source web-based system administration tool to bypass two-factor authentication. GTIG worked with the vendor to close the flaw and disrupt the campaign. Forensic analysis of the Python exploit showed AI-like traits—structured docstrings, Pythonic formatting, and a hallucinated CVSS score. Google noted the attackers did not use Gemini or Anthropic Mythos.

🔒 Check Point Research's Q1 2026 report finds ransomware volume near historic highs while activity consolidates around a smaller set of dominant groups. The top 10 operators now claim 71% of victims, led by Qilin, The Gentlemen, and LockBit. Consolidation raises individual incident impact and shifts attacker geography and target patterns. Defenders should prioritize prevention, exposure management, and network/cloud access controls to limit exploitation.

⚠ OpenAI and Anthropic models were used by attackers in a cyber-attack that targeted a municipal water and drainage utility in the Monterrey metropolitan area, Dragos reports. The incident, which unfolded between December 2025 and February 2026, involved roughly 350 artifacts, many of them AI-generated malicious scripts used as offensive tooling. According to the report, Anthropic's Claude served as the primary technical executor—handling prompt-and-response interactions, intrusion planning and deployment—while OpenAI's GPT models were used for analytical tasks and generating Spanish-language outputs. Although the OT breach was ultimately unsuccessful, Dragos warns the campaign demonstrates how commercial LLMs can accelerate and refine attacks against operational environments and recommends tighter remote access policies and stronger authentication controls.

⚠️ ThreatsDay reports a mix of blunt‑force commodity attacks and high‑impact technical flaws this week. A new MicroStealer campaign is targeting education and telecom organizations, exfiltrating browser credentials, active sessions and wallets via Discord webhooks and attacker servers. Researchers disclosed critical ICS and MOVEit vulnerabilities while analysis shows the VECT 2.0 ransomware encryptor is broken. Browsers and AI are accelerating risk vectors — patch and verify installs urgently.

🛡️ Kaspersky researchers found three malicious PyPI wheel packages — uuid32-utils, colorinal and termncolor — that covertly delivered a new malware family named ZiChatBot to Windows and Linux hosts. The packages drop platform-specific loaders (terminate.dll or terminate.so) that persist via a Registry autorun entry or a crontab and act as droppers for the main payload. ZiChatBot uses public Zulip REST APIs as its command-and-control channel, executes shellcode received from the service, and signals success by sending a heart emoji. The packages were uploaded in July 2025 and have been removed; organizations should audit dependencies, verify build environments, and monitor the published indicators.

⚠️ Cofense warns that low-skilled threat actors are increasingly abusing Vercel's v0.dev GenAI tools to generate convincing phishing pages with minimal effort. Attackers can prototype for free, purchase tokens to build pages, and use Vercel hosting—its pro tier is roughly $20/month—to deploy and tear down sites quickly. Integrations with services like Telegram, AWS, Stripe and xAI further simplify operations. Cofense advises security teams to verify sender domains, watch for urgency cues and report malicious Vercel sites for takedown.

🐧 Trend Micro researchers revealed a previously undocumented Linux implant named Quasar Linux (QLNX) that targets software developers by compromising development and DevOps environments such as npm, PyPI, GitHub, AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes. QLNX dynamically compiles rootkit and PAM backdoor modules on the host, runs fileless in memory, and employs multiple persistence methods while wiping logs and spoofing process names to remain stealthy. The toolkit includes a 58-command RAT, credential harvesting (SSH keys, cloud configs, and /etc/shadow), kernel eBPF hiding, surveillance, lateral movement, and in-memory injection; Trend Micro provided IoCs but attribution and prevalence remain unclear.

⚠️ ReversingLabs researchers describe an ongoing supply‑chain campaign called PromptMink that manipulates AI coding agents into installing malicious dependencies. Attackers publish bait packages with persuasive READMEs and LLM‑optimized documentation on registries like NPM and PyPI to increase discovery by autonomous agents and developers. The operation, attributed to North Korea’s Famous Chollima, paired legitimate‑looking SDKs with second‑layer packages carrying infostealers, later evolving to compiled Rust add‑ons, SEAs, SSH backdoors, and project exfiltration.

📩 Microsoft Defender Research disclosed a large-scale credential-theft campaign that targeted over 35,000 users at roughly 13,000 organizations using polished fake internal compliance notifications. Running April 15–16, 2026, the messages used enterprise-style HTML templates, organization-specific names and attached PDFs that redirected recipients through a Cloudflare CAPTCHA to staged authentication pages. Attackers employed an adversary-in-the-middle (AiTM) flow to harvest tokens and compromise accounts, primarily impacting US firms but seen in 26 countries. Microsoft recommends enabling passwordless authentication, using authenticator apps for MFA, turning on Safe Links and Safe Attachments, and configuring attack disruption in Microsoft Defender XDR.

🔎 A North Korea-aligned espionage group has trojanized Windows and Android clients on a regional Yanbian gaming site, according to ESET. The campaign, attributed to ScarCruft (APT37), delivered an Android port of the BirdCall backdoor (internally named zhuagou) and a trojanized mono.dll on Windows to deploy RokRAT and BirdCall. The malware harvests contacts, SMS, files, screenshots and audio, and routes command-and-control through cloud storage accounts.

🔒 Trellix disclosed on May 4 that threat actors gained unauthorized access to a portion of its source code repository and that it has notified law enforcement while working with leading forensic experts. The company, formed from the merger of McAfee Enterprise and FireEye, said it has found no evidence that its source code release or distribution process was affected or exploited. Trellix sells threat intelligence and AI-powered detection services including NDR and EDR and will share further details once the investigation concludes.