As Google begins early access testing, it has conceded that "experienced users" should have an escape hatch. According to Google, online scam and malware campaigns are getting more aggressive, and there's real harm being done in spite of the platform's sideloading scare screens. Google says it's common for scammers to use social engineering to create a false sense of urgency, prompting users to bypass Android's built-in protections to install malicious apps.
According to a security report from Infoblox, in cooperation with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the China-focused Universe Browser is advertised as a safe and private way to bypass censorship and web blocks. It has a specific use case for would-be online gamblers. But just underneath its surface, the browser is recording the user's location, routing all traffic data through servers in China, installing keyloggers, and changing network settings.
Some of these [companies' are heavily involved in the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sector, suggesting that the operation may be linked to North Korea's current efforts to scale up its drone program," ESET security researchers Peter Kálnai and Alexis Rapin said in a report shared with The Hacker News. It's assessed that the end goal of the campaign is to plunder proprietary information and manufacturing know-how using malware families such as ScoringMathTea and MISTPEN.
Webhooks on Discord are a way to post messages to channels in the platform without requiring a bot user or authentication, making them an attractive mechanism for attackers to exfiltrate data to a channel under their control. "Importantly, webhook URLs are effectively write-only," Socket researcher Olivia Brown said in an analysis. "They do not expose channel history, and defenders cannot read back prior posts just by knowing the URL."
OpenAI has published research revealing how state-sponsored and cybercriminal groups are abusing artificial intelligence (AI) to spread malware and perform widespread surveillance. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) AI has benefits in the cybersecurity space; it can automate tedious and time-consuming tasks, freeing up human specialists to focus on complex projects and research, for example.
The Noodlophile campaign, active for over a year, now leverages advanced spear-phishing emails posing as copyright infringement notices, tailored with reconnaissance-derived details like specific Facebook Page IDs and company ownership information.
"Like a real-world virus variant, this new 'ClickFix' strain quickly outpaced and ultimately wiped out the infamous fake browser update scam that plagued the web just last year."
