#Malware

#Malware

Spyware is one of the top threats to your mobile security and can severely impact your handset's performance if you are unlucky enough to become infected. It is a type of malware that typically lands on your iPhone or Android phone through malicious mobile apps or through phishing links, emails, and messages. While appearing to be a legitimate software package or useful utility, spyware will operate quietly in the background to monitor your movements,

The North Korea-linked threat actor known as UNC1069 has been observed targeting the cryptocurrency sector to steal sensitive data from Windows and macOS systems with the ultimate goal of facilitating financial theft. "The intrusion relied on a social engineering scheme involving a compromised Telegram account, a fake Zoom meeting, a ClickFix infection vector, and reported usage of AI-generated video to deceive the victim," Google Mandiant researchers Ross Inman and Adrian Hernandez said.

By mid-2026, at least one major global enterprise will fall to a breach caused or significantly advanced by a fully autonomous agentic AI system.

Starting today, Microsoft is making it more difficult for cyber attackers to infiltrate organizations via Teams. A new update now blocks dangerous file types and malicious URLs, unless companies explicitly change the default settings. The new features were already known, but will activate automatically today for organizations that have not tampered with the default settings. Companies with customized configurations will not notice the change; their settings will remain intact.

South Korea has successfully extradited a 29-year-old Lithuanian national accused of stealing approximately $1.8 million in digital assets through sophisticated malware.

The VS Code extensions masquerade as a premium dark theme and an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered coding assistant, but, in actuality, harbor covert functionality to download additional payloads, take screenshots, and siphon data. The captured information is then sent to an attacker-controlled server. "Your code. Your emails. Your Slack DMs. Whatever's on your screen, they're seeing it too," Koi Security's Idan Dardikman said. "And that's just the start. It also steals your WiFi passwords, reads your clipboard, and hijacks your browser sessions."

Small-business owner Johnny Carroll only got refund after a year of pleading and the company eventually said it had been a 'malware incident'.

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.

OpenAI has intensified its efforts to combat the misuse of artificial intelligence. In a new report, the company reveals that it has dismantled several international networks in recent months that were using its models for cyberattacks, scams, and political influence. The analysis shows how malicious actors are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their use of AI, while OpenAI is simultaneously expanding its defense mechanisms.

After installing a backdoor to the infected systems, they then downloaded two Java Archive (JAR) files that effectively patched the original vuln.

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.