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Mongolian governmental institutions have emerged as the target of a previously undocumented China-aligned advanced persistent threat (APT) group tracked as GopherWhisper . "The group wields a wide array of tools mostly written in Go, using injectors and loaders to deploy and execute various backdoors in its arsenal," Slovakian cybersecurity company ESET said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "GopherWhisper abuses legitimate services, notably Discord, Slack, Microsoft 365 Outlook, and file.io for command-and-control (C&C) communication and exfiltration." The group was first discovered in January 2025 following the discovery of a never-before-seen backdoor codenamed LaxGopher on a system belonging to a Mongolian governmental entity. Also discovered as part of the threat actor's arsenal are a number of other malware families, mostly developed using Golang to receive instructions from the C&C server, execute them, and send the results back. Also...

Vercel on Wednesday revealed that it has identified an additional set of customer accounts that were compromised as part of a security incident that enabled unauthorized access to its internal systems. The company said it made the discovery after expanding its investigation to include an extra set of compromise indicators, alongside a review of requests to the Vercel network and environment variable read events in its logs. "Second, we have uncovered a small number of customer accounts with evidence of prior compromise that is independent of and predates this incident, potentially as a result of social engineering, malware, or other methods," the company said in an update. In both cases, Vercel said it notified affected parties. It did not disclose the exact number of customers who were impacted. The development comes after the company that created the Next.js framework acknowledged the breach originated with a compromise of Context.ai after it was used by a Vercel em...

Apple has rolled out a software fix for iOS and iPadOS to address a Notification Services flaw that stored notifications marked for deletion on the device. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-28950 (CVSS score: N/A), has been described as a logging issue that has been addressed with improved data redaction. "Notifications marked for deletion could be unexpectedly retained on the device," Apple said in an advisory. The shortcoming affects the following devices - iPhone 11 and later, iPad Pro 12.9-inch 3rd generation and later, iPad Pro 11-inch 1st generation and later, iPad Air 3rd generation and later, iPad 8th generation and later, and iPad mini 5th generation and later - Fixed in iOS 26.4.2 and iPadOS 26.4.2 iPhone XR, iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, iPhone 11 (all models), iPhone SE (2nd generation), iPhone 12 (all models), iPhone 13 (all models), iPhone SE (3rd generation), iPhone 14 (all models), iPhone 15 (all models), iPhone 16 (all models), iPhone 16e, iPad mini (...

Cybersecurity researchers have warned of malicious images pushed to the official " checkmarx/kics " Docker Hub repository. In an alert published today, software supply chain security company Socket revealed that unknown threat actors managed to have overwritten existing tags, including v2.1.20 and alpine, while also introducing a new v2.1.21 tag that does not correspond to an official release. The Docker repository has been archived as of writing. "Analysis of the poisoned image indicates that the bundled KICS binary was modified to include data collection and exfiltration capabilities not present in the legitimate version," Socket said. "The malware could generate an uncensored scan report, encrypt it, and send it to an external endpoint, creating a serious risk for teams using KICS to scan infrastructure-as-code files that may contain credentials or other sensitive configuration data." Further analysis of the incident has uncovered that related Ch...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a fresh set of packages that have been compromised by bad actors to deliver a self-propagating worm that spreads through stolen developer npm tokens. The supply chain worm has been detected by both Socket and StepSecurity , with the companies tracking the activity under the name CanisterSprawl owing to the use of an ICP canister to exfiltrate the stolen data, in a tactic reminiscent of TeamPCP's CanisterWorm to make the infrastructure resilient to takedowns. The list of affected packages is below - @automagik/genie (4.260421.33 - 4.260421.40) @fairwords/loopback-connector-es (1.4.3 - 1.4.4) @fairwords/websocket (1.0.38 - 1.0.39) @openwebconcept/design-tokens (1.0.1 - 1.0.3) @openwebconcept/theme-owc (1.0.1 - 1.0.3) pgserve (1.1.11 - 1.1.14) The malware is triggered during install time via a postinstall hook to steal credentials and secrets from developer environments, and then leverage the stolen npm tokens to push poisoned ver...

The threat actor known as Harvester has been attributed to a new Linux version of its GoGra backdoor deployed as part of attacks likely targeting entities in South Asia. "The malware uses the legitimate Microsoft Graph API and Outlook mailboxes as a covert command-and-control (C2) channel, allowing it to bypass traditional perimeter network defenses," the Symantec and Carbon Black Threat Hunter Team said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The cybersecurity company said it identified artifacts uploaded to the VirusTotal platform from India and Afghanistan, suggesting that the two countries may be the target of the espionage activity. Harvester was first publicly documented by Symantec in late 2021, linking it to an information-stealing campaign aimed at telecommunications, government, and information technology sectors in South Asia since June 2021, using a bespoke implant called Graphon that used the Microsoft Graph API for C2. Subsequent activity flagged in Au...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a previously undocumented data wiper that has been used in attacks targeting Venezuela at the end of last year and the start of 2026. Dubbed Lotus Wiper , the novel file wiper has been used in a destructive campaign targeting the energy and utilities sector in Venezuela, per findings from Kaspersky. "Two batch scripts are responsible for initiating the destructive phase of the attack and preparing the environment for executing the final wiper payload," the Russian cybersecurity vendor said . "These scripts coordinate the start of the operation across the network, weaken system defenses, and disrupt normal operations before retrieving, deobfuscating, and executing a previously unknown wiper." Once deployed, the wiper erases recovery mechanisms, overwrites the content of physical drives, and systematically deletes files across affected volumes, effectively leaving the system in an inoperable state. No extortion or paymen...

On January 31, 2026, researchers disclosed that Moltbook, a social network built for AI agents, had left its database wide open, exposing 35,000 email addresses and 1.5 million agent API tokens across 770,000 active agents. The more worrying part sat inside the private messages. Some of those conversations held plaintext third-party credentials, including OpenAI API keys shared between agents, stored in the same unencrypted table as the tokens needed to hijack the agent itself. This is the shape of a toxic combination: a permission breakdown between two or more applications, bridged by an AI agent, integration, or OAuth grant, that no single application owner ever authorized as its own risk surface. Moltbook's agents sat at that bridge, carrying credentials for their host platform and for the outside services their users had wired them into, in a place that neither platform owner had line of sight into. Most SaaS access reviews still examine one application at a time, which is...

Microsoft has released out-of-band updates to address a security vulnerability in ASP.NET Core that could allow an attacker to escalate privileges. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-40372 , carries a CVSS score of 9.1 out of 10.0. It's rated Important in severity. An anonymous researcher has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. "Improper verification of cryptographic signature in ASP.NET Core allows an unauthorized attacker to elevate privileges over a network," Microsoft said in a Tuesday advisory. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain SYSTEM privileges." The tech giant said an attacker could abuse the vulnerability to disclose files and modify data, but emphasized that successful exploitation hinges on three prerequisites - The application uses Microsoft.AspNetCore.DataProtection 10.0.6 from NuGet (either directly or through a package that depends on it, such as Microsoft.AspNetCore.DataProtection.S...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new variant of a known malware called LOTUSLITE that's distributed via a theme related to India's banking sector. "The backdoor communicates with a dynamic DNS-based command-and-control server over HTTPS and supports remote shell access, file operations, and session management, indicating a continued espionage-focused capability set rather than financially motivated objectives," Acronis researchers Subhajeet Singha and Santiago Pontiroli said in an analysis. The use of LOTUSLITE was previously observed in spear-phishing attacks targeting U.S. government and policy entities using decoys associated with the geopolitical developments between the U.S. and Venezuela. The activity was attributed with medium confidence to a Chinese nation-state group tracked as Mustang Panda. The latest activity flagged by Acronis involves deploying an evolved version of LOTUSLITE that demonstrates "incremental improvements" over ...

A critical security vulnerability has been disclosed in a Python-based sandbox called Terrarium that could result in arbitrary code execution. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-5752 , is rated 9.3 on the CVSS scoring system. "Sandbox escape vulnerability in Terrarium allows arbitrary code execution with root privileges on a host process via JavaScript prototype chain traversal," according to a description of the flaw in CVE.org. Developed by Cohere AI as an open-source project, Terrarium is a Python sandbox that's used as a Docker-deployed container for running untrusted code written by users or generated with assistance from a large language model (LLM). Notably, Terrarium runs on Pyodide, a Python distribution for the browser and Node.js, enabling it to support standard Python packages.  The project has been forked 56 times and starred 312 times. According to the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC), the root cause relates to a JavaScript prototype chain t...

Threat actors associated with The Gentlemen ransomware‑as‑a‑service (RaaS) operation have been observed attempting to deploy a known proxy malware called SystemBC . According to new research published by Check Point, the command-and-control (C2 or C&C) server linked to SystemBC has led to the discovery of a botnet of more than 1,570 victims. "SystemBC establishes SOCKS5 network tunnels within the victim’s environment and connects to its C&C server using a custom RC4‑encrypted protocol," Check Point said. "It can also download and execute additional malware, with payloads either written to disk or injected directly into memory." Since its emergence in July 2025, The Gentlemen has quickly established itself as one of the most prolific ransomware groups, claiming more than 320 victims on its data leak site. Operating under a classic double-extortion model, the group is versatile as it's sophisticated, exhibiting capabilities to target Windows, Linux, N...