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The North Korea-aligned state-sponsored hacking group known as ScarCruft has compromised a video game platform in a supply chain espionage attack, trojanizing its components with a backdoor called BirdCall to likely target ethnic Koreans residing in China. While prior versions of the backdoor have primarily targeted Windows users only, the supply chain attack is assessed to have enabled the threat actors to also target Android devices, essentially turning it into a multi-platform threat. According to ESET, the campaign has singled out sqgame[.]net, a gaming platform used by ethnic Koreans living in the Yanbian region in China bordering North Korea and Russia. It's also known to act as a primary, high-risk transit point for North Korean defectors crossing the Tumen River. The targeting of this platform is said to be a deliberate strategy given ScarCruft's storied   history of targeting North Korean defectors, human rights activists, and university professors. "In t...

A critical security vulnerability in Weaver (Fanwei) E-cology , an enterprise office automation (OA) and collaboration platform, has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability ( CVE-2026-22679 , CVSS score: 9.8) relates to a case of unauthenticated remote code execution affecting Weaver E-cology 10.0 versions prior to 20260312. The issue resides in the "/papi/esearch/data/devops/dubboApi/debug/method" endpoint that allows an attacker to execute arbitrary commands by invoking exposed debug functionality. "Attackers can craft POST requests with attacker-controlled interfaceName and methodName parameters to reach command-execution helpers and achieve arbitrary command execution on the system," according to a description of the flaw in the NIST National Vulnerability Database (NVD). The advisory also noted that the Shadowserver Foundation observed the first signs of active exploitation on March 31, 2026. Chinese security vendor QiAnXin said it w...

Microsoft has disclosed details of a large-scale credential theft campaign that has leveraged a combination of code of conduct-themed lures and legitimate email services to direct users to attacker-controlled domains and steal authentication tokens. The multi-stage campaign, observed between April 14 and 16, 2026, targeted more than 35,000 users across over 13,000 organizations in 26 countries, with 92% of the targets located in the U.S. The majority of phishing emails were directed against healthcare and life sciences (19%), financial services (18%), professional services (11%), and technology and software (11%) sectors. "The lures in this campaign used polished, enterprise-style HTML templates with structured layouts and preemptive authenticity statements, making them appear more credible than typical phishing emails and increasing their plausibility as legitimate internal communications," the Microsoft Defender Security Research Team and Microsoft Threat Intelligence sa...

An active phishing campaign has been observed targeting multiple vectors since at least April 2025 with legitimate Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software as a way to establish persistent remote access to compromised hosts. The activity, codenamed VENOMOUS#HELPER , has impacted over 80 organizations, most of which are in the U.S., according to Securonix. It shares overlaps with clusters previously tracked by Red Canary and Sophos, the latter of which has given it the moniker STAC6405 . While it's not clear who is behind the campaign, the cybersecurity company said it aligns with a financially motivated Initial Access Broker (IAB) or a ransomware precursor operation. "In this case, a customized SimpleHelp and ScreenConnect RMMs are used to bypass defenses as they are legitimately installed by the unsuspecting victim," researchers Akshay Gaikwad, Shikha Sangwan, and Aaron Beardslee said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Setting aside the fact that the ...

Progress Software has released updates to address two security flaws in MOVEit Automation, including a critical bug that could result in an authentication bypass. MOVEit Automation (formerly Central) is a secure, server-based managed file transfer (MFT) solution used to schedule and automate file movement workflows in enterprise environments without requiring any custom scripts.  The vulnerabilities in question are CVE-2026-4670 (CVSS score: 9.8), an authentication bypass vulnerability, and CVE-2026-5174 (CVSS score: 7.7), an improper input validation vulnerability that could allow privilege escalation. "Critical and high vulnerabilities in MOVEit Automation may allow authentication bypass and privilege escalation through the service backend command port interfaces," Progress Software said in an advisory. "Exploitation may lead to unauthorized access, administrative control, and data exposure." The shortcomings affect the following versions - MOVEit Autom...

This week, the shadows moved faster than the patches. While most teams were still triaging last month’s alerts, attackers had already turned control panels into kill switches, kernels into open doors, and open-source pipelines into silent delivery systems. The game has shifted from breach to occupation. They’re living inside SaaS sessions, pushing code with trusted commits, and scaling operations like legitimate businesses — except their product is chaos. And the underground is getting uncomfortably professional. Here’s the full weekly cybersecurity recap: ⚡ Threat of the Week cPanel Flaw Comes Under Attack —A critical flaw in cPanel and WebHost Manager (WHM) has come under active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-41940, could result in an authentication bypass and allow remote attackers to gain elevated control of the control panel. In some cases , the attacks have led to a complete wipe of entire websites and backups. Other attacks have deployed ...

On December 4, 2025, a 17-year-old was arrested in Osaka under Japan’s Unauthorized Access Prohibition Act. The young man had run malicious code to extract the personal data of over 7 million users of Kaikatsu Club , Japan's largest internet cafe chain. When asked, the young man shared his motivation for the hack: he wanted to buy Pokémon cards. In a sense, this is a fairly conventional story. Since the 1990s, we’ve read about computing wunderkinds such as Kevin Mitnick, whose technical ability exceeded their judgment and who were drawn into high-profile cybercrimes in pursuit of status, profit, or excitement. But something is different in this story: the young man in question wasn’t technical. The rise of AI-assisted attacks In 2025, LLM-backed chat and agent systems crossed a threshold, going from useful but error-prone coding assistants to end-to-end coding powerhouses. Throughout the year, several measures of cybercrime frequency and severity approximately doubled. Instanc...

The China-based cybercrime group known as Silver Fox has been linked to a new campaign targeting organizations in Russia and India with a new malware called ABCDoor . The activity involved using phishing emails that mimic correspondence from the Income Tax Department of India in December 2025, followed by a similar campaign aimed at Russian entities in January 2026. "Both waves followed a nearly identical structure: phishing emails were styled as official notices regarding tax audits or prompted users to download an archive containing a 'list of tax violations,'" Kaspersky said . "Inside the archive was a modified Rust-based loader pulled from a public repository. This loader would download and execute the well-known ValleyRAT backdoor." The campaign is estimated to have impacted organizations across the industrial, consulting, retail, and transportation sectors. More than 1,600 phishing emails were flagged between early January and early February. ...

A previously unknown threat actor has been observed targeting government and military entities in Southeast Asia, alongside a smaller cluster of managed service providers (MSPs) and hosting providers in the Philippines, Laos, Canada, South Africa, and the U.S., by exploiting the recently disclosed vulnerability in cPanel. The activity, detected by Ctrl-Alt-Intel on May 2, 2026, involves the abuse of CVE-2026-41940 , a critical vulnerability in cPanel and WebHost Manager (WHM) that could result in an authentication bypass and allow remote attackers to gain elevated control of the control panel. The attack efforts have originated from the IP address "95.111.250[.]175," primarily singling out government and military domains associated with the Philippines (*.mil.ph and (*.ph)) and Laos (*.gov.la), as well as MSPs and hosting providers, using publicly-available   proof-of-concepts (PoCs). In addition, Ctrl-Alt-Intel revealed that the threat actor used a separate custom exp...

A coordinated international operation involving U.S. and Chinese authorities has arrested at least 276 suspects and shut down nine scam centers used for cryptocurrency investment fraud schemes targeting Americans, resulting in millions of dollars in losses. The crackdown was led by the Dubai Police, under the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Ministry of Interior, in partnership with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Chinese Ministry of Public Security. Among those arrested are individuals from Burma and Indonesia, who were apprehended by authorities from Dubai and Thailand. Thet Min Nyi, 27, Wiliang Awang, 23, Andreas Chandra, 29, Lisa Mariam, 29, and two fugitive co-conspirators have been charged with federal fraud and money laundering charges in the U.S. "Fraudsters who target Americans from overseas cannot operate with impunity, no matter where in the world they reside," Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department's (DoJ) Crimi...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday added a recently disclosed security flaw impacting various Linux distributions to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-31431 (CVSS score: 7.8), is a case of local privilege escalation (LPE) flaw that could allow an unprivileged local user to obtain root. The nine-year-old flaw is also tracked as Copy Fail by Theori and Xint. Fixes have been made available in Linux kernel versions 6.18.22, 6.19.12, and 7.0. "Linux Kernel contains an incorrect resource transfer between spheres vulnerability that could allow for privilege escalation," CISA said in an advisory. In a write-up published earlier this week, the researchers said Copy Fail is the result of a logic bug in the Linux kernel's authentication cryptographic template that allows an attacker to reliably trigger privilege escalation tri...

Cybersecurity company Trellix has announced that it suffered a breach that enabled unauthorized access to a "portion" of its source code. It said it "recently identified" the compromise of its source code repository and that it began working with "leading forensic experts" to resolve the matter immediately. It also said it has notified law enforcement of the matter. Trellix did not disclose the exact nature of the data that may have been accessed by the attackers. However, it pointed out that there are no indications that its source code has been affected or exploited. "Based on our investigation to date, we have found no evidence that our source code release or distribution process was affected, or that our source code has been exploited," the company added.  The company did not share any details about who may be behind the incident, and for how long the attackers had access to its systems. Trellix noted that additional information will b...