Turla Turns Kazuar Backdoor Into Modular P2P Botnet for Persistent Access  Ravie Lakshmanan  May 15, 2026 Botnet / Threat Intelligence The Russian state-sponsored hacking group known as Turla has transformed its custom backdoor Kazuar into a modular peer-to-peer (P2P) botnet that's engineered for stealth and persistent access to compromised hosts. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), is assessed to be affiliated with Center 16 of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB). It overlaps with activity traced by the broader cybersecurity community under the names ATG26, Blue Python, Iron Hunter, Pensive Ursa, Secret Blizzard (formerly Krypton), Snake, SUMMIT, Uroburos, Venomous Bear, Waterbug, and WRAITH.

What 45 Days of Watching Your Own Tools Will Tell You About Your Real Attack Surface  The Hacker News  May 15, 2026 Endpoint Security / Threat Detection Your Biggest Security Risk Isn't Malware — It's What You Already Trust , we made a simple argument: the most dangerous activity inside most organizations no longer looks like an attack. PowerShell, WMIC, netsh, Certutil, MSBuild — the same trusted utilities your IT team uses every day are also the preferred toolkit of modern threat actors. Bitdefender's analysis of 700,000 high-severity incidents found legitimate-tool abuse in 84% of them .

TanStack Supply Chain Attack Hits Two OpenAI Employee Devices, Forces macOS Updates  Ravie Lakshmanan  May 15, 2026 Supply Chain Attack / Malware OpenAI has disclosed that two of its employee devices in its corporate environment were impacted via the Mini Shai-Hulud supply chain attack on TanStack, but noted that no user data, production systems, or intellectual property were compromised or modified in an unauthorized manner. "Upon identification of the malicious activity, we worked quickly to investigate, contain, and take steps to protect our systems," OpenAI said . "We observed activity consistent with the malware's publicly described behavior, including unauthorized access and credential-focused exfiltration activity, in a limited subset of internal source code repositories to which the two impacted employees had access." The artificial intelligence (AI) upstart said only limited credential material was successfully transferred from these code repositories, adding no other information or code was impacted.

How AI Hallucinations Are Creating Real Security Risks  The Hacker News  May 14, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / Identity Security AI hallucinations are introducing serious security risks into critical infrastructure decision-making by exploiting human trust through highly confident yet incorrect outputs. When an AI model lacks certainty, it doesn’t have a mechanism to recognize that. Instead, it generates the most probable response based on patterns in its training data, even if that response is inaccurate.

Azerbaijani Energy Firm Hit by Repeated Microsoft Exchange Exploitation  Ravie Lakshmanan  May 13, 2026 Cyber Espionage / Malware A threat actor with affiliations to China has been linked to a "multi-wave intrusion" targeting an unnamed Azerbaijani oil and gas company between late December 2025 and late February 2026, marking an expansion of its targeting. The activity has been attributed by Bitdefender with moderate-to-high confidence to a hacking group known as FamousSparrow (aka UAT-9244), which shares some level of tactical overlap with clusters tracked under the monikers Earth Estries and Salt Typhoon. The attack paves the way for the deployment of two distinct backdoors across three separate waves: Deed RAT (aka Snappybee), a successor of ShadowPad that's used by multiple China-nexus espionage groups, and TernDoor , which was recently discovered in attacks targeting telecommunications infrastructure in South America since 2024.

[Webinar] How Modern Attack Paths Cross Code, Pipelines, and Cloud  The Hacker News  May 13, 2026 AppSec / Webinar TL;DR: Stop chasing thousands of "toast" alerts. Join experts from Wiz to learn how hackers connect tiny flaws to build a "Lethal Chain" to your data—and how to break it. Register for the Strategic Briefing Here .

Most Remediation Programs Never Confirm the Fix Actually Worked  The Hacker News  May 13, 2026 Cloud Security / Automation Security teams have never had better visibility into their environments and never been worse at confirming what they fix stays fixed. Mandiant's M-Trends 2026 report puts the mean time to exploit at an estimated negative seven days. The Verizon 2025 DBIR puts median time to remediate edge device vulnerabilities at 32 days.

GemStuffer Abuses 150+ RubyGems to Exfiltrate Scraped U.K. Council Portal Data  Ravie Lakshmanan  May 13, 2026 Software Supply Chain / Data Exfiltration Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new campaign dubbed GemStuffer that has targeted the RubyGems repository with more than 150 gems that use the registry as a data exfiltration channel rather than for malware distribution. "The packages do not appear designed for mass developer compromise," Socket said .

Android Adds Intrusion Logging for Sophisticated Spyware Forensics  Ravie Lakshmanan  May 13, 2026 Encryption / Spyware Google on Tuesday unveiled a new opt-in Android feature called Intrusion Logging for storing forensic logs to better analyze sophisticated spyware attacks. Intrusion Logging, available as part of Advanced Protection Mode , enables "persistent and privacy-preserving forensics logging to allow for investigation of devices in the event of a suspected compromise," the company said. The feature, it added, was developed in partnership with Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders.

RubyGems Suspends New Signups After Hundreds of Malicious Packages Are Uploaded  Ravie Lakshmanan  May 12, 2026 Supply Chain Attack / Software Security RubyGems , the standard package manager for the Ruby programming language, has temporarily paused account sign ups following what has been described as a "major malicious attack." "We're dealing with a major malicious attack on RubyGems right now," Maciej Mensfeld, senior product manager for software supply chain security at Mend.io, said in a post on X. "Signups are paused for the time being. Hundreds of packages involved – mostly targeting us, but some carrying exploits." Visitors to RubyGems' sign up page are now greeted with the message: "New account registration has been temporarily disabled." Mend.io, which secures RubyGems, said it intends to release more details once the incident is contained.

New TrickMo Variant Uses TON C2 and SOCKS5 to Create Android Network Pivots  Ravie Lakshmanan  May 12, 2026 Malware / Mobile Security Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new version of the TrickMo Android banking trojan that uses The Open Network (TON) for command-and-control (C2). The new variant, observed by ThreatFabric between January and February 2026, has been observed actively targeting banking and cryptocurrency wallet users in France, Italy, and Austria. "TrickMo relies on a runtime-loaded APK  (dex.module), used also by the previous variant, but updated with new features adding new network-oriented functionality, including reconnaissance, SSH tunnelling, and SOCKS5 proxying capabilities that allow infected devices to function as programmable network pivots and traffic-exit nodes," the Dutch mobile security company said in a report shared with The Hacker News.

Webinar: What the Riskiest SOC Alerts Go Unanswered - and How Radiant Security Can Help  The Hacker News  May 12, 2026 Threat Detection / AI Security Why do the Riskiest SOC Alerts Go Unanswered? Security operations teams are drowning in alerts. But the real problem isn't always alert volume; it's the blind spots.

Why Agentic AI Is Security's Next Blind Spot  The Hacker News  May 12, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / Threat Detection Agentic AI is already running in production environments across many organizations today. It is executing tasks, consuming data, and taking actions — most likely without meaningful involvement from the security team. The industry conversation has largely framed this as a question of policy: allow it, restrict it, or monitor it?

Instructure Reaches Ransom Agreement with ShinyHunters to Stop 3.65TB Canvas Leak  Ravie Lakshmanan  May 12, 2026 Vulnerability / Network Security American educational technology company Instructure, the parent company of Canvas, said it reached an "agreement" with a decentralized cybercrime extortion group after it breached its network and threatened to leak stolen information from thousands of schools and universities. In an update shared on Monday, the Utah-based firm said it "reached an agreement with the unauthorized actor involved in this incident," citing "concerns about the potential publication of data." In taking the controversial decision to pay a ransom to avoid a leak, the company said the agreement covers all its impacted customers and that the pilfered data was returned to it, along with digital confirmation of data destruction. It also said it has been informed that none of the company's customers will be separately extorted as a result of the hack.

OpenAI Launches Daybreak for AI-Powered Vulnerability Detection and Patch Validation  Ravie Lakshmanan  May 12, 2026 Vulnerability / AI Security OpenAI has launched Daybreak , a new cybersecurity initiative that brings together frontier artificial intelligence (AI) model capabilities and Codex Security to help organizations identify and patch vulnerabilities before attackers find a way in using the same issues. "Daybreak combines the intelligence of OpenAI models, the extensibility of Codex as an agentic harness, and our partners across the security flywheel to help make the world safer for everyone," the AI upstart said . "Defenders can bring secure code review, threat modeling, patch validation, dependency risk analysis, detection, and remediation guidance into the everyday development loop so software becomes more resilient from the start." Like Anthropic's Mythos , the idea is to leverage AI to tilt the balance in favor of defenders and help detect and address security issues before they are found by bad actors.

iOS 26.5 Brings Default End-to-End Encrypted RCS Messaging Between iPhone and Android  Ravie Lakshmanan  May 12, 2026 Encryption / Mobile Security Apple on Monday officially released iOS 26.5 with support for end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to Rich Communication Services (RCS) in beta as part of a "cross-industry effort" to replace traditional SMS with a more secure alternative. To that end, E2EE RCS messaging is rolling out to iPhone users running iOS 26.5 with supported carriers and Android users on the latest version of Google Messages. The feature is enabled by default for both new and existing conversations in both platforms.

TeamPCP Compromises Checkmarx Jenkins AST Plugin Weeks After KICS Supply Chain Attack  Ravie Lakshmanan  May 11, 2026 Supply Chain Attack / DevSecOps Checkmarx has confirmed that a modified version of the Jenkins AST plugin was published to the Jenkins Marketplace. "If you are using Checkmarx Jenkins AST plugin, you need to ensure that you are using the version 2.0.13-829.vc72453fa_1c16 that was published on December 17, 2025 or previously," the cybersecurity company said in a statement over the weekend. As of writing, Checkmarx has released 2.0.13-848.v76e89de8a_053 on both GitHub and the Jenkins Marketplace.

Hackers Used AI to Develop First Known Zero-Day 2FA Bypass for Mass Exploitation  Ravie Lakshmanan  May 11, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / Vulnerability Google on Monday disclosed that it identified an unknown threat actor using a zero-day exploit that it said was likely developed with an artificial intelligence (AI) system, marking the first time the technology has been put to use in the wild in a malicious context for vulnerability discovery and exploit generation. The activity is said to be the work of cybercrime threat actors who appear to have collaborated together to plan what the tech giant described as a "mass vulnerability exploitation operation." "Our analysis of exploits associated with this campaign identified a zero-day vulnerability implemented in a Python script that enables the user to bypass two-factor authentication (2FA) on a popular open-source, web-based system administration tool," Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The tech giant said it worked with the impacted vendor to responsibly disclose the flaw and get it fixed in order to proactively disrupt the activity.

Your Purple Team Isn't Purple — It's Just Red and Blue in the Same Room  The Hacker News  May 11, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / Penetration Testing Defending a network at 2 am looks a lot like this: an analyst copy-pasting a hash from a PDF into a SIEM query. A red team script is being rewritten by hand so the blue team can use it. A patch waiting on a change-approval window that's longer than the exploitation window itself.

Fake OpenAI Privacy Filter Repo Hits #1 on Hugging Face, Draws 244K Downloads  Ravie Lakshmanan  May 11, 2026 Supply Chain Attack / Threat Intelligence A malicious Hugging Face repository managed to take a spot in the platform's trending list by impersonating OpenAI's Privacy Filter open-weight model to deliver a Rust-based information stealer to Windows users. The project, named Open-OSS/privacy-filter , masqueraded as its legitimate counterpart released by OpenAI late last month ( openai/privacy-filter ), including copying the entire description verbatim to trick unsuspecting users into downloading it. Access to the malicious model has since been disabled by Hugging Face.

TCLBANKER Banking Trojan Targets Financial Platforms via WhatsApp and Outlook Worms  Ravie Lakshmanan  May 08, 2026 Malware / Threat Intelligence Threat hunters have flagged a previously undocumented Brazilian banking trojan dubbed TCLBANKER that's capable of targeting 59 banking, fintech, and cryptocurrency platforms. The activity is being tracked by Elastic Security Labs under the moniker REF3076 . The malware family is assessed to be a major update of the Maverick  family, which is known to leverage a worm called SORVEPOTEL to spread via WhatsApp Web to a victim's contacts.

Fake Call History Apps Stole Payments From Users After 7.3 Million Play Store Downloads  Ravie Lakshmanan  May 08, 2026 Android / Mobile Security Cybersecurity researchers have discovered fraudulent apps on the official Google Play Store for Android that falsely claimed to offer access to call histories for any phone number, only to trick users into joining a subscription that provided fake data and incurred financial loss. The 28 apps have collectively racked up more than 7.3 million downloads, with one of them alone accounting for over 3 million downloads, before they were taken down from the official app storefront.The activity, codenamed CallPhantom by Slovakian cybersecurity company ESET, primarily targeted Android users in India and the broader Asia-Pacific region. "The offending apps, which we named CallPhantom based on their false claims, purport to provide access to call histories, SMS records, and even WhatsApp call logs for any phone number," ESET security researcher Lukáš Štefanko said in a report shared with The Hacker News.

One Click, Total Shutdown: The "Patient Zero" Webinar on Killing Stealth Breaches  The Hacker News  May 08, 2026 Artificial Intelligence / Threat Detection The hardest part of cybersecurity isn't the technology, it’s the people. Every major breach you’ve read about lately usually starts the same way: one employee, one clever email, and one "Patient Zero" infection. In 2026, hackers are using AI to make these "first clicks" nearly impossible to spot.

Quasar Linux RAT Steals Developer Credentials for Software Supply Chain Compromise  Ravie Lakshmanan  May 08, 2026 Linux / DevOps A previously undocumented Linux implant codenamed Quasar Linux RAT (QLNX) is targeting developers' systems to establish a silent foothold as well as facilitate a broad range of post-compromise functionality, such as credential harvesting, keylogging, file manipulation, clipboard monitoring, and network tunneling. "QLNX targets developers and DevOps credentials across the software supply chain," Trend Micro researchers Aliakbar Zahravi and Ahmed Mohamed Ibrahim said in a technical analysis of the malware. "Its credential harvester extracts secrets from high-value files such as .npmrc (npm tokens), .pypirc (PyPI credentials), .git-credentials, .aws/credentials, .kube/config, .docker/config.json, .vault-token, Terraform credentials, GitHub CLI tokens, and .env files.

One Missed Threat Per Week: What 25M Alerts Reveal About Low-Severity Risk  The Hacker News  May 08, 2026 Threat Detection / AI Security The dark secret of enterprise security operations is that defenders have quietly institutionalized the practice of not looking. This is not just anecdotal, but rather backed by a recent report investigating more than 25 million security alerts, including informational and low-severity, across live enterprise environments. The dataset behind these findings includes 10 million monitored endpoints and identities, 82,000 forensic endpoint investigations including live memory scans, 180 million files analyzed, and telemetry from 7 million IP addresses, 3 million domains and URLs, and over 550,000 phishing emails.

New Linux PamDOORa Backdoor Uses PAM Modules to Steal SSH Credentials  Ravie Lakshmanan  May 08, 2026 Malware / Threat Intelligence Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new Linux backdoor named PamDOORa that's being advertised on the Rehub Russian cybercrime forum for $1,600 by a threat actor called "darkworm." The backdoor is designed as a Pluggable Authentication Module ( PAM )-based post-exploitation toolkit that enables persistent SSH access by means of a magic password and specific TCP port combination. It's also capable of harvesting credentials from all legitimate users who authenticate through the compromised system. "The tool, called PamDOORa, is a new PAM-based backdoor, designed to serve as a post-exploitation backdoor, enabling authentication to servers via OpenSSH," Flare.io researcher Assaf Morag said in a technical report.