Cisco Warns of Active Attacks Exploiting Unpatched 0-Day in AsyncOS Email Security Appliances

Cisco has alerted users to a maximum-severity zero-day flaw in Cisco AsyncOS software that has been actively exploited by a China-nexus advanced persistent threat APT actor codenamed UAT-9686 in attacks targeting Cisco Secure Email Gateway and Cisco Secure Email and Web Manager. The networking...

APT-ClaritySet: A Large-Scale, High-Fidelity Labeled Dataset for APT Malware with Alias Normalization and Graph-Based Deduplication

Large-scale, standardized datasets for Advanced Persistent Threat APT research are scarce, and inconsistent actor aliases and redundant samples hinder reproducibility. This paper presents APT-ClaritySet and its construction pipeline that normalizes threat actor aliases reconciling approximately...

Exploits and vulnerabilities in Q3 2025

In the third quarter, attackers continued to exploit security flaws in WinRAR, while the total number of registered vulnerabilities grew again. In this report, we examine statistics on published vulnerabilities and exploits, the most common security issues impacting Windows and Linux, and the...

From One Attack Domain to Another: Contrastive Transfer Learning with Siamese Networks for APT Detection

Advanced Persistent Threats APT pose a major cybersecurity challenge due to their stealth, persistence, and adaptability. Traditional machine learning detectors struggle with class imbalance, high dimensional features, and scarce real world traces. They often lack transferability-performing well ...

An Explainable Recursive Feature Elimination to Detect Advanced Persistent Threats Using Random Forest Classifier

Intrusion Detection Systems IDS play a vital role in modern cybersecurity frameworks by providing a primary defense mechanism against sophisticated threat actors. In this paper, we propose an explainable intrusion detection framework that integrates Recursive Feature Elimination RFE with Random...

About Remote Code Execution – Windows LNK File (CVE-2025-9491) vulnerability

About Remote Code Execution - Windows LNK File CVE-2025-9491 vulnerability. A vulnerability in the Microsoft Windows shortcut .LNK handling mechanism allows malicious command-line arguments to be hidden in the Target field using whitespace characters, making them invisible to standard tools...

Attention Augmented GNN RNN-Attention Models for Advanced Cybersecurity Intrusion Detection

In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid deep learning architecture that synergistically combines Graph Neural Networks GNNs, Recurrent Neural Networks RNNs, and multi-head attention mechanisms to significantly enhance cybersecurity intrusion detection capabilities. By leveraging the comprehensiv...

Cyber Warfare during Operation Sindoor: Malware Campaign Analysis and Detection Framework

Rapid digitization of critical infrastructure has made cyberwarfare one of the important dimensions of modern conflicts. Attacking the critical infrastructure is an attractive pre-emptive proposition for adversaries as it can be done remotely without crossing borders. Such attacks disturb the...

APTSimulator

This is a toolset for simulating an APT Advanced Persistent Threat attack on a Windows system. The tool, called APT Simulator, is a Windows Batch script that uses a set of tools and output files to make a system look as if it was compromised. It is designed to be simple and easy to use, requiring...

China-Linked APT41 Hackers Target U.S. Trade Officials Amid 2025 Negotiations

The House Select Committee on China has formally issued an advisory warning of an "ongoing" series of highly targeted cyber espionage campaigns linked to the People's Republic of China PRC amid contentious U.S.–China trade talks. "These campaigns seek to compromise organizations and individuals...

A Decade-Long Landscape of Advanced Persistent Threats: Longitudinal Analysis and Global Trends

An advanced persistent threat APT refers to a covert, long-term cyberattack, typically conducted by state-sponsored actors, targeting critical sectors and often remaining undetected for long periods. In response, collective intelligence from around the globe collaborates to identify and trace...

Bi-Level Game-Theoretic Planning of Cyber Deception for Cognitive Arbitrage

Cognitive vulnerabilities shape human decision-making and arise primarily from two sources: 1 cognitive capabilities, which include disparities in knowledge, education, expertise, or access to information, and 2 cognitive biases, such as rational inattention, confirmation bias, and base rate...

New Ransomware Charon Uses Earth Baxia APT Techniques To Target Enterprises

We uncovered Charon, a new ransomware strainfamily that uses advanced APT-style techniques, including DLL sideloading, process injection, and anti-EDR capabilities, to target organizations with customized ransom demands...

Newly identified wiper malware “PathWiper” targets critical infrastructure in Ukraine

Cisco Talos observed a destructive attack on a critical infrastructure entity within Ukraine, using a previously unknown wiper we are calling "PathWiper". The attack was instrumented via a legitimate endpoint administration framework, indicating that the attackers likely had access to the...

Earth Kurma Targets Southeast Asia With Rootkits and Cloud-Based Data Theft Tools

Government and telecommunications sectors in Southeast Asia have become the target of a "sophisticated" campaign undertaken by a new advanced persistent threat APT group called Earth Kurma since June 2024. The attacks, per Trend Micro, have leveraged custom malware, rootkits, and cloud storage...

Zero-Day Alert: Google Releases Chrome Patch for Exploit Used in Russian Espionage Attacks

Google has released out-of-band fixes to address a high-severity security flaw in its Chrome browser for Windows that has been exploited in the wild as part of attacks targeting organizations in Russia. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-2783 , has been described as a case of "incorrect handl...

UAT-5918 Targets Taiwan's Critical Infrastructure Using Web Shells and Open-Source Tools

Threat hunters have uncovered a new threat actor named UAT-5918 that has been attacking critical infrastructure entities in Taiwan since at least 2023. "UAT-5918, a threat actor believed to be motivated by establishing long-term access for information theft, uses a combination of web shells and...

UAT-5918 targets critical infrastructure entities in Taiwan

By Jung soo An, Asheer Malhotra, Brandon White, and Vitor Ventura. Cisco Talos discovered a malicious campaign we track under the UAT-5918 umbrella that has been active since at least 2023. UAT-5918, a threat actor believed to be motivated by establishing long-term access for information theft,...

U.S. Charges 12 Chinese Nationals in State-Backed Hacking Operations

The U.S. Department of Justice DoJ has announced charges against 12 Chinese nationals for their alleged participation in a wide-ranging scheme designed to steal data and suppress free speech and dissent globally. The individuals include two officers of the People's Republic of China's PRC Ministr...

Researchers Uncover Espionage Tactics of China-Based APT Groups in Southeast Asia

A suspected China-based threat actor has been linked to a series of cyber attacks targeting high-profile organizations in Southeast Asia since at least October 2023. The espionage campaign targeted organizations in various sectors spanning government ministries in two different countries, an air...