Phishing actors exploit complex routing and misconfigurations to spoof domains

Phishing actors are exploiting complex routing scenarios and misconfigured spoof protections to effectively spoof organizations’ domains and deliver phishing emails that appear, superficially, to have been sent internally. Threat actors have leveraged this vector to deliver a wide variety of...

JackFix Uses Fake Windows Update Pop-Ups on Adult Sites to Deliver Multiple Stealers

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new campaign that's leveraging a combination of ClickFix lures and fake adult websites to deceive users into running malicious commands under the guise of a "critical" Windows security update. "Campaign leverages fake adult websites xHamster,...

Hackers Hide RMM Installs as Fake Chrome Updates and Teams Invites

New research from Red Canary and Zscaler shows phishing lures now drop RMM tools like ITarian and Atera,…...

Blind Eagle's Five Clusters Target Colombia Using RATs, Phishing Lures, and Dynamic DNS Infra

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered five distinct activity clusters linked to a persistent threat actor known as Blind Eagle between May 2024 and July 2025. These attacks, observed by Recorded Future Insikt Group, targeted various victims, but primarily within the Colombian government acros...

Threat actors thrive in chaos

Welcome to this week's edition of the Threat Source newsletter. If there's one thing that threat actors love, it's chaos. Headlines in the news that provoke an emotional response make excellent phishing lures because the intense feelings invoked by a provocative subject line cause our critical...

North Korean Hackers Target Energy and Aerospace Industries with New MISTPEN Malware

A North Korea-linked cyber-espionage group has been observed leveraging job-themed phishing lures to target prospective victims in energy and aerospace verticals and infect them with a previously undocumented backdoor dubbed MISTPEN. The activity cluster is being tracked by Google-owned Mandiant...

China-linked APT17 Targets Italian Companies with 9002 RAT Malware

A China-linked threat actor called APT17 has been observed targeting Italian companies and government entities using a variant of a known malware referred to as 9002 RAT. The two targeted attacks took place on June 24 and July 2, 2024, Italian cybersecurity company TG Soft said in an analysis...

Brazilian Feds Dismantle Grandoreiro Banking Trojan, Arresting Top Operatives

A Brazilian law enforcement operation has led to the arrest of several Brazilian operators in charge of the Grandoreiro malware. The Federal Police of Brazil said it served five temporary arrest warrants and 13 search and seizure warrants in the states of São Paulo, Santa Catarina, Pará, Goiás, a...

Malware distributor Storm-0324 facilitates ransomware access

The threat actor that Microsoft tracks as Storm-0324 is a financially motivated group known to gain initial access using email-based initial infection vectors and then hand off access to compromised networks to other threat actors. These handoffs frequently lead to ransomware deployment. Beginnin...

PicassoLoader Malware Used in Ongoing Attacks on Ukraine and Poland

Government entities, military organizations, and civilian users in Ukraine and Poland have been targeted as part of a series of campaigns designed to steal sensitive data and gain persistent remote access to the infected systems. The intrusion set, which stretches from April 2022 to July 2023,...

URLs have always been a great hiding place for threat actors

Welcome to this weeks edition of the Threat Source newsletter. Talos recent blog post on the dangers posed by the newly released ".zip" top-level domain TLD recently outlined how threat actors could create real URLs that look like file names and trick users into clicking on their links. .Zip and...

New Botnet Malware 'Horabot' Targets Spanish-Speaking Users in Latin America

Spanish-speaking users in Latin America have been at the receiving end of a new botnet malware dubbed Horabot since at least November 2020. "Horabot enables the threat actor to control the victim's Outlook mailbox, exfiltrate contacts' email addresses, and send phishing emails with malicious HTML...

Cyber Attacks Strike Ukraine's State Bodies in Espionage Operation

The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine CERT-UA has warned of cyber attacks targeting state bodies in the country as part of an espionage campaign. The intrusion set, attributed to a threat actor tracked by the authority as UAC-0063 since 2021, leverages phishing lures to deploy a variety...

PY#RATION: New Python-based RAT Uses WebSocket for C2 and Data Exfiltration

Cybersecurity researchers have unearthed a new attack campaign that leverages a Python-based remote access trojan RAT to gain control over compromised systems since at least August 2022. "This malware is unique in its utilization of WebSockets to avoid detection and for both command-and-control C...

MuddyWater Hackers Target Asian and Middle East Countries with Updated Tactics

The Iran-linked MuddyWater threat actor has been observed targeting several countries in the Middle East as well as Central and West Asia as part of a new spear-phishing activity. "The campaign has been observed targeting Armenia, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Oman, Qatar, Tajikistan,...

Experts Detail 3 Hacking Teams Working Under the Umbrella of TA410 Group

A cyberespionage threat actor known for targeting a variety of critical infrastructure sectors in Africa, the Middle East, and the U.S. has been observed using an upgraded version of a remote access trojan with information stealing capabilities. Calling TA410 an umbrella group comprised of three...

Chinese 'Mustang Panda' Hackers Spotted Deploying New 'Hodur' Malware

A China-based advanced persistent threat APT known as Mustang Panda has been linked to an ongoing cyber espionage campaign using a previously undocumented variant of the PlugX remote access trojan on infected machines. Slovak cybersecurity firm ESET dubbed the new version Hodur, owing to its...

Porn Problem: Adult Ads Persist on US Gov’t, Military Sites

U.S. military and government website subdomains have a sticky problem: They’re “quite vulnerable” to blackhat SEO tactics that result in persistent redirects to spammy Viagra ads and porn videos. An example is one that showed up on a dot.mil subdomain on the Minnesota National Guard site you can...

Lewd Phishing Lures Aimed at Business Explode

Attackers have amped up their use of X-rated phishing lures in business email compromise BEC attacks. A new report found a stunning 974-percent spike in social-engineering scams involving suggestive materials, usually aimed at male-sounding names within a company. The Threat Intelligence team wit...

Pakistan-Linked Hackers Added New Windows Malware to Its Arsenal

Cybercriminals with suspected ties to Pakistan continue to rely on social engineering as a crucial component of its operations as part of an evolving espionage campaign against Indian targets, according to new research. The attacks have been linked to a group called Transparent Tribe, also known ...