The paid WordPress SEO plugin Rank Math PRO was hit by a supply chain attack. Copies of version 3.0.123 downloaded from the vendor's site or delivered as updates between October 15, 2026 20:02 UTC and October 16, 2026 07:12 UTC contained malware (securityweek.com, thehackernews.com, bleepingcomputer.com). Any site that installed and activ…
On August 20, 2026, a compromised release of the Rust crate arrayref (0.3.10, about 245 million all-time downloads) appeared on crates.io. It added a dependency on the typosquatted crate proc-macro1 1.0.107, whose build script downloads and runs a remote binary at compile time. The maintainer account droundy appears to have been compromis…
SafeDep found a remote access implant in mathmain, an npm package that copies mathjs, and in two sibling packages, mathsbase and math-universe. The malicious code ships AES-256-GCM encrypted and activates only when lusolve() is called with matrix data whose LU lower factor serializes to a specific password. Once decrypted, the implant tak…
FortiGuard Labs analyzed a SectopRAT variant that is embedded in legitimate software to evade detection. The malware uses a multi-stage loader to extract its payload from files, then applies API hashing, indirect function calls and in-memory loading to run the final .NET payload. Once running, it sets up encrypted communication with its C…
Unit 42 analyzed an Atomic macOS (AMOS) stealer infection generated in a lab on Aug. 5, 2026, starting from a fake "macOS toolkit" instruction page hosted at getmacouscloud.com. The page tells victims to paste a command into Terminal, a ClickFix-style copy/paste technique, which downloads a Zsh script and then installs a Mach-O AMOS paylo…
SmartLoader is a commodity loader in active deployment, attributed to Malware-as-a-Service infrastructure linked to LummaStealer delivery in recent campaigns. Reverse engineering shows it is built almost entirely from off-the-shelf parts: a stock signed LuaJIT 2.1.0-beta3 interpreter, a commercial Lua VM obfuscator from the game-cheat sce…
On October 5, 2026, the RubyGems account reqthrottle3474 published 42 malicious gems within about an hour. Most are named for cryptocurrency developer tooling (e.g. eth-keystore-utils, bip39-wordlist-utils, btc-wallet-tools), and the last 16 typosquat real gems (bitcion, etheremu.rb, kecack, solaan-ruby). The code runs during gem install …
Cloudflare published defensive guidance following the disclosure of actively exploited Citrix NetScaler vulnerabilities. CVE-2026-88771 allows unauthenticated command execution on affected appliances, including in the default configuration. CVE-2026-88772 affects configurations using DTLS. Citrix's September 27, 2026 bulletin reported obs…
Toy Ghouls (aka Bearlyfy, Laboo.boo, Feral Wolf), a financially motivated group targeting Russian organizations since 2025, was observed in early July 2026 using a custom backdoor for the first time. Kaspersky GERT identified two versions, mqtt-bird-agent 0.1.0 (C2 over the public HiveMQ MQTT broker) and matrix-bird-agent 0.1.0 (C2 over a…
On September 8, 2026, an attacker added a malicious source dependency to Deep-Live-Cam, a Python face-swapping app with about 96,600 GitHub stars. Commit 7895c547 ("chore: update requirements.txt") rewrote 18 dependency entries and added requests @ git+https://github.com/pypls/requests.git. This points installation to a lookalike reposito…
ESET documented the evolution of MATCHBOIL, a custom C downloader used by the Russia-aligned cyberespionage group UAC-0099. Samples span April 2024 to April 2026, although CERT-UA first documented the malware in August 2025. Each iteration became more sophisticated, with new obfuscation, sandbox checks and persistence methods. All victims…
Unit 42 (Palo Alto Networks) tracks a campaign, CL-UNK-1211, in which operators compromised government Linux infrastructure between October 2025 and April 2026. The operators used PHP and shell scripts that appear to be AI-generated, with conversational comments and step-by-step reasoning. They harvested credentials and went after databas…
Acronis Threat Research Unit found that the Gentlemen ransomware operation is using the BYOVD (bring your own vulnerable driver) technique with legitimate Lenovo and Safetica kernel drivers to terminate endpoint security software before encrypting files. Two custom dropper samples were recovered from a recent incident. They install the dr…
The npm account dirtyblanket published nine typosquatted packages on September 29, 2026 in 33 minutes, eight copying Express and one copying React. On Linux, a preinstall hook fetches node.js through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, which pulls the worm linux.sh from Codeberg and runs it with bash. The worm installs CHAOS, an open-so…
ESET Research reports that the China-aligned APT group FamousSparrow has been using a new modular C++ backdoor, SparroWocky, since at least August 2025. The backdoor has replaced SparrowDoor as the group's main implant. From mid-2025 into 2026, about 90% of the group's targets in ESET telemetry were in Latin America, mostly governmental e…
Kaspersky identified MovieReaper, a previously unknown modular, multi-stage crimeware framework distributed since mid-August 2026 through movie-themed torrents, including fake "The Odyssey (2026)" releases. Rather than compromising individual trackers, the actor modified the public torrent file repository itorrents.org, so trackers relyin…
On 4 August 2026, an npm worm published 2,234 poisoned versions across 444 package names, using credentials from twelve organisations. Affected scopes include @ornikar, @deliveroo, @onereach, @or-sdk, @servicetitan, @qlik, @picsart, and the keyv and cacheable families. The keyv, flat-cache, file-entry-cache and cacheable-request packages …
SafeDep flagged the malicious npm package ulid-xyz in June 2026. It typosquats ulidx and is a cross-platform remote access trojan. It is delivered through a three-layer transitive dependency chain: ioredis-xyz (a clone of the legitimate ioredis client) depends on redis-type-xyz (an empty manifest posing as Redis OM), which in version 1.10…
SafeDep reports that the PolinRider loader family now resolves its C2 servers from Ethereum mainnet. The loader reads small transactions from operator wallets and decodes the recipient address as an IP:port. SafeDep confirmed 35 GitHub repositories carrying the loader at HEAD on 2026-09-30 (7,578 stars and 2,884 forks combined). The inves…
SafeDep identified a malicious tensorlake npm release, version 0.5.144 (about 106,000 monthly downloads), that ran a Mini Shai-Hulud worm on install. It was published at 01:12:07 UTC on 8 October and flagged by SafeDep eight minutes later. The attacker used a repository administrator account to commit the payload to main through the GitHu…