FortiGuard Incident Response reports a supply chain attack on the QuickFox Windows application, whose trojanized components deployed the FDMTP implant to users. QuickFox's user base is mainly Chinese international students and expats. Affected Windows versions are those later than v3.0.35 and earlier than v3.55.6. QuickFox has removed the…
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…
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…
Between April and July 2026, the threat actor UNC7017 tampered with the AOMEI Backupper update infrastructure several times to deliver the CrossRoad downloader and the ShinyRoad modular backdoor. Each tampering window lasted only five to ten minutes before reverting to authentic files. This made the campaign hard to detect and suggests it…
A supply chain campaign tracked as UNC7017 hijacked the update infrastructure of AOMEI Technology between April and July 2026 to distribute the CROSSROAD downloader and the SHINYROAD backdoor through AOMEI Backupper and AnyViewer update workflows. The attackers tampered with server configurations only briefly, then restored legitimate con…
FortiGuard Labs describes ClingSTUN, a Linux back-connect proxy backdoor that keeps persistent access and turns compromised devices into remotely controlled proxy nodes. It combines persistence, process termination, watchdog manipulation and remote command execution. It also uses legitimate public STUN servers for NAT traversal, to discov…
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…
Between April and July 2026, a threat actor tracked as UNC7017 compromised AOMEI update and notification infrastructure and used it to push malware to users of AOMEI Backupper. The attackers briefly altered two configuration files and restored them within minutes to evade detection. The campaign was uncovered by ManageEngine's Threat Anal…
Between May and July 2026, attackers tracked by Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) as UNC7017 altered files on AOMEI's own update servers for windows of 5 to 10 minutes. Any copy of AOMEI Backupper that checked for updates during a window downloaded and ran a backdoor. GTIG, Mandiant and ManageEngine's Threat Analysis Lab disclosed t…
BRONZE SANDCASTLE (written Bronze Sandcastle by thehackernews.com) is a previously undocumented intrusion set disclosed by SophosLabs on 2026-10-21. It is assessed as China-based or China-aligned and has been active since mid-2025 (thehackernews.com). Between August 2025 and August 2026 it compromised victims in the Philippines, Taiwan, A…
SafeDep analyzed sckit (the "supplychain.local worm"), a previously unreported cross-platform Go implant framework found on September 23, 2026 in the compromised MemTensor packages @memtensor/email protected (npm) and email protected (PyPI). It harvests credentials from developer machines and CI jobs, takes signed tasks from a C2 server, …
Kaspersky analysis of an installer first classified as adware (MD5 c24e99f9437feacaa63766a3cde3fe3d) found that it delivers the ValleyRAT backdoor. The installer drops a modified, signed Chinese wallpaper tool, QN Wallpaper, and uses it for DLL sideloading of a malicious libcef.dll. The adware's advertising function does not work. Attacke…
Kaspersky GERT reports that the NightEagle APT (also tracked as APT-Q-95), active since at least 2023 and previously focused on Asia, is now attacking businesses in Russia. The attackers usually gain access through compromised valid credentials on corporate VPNs, connecting from Russian IPs tied to Cloudflare WARP tunnels and from Europea…
Kaspersky researchers describe a new MacSync macOS infostealer variant, first seen in the wild in September 2026, that replaces the earlier AppleScript-based droppers with FAT Mach-O binaries written in Objective-C and Swift. MacSync is sold as malware-as-a-service, so delivery varies by operator. In this campaign it spread through malici…
Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 reports that a suspected advanced actor tracked as CL-STA-0954 (aka UNC5820) deployed a previously unreported memory-resident ARM64 implant, PEERSTITCH, on Fortinet FortiGate firewalls. The group exploited the FortiOS path traversal flaw CVE-2025-61624 for the final stage. The intrusion hit a telecommunications …
Russian firm Solar (a Rostelecom subsidiary) reported a nearly two-year intrusion at an unnamed Russian healthcare organization, attributed to the Belarus-aligned hacktivist cluster Partisan Zmiy (Cyber Partisans). Solar found the compromise in December 2025, but the earliest signs date to early 2024. Unlike the group's usual destructive …
Researchers at SafeDep analyzed a macOS implant recovered from a compromised workstation. Infection began on 2026-07-26 with a paid YouTube video ad impersonating TradingView that led to a fake .pkg installer. The malware is a remote-controlled task runner, not a single-purpose stealer. It persists via a LaunchAgent that re-fetches a shel…
The Mini Shai-Hulud worm from May 2026 is still infecting new GitHub repositories. SafeDep found six repositories that received malicious hook files between 20 and 24 September 2026. The cause is that all tags of the actions-cool/issues-helper GitHub Action, hijacked on 18 May 2026, still point to the malicious commit, and the payload is …
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 …
Elastic Security Labs is tracking REF8801, a campaign in which a fake Web3 venture capital accelerator, Apex Accelerator (Apex Foundation), targets cryptocurrency startups and founders with malicious npm packages. The packages, @apexacc/cli and @apexacc/audit, pose as an AI advisor and an MCP-based security scanner, with offers of free Cl…