FortiGuard Labs analyzed a TrickBot variant that carries command-and-control (C2) traffic over DNS tunneling, embedding encoded data in DNS queries and responses, instead of the HTTP used by earlier variants. The malware persists through Windows Task Scheduler, stores its configuration in NTFS Alternate Data Streams, and hinders analysis …
ESET researchers observed the Russia-aligned group UAC-0099 embedding a decoy request for guidance on building a nuclear weapon in a comment inside a VBScript used in the early stages of an attack on a target in Ukraine. The comment was meant to trigger the safety guardrails of an LLM-powered code scanner so that it stops inspecting the f…
Darktrace researchers documented a new campaign distributing CikaBika Bot, a Rust-based remote access trojan controlled entirely through Discord. The infection chain starts with a disk image named PropositionProjet.img, which contains a French-language decoy PDF and a Windows shortcut disguised as a Word document. A Nim loader extracts th…
A 40-year-old Nigerian national, Chukwuemeka Victor Amachukwu, was sentenced to eight years in prison by a US federal court for a 2019-2023 scheme that combined hacking of US tax preparation businesses, filing of fraudulent tax returns and fake investment fraud. He used identities stolen from victim organizations to file false returns wit…
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…
This ESET blog post argues that AI is speeding up the threat landscape for SMBs, both by empowering threat actors and by widening the attack surface as businesses adopt AI faster than they govern it. The ESET SMB Cyber Readiness Index 2026 reports that 73% of SMBs are integrating AI, 40% lack a proper AI policy, and 45% suffered a cyberse…
Episode 485 of the Smashing Security podcast, hosted by Graham Cluley with guest Lianne Potter, covers several security stories. Researchers who wanted to test LG smart TVs for security risks got around the terms and conditions by setting up the TV while drunk, on the reasoning that they could not be bound by a contract agreed to while in…