GreyNoise observed an increase in scanning and exploitation attempts against Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) in Ukraine between 21 September and 1 October 2026, coinciding with an escalation in Russian strikes. Most of the activity targeted CVE-2021-36260, an unauthenticated command injection flaw in unpatched Hikvision products. GreyNoise…
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…
Since mid-2025 the Kremlin has sharply escalated restrictions on digital communications, according to Insikt Group (Recorded Future). Measures include VPN blocking, state-managed regional internet shutdowns, throttling of Telegram and WhatsApp, promotion of the state-owned Max messenger, and expanded surveillance of Russian and foreign en…
Between May 9 and May 18, 2026, GreyNoise observed a major spike in scanning of SonicWall SonicOS management interfaces. The May 12 peak of about 597,000 sessions was the largest single-day total on the SonicWall SonicOS API Scanner tag in 90 days, roughly 46x the typical daily volume. Earlier spikes on this tag (January 18, January 30 an…
Following reported Ukrainian drone strikes on three Yandex facilities in Russia between October 7 and 11, claims spread that Russian bot farms and influence operations had been knocked offline. Cloudflare analyzed Radar and Bot Management data for the two Yandex ASNs, AS13238 (search) and AS200350 (Yandex.Cloud). It found no evidence that…
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…
North Korea (DPRK) is running simple reply-baiting phishing attacks against Ukrainian targets. The goal is to gain insight into its own war effort in Ukraine. The article is a short teaser, so it gives no information on the specific actor, targets, infrastructure or tooling. Technical Details - The campaign relies on reply-baiting phishin…
A joint advisory (AA25-343A) from FBI, CISA, NSA and some 18 other US, European, Five Eyes and Czech agencies warns that pro-Russia hacktivist groups are conducting opportunistic, low-sophistication attacks on critical infrastructure OT. The groups named are Cyber Army of Russia Reborn (CARR), Z-Pentest, NoName057(16) and Sector16. They e…
The fourth weekly Security Affairs AI-cybersecurity newsletter, by Pierluigi Paganini, is a curated list of headlines on the intersection of AI and security. It contains no original analysis or technical detail. Items include CyberXero, described as an AI-augmented initial access broker targeting Ukrainian critical infrastructure, and a C…
GreyNoise reports that a single malicious cyber actor, tracked since 7 May 2026, is a suspected Chinese speaker working in UTC+8 and is the same as or related to Red Heron (reported by Acronis), based on the shared C2 domain, malware family, Gitea exploitation and other TTPs. The actor exploited the wp2shell WordPress chain (CVE-2026-6303…
A multinational advisory (CISA, NSA, FBI, AIVD, MIVD, NCSC-UK and others) warns that the Russian state-supported APT LAUNDRY BEAR (aka Void Blizzard, TA488) has compromised Western government, defense industrial base and NGO organizations running Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) since at least July 2025. The campaign uses a view-based XSS…
ESET Chief Security Evangelist Tony Anscombe reviews the main cybersecurity stories of August 2026 in a monthly video roundup. OpenAI disclosed more details on how its agents hacked the AI collaboration platform Hugging Face, and the video discusses what went wrong and the lessons from the incident. Iran-linked hackers are believed to hav…
A court in Zurich sentenced an unnamed 52-year-old Ukrainian man to 12 years and nine months in prison and banned him from Switzerland for ten years. The court found him to be the lead developer of the LockerGoga, MegaCortex and Nefilim ransomware families. Victims include Norsk Hydro, Stadler Rail (500 GB stolen in 2020, reported US $6 m…
Qilin and Settra ransomware groups are actively exploiting CVE-2026-0257, an authentication bypass in PAN-OS GlobalProtect and Prisma Access disclosed in May 2026, according to ReliaQuest. Because access arrives through the victim's own VPN, it can resemble legitimate remote work and go unnoticed until credential theft, lateral movement, …
Symantec reports that the Russia-linked APT28 (aka Swallowtail, Fancy Bear, Forest Blizzard, BlueDelta), which the U.S. government links to the GRU, targeted organizations in two NATO member states. Victims were a naval shipbuilder, a manufacturer of military aircraft engines and a law enforcement agency (thehackernews.com, cyberscoop.com…
F5 Labs, using Efflux sensor telemetry, found that HTTP requests hitting its sensors rose from 5,125,557 in 2023 to 8,727,820 in 2024 (about 71%, or nearly 95% once normalized for sensor count). Most of the increase came from the BotPoke scanner, which looks for filenames associated with malware distribution sites. It was active mainly in…
F5 Labs published research on SparkRAT, a freely available, Go-based open-source Remote Access Trojan with a C2 server and builds for Windows, Linux and macOS. Public reporting since January 2023 shows use by a widening set of actors: Chinese-speaking groups, Winnti (APT41), Patchwork, TAG-100, suspected UAC-0194 against Ukraine, and Cybe…
This SentinelOne weekly roundup (Week 39, 2026) covers one law enforcement success and two active threat campaigns. A US court sentenced Armenian national Karen Serobovich Vardanyan ("Maneeken"/"Karl Lagerfeld"), an initial access specialist for Ryuk ransomware, to two years in prison and over $1.2 million in restitution. SentinelLABS ide…
This Foreign Affairs essay, co-written by Bruce Schneier and Seva Gunitsky, argues that AI offers autocrats two things: real-time monitoring of subordinates and replacement of human intermediaries. Examples include RT's AI-generated anchors, China's Zero Trust AI system and smart city oversight, Russia's Oculus censorship system and Melio…
This weekly recap covers several concurrent incidents. ConnectWise disabled seven application identities and suspended Cloud Backup after unknown actors abused them to compromise Microsoft 365 tenants. China-nexus Armory Castle (UNC5221 / Warp Panda) exploited BeyondTrust Remote Support flaw CVE-2026-102764 (CVSS 9.3) as a zero-day in lat…