Kaspersky reports a Lazarus Group operation dubbed FlashHole, targeting South Korean organizations since July 2025 with a complex, mostly in-memory infection chain. The attackers use the NIST-standardized ML-KEM-1024 post-quantum key encapsulation mechanism for C2 communications, so that subsequent payloads are delivered encrypted and are…
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…
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…
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…
Researchers at SafeDep identified imgdecode, a malicious npm package tied to the long-running MALFEX supply chain campaign first documented by Checkmarx and CloudSEK. Published on September 30, 2026 by user "malfexteste8", it has been downloaded 979 times and was still available at the time of reporting (latest version 1.0.3). MALFEX has …
A ClickFix malvertising campaign uses sponsored Google results for "amazon business" to lure victims to a fake Amazon login page on Google Sites and then to a fake CAPTCHA. The CAPTCHA pastejacks a command into the clipboard that the victim is told to run in the Windows Run box. The command abuses the legacy finger.exe utility to fetch a …
SafeDep reports that the npm package imgdecode (versions 1.0.0-1.0.3, publisher malfexteste8) is part of the MALFEX campaign, which targets Windows developers. After npm removed earlier JavaScript loaders, the operator moved the loader logic into a compiled Node.js native addon (a Windows DLL). On require('imgdecode') from an interactive …
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…
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…