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8 stories in the last 30d

KREMLIN Banking Malware Infects Over 1,500 Systems With Malicious Chrome Extension

Elastic tracks KREMLIN banking malware that used fake Brazilian bank JavaScript lures to deploy malicious Chrome and Edge extensions on 1,515 systems.

Elastic researchers tracked the KREMLIN banking malware operation across seven campaigns over 15 months, infecting 1,515 systems, 98.75% of them in Brazil. Portuguese-language lures posing as bank records and invoices deploy a hostile 'AVSync' extension into Chrome and Edge profiles that harvests passwords, session cookies, keystrokes and screenshots. Loaders check for sandboxes, create scheduled tasks and fetch fresh infrastructure from an Ethereum smart contract; a network canary takeover temporarily disrupted infections.

Cyber Security News · 9h agoMalware in the wild

Home & Small Office Wireless Routers Exploited to Attack Gaming Servers

Unit 42 details an updated Gafgyt botnet variant exploiting Zyxel, Huawei, and Realtek router vulnerabilities to recruit devices for DoS attacks on gaming servers.

Unit 42 researchers identified an updated Gafgyt variant derived from the JenX botnet that combines three remote code execution exploits: CVE-2017-18368 (Zyxel P660HN-T1A), CVE-2017-17215 (Huawei HG532), and CVE-2014-8361 (Realtek RTL81XX chipset). Shodan scans show more than 32,000 wireless routers worldwide potentially vulnerable to these exploits. The exploits act as droppers, pulling architecture-specific binaries from a malicious server (185.172.110.224), and the botnet performs denial-of-service attacks against gaming servers, most notably Valve Source engine servers.

TuxBot v3: Inside an IoT Botnet Framework With LLM

Unit 42 uncovers TuxBot v3, an LLM-assisted IoT botnet framework with 17-architecture builds, Telnet brute-forcing, and DDoS capabilities.

Palo Alto Unit 42 identified TuxBot v3 Evolution, a modular IoT botnet framework derived from AISURU, Wuhan-lineage botnets, and MHDDoS. The C-based bot brute-forces Telnet with 1,496 credential pairs, targets over 30 IoT device families, and communicates with a Go-based C2 over encrypted TCP with multiple fallback mechanisms including DGA, P2P, and DNS TXT. LLM-assisted development left hallucinated crypto implementations and broken exploit modules in the analyzed samples, though roughly 70% of core functionality works. Researchers warn polished production builds likely exist, raising the threat potential.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 28d agoMalware1

The extension you never installed: KREMLIN forges Chrome's own integrity checks to steal banking sessions

Elastic details KREMLIN, a Brazilian banking malware whose malicious Chrome/Edge extension forges Chromium integrity checks to steal sessions.

Elastic Security Labs tracked operation REF9334 and its KREMLIN toolkit, a Brazilian banking malware campaign impersonating twelve banks across seven campaigns since May 2025. The infection chain uses multi-stage obfuscated JavaScript loaders with sandbox checks (file and process counting), scheduled-task persistence, and an Ethereum smart contract acting as a dead-drop resolver for C2 and payload URLs, abusing Archive.org for hosting. The malicious browser extension bypasses Chromium integrity mechanisms by manipulating Secure Preferences and regenerating required HMACs and App-Bound encrypted hashes. Threat Command disrupted over 1,500 infections by registering the kill-switch canary domain.

Elastic Security Labs · 2d agoMalware in the wild

AsyncRAT Malware Abuses AutoIt and PowerShell to Hide Inside Legitimate Windows Process

Point Wild details a five-stage AsyncRAT campaign using AutoIt abuse and process injection to hide a .NET RAT inside Microsoft's signed charmap.exe.

Researchers at Point Wild Threat Intelligence analyzed a campaign starting from a lure batch file ('Right-click to open Invoice Details.bat') that launches hidden PowerShell to reconstruct a Base64/XOR-obfuscated payload. The stage drops a renamed signed AutoIt interpreter and loader script into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Temp and achieves persistence via a batch file in the user's Startup folder (T1547.001). The loader decrypts the payload in memory with single-byte XOR key 0x36 and injects it into SysWOW64\charmap.exe using OpenProcess/VirtualAllocEx/WriteProcessMemory/CreateRemoteThread, with PE-sieve confirming an in-memory implanted PE and patched AMSI modules. The final AsyncRAT payload performs screen capture and data theft, with observed C2 at 158[.]51[.]122[.]136:4944 over raw TCP.

GBHackers · 2d agoMalware3· 1 read

F5 BIG-IP APM Malware Injects a PHP Web Shell Into Memory, Evading Disk Scans

Sophos found F5 BIG-IP APM malware that injects a PHP web shell into Apache's memory, evading disk scans, linked to exploited CVE-2025-53521.

Sophos's September 7 analysis describes malware tied to F5's c05d5254 activity that hooks apr_dso_load, modifies the libphp PHP module in memory, and injects a PHP web shell when Apache loads apm_css.php3, full_wt.php3 or webtop_popup_css.php3, leaving on-disk files clean. A separate installer infects /usr/sbin/httpd and umount, runs before Apache starts, disables SELinux (per ESET's related PoisonedRefresh analysis), and opens a local socket at /run/bigtlog.pipe for shell access. The activity is linked to CVE-2025-53521 in BIG-IP APM, rated 9.8 CVSS 3.1, patched in October 2025, added to CISA KEV on March 27, 2026.

The Hacker News · 7d agoMalware in the wildCVE-2025-53521

Microsoft Links 30+ Rotating Domains to MacSync Stealer Infrastructure

Microsoft links 30+ rotating domains to the MacSync macOS infostealer, confirming active credential and file exfiltration through chunked HTTP PUT uploads.

Microsoft Defender Experts correlated 30+ domains with MacSync Stealer, requiring aligned endpoint and network behaviors (process ancestry, command-line patterns, /curl/, /dynamic?txd=, and /gate?buildtxd= paths, API-key headers, chunked HTTP PUT parameters) to link infrastructure. Execution begins from an interactive zsh session consistent with ClickFix social engineering, with curl retrieving and Base64/gunzip decoding the payload, followed by collection of Keychain data, browser credentials, SSH keys, AWS credentials, Kubernetes configs, and Apple Notes. Data is zipped to /tmp/osalogging.zip, chunked, uploaded via HTTP PUT, and artifacts are deleted afterward; the analysis builds on RST Cloud's May 8 findings and overlaps with Microsoft's earlier 250+ domain ClickFix campaign distributing MacSync and Atomic Stealer (AMOS).

The Hacker News · 28d agoMalware in the wild

ThreatsDay: 296K IoT Botnet, 100+ Water Systems Targeted, SharePoint RCE Chain + 27 New Stories

Weekly ThreatsDay bulletin details a ShinyHunters-style social engineering hit on ReliaQuest, the 296,000-device Dysphoria IoT botnet, and several new malware families.

ReliaQuest confirmed a social engineering attack on August 22, 2026, in which an attacker used a fake SSO page and MFA push approval to gain brief view-only access to an identity dashboard, with tactics matching ShinyHunters, which has since listed the firm on its leak portal. The Shadowserver Foundation reported the Dysphoria botnet has compromised nearly 296,000 IoT devices for DDoS attacks and recently added residential proxy capability. Cisco Talos documented JWR, an operator-driven phishing-as-a-service framework linked to The Outsider that harvests credentials, identity documents, and 2FA codes over an encrypted WebSocket. New malware coverage includes the Octagon Android fraud bot ($1,400/month), the C2Looper Rust backdoor delivered via ClickFix, and the Aeternum loader that moved C2 to the Polygon blockchain.

The Hacker News · 14d agoMalware in the wild