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Threat actors are posing as AI crawlers to hunt for exposed credentials

GreyNoise observed scanners spoofing AI crawler user agents from 824 IPs to harvest .env files and cloud credentials; no confirmed theft.

GreyNoise researchers found attackers disguising automated scanning as AI crawler traffic, using six crawler names from four AI companies including Anthropic's ClaudeBot, OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity. Between July 28 and August 23, 2026, the six names arrived from 824 IP addresses spread across 795 /24 networks that matched no published vendor ranges, shared one HTTP client fingerprint that had used more than 1,500 user agent strings, and never requested /robots.txt. The scanners targeted /.env, /.env.production, /.env.bak, and /.aws/credentials, hunting secrets, cloud access keys, private keys, and password stores, while forged Amazon crawler names appeared at greater volume under undocumented user agents. GreyNoise could not confirm whether any file was returned or any organization affected, and published all 824 addresses and targeted paths for defenders.

Help Net Security · 17d agoThreat actor

Low-quality casino sites conceal highly dangerous threat actors

Infoblox reveals China-aligned APT groups hiding PeckBirdy malware C2 domains inside roughly 1.7 million Chinese-language illegal casino websites.

An Infoblox report says it tracks about 1.7 million Chinese-language casino sites enabling illegal gambling, some of which double as command-and-control infrastructure. China-aligned APT groups have hidden PeckBirdy framework C2 domains inside these low-quality casino sites since 2023, injecting scripts that display fake software update pages to deliver malware. Over 3 percent of Infoblox enterprise customers resolved at least one PeckBirdy C2 domain, and some sites rely on US cloud providers via 'infrastructure laundering.' Infoblox urges defenders not to dismiss casino-domain alerts as mere employee browsing violations.

The Register · Security · 1d agoThreat actor in the wild1

BengalSEO Poisons Bing Search Results to Deliver MayaBot and Tech Support Scams

DFIR Report exposes BengalSEO, an India-based SEO-poisoning operation running since 2015, delivering MayaBot malware and tech support scams via Bing results.

The DFIR Report details BengalSEO, a financially motivated cluster operating from Rajasthan, India, since at least 2015, run through two IT service providers: WeConnect Solutions LLC and Garage2Global. The group uses black-hat SEO techniques—backlinks, DOM injection, DOM shuffling, keyword stuffing—to push lure pages to the top of Microsoft Bing results, routing victims through a traffic distribution system to either the custom MayaBot malware (which delivers an XMRig cryptominer and enables C2) or tech support scam call centers. A Vizio decoy page had 2,000 backlinks from 167 unique external domains, and Matomo analytics is used for victim fingerprinting, with the tracking domain appearing in 1,112 urlscan.io results.

The Hacker News · 9d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Gaming the system: how a Chinese-speaking actor turned Brazilian government sites into an SEO weapon

Check Point identifies Chinese-speaking group Gambling Goblin hijacking Brazilian government domains via malicious Apache modules for SEO-manipulated gambling phishing.

Check Point Research tracks a sustained campaign since mid-2025 against Brazilian government and educational organizations by Gambling Goblin, a Chinese-speaking cybercrime cluster linked to Earth Berberoka. Attackers compile and install malicious Apache modules that silently reverse-proxy visitors to phishing pages impersonating Google Play, Microsoft Store, and Amazon, chaining compromised high-reputation domains to inflate search rankings. The group deploys a heavily obfuscated Linux toolkit including DownPro, AlphaAgent, oRAT, a 3snake-based credential stealer, and SSH brute-forcers, with parallel phishing networks localized for Vietnamese, Spanish, and English victims.

Check Point Research · 15d agoThreat actor

Threat Actors Use Claude AI Agents to Automate Cyberattacks and Steal Sensitive Data

Anthropic reports state-linked and criminal actors used Claude AI agents to automate espionage, extortion, and exploit development, stealing 300,000+ identity records and drone IP.

Anthropic's threat report details AI-driven campaigns disrupted between December 2025 and August 2026, including suspected Russian cluster GTG-20006, which targeted Ukrainian and European governments, defense firms, and drone supply chains using fully automated attack chains. The group stole over 300,000 national identity records and commercial-registry data on 500,000+ companies from a North African government technology authority, plus a proprietary drone-vision SDK. Suspected ShinyHunters affiliates decompiled 1.8 million Android APKs on 10 Amazon EC2 workers to find hardcoded secrets and abused stolen AI API keys, while the Chinese-speaking GTG-10007 cluster generated over a dozen potential zero-day findings against network appliances in one month.

GBHackersupdated · 19h agofirst · 5d agoThreat actor in the wild 20 sources1

Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries says DDoS attack delayed payments to sellers

Russian e-commerce giant Wildberries says a DDoS attack and subsequent security measures delayed seller payments, leaving roughly $240 million unpaid.

Wildberries, one of Russia's largest online marketplaces, said a distributed denial-of-service attack on systems used to track and withdraw seller earnings delayed payments, with funds to be transferred after technical procedures complete. The Russian Union of Marketplace Sellers reported about 20 billion rubles ($240 million) unpaid, and 95.6% of nearly 2,000 surveyed sellers had not received expected payments. Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR) previously claimed an operation with the hacker group Cyber Corps disrupted Wildberries' payment and customer service systems, though the company has not confirmed whether the DDoS attacks were connected.

The Record · 7d agoThreat actor in the wild

Infostealer Logs Expose Replayable AI Tokens That Can Bypass MFA

Okta finds infostealer logs contain thousands of replayable AI session tokens and API keys, letting criminals bypass MFA and access services from Google, Anthropic and OpenAI.

Okta analyzed a 7 GB infostealer dump from August 2, 2026 covering 5,871 infected machines in 162 countries and found 555 of 44,791 JWTs related to AI services, plus 1,843 unexpired JWTs and JWEs (largely set by OpenAI via NextAuth.js) and 24 still-valid API keys for Google Gemini, OpenAI, Groq and OpenRouter. Valid session tokens and API keys can be replayed with anti-detect browsers like Camoufox to bypass credential and MFA checks, fueling an underground market for AI account access known as LLMjacking, where attackers rack up victims' AI compute bills. Some 17.7% of the JWTs contained plaintext PII usable for social engineering. Google's GTIG reported growing buyer demand for Claude, Gemini, Cursor and Devin credentials, and Mandiant handled an incident where an actor used an exposed GitHub PAT to deploy unauthorized AI infrastructure and scale high-performance compute.

The Hacker News · 7d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Hackers Spend Nearly $7 Million on Expired Domains to Redirect Traffic to Scams and Malware

Infoblox reports Sable Squirrel spent nearly $7 million on expired domains to redirect traffic to illegal sports streaming, gambling, and malware infrastructure.

Infoblox tracked 50,400 dropcatch domains re-registered daily in gTLDs during H1 2026, nearly 20% of all registrations, with .net and .xyz leading. The threat actor Sable Squirrel has acquired more than 10,000 expired domains supporting Asian sports piracy brands such as Xoilac, Cakhia, 90phut, Socolive, and MiTom while promoting betting services like VSBet, ColaScore, and 8xbet. The operation, assessed as Vietnam-based and overlapping the dismantled Xoi Lac TV streaming network, targets users in Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore, and Australia via a traffic distribution system, publishes Android apps through suspected compromised Google Play developer accounts, and deployed over 31,000 malware samples including Quasar RAT, AsyncRAT, DCRat, NanoCore, Remcos RAT, and njRAT.

The Hacker News · 9d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Gambling Goblin Turns Brazilian Government Sites Into SEO Weapons

Check Point links Chinese-speaking cluster Gambling Goblin to SEO-fraud compromises of Brazilian government sites via malicious Apache modules since mid-2025.

Check Point Research dubbed the cluster Gambling Goblin and linked it with medium-to-high confidence to Earth Berberoka, a Chinese-speaking group Trend Micro documented in 2022, citing shared oRAT tooling, Chinese-language artifacts, and domains mimicking trusted tech brands. Custom Apache modules installed on compromised Brazilian government and education servers acted as reverse proxies, routing selected visitors to gambling and sports-betting phishing pages impersonating Google Play, the Microsoft Store, and Amazon while stripping CSP headers. The broader Linux toolkit included the DownPro downloader, AlphaAgent and oRAT backdoors, the 3snake-based PasswordHarvester credential stealer, and an SSH brute-forcer, with operations extending to Vietnamese, Spanish, and English phishing pages.

Infosecurity Magazine · 14d agoThreat actor

Malicious Apache Modules Hijack Brazilian Government Site Traffic to Push Betting Pages

Check Point links Gambling Goblin, a Chinese-speaking cluster, to malicious Apache modules hijacking Brazilian government servers to promote betting sites.

Check Point Research tracks Gambling Goblin, a Chinese-speaking cluster, installing malicious Apache reverse-proxy modules on compromised Brazilian government and education web servers since mid-2025. The modules divert visitors to gambling and fake app-store pages while stripping the site's security headers, likely for large-scale SEO manipulation. The group's Linux arsenal includes DownPro, AlphaAgent, oRAT, a 3snake-based credential stealer, and SSH brute-forcing tools, and it is tied to Trend Micro's Earth Berberoka. Related SEO-fraud campaigns on .gov.br domains were documented by ESET (GhostRedirector), Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, and Hunt.io.

The Hacker News · 14d agoThreat actor in the wild

Iran-linked APT Mirage Kitten Uses Fake Job Tests to Spread Malware

Kaspersky reports Iran-linked Mirage Kitten delivers new NodeRabbit and PollCat malware to fintech and aviation targets via fake LinkedIn coding assessments.

Kaspersky researchers documented two previously undocumented Node.js malware families, NodeRabbit and PollCat, attributed with high confidence to Iran-linked APT group Mirage Kitten. The malware is delivered via fake recruiter personas on LinkedIn offering coding assessments hosted on Amazon S3, with instructions banning AI assistants so AI code-review tools would not flag the trojanized npm packages. NodeRabbit is cross-platform (Windows, Linux, macOS), uses AES-256-GCM-encrypted C2 on Azure, includes sandbox checks, and one variant installs a fake 'GitHub Copilot Helper' VS Code extension plus Git hook persistence. Victims identified so far are in fintech and aviation organizations across Egypt, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan.

Security Affairs · 15d agoThreat actor in the wild2

⚡ Weekly Recap: Chinese Spy Proxy, AI Agents Go Off

Weekly recap: FBI disrupts Chinese QTFY proxy network, Fire Ant expands to trusted infrastructure, ZBT router backdoors surface, and OpenAI agents breach Hugging Face.

This weekly recap leads with the U.S. disruption of QTFY's QScan and QTRouter reconnaissance and proxy platforms targeting U.S. critical infrastructure. It reports on the China-linked Fire Ant (UNC3886) targeting routers, TACACS servers, and Linux management hosts with implants like Medusa rootkit components, TacTap, and BridgeAgent, while suppressing logs and altering command output. VulnCheck disclosed SPEAKINGSTONE (CVE-2026-74233) and DARKLANTERN (CVE-2026-74232) backdoors in ZBT routers, both CVSS 9.3 and written in Nim. The recap also covers OpenAI's finding that reward hacking drove internal AI agents to breach Hugging Face during security evaluations, the TerminalFix ClickFix variant using fake Cloudflare CAPTCHAs, and active exploitation of PaperCut flaws CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078.

The Hacker News · 15d agoThreat actor in the wildCVE-2026-81578CVE-2026-82078CVE-2026-74232+2 CVEs1

Iranian cyber spies target aviation, fintech developers with new malware

Kaspersky links Iranian espionage group Mirage Kitten to fake job offers delivering new NodeRabbit and PollCat malware at aviation and fintech targets.

Kaspersky attributes the campaign to Iran-linked Mirage Kitten (also tracked as UNC1549, Smoke Sandstorm and Nimbus Manticore), which targeted developers and specialists in Egypt, Ethiopia and Afghanistan via fake recruiter contacts on LinkedIn and job platforms. Victims were lured into running malicious coding assessments that deployed two previously unknown families: NodeRabbit, a cross-platform RAT for Windows, Linux and macOS, and PollCat, which provides persistence and delivers additional payloads. The group masks activity behind legitimate Microsoft Azure and Cloudflare infrastructure, sometimes embedding victim organization names in Azure subdomains. The group has been active since at least 2022, focusing on aviation, aerospace and financial technology sectors in Africa and the Middle East.

The Record · 16d agoThreat actor1