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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

Risky Bulletin: Slovakia finds Russian backdoor in traffic speed cameras

Slovakia's NBU found an SMS-triggered backdoor in Russian-made NERO R-ONE traffic cameras, pausing a 279-unit deployment.

Slovakia's national security service NBU issued an alert against NERO R-ONE high-speed traffic cameras after finding a backdoor that grants shell and network access via SMS from hardcoded Russian phone numbers. The cameras are a rebranded version of the Russian CORDON PRO.M model by St. Petersburg firm Semicon, purchased via a Cyprus shell company under a €30 million EU-funded project. The report also found SecureBoot disabled, vulnerable web management, and unauthenticated live streams; the Interior Ministry paused deployment of 279 cameras pending independent assessment.

Risky Business News · 29d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Hackers Use Hundreds of AI Agents to Exploit PaperCut Flaws and Compromise 440 Servers Worldwide

A Russian-speaking actor used hundreds of AI agents to exploit PaperCut flaws, compromising 440 servers across 395 organizations in 48 countries.

GreyNoise's Global Observation Grid observed a Russian-speaking threat actor operating from IP 45.142.193.132 deploy hundreds of autonomous AI agents, built on OpenAI's Codex harness with a DeepSeek model, to exploit PaperCut NG/MF flaws CVE-2026-81578 (authentication bypass) and CVE-2026-82078 (unsafe reflection RCE). At least 440 servers across 395 organizations in 48 countries were compromised; the US had 98 victims and educational institutions accounted for 204. The agents paired with Mimikatz, Certipy, Rubeus, and Impacket, escalated to domain admin in 12 of 440 cases, and executed DCSync to exfiltrate the full NTDS.DIT credential database.

One Attacker Has Scraped Both Salesforce and ServiceNow Portals Since 2025

Reco tracks the City Forum campaign: one Contabo VPS has scraped Salesforce and ServiceNow guest portals across finance, telecom and public sector since March 2025.

Reco researchers identified infrastructure at 158.220.87.79, a Contabo VPS using Go's default net/http user agent, that has harvested records from Salesforce Experience Cloud and ServiceNow customer portals across telecom, financial services, enterprise software and public sector targets for over a year. The tool abuses over-privileged persistent guest users, enumerating Salesforce Aura sites (560,000+ events at one target), probing Lightning Web Runtime via the UI-API across API versions v56.0-v66.0, and hitting the poorly documented ServiceNow Service Portal search endpoint. No named victims or actor attribution yet, and activity is ongoing with rising volume. Defenders are advised to hunt the Go-http-client user agent and specific IP in Salesforce Event Monitoring logs and syslog_transaction on ServiceNow, then tighten guest sharing rules and Knowledge Base read criteria.

The Hacker News · Aug 18, 2026Threat actor in the wild1

Attackers Expose Ongoing AI Tool Use Targeting Organizations in Latin America

Unit 42 documents two AI-assisted intrusion campaigns against Latin American government, utility, and financial organizations using LLM-orchestrated tooling.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 tracks two ongoing intrusion clusters, CL-CRI-1131 (Mexican transportation, federal ministries, municipal water utilities) and CL-CRI-1163 (Brazilian financial sector), both using living-off-the-land techniques, SOCKS5 relays, and custom RATs. The attackers appear to orchestrate operations via commercial LLMs like Claude and GPT-4.1, evidenced by iterative batch scripts and AI-generated tunneling tool naming. The Mexican campaign (also reported as Operation Escaneo by CloudSEK) exfiltrated sensitive data via dynamic-DNS infrastructure with rotated multi-SAN TLS certificates between February and June 2026. This signals broader adoption of AI-enhanced operations by diverse threat groups in the region.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 14d agoThreat actor in the wild1

APT36 Suspected in PATCHCORD Espionage Campaign Using Google Sheets C2

Acronis links the PATCHCORD espionage campaign targeting Afghan telecom and South Asian critical infrastructure to APT36 with moderate confidence.

Acronis Threat Research Unit documented PATCHCORD, a previously undocumented C/C++ backdoor delivered via fake VPN installers impersonating Afghan Telecom (AFTEL), which hijacks Edge, Chrome and Firefox shortcuts for persistence and executes in-memory shellcode. A related Go implant, SHEETCORD, abuses the Google Sheets API for per-victim C2 and was distributed via a domain impersonating India's National Informatics Centre, while a third tool, HACKERAI C2 Agent, uses GitHub Gists and shows signs of LLM-assisted coding. An exposed staging server revealed SuperShell, RAT frameworks, credential-harvesting tools and OpenSSH exploit code, and the researchers attribute the activity to APT36/Transparent Tribe at moderate confidence.

Security Affairs · Aug 16, 2026Threat actor in the wild

⚡ 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

Three Threat Groups Target Russian Enterprises With Backdoors, Ransomware, and Wipers

Kaspersky details NightEagle, Hacking Cat, and Toy Ghouls targeting Russian enterprises with Exchange backdoors, Gorilla RAT, and destructive Monkey ransomware.

Kaspersky reports three threat clusters targeting Russian enterprises: NightEagle (APT-Q-95), the pro-Ukrainian hacktivist group Hacking Cat, and Toy Ghouls. NightEagle uses compromised VPN credentials and the GhostContainer modular backdoor to fully compromise Microsoft Exchange servers, chaining CVE-2020-0688 exploitation, BlueKeep (CVE-2019-0708), Active Directory vulnerabilities, and DCSync to seize domain controllers. Hacking Cat exploits Exchange flaws including CVE-2021-26855 and CVE-2026-42897 to deliver the Gorilla RAT and multiple Monkey ransomware variants written in Rust, .NET, C++, and Golang targeting Windows, Linux, and VMware ESXi, with some variants acting as wipers that never store the encryption key.

The Hacker Newsupdated · 5h agofirst · 22h agoThreat actor in the wild 5 sourcesCVE-2020-0688CVE-2019-0708CVE-2021-26855+1 CVEs2

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

Hackers Use LLMs to Generate Exploit Scripts and Automate Post-Exploitation Across Latin America

Unit 42 says Latin American attackers used LLMs to automate post-exploitation in campaigns hitting Mexican government, water utilities, and Brazilian financial firms.

Unit 42 identified two campaigns in Latin America whose operators used commercial LLMs (Claude, GPT-4.1) behind a self-hosted NextChat interface to generate and debug post-exploitation scripts. Cluster CL-CRI-1131 compromised a transportation organization, Mexican federal ministries, and water utilities in Mexico and Ecuador, using native Windows tools and Volume Shadow Copies to dump the SAM registry hive and NTDS.dit. Cluster CL-CRI-1163 targeted Brazilian financial organizations with job-themed phishing, custom RATs, and a Go-based reverse SOCKS5 tunneling utility called SockTz, with nine versions deployed within roughly two hours. Trend Micro tracks related AI-augmented activity as SHADOW-AETHER-040 and SHADOW-AETHER-064.

GBHackers · 7d agoThreat actor in the wild1

BlackHatSect0r Hackers Disable AI Safety Controls to Automate Credential Theft and Cyberattacks

French-speaking crew BlackHatSect0r disabled AI agent safety controls to automate scanning, credential harvesting, and vishing, exposing 16,834 stolen credentials.

Socradar researchers analyzed the exposed infrastructure of a French-speaking crew called BlackHatSect0r && DXQRTXX, which ran a Nous Research Hermes agent on a DeepSeek model with safety controls removed via HERMES_DISABLE_SAFETY=1. A custom Go-based C2 platform, DXSCAN, was exposed on port 8080 with over 200 secret-detection patterns, a vault of 16,834 harvested credentials, and scanning activity queuing 2.75 million domains and reaching more than 726,000 hosts. The kit also held a database of roughly 450,000 French telecom subscriber records used to prepare vishing lures impersonating Société Générale, plus JWT-forging tooling for a cryptocurrency exchange. Most confirmed compromises relied on exposed secrets and cloud misconfiguration rather than novel exploits; the one cited vulnerability, CVE-2026-42530, is an NGINX HTTP/3 QPACK use-after-free fixed in version 1.31.2.

GBHackersupdated · 3h agofirst · 6h agoThreat actor in the wild 4 sourcesCVE-2026-42530

China-Linked UNC3569 Exploited Sogou Input Method Flaw to Deploy GRAYRABBIT Backdoor

China-linked UNC3569 exploited a Sogou Input Method flaw to deploy GRAYRABBIT backdoor on Windows machines across East and Southeast Asia.

Gen Digital found that China-linked UNC3569, a hacker-for-hire group tracked by Google since 2021, exploited a flaw in Sogou Input Method's Windows sgbiz: link handler to reach a sandbox-disabled Chromium 80 build and exploit 2021's CVE-2021-38003 for code execution. The chain delivered GRAYRABBIT, a remote shell backdoor capable of file transfer and module loading, via a 7-Zip DLL sideloading trick gated on process count. Tencent fixed the handler flaw in April 2026 but the embedded browser remains outdated. Sogou has over 455 million monthly users and roughly 70% share of Chinese input methods.

The Hacker Newsupdated · 3d agofirst · 6d agoThreat actor in the wild 3 sourcesCVE-2021-38003