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DDoS Attacks Cause Major Threema Outages

Sustained distributed denial-of-service attacks knocked Swiss secure messenger Threema offline for hours before upstream filtering restored service; On-Prem users unaffected.

Threema suffered a series of large-scale DDoS attacks that left its Swiss secure messaging service unavailable for about four hours Tuesday evening, with intermittent outages into Wednesday morning until restoration at 12:23 p.m. CEST. Attacks also targeted colocation partner Nine and kept changing patterns, complicating mitigation. Threema deployed additional upstream DDoS protection on August 14 and plans status page improvements; Threema On-Prem customers running their own infrastructure were unaffected.

Security Affairs · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wild

North Korea-linked Hackers Hide a Backdoor Inside HAProxy

Rapid7 reports North Korea-linked hackers implanted a backdoor compiled into HAProxy at South Korean automotive and media firms, enabling covert C2 and credential theft.

Rapid7 documented a previously undocumented Linux toolkit hitting South Korean automotive and media organizations, centered on a backdoor compiled directly into victims' HAProxy 2.8.12. The 'ted backdoor' uses HAProxy's native filter API to intercept HTTP traffic, receive C2 commands hidden in requests to a fake image path, and erase all traces from logs and counters; the toolkit also trojanizes crond, agetty, atd, sshd, and polkitd, adds an SSH keylogger, and runs curlRAT with virtualization checks. It can inject scripts or replace page content for selected victims, turning the load balancer into a watering hole. Attribution sits at medium confidence toward North Korean state actors, with overlaps to APT37-linked infrastructure and a concurrent Lazarus campaign; the campaign's command domains have since gone dark.

Security Affairs · 9d agoThreat actor in the wild1

2,000 Leaked Documents Reveal How Russia Turns Engineering Students Into GRU Cyber Operators

Leaked Bauman Moscow State Technical University files reveal a hidden GRU training pipeline feeding APT28 and Sandworm units.

More than 2,000 leaked Bauman Moscow State Technical University documents show that Department No. 4, a hidden program inside the Military Training Center, trained roughly 250 career and reserve students for GRU cyber and intelligence roles across six academic years. Graduates were linked to Military Unit 26165 (APT28), Unit 74455 (Sandworm/APT44) and Unit 29155, and former Unit 26165 commander Viktor Netyksho was involved in department oversight. Reporting by The Insider, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and other outlets, with independent analysis by DomainTools, estimates 10-15 students annually were selected for GRU-related assignments before graduating.

Security Affairs · 14d agoThreat actor1

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

North Korea-linked IT Workers Are Getting Hired Inside Western Companies

Huntress documented five DPRK-linked FAMOUS CHOLLIMA workers hired by Western companies in 2026 using fake identities, proxies and laptop farms.

Huntress published an investigation of five confirmed 2026 cases of North Korea-linked IT workers, tracked as FAMOUS CHOLLIMA, obtaining remote jobs at legitimate companies in IT, sales, marketing and healthcare. The workers use stolen or fabricated identity documents, VPNs and proxy services, and some were caught using PiKVM hardware-level control, travel routers and laptop farms to mask their true location. Detection relied on document forensics, behavioral anomalies and indicators like identical typo artifacts in electricity bills rather than network intrusions.

Security Affairs · 16d agoThreat actor in the wild

Dark Caracal Deploys New Go Malware With Ethereum-Based C2 Fallback

Dark Caracal targeted a Venezuelan communications organization with new Go-based GoCaracal malware and an updated Bandook backdoor using Ethereum smart-contract C2 fallback.

Arctic Wolf Labs linked a June 2026 intrusion against a communications organization in Venezuela to Dark Caracal, an espionage group associated with Lebanon's General Directorate of General Security (GDGS). The group deployed a previously undocumented Go-based framework called GoCaracal in lightweight and extended builds alongside a Delphi-loaded Bandook backdoor, with delivery via phishing emails carrying weaponized SVG attachments through URL shorteners. The extended build uses a custom Solidity contract, BulletproofC2, on Ethereum to retrieve replacement C2 addresses without redeploying malware, and Arctic Wolf traced 249 related samples from January to July 2026 showing a modular evolution arc.

Security Affairs · 20d agoThreat actor in the wild

Operation Jackal: 58 Arrests Expose the Money Laundering Machine Behind Global Scams

INTERPOL's Operation Jackal IV made 58 arrests across 22 countries, disrupting Black Axe-linked networks laundering scam, BEC and sextortion proceeds.

INTERPOL's Operation Jackal IV (November 2025–June 2026) involved 22 countries and led to 58 arrests and 263 suspects identified tied to West African organized crime networks such as Black Axe. Key actions included 39 arrests in South Africa with $2.67 million seized and 257 bank accounts frozen, 17 arrests in Argentina against a crime-as-a-service laundering network, and a Romanian call-center investment scam with estimated global losses around €143 million. The operation also flagged rising sextortion of minors as young as 14 by these networks.

Security Affairs · 22d agoThreat actor

Inside Operation CameraSwarm: How One Actor Took Over 14,000 Dahua Cameras

One actor compromised over 14,000 Dahua cameras in Ukraine and Russia using brute-force, authentication bypass, and cloud relay serial-number abuse.

Hunt.io reconstructed Operation CameraSwarm from an exposed operator directory, revealing one actor compromised 14,000+ Dahua cameras between June 17 and July 22, 2026, mainly in Ukraine and Russia. The toolkit included a brute-force engine, a two-flaw 2021 authentication-bypass chain planting a persistent backdoor account on 1,923 cameras, and abuse of Dahua's cloud relay where 89.4% of probed serials returned open, unauthenticated channels. A SalatStealer Windows binary and Defender-disabling PowerShell script were staged on the same server but appear unrelated to the camera campaign.

Security Affairs · 28d agoThreat actor in the wildCVE-2024-39943CVE-2025-31702

Mustang Panda Upgrades CoolClient With a Kernel Rootkit

Mustang Panda's updated CoolClient backdoor deploys a signed kernel driver to hide processes, files and network activity in Asian intrusions.

Kaspersky analysis shows Mustang Panda (HoneyMyte) upgraded its CoolClient espionage backdoor with a signed kernel-mode driver installed as a Windows service, communicating via IOCTL requests to hide processes, files and registry entries. In a Myanmar campaign the actor deployed PlugX first, then CoolClient via a fake Windows Defender directory and Sangfor defender.exe DLL sideloading, with scheduled task and AutoRun persistence and UAC bypass. The updated variant was observed in intrusions across Pakistan, Mongolia and Myanmar, with victims also in Russia including confirmed government entities.

Security Affairs · Aug 16, 2026Threat actor in the wild1

Crooks Are Buying Your Expired Domains and Using Them to Deliver Malware

Infoblox finds dropcatch expired domains fuel malware delivery and C2, with actor Sable Squirrel spending ~$7M on 10,000+ domains.

Infoblox Threat Intel reports that in H1 2026 dropcatch (re-registered expired) domains made up nearly 20% of all new registrations, about 65,000 per day, inheriting reputation and traffic that attackers exploit. Threat actor Sable Squirrel spent nearly $7 million on 10,000+ expired domains, running Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese and Australian streaming platforms (Xoilac, Cakhia, 90phut) that double as C2 servers for Quasar RAT, AsyncRAT, DCRat and Remcos RAT. Scavenger actors like Shady Squirrel acquire previously compromised domains and feed inherited traffic to SocGholish and tech support scam networks.

Security Affairs · Aug 16, 2026Threat actor

ExfilSquad Targets New Victims, Shares Data via Torrents

Extortion group ExfilSquad lists 13 new US, UK and Swedish victims and now distributes stolen data via peer-to-peer torrents.

ExfilSquad, a data-theft extortion collective that emerged in mid-2026, announced 13 new victims in the US, UK and Sweden with an August 5, 2026 negotiation deadline. The group skips ransomware, instead stealing data and threatening publication on a dark web leak site. Resecurity says its TTPs center on exploiting misconfigured Microsoft Dataverse, Power Pages, case management and CRM portals. The group now distributes stolen data through per-victim torrent trackers and web seeds, making leaks hard to contain.

Security Affairs · Aug 11, 2026Threat actor in the wild