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xHunt Campaign: New Watering Hole Identified for Credential Harvesting
Unit 42 tied the xHunt campaign to a watering hole on a Kuwait government website used to passively harvest visitors' NTLM credential hashes.
Palo Alto Unit 42 identified a Kuwait government organization's webpage injected with hidden HTML referencing image paths on domains (microsofte-update.com, learn-service.com) tied to xHunt/Hisoka C2 infrastructure. When visitors loaded the page, Windows would attempt SMB/NetBIOS authentication to the remote share, allowing the operators to capture NTLM hashes that could be cracked or relayed. Related DNS redirect activity on xHunt infrastructure in 2019 pointed to additional credential-harvesting interest against Kuwaiti government email servers.
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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.
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Suspected Russian Hackers Abuse Google OAuth and WhatsApp Linking to Hijack Accounts
Google tracked three suspected Russian espionage clusters abusing OAuth flows, app passwords, and WhatsApp linking to hijack accounts of diplomats and defense targets.
Google Threat Intelligence Group detailed three suspected Russian espionage clusters, UNC6293, UNC7005 (Storm-2945), and UNC5976, targeting academia, aerospace, defense, governments, and think tanks in Europe, the US, Ukraine, and Armenia. UNC6293, assessed as a sub-cluster of APT29/Ice Relic, conducted OAuth and application-specific password phishing while impersonating State Department officials. UNC5976 registered file-sharing-themed domains hosting fake OAuth login pages and deployed a malicious Excel plugin codenamed HEADRUSH, while UNC7005 abused WhatsApp device linking to hijack accounts and record victims' audio and video.
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Aggah Campaign: Bit.ly, BlogSpot, and Pastebin Used for C2 in Large Scale Campaign
Aggah campaign abuses Bit.ly, BlogSpot, and Pastebin as multi-hop C2 to deliver RevengeRAT across the Middle East, US, Europe, and Asia.
Unit 42 details the Aggah campaign, which began with spearphishing emails in March 2019 spoofing a large financial institution and targeting education, media/marketing, and government organizations in the Middle East, later expanding to the US, Europe, and Asia. Delivery documents use Template Injection to load a remote OLE file whose macro runs mshta against a Bit.ly link redirecting to a BlogSpot post, which then uses Pastebin pastes to download RevengeRAT configured with a duckdns[.]org C2 domain. The embedded script also deletes Microsoft Defender signatures and kills Defender and Office processes, and modifies registry keys to enable macros. High-level TTPs resemble the Gorgon Group, but Unit 42 could not confirm attribution.
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