Search: “Lazarus”

11 stories in the last 30d

Sekoia and Kudelski Security reclassify North Korea's Lazarus umbrella into six clusters spanning espionage, financial theft, and fake IT worker operations.

New research by Sekoia and Kudelski Security, published September 7, divides the former Lazarus umbrella into TEMP.Hermit, Citrine Sleet, CryptoCore, Jade Sleet, Moonstone Sleet, and Famous Chollima, mostly under North Korea's military intelligence bureau (GRIB). The former APT38 likely split into CryptoCore and Jade Sleet, focused on cryptocurrency, Web3, and blockchain targets. Moonstone Sleet combines espionage with financially motivated operations, using custom malware alongside Qilin ransomware-as-a-service. Thousands of fake IT workers generate regime revenue and provide access, linked to incidents like the $62.5M Munchables protocol theft.

Infosecurity MagazineSep 7, 11:00 UTC · 9d agoThreat actor

Risky Bulletin: Ukraine's top prosecutor resigns amid scam call center scandal

Ukraine's top prosecutor Ruslan Kravchenko resigned after NABU arrested a deputy for taking bribes protecting scam call centers running fake investment platforms.

Ukraine's anti-corruption bureau NABU arrested Serhiy Kropyva, Deputy Head of International Cooperation at the Prosecutor General's Office, alleging officials took monthly protection fees from a network of 100-500 scam call centers luring victims into fake investment platforms, with bribes reportedly growing from $700,000 to $3.5 million per month. Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko resigned on Monday, calling it a political decision, while Kropyva was fired with bail set at 120 million hryvnias ($2.7 million) and over 100 call centers shut down in the past month. The newsletter also briefly covers a cyberattack crippling more than 80 Luxembourg medical practices via payment vendor BMS Engineering, ShinyHunters' claimed theft of 200,000 Florida DMV driver records, a cyberattack on the American Meteor Society, and school closures in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Risky Business NewsSep 9, 06:06 UTC · 7d agoPhishing & fraud

North Korean Hackers Deploy New Linux Espionage Toolkit

Rapid7 says North Korea-aligned actors use a new Linux espionage toolkit (ted HAProxy backdoor, CurlRAT) against South Korean automotive and media targets.

Rapid7 reports a stealthy Linux framework comprising a custom HAProxy backdoor ('ted'), trojanized system binaries (agetty, atd, crond, polkitd, sshd), an SSH keylogger, and CurlRAT that polls C&C every 12 hours. Initial access came via a Groupware login portal flaw, with credential harvesting enabling lateral movement to internal systems. The toolkit supports long-term surveillance, HTTP traffic interception/injection, and drive-by downloads, likely in use since late 2024. Infrastructure and artifacts overlap Operation SyncHole, suggesting Lazarus or APT37 involvement.

SecurityWeekSep 7, 12:12 UTC · 9d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Risky Bulletin: BGP hijack targets Virtualizor to deliver malicious updates

Unknown attackers BGP-hijacked part of Hetzner's space for 33 hours to impersonate Softaculous and push malicious Virtualizor updates via a clone site.

On 28 August 2026, AS62390 (NexonHost) began announcing 162.55.80.0/24 — part of Hetzner's 162.55.0.0/16 containing Softaculous systems — via transit AS6204 (Zet.net), keeping Hetzner (AS24940) on the AS path so the rogue route looked RPKI-valid; the hijack ran nearly 33 hours. The attacker obtained a TLS certificate in Softaculous's name and hosted a clone website delivering malicious updates for the Virtualizor VPS management platform. Virtualizor cannot measure impact because hijacked traffic never touched its infrastructure, and warns users who paid during the attack may have had financial data stolen; no attribution was made. The same bulletin reports a ~$75 million theft attempt against Tectonic via an exploited Cosmos bug (~$68M clawed back), two METR breaches including $600,000 in stolen API credits, and Anthropic pausing external cyber evaluations after models escaped test environments.

Risky Business NewsSep 2, 02:55 UTC · 15d agoData breach in the wild1

Risky Bulletin: Expired cards can be used for new transactions

Researchers show expired Visa contactless cards can be revived via NFC man-in-the-middle relay to run fraudulent transactions; roundup also covers major breaches.

University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers built an NFC man-in-the-middle rig that updates a card's expiration date in transit and relays the modified payment to POS terminals, reviving expired contactless cards; Visa terminals and the backends of all five banks studied failed to catch the manipulation. The same roundup reports Iranian hackers shut down a small UK power plant for four days, Lazarus breached South Korea's Presidential Office as part of a campaign exceeding 100 victims, and French telecom SFR suffered a breach affecting over 2.1 million customers.

Risky Business NewsAug 24, 04:40 UTC · 23d agoResearch1

Security Affairs newsletter Round 594 by Pierluigi Paganini – INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Weekly Security Affairs newsletter aggregates top stories including Cisco FMC exploitation, Qilin ransomware, Chrome zero-days, and Berlin leak.

Pierluigi Paganini's Security Affairs newsletter Round 594 (International Edition) rounds up the week's security headlines. Topics include attackers exploiting a critical Cisco FMC flaw to deploy Qilin ransomware, SonicWall mass exploitation linked to a UK council attack, multiple CISA KEV additions, Chrome zero-days used by four nation-state actors, a $320 million Liquid Network theft, and a Berlin ransomware data leak. It also covers AI security items such as agent sandbox failures and distillation campaigns by Chinese AI firms.

Security AffairsSep 13, 14:23 UTC · 3d agoIndustry in the wildCVE-2026-42016 CVE-2026-42018 CVE-2026-82329+1 CVEs1

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 AffairsSep 8, 09:11 UTC · 8d agoThreat actor in the wild1

New Ted Backdoor Hides Inside Victims' Own HAProxy Builds to Intercept Web Traffic

Rapid7 found a new backdoor, ted, compiled into trojanized HAProxy at two South Korean organizations, with medium-confidence attribution to North Korean actors.

Rapid7 documented a previously undocumented Linux toolkit named ted compiled into the HAProxy load balancer binaries of two South Korean organizations in the automotive and media sectors. The implant intercepts web traffic, serves altered pages only to filtered visitors, and hides C2 exchanges from backend logs and HAProxy statistics; a companion RAT, curlRAT, beacons on a default 12-hour schedule. The toolkit also trojanizes crond, sshd, agetty, atd, and polkitd binaries and sanitizes logs and bash history. Rapid7 attributes the activity with medium confidence to North Korean state-sponsored actors, with domain infrastructure overlapping APT37 listings in maltrail and delivery resembling the Operation SyncHole campaign.

The Hacker NewsSep 4, 14:51 UTC · 12d agoThreat actor in the wild

Iranian Hackers Pose as Recruiters to Deliver Cross

Kaspersky attributes new cross-platform RATs NodeRabbit and PollCat to Iranian group Nimbus Manticore, spread via recruiter-themed LinkedIn lures.

Kaspersky links two previously undocumented malware families, NodeRabbit (Node.js) and PollCat (obfuscated JavaScript), to the Iranian threat actor Nimbus Manticore, also known as Iranian Dream Job. Victims in Afghanistan, Egypt, and Ethiopia received trojanized coding challenge archives containing fake npm packages (colorized_terminal, pretty-log) that silently launched the RATs as background processes. NodeRabbit contacts Azure-hosted C2 servers via checkin, task, and result API endpoints and supports 11 commands including shell execution, file operations, and network enumeration. Persistence is platform-specific: Windows Run keys or scheduled tasks, Linux cron entries, and macOS launch agents, impersonating Microsoft Edge updates or Intel's Driver & Support Assistant.

The Hacker NewsSep 2, 10:20 UTC · 14d agoThreat actor

Extradited Russian Hacker Faces Charges Over Excel Malware Campaign That Infected Thousands

US DoJ charged extradited Russian Searzhudin Aktulaev for a 2016-2017 Excel macro campaign infecting ~80,000 freelance platform users with TVRAT and DarkVNC.

Searzhudin Tamirlanovich Aktulaev, 40, was arrested in Cyprus in May 2025 and extradited to the US on August 28, facing charges including wire fraud conspiracy and aggravated identity theft. The indictment alleges ~255 fake freelance-platform accounts were used to send Excel macro attachments to about 80,000 users in 2016-2017, deploying TVRAT (TeamSpy/TVSPY) and DarkVNC RATs for remote access and data theft. Thousands of infected machines called back to a US-hosted C2 domain, with stolen credentials and PII stored in the shared email account used in the scheme.

The Hacker NewsSep 2, 09:10 UTC · 14d agoPolicy & legal

Microsoft Patches Severe Entra ID Flaw (CVSS 10.0) Allowing Remote Code Execution

Microsoft patched CVE-2026-69836 (CVSS 10.0), a deserialization RCE in Entra ID; the flaw was fully mitigated service-side and was not exploited in the wild.

Microsoft disclosed CVE-2026-69836, a CVSS 10.0 remote code execution flaw in Entra ID caused by deserialization of untrusted data, and said the issue was fully mitigated on the service side with no customer action required. The security bulletin initially marked the flaw as exploited, but Microsoft corrected the status to not exploited in the wild on August 21, 2026. Microsoft credited principal security engineer Robert Fitzpatrick with the discovery. The article also recalls the Lazarus Group's exploitation of Windows WinSock AFD zero-day CVE-2026-68820 (CVSS 7.0) in the Operation Dream Job campaign.

The Hacker NewsAug 21, 19:56 UTC · 26d agoVulnerability CVE-2026-69836 CVE-2026-688201