ZeroHour

Search: “ssh”

4 stories

Nimbus Manticore Expands Toolset With TWOSTROKE

Group-IB found new infrastructure and TWOSTROKE-like malware used by IRGC-linked Nimbus Manticore, indicating expanded Middle East and Europe targeting.

Group-IB reported new Tortoiseshell infrastructure spanning Europe and the Middle East and two previously undocumented tools from IRGC-linked Nimbus Manticore (UNC1549): a reverse SSH tunneling utility connecting to 172.86.98.113 on port 443, and a C++ backdoor masquerading as wtsapi32.dll with three hard-coded C2 servers. The backdoor overlaps with TWOSTROKE and supports file transfer, execution, host information gathering, and persistence. Findings build on Kaspersky's report of the NightLedger backdoor and WebSocket tunnelers BridgeHead and ArcBridge, and suggest expanded targeting beyond the Middle East into Europe.

The Hacker News · 20d agoThreat actor in the wild

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 · 13d agoThreat actor

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 · 7d agoThreat actor in the wild

The Coding-Agent Trap: When a "Free" LLM Endpoint Is the Adversary, (Mon, Aug 31st)

A SANS honeypot caught a real coding-agent session routed to a rogue "free" LLM endpoint, exposing a Windows user's transcript and tool outputs.

A SANS analyst describes how an internet-exposed inference honeypot was discovered, relabeled with sought-after model names like DeepSeek, and enrolled in infrastructure serving "free" LLM backends. On 2026-08-30 an opencode terminal coding agent sent an 88-message, 224 KB transcript 210 times in 91 seconds via a China Unicom relay, exposing directory listings, tool outputs and read file portions. The analyst frames tool-enabled agents treating model endpoints as trusted control planes as a novel risk — a "rogue model endpoint" that could request tool executions on the user's machine.

SANS Internet Storm Center · 15d agoAI safety & security1