Search: “casterat”

SloppyRAT: A New Tool For Ransomware Attacks

Zscaler details SloppyRAT, a new DLL backdoor delivered via ClickFix lures that stages CastleLoader and CastleRAT ahead of ransomware attacks.

Zscaler ThreatLabz analyzed SloppyRAT, a DLL-based backdoor distributed via ClickFix lures that abuses finger.exe over TCP port 79 to download a batch script. The malware copies curl.exe to download IronPython 3.4.2 from GitHub and executes zlib-compressed Base64-encoded Python to deploy CastleLoader and CastleRAT, then reflectively loads SloppyRAT in memory. It hinders analysis using XOR stack-string obfuscation, a modified affine cipher with modulus 127, and 13 runtime-decrypted code blocks, while communicating with C2 over a reverse SOCKS channel.

Zscaler ThreatLabz·updated Sep 11, 09:12 UTC · 6d ago·first Sep 10, 14:43 UTC · 6d agoMalware in the wild 3 sources

Meta Ads Push StreamRat Android Trojan That Can Gain Near-Complete Device Control

ThreatFabric details StreamRat, a new Android banking trojan spread via Meta malvertising in Spain that reached about 571,000 EU accounts.

ThreatFabric reported that a fake TV-streaming malvertising campaign on Meta promoted StreamRat, a technically sophisticated Android banking trojan, targeting Spanish-speaking users; the ads reached an estimated 570,950 Meta accounts in the EU between June 11 and July 3, 2026. Once installed via sideloaded APKs, the trojan abuses Accessibility to log keystrokes, show credential-stealing overlays, capture screens, and remotely control devices, and was also promoted through TikTok. Its dropper requests default Home app and VPN permissions and was hosted via GitHub releases, closely resembling one used in the earlier Mirax campaign. C2 infrastructure includes IPs 45.147.28.59 and 193.32.2.245, and no named threat actor was attributed.

The Hacker News·Sep 2, 12:22 UTC · 14d agoMalware in the wild

ValleyRAT masquerading as adware

Kaspersky reports threat actors distributing the ValleyRAT backdoor disguised as adware, tracing the infection chain to the final payload.

Kaspersky researchers analyzed a campaign distributing the ValleyRAT backdoor under the guise of adware. The write-up documents the complete infection chain, from the malicious installer through deployment of the final backdoor payload. ValleyRAT is a remote access tool typically used by criminal actors for surveillance and data theft.

Kaspersky Securelist·Aug 31, 10:00 UTC · 17d agoMalware in the wild

AlayaVista: Streaming World Modeling from Panoramic States to Perspective Video

AlayaVista is a camera-controllable streaming video world model that decouples panoramic scene evolution from perspective synthesis, trained on a 1,318-hour 4K dataset.

AlayaVista builds a 360-degree scene prior from a single perspective image, evolves it as a camera-conditioned panoramic latent state, and maps it to perspective video via a latent viewport renderer plus a perspective refiner. Chunk-autoregressive generation and few-step distillation enable efficient streaming. The authors introduce MUGEN, a real-world panoramic video dataset with 1,318 hours of at-least-4K video and rich semantic and geometric annotations.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 12, 20:00 UTC · 4d agoAI research

Russian man indicted for spreading malware to 80,000 freelancers

US prosecutors indicted a Russian national for infecting roughly 80,000 freelancers with TVRAT and DarkVNC malware via fake freelance-platform accounts.

Searzhudin Tamirlanovich Aktulaev, 40, was indicted in California for conspiracy, transmission of malicious code, and aggravated identity theft; he was arrested in Cyprus in May 2025 and extradited in August 2026. From June 2016 to November 2017, about 255 fake accounts on a Northern California freelance platform messaged roughly 80,000 users with malicious Excel attachments that ran macros to download malware. The campaign deployed TVRAT (also known as TeamSpy), which exploited a TeamViewer flaw, and DarkVNC via VNC Viewer, exfiltrating stolen data to US-hosted command-and-control servers. About half the victims were in the US, and stolen credentials were used for fraud.

Help Net Security·Sep 3, 00:00 UTC · 14d agoPolicy & legal in the wild

Before You Poll with LLMs: A Deliberative Diagnostic Framework

Deliberative diagnostic shows all five tested frontier LLMs misrepresent human belief shifts after arguments, with GPT-5.1 reversing on outgroup questions.

The Deliberative Polling Diagnostic Framework compares human and LLM persona belief shifts after identical informational interventions, using data from America in One Room (526 personas, 72 questions). All five frontier models tested failed uniquely: GPT-5.1 exhibited partisan reversal (80% on outgroup vs 26% on policy questions), Gemini 2.0 Flash, Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Llama 3.3 70B overshot at 5-7x human magnitude, and DeepSeek V3 showed near-zero change (rigidity). The authors term the underlying signature 'self-sycophancy', conformity to the model's internal persona stereotype rather than reasoning from provided information.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 14, 16:41 UTC · 2d agoAI research

Multiple ArtraDownloader Variants Used by BITTER to Target Pakistan

BITTER used three ArtraDownloader variants since 2015 to target Pakistan, China, and Saudi Arabia, deploying BitterRAT and exploiting CVE-2017-11882 in one wave.

Palo Alto Unit 42 documents ArtraDownloader, a previously unreported downloader family used by the suspected South Asian group BITTER, with three variants and roughly 80 unique samples dating back to February 2015. Between September 2018 and January 2019, BITTER used spearphishing documents hosted on compromised Pakistani websites to target Pakistan and, for the first time, Saudi Arabia; one RTF sample exploited the EQNEDT vulnerability CVE-2017-11882. The downloader retrieves BitterRAT over HTTP, uses simple registry keys for persistence, and byte-level string obfuscation. Infrastructure overlap with the previously reported MY24 InPage-exploit payload was also observed.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 17, 13:22 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wildCVE-2017-11882

StreamRat Android malware spreads through Meta and TikTok ads

Malwarebytes reports StreamRat Android banking trojan spread via Meta and TikTok ads reaching roughly 570,000 users, mostly in Spain.

Malwarebytes researchers uncovered a malicious advertising campaign on Meta and TikTok promoting a fake free TV-streaming service that delivered the StreamRat Android banking trojan and infostealer. The ads, aimed at Spanish-speaking users with most victims in Spain, reached approximately 570,000 Meta users in a campaign running June 11 through July 3, 2026. The download site detected Android devices and the referral source, then coached users through sideloading steps including enabling installs from unknown sources. StreamRat can monitor the screen, capture typed credentials, display fake login screens, and give attackers remote control, including black-screen and fake Android update overlays.

Malwarebytes Labs·Sep 3, 16:04 UTC · 13d agoMalware in the wild

Silver Fox Targets Japanese Manufacturer with 3

Chinese group Silver Fox used new vulnerable drivers and DLL side-loading to deploy ValleyRAT at a Japanese industrial manufacturer.

Cato Networks detailed a Silver Fox campaign against a Japanese industrial manufacturing organization combining new vulnerable-driver abuse (BootRepair.sys and EnPortv.sys alongside wsftprm.sys), DLL side-loading via Zeon Corporation PDF binaries, and NTDLL unhooking to deliver ValleyRAT (Winos 4.0), a Gh0st RAT variant. The chain starts with an invoice-themed phishing lure hosting attacker-controlled content on legitimate QQ and Tencent Cloud services. Shellcode is injected into svchost.exe via thread-context hijacking, and a dual watchdog design pairs payload monitoring with a scheduled-task batch script for persistence. A separate 180-day VirusTotal retrohunt found 146 Atlas RAT samples across six PDB builds, though the Silver Fox link remains circumstantial.

The Hacker News·Aug 27, 10:50 UTC · 20d agoThreat actor in the wild

Iran-Linked Hackers Use Fake LinkedIn Job Offers to Deploy NodeRabbit and PollCat RATs

Iran-linked Mirage Kitten targets software engineers with fake LinkedIn recruiter coding tests deploying new NodeRabbit and PollCat RATs.

Kaspersky researchers link the campaign to Mirage Kitten (also tracked as UNC1549, Smoke Sandstorm, Nimbus Manticore), with victims in aviation, aerospace and fintech in Egypt, Ethiopia and Afghanistan. Trojanized npm dependencies (colorized_terminal, pretty-log) bundled in coding-challenge archives launch the Node.js implants across Windows, Linux and macOS. NodeRabbit uses AES-256-GCM-encrypted C2 via Azure, and its third variant persists through a fake GitHub Copilot Helper VS Code extension plus Git post-merge/post-checkout hooks. PollCat is an obfuscated JavaScript RAT that registers with C2 before OTP authentication and inventories tools from 24 security vendors.

GBHackers·Sep 9, 12:52 UTC · 7d agoThreat actor in the wild1

ValleyRAT: When Legitimate Software Becomes a Malware Delivery Tool

Kaspersky details ValleyRAT delivered via trojanized QN Wallpaper using DLL sideloading, tied to Silver Fox and hitting 1,500+ users in China and India.

Kaspersky found a malicious installer abusing a modified version of the legitimate QN Wallpaper adware application to deliver the ValleyRAT backdoor via DLL sideloading of libcef.dll. The installer masquerades as DingTalk, Chrome or Tencent Meeting software, creates persistence, disables Windows Defender via the DisableAntiSpyware registry key, and loads AES-encrypted payloads. ValleyRAT collects keystrokes, clipboard contents and screenshots plus system details, can download additional modules, and resists removal by injecting into svchost.exe or marking its process critical. The campaign was detected over 100,000 times in 2026, affecting more than 1,500 users mainly in China and India, and is attributed to Silver Fox with both espionage and financial motives.

Security Affairs·Aug 31, 19:45 UTC · 16d agoMalware in the wild

Security Affairs newsletter Round 589 by Pierluigi Paganini

Security Affairs·Aug 9, 11:49 UTC · Aug 9, 2026Industry

Russian Man Extradited Over Malware Campaign Targeting Freelancers

A Russian national was extradited to the US for allegedly spreading TVRAT and DarkVNC malware to 80,000 freelance platform users via Excel attachments.

Searzhudin Tamirlanovich Aktulaev, 40, was arrested in Cyprus in May 2025, extradited on August 28, 2026, and indicted on conspiracy, computer damage, unauthorized access and aggravated identity theft charges. Prosecutors say he and co-conspirators used about 255 fake accounts on a freelance employment platform's messaging system to send macro-laden Excel attachments between June 2016 and November 2017, deploying TVRAT (TVSPY/TeamSpy) and DarkVNC remote access trojans. Thousands of victims were identified on a US-hosted C2 domain, with roughly half of the 80,000 affected users in the US; C2 infrastructure was paid for with virtual currency. If convicted he faces up to 20 years for wire fraud conspiracy plus additional terms and fines.

Infosecurity Magazine·Sep 2, 15:00 UTC · 14d agoPolicy & legal in the wild1

Hackers Use Fake LinkedIn Job Offers to Infect Developers With New Cross-Platform RATs

Iran-linked Mirage Kitten uses fake LinkedIn job challenges to deliver new cross-platform RATs NodeRabbit and PollCat to developers in fintech, aviation, and aerospace.

PolySwarm documented a campaign by Iran-linked Mirage Kitten (UNC1549) that uses fake recruiter personas and technical hiring challenges on LinkedIn to deliver the newly documented RATs NodeRabbit and PollCat, which run on Windows, Linux, and macOS. A challenge archive bundles a fake npm package (colorized_terminal 2.1.0) in node_modules that loads NodeRabbit, while a React-based challenge delivers PollCat with an attacker-controlled OTP screen. NodeRabbit persists through a malicious Visual Studio Code extension and Git post-merge/post-checkout hooks; PollCat persists via scheduled tasks, cron, and LaunchAgents. Victims were observed in fintech, aviation, and aerospace, with confirmed targets in Egypt, Ethiopia, and Afghanistan.

Cyber Security News·Sep 9, 14:07 UTC · 7d agoMalware in the wild

New Malware 'Rover' Targets Indian Ambassador to Afghanistan

Unit 42 reports a spearphishing attack delivering the custom Rover Trojan to India's Ambassador to Afghanistan, exploiting CVE-2010-3333 in Word.

On December 24, 2015, Unit 42 identified a targeted spearphishing email spoofing Indian Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, sent to India's Ambassador to Afghanistan. The RTF attachment exploited CVE-2010-3333 in Microsoft Word to download a downloader from newsumbrella.net, which retrieved the Rover Trojan and DLL plugins from 46.166.165.254. Rover uses OpenCV for webcam capture, OpenAL for audio recording and libsndfile for audio files, with data exfiltration over its C2 channel; separate payload versions target Windows XP and later systems.

Palo Alto Unit 42·Aug 17, 12:57 UTC · Aug 17, 2026Threat actor in the wildCVE-2010-3333

Security Affairs newsletter Round 590 by Pierluigi Paganini

Weekly Security Affairs newsletter roundup aggregating top cybercrime, malware, APT and AI security stories including ExfilSquad, Kimwolf v7 and Kimsuky AI use.

This is the Round 590 weekly newsletter from Security Affairs, linking to the week's major stories rather than reporting a single incident. Headlines include ExfilSquad extortion, a 7.3M chess.com record leak, Kimwolf botnet v7, SharePoint exploitation after a public PoC, Kimsuky integrating AI, and China-linked autonomous-style attacks. It is a digest and promotional item with no standalone technical details.

Security Affairs·Aug 16, 08:31 UTC · Aug 16, 2026Industry

Technical Manual for a Toolkit for Measuring Contextual Individuation in Transformer Language Models

An open methodology toolkit measures whether transformer language models contextualize fixed word forms across domains using bridge forms and layer-wise silhouette analysis.

The manual documents an open toolkit built around 'bridge forms' - identical written words recurring across two or more subject domains with a different sense in each - to test whether transformer language models individuate word occurrences by context beyond the embedding layer. It covers declarative specification of bridge forms, Wikipedia corpus acquisition, occurrence localization, layer-wise representation extraction, domain-pairwise silhouette measurement, and visualization, justifying each choice against failure modes such as sense contamination and subword-tokenization misalignment. It is a methodological and implementation reference and reports no empirical results.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 4, 16:38 UTC · 12d agoAI research

Vishing campaign abuses Microsoft Teams to give attackers a foothold in company networks

Unit 42 details 'Spring Ring', a vishing campaign using fake IT support on Microsoft Teams to reach 150+ employees at 10+ companies.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 documented 'Spring Ring', a voice-phishing campaign that ran January to April 2026, using 26 attacker identities and fake Microsoft 365 tenants such as 'ITProtectionDepartment' to impersonate internal IT support on Microsoft Teams. One path used Quick Assist or downloaded remote-support tools to run an obfuscated PowerShell script that disabled malware scanning before contacting C2; the other delivered a cloud-hosted file triggering browser hijacking, SMB internal network scanning, and a PetitPotam NTLM relay attempt against domain controllers to gain domain-level privileges. Both intrusion attempts were blocked before attackers reached their objectives. Collaboration-platform phishing alerts rose to 42% of Unit 42's telemetry in early 2026, up from 30%.

Help Net Security·Sep 1, 00:00 UTC · 16d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild1

Russian APT BlueDelta Uses HOOKEDGE to Target Defense and Diplomatic Organizations

Russian GRU-linked BlueDelta (APT28) deployed HOOKEDGE backdoor via macro Word lures against European governments using webhook.site and Microsoft Edge for stealthy C2.

Recorded Future's Insikt Group documented a BlueDelta (APT28/Fancy Bear/Forest Blizzard) espionage campaign from late September 2025 through early April 2026 targeting government and diplomatic organizations in Romania, Spain and Türkiye. The group delivered HOOKEDGE, a lightweight Windows batch-script backdoor, via macro-enabled Word documents with diplomatic lures, including one impersonating Spain's Ministry of the Presidency after a Spanish-Moldovan meeting. HOOKEDGE uses webhook.site as C2, a scheduled task every 30 minutes that downloads commands through Microsoft Edge, and canary pixels like docopened.jpg to track phishing funnel progress. A second tier with 5-minute check-ins served high-value victims, and beaconing intervals were stretched to 61 minutes to evade sandboxes; code overlap ties HOOKEDGE to BlueDelta's earlier HEADLACE backdoor.

Security Affairs·Aug 28, 11:26 UTC · 19d agoThreat actor in the wild1

RenderFormer-V2: Neural Rendering with Heterogeneous Scene Primitives

RenderFormer-V2 is a transformer-based neural renderer handling caustics, volumetric scattering and out-of-distribution materials without per-scene training or specialized code.

RenderFormer-V2 is a learned transformer-based neural rendering model that models global light transport as a sequence-to-sequence transformation, handling caustics, volumetric scattering, environment lighting, textured and displaced surfaces and out-of-distribution materials. It uses a two-stage process: a view-independent stage resolving primitive-to-primitive transport, and a view-dependent stage converting the neural scene representation into pixels. Improvements include combined windowed-attention with a rendering-informed attention sink for scalability, support for heterogeneous primitives like environment maps and participating media, and a surface-reflectance-independent neural material encoding, validated across diverse scenes with extensive ablations.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 3, 20:00 UTC · 13d agoAI research

To See a World in a Living Context: Unified Indoor-Outdoor Urban World Generation

Researchers introduce HoloWorld, a unified text-driven framework generating coherent indoor-outdoor 3D urban worlds, improving average AQS over SOTA by 7.68%.

HoloWorld is a text-driven 3D generation framework that unifies indoor and outdoor urban world generation using a continuously updated cross-scale world context. It autoregressively generates urban exteriors with consistent spatial organization, grounded in 3D building instances and footprints, then produces building-specific interiors with geometry-constrained layouts that inherit exterior appearance. The authors claim it is the first framework to unify indoor and outdoor generation within one coherent 3D urban world, reporting a 7.68% average AQS improvement over prior SOTA and the highest average RDR score.

Hugging Face daily papers·Aug 28, 20:00 UTC · 19d agoAI research

One Symptom, Three Levers: A Critical Review of On-Policy Self-Distillation

A review paper frames on-policy self-distillation collapse as governed by three levers: token weighting, privileged information, and guidance decay.

The paper critically reviews On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD), where a language model trains on its own generations scored token-by-token by a teacher conditioned on privileged information such as reference solutions or environment feedback. It identifies collapse, the progressive narrowing of producible reasoning paths, as the dominant failure mode and analyzes it through three levers: signal weighting, the nature of privileged information, and teacher dynamics. The review is restricted to mathematical reasoning, reports no new experiments, and offers a shared vocabulary separating settled findings from disputed ones.

Hugging Face daily papers·Aug 25, 20:00 UTC · 22d agoAI research

RelightFormer: Feed-forward Generative Transformer for Multiview Object Relighting

RelightFormer is a feed-forward generative transformer for photorealistic single- and multi-view object relighting, trained on a 90K-object dataset.

Researchers introduce RelightFormer, a feed-forward generative transformer adapted from a video foundation model that performs direct image relighting without explicit intrinsic property estimation. The architecture injects target environment maps via a latent illumination module with cross-attention and uses permutation-invariant positional encodings for unordered multi-view inputs. Training relies on the newly constructed Laval Objaverse Dataset (LOD) with 90K objects and 39K unique illuminations, and the model shows state-of-the-art quality with strong zero-shot generalization across single-view, multi-view, and novel-view relighting.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 6, 20:00 UTC · 10d agoAI research