ZeroHour

Search: “Windows Defender Application Control”

189 stories

Panzer Ransomware Targets Italian Manufacturers and Telecom Firms With ESXi-Ready RaaS

New Panzer ransomware-as-a-service operation lists Italian firms Doimo Cucine and NTE Italia as victims, offering encryptors for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and ESXi.

Panzer, a ransomware-as-a-service operation that surfaced August 5, listed a kitchen manufacturer in Treviso (Doimo Cucine) and a telecommunications engineering firm in Catanzaro (NTE Italia) among alleged victims, claiming 30 GB and 16 GB of stolen data respectively. The group advertises encryptors for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, and VMware ESXi, a Tox-based affiliate recruitment process with screening, an affiliate dashboard, and an 80/20 revenue split. Neither victim had publicly confirmed the incidents when researcher Andrea Fortuna's report was published, and the group's first access method and payload have not been independently analyzed. Panzer posted victims across 11 countries as claimed Italian ransomware incidents reached 212 by September 6, already above 2025's full-year total of 169.

Cyber Security News · 8d agoRansomware in the wild

Chaotic Eclipse Released GreenSection, A PoC For NVIDIA Memory Corruption Zero-Day

Researcher Chaotic Eclipse released GreenSection, a PoC exploiting an unpatched out-of-bounds write in NVIDIA Windows user-mode shared memory.

Security researcher Chaotic Eclipse disclosed an out-of-bounds write in NVIDIA's Windows user-mode components, which share a global memory section (\BaseNamedObjects\{52813408-3561-4705-820a-2b3b78be92ba}) with full read/write access to all users. The PoC crashes applications running Vulkan or OpenGL; the researcher says the bug could cross user boundaries or compromise dwm.exe but did not fully assess the impact. No CVE has been assigned and no patch is mentioned. The researcher recently released zero-day PoCs against Kaspersky, Avast, and CrowdStrike Falcon.

Security Affairs · 9d agoExploit / PoC 2 sources

Hackers Weaponize AI Safety Guardrails to Hide Malware From LLM-Powered Security Scanners

ESET says Russia-aligned actor UAC-0099 hid guardrail-triggering comments in VBScript to derail LLM-based malware scanners in Ukraine.

ESET researchers linked a technique named GuardBreaker to Russia-aligned threat actor UAC-0099 during an attack against an organization in Ukraine. The group embedded a safety-sensitive, weapon-related request in a VBScript comment so an LLM-powered analysis tool might interpret it as an instruction and refuse or truncate analysis before reaching the malicious code. The VBScript downloaded MATCHBOIL, a C#-based loader used by the group alongside MATCHWOK and DRAGSTARE. OWASP guidance recommends treating code comments and metadata as untrusted input, sanitizing it, and never treating an LLM refusal as a clean verdict.

GBHackersupdated · 5d agofirst · 5d agoThreat actor in the wild 3 sources1

Spark RAT Targets Cambodia, Abuses Vulnerable OPSWAT Driver to Disable Security Tools

Acronis details a Spark RAT campaign against Cambodia abusing the vulnerable OPSWAT ardrv.sys driver (CVE-2026-36425) to disable Microsoft Defender and other security tools.

Acronis TRU analyzed a multi-stage Spark RAT campaign targeting Cambodian individuals and organizations with lures spanning government notices, public health materials, and real estate documents. Attack chains use phishing emails with Inno Setup archives, DLL side-loading via a signed Tencent executable, and BYOVD abuse of the vulnerable OPSWAT ardrv.sys driver (CVE-2026-36425) to terminate security software. Shellcode hidden in PNG files patches AMSI and ETW, establishes scheduled task and service persistence, and injects into vssvc.exe and ctfmon.exe to run the open-source Go-based Spark RAT. Tactics resemble the Silver Fox actor, but Acronis tracks the cluster as unattributed with low confidence.

The Hacker News · 20d agoMalware in the wildCVE-2026-36425

Shai-Hulud's Reach Just Grew to 469 Credential Locations. Here's What That Means

GitGuardian found the Shai-Hulud infostealer worm now scans 469 credential locations, including CI/CD and AI tool configs, expanding supply-chain risk.

GitGuardian researchers found that a recent Shai-Hulud worm variant scans for credentials across 469 locations in developer environments, CI/CD tooling, cloud configurations, and AI tool configs, up from 189 paths in earlier variants. The worm reuses stolen credentials to pivot from developer workstations to source code, cloud infrastructure, and package publishing channels, turning credential theft into forward-propagating supply chain attacks. The analysis urges defenders to prioritize removing long-lived package publishing tokens in favor of short-lived OIDC-based trusted publishing, citing recent Docker and GitHub Actions improvements.

The Hacker News · 13d agoMalware in the wild1

BambooToken malware controls Windows and Linux systems via MQTT

Lumen Black Lotus Labs exposes BambooToken, a China-aligned malware framework using MQTT C2 to backdoor Windows and Linux systems at roughly a dozen enterprises.

Lumen's Black Lotus Labs documented BambooToken, a previously unknown malware framework active since at least 2023 that adopted MQTT for command-and-control in 2024-2025 variants targeting Windows and Linux. Infection occurs via DLL side-loading through digitally signed Tendyron OnKey USB-token software or an impersonated Kingsoft Office installer; dead code suggests keylogging, clipboard theft, audio/webcam capture, and screenshot modules. Telemetry identified roughly a dozen compromised entities, mostly in Asia and South America, including a Hong Kong GitLab server and possibly users of the SpeedCN VPN service. Targeting patterns are consistent with China-aligned operations, though no attribution to a known cluster was made.

BleepingComputerupdated · 1d agofirst · 1d agoMalware in the wild 2 sources1

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 · 20d agoThreat actor in the wild

Hackers Turn More Than 3,500 Redis Servers Into Cryptocurrency Miners

Hunters.io researchers report 3,562 exposed Redis servers hijacked via replication abuse into Monero cryptomining, causing performance loss and data-integrity risk.

Researchers at Hunters.io exposed a cryptomining operation that compromised 3,562 distinct Redis servers after scanning 12,966 targets. The attackers used unauthenticated Redis instances and master-replica replication to plant a cron task that downloaded and ran XMRig every five minutes. The miner connects to a mining pool over encrypted port 443 and hides among temporary files. Impact includes high CPU usage, elevated cloud bills, and data-loss risk from altered Redis persistence settings.

Cyber Security News · 7d agoMalware in the wild

Microsoft Links 30+ Rotating Domains to MacSync Stealer Infrastructure

Microsoft links 30+ rotating domains to the MacSync macOS infostealer, confirming active credential and file exfiltration through chunked HTTP PUT uploads.

Microsoft Defender Experts correlated 30+ domains with MacSync Stealer, requiring aligned endpoint and network behaviors (process ancestry, command-line patterns, /curl/, /dynamic?txd=, and /gate?buildtxd= paths, API-key headers, chunked HTTP PUT parameters) to link infrastructure. Execution begins from an interactive zsh session consistent with ClickFix social engineering, with curl retrieving and Base64/gunzip decoding the payload, followed by collection of Keychain data, browser credentials, SSH keys, AWS credentials, Kubernetes configs, and Apple Notes. Data is zipped to /tmp/osalogging.zip, chunked, uploaded via HTTP PUT, and artifacts are deleted afterward; the analysis builds on RST Cloud's May 8 findings and overlaps with Microsoft's earlier 250+ domain ClickFix campaign distributing MacSync and Atomic Stealer (AMOS).

The Hacker News · 28d agoMalware in the wild