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The Smishing Deluge: China-Based Campaign Flooding Global Text Messages

Unit 42 attributes a global smishing campaign with 194,000+ phishing domains impersonating tolls, banks, and couriers to the Smishing Triad.

Palo Alto Unit 42 attributes ongoing smishing texts about toll violations and package misdelivery to the Smishing Triad, targeting U.S. residents since April 2024. Researchers identified 194,345 FQDNs across 136,933 root domains registered since January 2024, mostly via Hong Kong registrar Dominet (HK) Limited with Chinese nameservers and hosting concentrated on U.S. cloud services. The decentralized campaign impersonates banking, cryptocurrency, e-commerce, healthcare, law enforcement, and social media services, and its scale points to a large phishing-as-a-service operation. Phishing pages harvest national ID numbers such as Social Security numbers, home addresses, payment details, and login credentials.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · Aug 17, 2026Phishing & fraud in the wild1

Hackers target WordPress sites via third-party WooCommerce plugin

Attackers exploit unauthenticated file-upload flaw CVE-2026-27540 in WooCommerce Wholesale Lead Capture plugin to install PHP webshells; Wordfence blocked 100,000+ attacks.

CVE-2026-27540 is an unauthenticated arbitrary file-upload vulnerability in the WooCommerce Wholesale Lead Capture premium plugin (versions 2.0.3.1 and older), caused by the exposed wwlc_file_upload_handler AJAX action trusting a user-controlled file_settings allowlist. Discovered by researcher Teemu Saarentaus, it was fixed in version 2.0.3.2 released February 20. Defiant reports Wordfence blocked over 100,000 attacks, with exploitation spikes between June 4-17, July 1, and August 30, delivering shell.php webshells for reconnaissance and additional payload uploads.

BleepingComputerupdated · 14h agofirst · 1d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 6 sourcesCVE-2026-275402· 1 read

Hackers target exposed Vite dev servers to steal AWS, Azure secrets

Mass scanning campaign exploits CVE-2026-39364 in exposed Vite dev servers to steal AWS, Azure, and Terraform credentials.

F5 honeypots detected over 800 attacks and roughly 32,000 events in a month against internet-exposed Vite development servers, abusing CVE-2026-39364 (file access control bypass in Vite 7.1.0-7.3.2 and 8.x before 8.0.5) via parameters like ?raw and ?import&raw. Attackers used extensive wordlists to harvest .env files, AWS/Azure credentials, Terraform state, and /proc/self/environ, with double-encoded traversal to bypass WAFs. The same IPs also leveraged older Vite flaws CVE-2025-30208, actively-exploited CVE-2025-31125, and CVE-2024-45811, primarily from US, Belgium, and Netherlands using Google Cloud ranges.

BleepingComputerupdated · 1d agofirst · 2d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 4 sourcesCVE-2026-39364CVE-2025-30208CVE-2025-31125+1 CVEs2

FBI Disrupts China-Linked QTFY Infrastructure Used to Steal Data From U.S. Organizations

FBI and Lumen disrupted QTFY's QScan and QTRouter botnet platforms used by Chinese state-sponsored hackers to conceal intrusions into U.S. agencies.

The U.S. DoJ announced court-authorized seizure of domains behind QScan and QTRouter, operated by the Chinese state-sponsored group QTFY and employed by Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Company. QTFY has been active since May 2018 and targeted NASA, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Energy, DoJ, HHS, NIH, the U.S. Senate, and academic institutions. QScan exploits vulnerable IoT devices, feeding them into QTRouter, an OpenWrt-based proxy obfuscation network likened to an operational relay box (ORB) that masks attack origins. The group exploited zero-days such as Ivanti CSA flaws CVE-2024-8190, CVE-2024-8963, and CVE-2024-9380, plus numerous N-days, and maintained persistence with RATs, web shells, and legitimate credentials.

The Hacker News · 14d agoThreat actor in the wildCVE-2018-13379CVE-2019-10068CVE-2019-19781+10 CVEs

Counterfeit installers to system compromise: Tracking a deceptive software download campaign

Microsoft tracks a counterfeit software-installer campaign compromising multinationals' China operations, moderately linked to the Silver Fox (Yinhu) actor.

Microsoft Defender Experts is tracking an active campaign using spoofed software download sites for brands such as Razer, Kaspersky, Microsoft Edge, Calibre, and Baidu Netdisk on .com.cn and .hl.cn domains, delivering installer archives whose hashes change per download, indicating server-side payload generation. The implants establish persistence, weaken security protections, and communicate with attacker-controlled infrastructure, with confirmed compromises across healthcare, manufacturing, gaming, technology, logistics, government, and education. Microsoft assesses with moderate confidence that the activity matches the publicly reported Silver Fox (Yinhu) fake software campaign; it has not attributed it to a nation-state actor.

Microsoft Security Blog · 15d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Fake Conferences, OAuth and WhatsApp: Inside Russia’s New Espionage Tactics

Google tracks three Russia-linked espionage clusters abusing OAuth, app passwords, and device code phishing against Western researchers and diplomats.

Google's Threat Intelligence Group documented three suspected Russia-linked clusters, UNC6293, UNC7005, and UNC5976, abusing legitimate authentication flows. UNC6293, a likely APT29/ICE RELIC sub-cluster, impersonates US State Department officials in app password and OAuth phishing targeting fewer than five victims at a time. UNC7005, tracked by Microsoft as STORM-2945, spoofs the GLOBSEC conference, runs device code phishing against Microsoft and WhatsApp accounts, and deploys VIDAR and AtomicStealer infostealers. Targets include researchers, academics, diplomats, think-tank analysts, and defense personnel in Europe and the United States.

Security Affairs · 26d agoThreat actor in the wild1