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CategoryAllRansomware 11Malware 9Vulnerability 4Exploit / PoC 4Threat actor 4Phishing & fraud 3AI safety & security 2Data breach 2Policy & legal 1Industry 1
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APT28-Linked HOOKEDGE Backdoor Targets European Government and Diplomatic Organizations

Recorded Future links new HOOKEDGE batch-script backdoor campaigns against Romanian, Spanish and Turkish government targets to Russia's APT28 (BlueDelta).

Recorded Future's Insikt Group identified campaigns deploying the previously undocumented HOOKEDGE backdoor against government and diplomatic organizations in Romania, Spain and Türkiye from late September 2025 to early April 2026. The lightweight Windows batch backdoor is delivered via macro-enabled Word documents and attributed with moderate confidence to APT28 (Fancy Bear, tracked as BlueDelta), described as the evolutionary successor to HEADLACE, using webhook.site for C2, payload staging and exfiltration. HOOKEDGE fetches .cmd payloads and returns output through headless Microsoft Edge HTTP requests, maintains a 30-minute scheduled task, and a second-stage implant gives high-value targets five-minute beaconing for interactive operator tasking.

The Hacker News · 18d agoThreat actor in the wild

Hackers Leverage Claude to Exfiltrate Secrets from 1.8M Android apps

ShinyHunters-linked operators used Claude to scan 1.8M Android apps for hardcoded secrets, fueling intrusions across 40+ tenants.

Anthropic's September 2026 threat intelligence report describes a French-speaking operator (aliases MeowSHA, frkoo, blazespider) tied to ShinyHunters who ran 10 AWS EC2 workers and used Claude to decompile and scan 1.8 million Android APKs for hardcoded secrets with TruffleHog. Verified credentials were sorted into 100+ Telegram channels and paired with GitHub PAT harvesting, providing initial access for confirmed intrusions. In one supply-chain incident the actors extracted data from roughly 200 downstream customer organizations and dumped 2,100+ Azure AD token sets across 40+ corporate tenants in about 34 hours using AI agents. Anthropic banned tied accounts and stressed its own systems were not compromised.

Cyber Security News · 1d agoThreat actor1

Hackers abused Claude to extract secrets from 1.8M Android apps

Anthropic reports ShinyHunters, Midnight Blizzard, and GTG-10007 misused Claude to automate credential theft, malware operations, and espionage against dozens of victims.

Anthropic's threat report details how ShinyHunters member 'frkoo' ran a credential-harvesting pipeline on ten AWS EC2 workers that mass-downloaded and decompiled 1.8 million Android APKs, scanning for hardcoded secrets with TruffleHog. In one AI-assisted operation, an actor extracted 2,100+ Azure AD authentication tokens across more than 40 Microsoft tenants in roughly 34 hours, and ShinyHunters affiliates also stole AI API keys and breached a SaaS provider affecting about 200 downstream customers. Russian espionage group Midnight Blizzard used Claude Code skills to automate malware development, phishing, C2, and exfiltration against 20+ government and defense entities, rebuilding malware automatically when detected. Chinese-linked GTG-10007 ran autonomous vulnerability research that uncovered zero-days in a major endpoint security product and hit roughly 50 organizations with confirmed compromises; Anthropic disrupted the abuse and banned the accounts.

BleepingComputerupdated · 3d agofirst · 4d agoThreat actor in the wild 11 sources1

Passkey-themed phishing attacks lead to Microsoft 365 data theft

Microsoft links ShinyHunters- and Helix-affiliated actors to passkey-themed vishing and device-code phishing that compromises Microsoft 365 accounts and steals cloud data.

Microsoft attributes passkey- and SSO-themed social engineering activity, observed since May 2026, to Storm-3121 (linked to ShinyHunters and Falcon) and Storm-3032 (tied to BlackFile members now operating as Helix). Attackers impersonate corporate IT help desks by phone or SMS, urging fake passkey, MFA, or SSO updates and directing victims to adversary-in-the-middle phishing pages or device-code authentication flows that yield credentials, session tokens, and OAuth tokens. Post-compromise behavior includes Microsoft Graph enumeration of users, SharePoint, and OAuth grants, plus persistence via attacker-controlled MFA methods. Google Threat Intelligence tracks related activity as UNC6671, linked to the BlackFile, Helix, Falcon, Pink, and Redact extortion gangs.

BleepingComputer · 4d agoPhishing & fraud in the wild 13 sources

Aurora Ransomware Operators Use Cursor AI in Attacks Against 10 Targets

Aurora ransomware operators used Cursor AI running Claude Sonnet to plan and execute intrusions against dozens of organizations in nine countries.

CloudSEK and Gambit Security analyzed exposed infrastructure tied to the Russian-speaking Aurora (Aur0ra) group, revealing months of activity against more than 20 organizations across nine countries between April and July 2026, with 33 victims listed by Ransomware.Live. The operator used the Cursor agentic coding assistant to plan attacks in Russian, including an AD CS exploitation plan, and Gambit observed Cursor Agent (running Anthropic's Claude Sonnet) performing hands-on exploitation tasks such as Nmap scanning, NetExec enumeration, NTLM relay, and certificate attacks against 10 targets. Attacks begin with email bombing plus IT help desk vishing via Xray-core, followed by SMB/LDAP/WinRM/RDP lateral movement, log clearing, Defender disabling, and exfiltration; the Windows and Linux/ESXi encryptors are built from a single Zig codebase, with shadow copy deletion and VM-killing before encryption.

The Hacker News · 15d agoRansomware in the wild1