The Hacker News.

"Over 290,000 websites infected with JSFireTruck JavaScript Malware in one month."

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Over 269,000 Websites Infected with JSFireTruck JavaScript Malware in One Month

Jun 13, 2025Web Security / Network Security

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a "large-scale campaign" that has been observed compromising legitimate websites with malicious JavaScript injections. According to Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, these malicious injects are obfuscated using JSFuck , which refers to an "esoteric and educational programming style" that uses only a limited set of characters to write and execute code. The cybersecurity company has given the technique an alternate name JSFireTruck owing to the profanity involved. "Multiple websites have been identified with injected malicious JavaScript that uses JSFireTruck obfuscation, which is composed primarily of the symbols [, ], +, $, {, and }," security researchers Hardik Shah, Brad Duncan, and Pranay Kumar Chhaparwal said . "The code's obfuscation hides its true purpose, hindering analysis." Further analysis has determined that the injected code is designed to check the website referrer (" docu...

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Ransomware Gangs Exploit Unpatched SimpleHelp Flaws to Target Victims with Double Extortion

Jun 13, 2025Vulnerability / Ransomware

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday disclosed that ransomware actors are targeting unpatched SimpleHelp Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) instances to compromise customers of an unnamed utility billing software provider. "This incident reflects a broader pattern of ransomware actors targeting organizations through unpatched versions of SimpleHelp RMM since January 2025," the agency said in an advisory. Earlier this year, SimpleHelp disclosed a set of flaws (CVE-2024-57727, CVE-2024-57728, and CVE-2024-57726) that could result in information disclosure, privilege escalation, and remote code execution. The vulnerabilities have since come under repeated exploitation in the wild, including by ransomware groups like DragonForce, to breach targets of interest. Last month, Sophos revealed that a Managed Service Provider's SimpleHelp deployed was accessed by the threat actor using these flaws, and then leveraged it to pivot t...

CTEM is the New SOC: Shifting from Monitoring Alerts to Measuring Risk

Jun 13, 2025Threat Detection / Enterprise Security

Introduction: Security at a Tipping Point Security Operations Centers (SOCs) were built for a different era, one defined by perimeter-based thinking, known threats, and manageable alert volumes. But today's threat landscape doesn't play by those rules. The sheer volume of telemetry, overlapping tools, and automated alerts has pushed traditional SOCs to the edge. Security teams are overwhelmed, chasing indicators that often lead nowhere, while real risks go unnoticed in the noise. We're not dealing with a visibility problem. We're dealing with a relevance problem. That's where Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) comes in. Unlike detection-centric operations that react to what's already happened, CTEM shifts the focus from what could happen to "why it matters." It's a move away from reacting to alerts and toward managing risk with targeted, evidence-based actions. The Problem with Alert-Centric Security At its core, the SOC is a monitoring engine. It digests input from f...

Apple Zero-Click Flaw in Messages Exploited to Spy on Journalists Using Paragon Spyware

Jun 13, 2025Spyware / Vulnerability

Apple has disclosed that a now-patched security flaw present in its Messages app was actively exploited in the wild to target civil society members in sophisticated cyber attacks. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-43200, was addressed on February 10, 2025, as part of iOS 18.3.1, iPadOS 18.3.1 , iPadOS 17.7.5 , macOS Sequoia 15.3.1 , macOS Sonoma 14.7.4 , macOS Ventura 13.7.4 , watchOS 11.3.1 , and visionOS 2.3.1 . "A logic issue existed when processing a maliciously crafted photo or video shared via an iCloud Link," the company said in an advisory, adding the vulnerability was addressed with improved checks. The iPhone maker also acknowledged that it's aware the vulnerability "may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specifically targeted individuals." It's worth noting that the iOS 18.3.1, iPadOS 18.3.1, and iPadOS 17.7.5 updates also resolved another actively exploited zero-day tracked as CVE-2025-24200. It's curr...

WordPress Sites Turned Weapon: How VexTrio and Affiliates Run a Global Scam Network

Jun 12, 2025Threat Intelligence / Malware

The threat actors behind the VexTrio Viper Traffic Distribution Service (TDS) have been linked to other TDS services like Help TDS and Disposable TDS, indicating that the sophisticated cybercriminal operation is a sprawling enterprise of its own that's designed to distribute malicious content. "VexTrio is a group of malicious adtech companies that distribute scams and harmful software via different advertising formats, including smartlinks and push notifications," Infoblox said in a deep-dive report shared with The Hacker News. Some of the malicious adtech companies under VexTrio Viper include Los Pollos, Taco Loco, and Adtrafico. These companies operate what's called a commercial affiliate network that connects malware actors whose websites unsuspecting users land on and so-called "advertising affiliates" who offer various forms of illicit schemes like gift card fraud, malicious apps, phishing sites, and scams. Put differently, these malicious traffi...

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New TokenBreak Attack Bypasses AI Moderation with Single-Character Text Changes

Jun 12, 2025AI Jailbreaking / Prompt Injection

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a novel attack technique called TokenBreak that can be used to bypass a large language model's (LLM) safety and content moderation guardrails with just a single character change. "The TokenBreak attack targets a text classification model's tokenization strategy to induce false negatives, leaving end targets vulnerable to attacks that the implemented protection model was put in place to prevent," Kieran Evans, Kasimir Schulz, and Kenneth Yeung said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Tokenization is a fundamental step that LLMs use to break down raw text into their atomic units – i.e., tokens – which are common sequences of characters found in a set of text. To that end, the text input is converted into their numerical representation and fed to the model.  LLMs work by understanding the statistical relationships between these tokens, and produce the next token in a sequence of tokens. The output tokens are detokeni...

AI Agents Run on Secret Accounts — Learn How to Secure Them in This Webinar

Jun 12, 2025Artificial Intelligence / SaaS Security

AI is changing everything — from how we code, to how we sell, to how we secure. But while most conversations focus on what AI can do, this one focuses on what AI can break — if you're not paying attention. Behind every AI agent, chatbot, or automation script lies a growing number of non-human identities — API keys, service accounts, OAuth tokens — silently operating in the background. And here's the problem: 🔐 They're invisible 🧠 They're powerful 🚨 They're unsecured In traditional identity security, we protect users. With AI, we've quietly handed over control to software that impersonates users — often with more access, fewer guardrails, and no oversight. This isn't theoretical. Attackers are already exploiting these identities to: Move laterally through cloud infrastructure Deploy malware via automation pipelines Exfiltrate data — without triggering a single alert Once compromised, these identities can silently unlock critical systems. You don't get a second cha...

Zero-Click AI Vulnerability Exposes Microsoft 365 Copilot Data Without User Interaction

Jun 12, 2025Artificial Intelligence / Vulnerability

A novel attack technique named EchoLeak has been characterized as a "zero-click" artificial intelligence (AI) vulnerability that allows bad actors to exfiltrate sensitive data from Microsoft 365 (M365) Copilot's context sans any user interaction. The critical-rated vulnerability has been assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2025-32711 (CVSS score: 9.3). It requires no customer action and has been already addressed by Microsoft. There is no evidence that the shortcoming was exploited maliciously in the wild. "AI command injection in M365 Copilot allows an unauthorized attacker to disclose information over a network," the company said in an advisory released Wednesday. It has since been added to Microsoft's Patch Tuesday list for June 2025, taking the total number of fixed flaws to 68. Aim Security, which discovered and reported the issue, said it's an instance of a large language model (LLM) Scope Violation that paves the way for indirect prompt injecti...

Non-Human Identities: How to Address the Expanding Security Risk

Jun 12, 2025DevOps / AI Security

Human identities management and control is pretty well done with its set of dedicated tools, frameworks, and best practices. This is a very different world when it comes to Non-human identities also referred to as machine identities. GitGuardian's end-to-end NHI security platform is here to close the gap. Enterprises are Losing Track of Their Machine Identities Machine identities–service accounts, API keys, bots, automation, and workload identities–that now outnumber humans by up to 100:1 are in fact a massive blind spot in companies' security landscape: Without robust governance, NHIs become a prime target for attackers. Orphaned credentials, over-privileged accounts, and "zombie" secrets are proliferating—especially as organizations accelerate cloud adoption, integrate AI-powered agents, and automate their infrastructure . Secrets Sprawl: The New Attack Surface GitGuardian's research shows that 70% of valid secrets detected in public repositories in 2022 remained active in ...

ConnectWise to Rotate ScreenConnect Code Signing Certificates Due to Security Risks

Jun 12, 2025Vulnerability / Software Security

ConnectWise has disclosed that it's planning to rotate the digital code signing certificates used to sign ScreenConnect, ConnectWise Automate, and ConnectWise remote monitoring and management (RMM) executables due to security concerns. The company said it's doing so "due to concerns raised by a third-party researcher about how ScreenConnect handled certain configuration data in earlier versions." While the company did not publicly elaborate on the nature of the problem, it has shed more light in a non-public FAQ accessible only to its customers (and later shared on Reddit ) - The concern stems from ScreenConnect using the ability to store configuration data in an available area of the installer that is not signed but is part of the installer. We are using this ability to pass down configuration information for the connection (between the agent and server) such as the URL where the agent should call back without invalidating the signature. The unsigned area is u...

Over 80,000 Microsoft Entra ID Accounts Targeted Using Open-Source TeamFiltration Tool

Jun 12, 2025Enterprise Security / Active Directory

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new account takeover (ATO) campaign that leverages an open-source penetration testing framework called TeamFiltration to breach Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) user accounts. The activity, codenamed UNK_SneakyStrike by Proofpoint, has targeted over 80,000 user accounts across hundreds of organizations' cloud tenants since a surge in login attempts was observed in December 2024, leading to successful account takeovers. "Attackers leverage Microsoft Teams API and Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers located in various geographical regions to launch user-enumeration and password-spraying attempts," the enterprise security company said . "Attackers exploited access to specific resources and native applications, such as Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Outlook, and others." TeamFiltration, publicly released by researcher Melvin "Flangvik" Langvik in August 2022 at the DEF CON security conference...

Former Black Basta Members Use Microsoft Teams and Python Scripts in 2025 Attacks

Jun 11, 2025Ransomware / Cybercrime

Former members tied to the Black Basta ransomware operation have been observed sticking to their tried-and-tested approach of email bombing and Microsoft Teams phishing to establish persistent access to target networks. "Recently, attackers have introduced Python script execution alongside these techniques, using cURL requests to fetch and deploy malicious payloads," ReliaQuest said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The development is a sign that the threat actors are continuing to pivot and regroup, despite the Black Basta brand suffering a huge blow and a decline after the public leak of its internal chat logs earlier this February. The cybersecurity company said half of the Teams phishing attacks that were observed between February and May 2025 originated from onmicrosoft[.]com domains, and that breached domains accounted for 42% of the attacks during the same period. The latter is a lot more stealthy and allows threat actors to impersonate legitimate traffi...