The Hacker News

"MuddyWater launches RustyWater RAT via spear-phishing across Middle East sectors."

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Russ Roberts (https://www.hawaiicybersecurityjournal.net).

MuddyWater Launches RustyWater RAT via Spear-Phishing Across Middle East Sectors

Jan 10, 2026Cyber Espionage / Malware

The Iranian threat actor known as MuddyWater has been attributed to a spear-phishing campaign targeting diplomatic, maritime, financial, and telecom entities in the Middle East with a Rust-based implant codenamed RustyWater . "The campaign uses icon spoofing and malicious Word documents to deliver Rust based implants capable of asynchronous C2, anti-analysis, registry persistence, and modular post-compromise capability expansion," CloudSEK resetter Prajwal Awasthi said in a report published this week. The latest development reflects continued evolution of MuddyWater's tradecraft, which has gradually-but-steadily reduced its reliance on legitimate remote access software as a post-exploitation tool in favor of a diverse custom malware arsenal comprising tools like Phoenix, UDPGangster , BugSleep (aka MuddyRot), and MuddyViper . Also tracked as Mango Sandstorm, Static Kitten, and TA450, the hacking group is assessed to be affiliated with Iran's Ministry of Intelli...

Europol Arrests 34 Black Axe Members in Spain Over €5.9M Fraud and Organized Crime

Jan 10, 2026Cybercrime / Financial Crime

Europol on Friday announced the arrest of 34 individuals in Spain who are alleged to be part of an international criminal organization called Black Axe . As part of an operation conducted by the Spanish National Police, in coordination with the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office and Europol, 28 arrests were made in Seville, along with three others in Madrid, two in Málaga, and one in Barcelona. "The criminal network is known for its involvement in a wide range of criminal activities, including cyber-enabled fraud, drug trafficking, human trafficking and prostitution, kidnapping, armed robbery and fraudulent spiritual practices," Europol said in a statement. It's estimated that the criminal network is responsible for fraud resulting in damages exceeding €5.93 million ($6.9 million). In addition to the arrests, authorities have frozen €119,352 ($138,935) in bank accounts and seized €66,403 ($77,290) in cash during house searches. Black Axe is assessed to be a hier...

2025 Cloud Security Risk Report

SentinelOneEnterprise Security / Cloud Security

Learn 5 key risks to cloud security such as cloud credential theft, lateral movements, AI services, and more.

China-Linked Hackers Exploit VMware ESXi Zero-Days to Escape Virtual Machines

Jan 09, 2026Virtualization / Vulnerability

Chinese-speaking threat actors are suspected to have leveraged a compromised SonicWall VPN appliance as an initial access vector to deploy a VMware ESXi exploit that may have been developed as far back as February 2024. Cybersecurity firm Huntress, which observed the activity in December 2025 and stopped it before it could progress to the final stage, said it may have resulted in a ransomware attack. Most notably, the attack is believed to have exploited three VMware vulnerabilities that were disclosed as zero-days by Broadcom in March 2025: CVE-2025-22224 (CVSS score: 9.3), CVE-2025-22225 (CVSS score: 8.2), and CVE-2025-22226 (CVSS score: 7.1). Successful exploitation of the issue could permit a malicious actor with admin privileges to leak memory from the Virtual Machine Executable (VMX) process or execute code as the VMX process. That same month, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added the flaw to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog...

Russian APT28 Runs Credential-Stealing Campaign Targeting Energy and Policy Organizations

Jan 09, 2026Email Security / Threat Intelligence

Russian state-sponsored threat actors have been linked to a fresh set of credential harvesting attacks targeting individuals associated with a Turkish energy and nuclear research agency, as well as staff affiliated with a European think tank and organizations in North Macedonia and Uzbekistan. The activity has been attributed to APT28 (aka BlueDelta), which was attributed to a "sustained" credential-harvesting campaign targeting users of UKR[.]net last month. APT28 is associated with the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU). "The use of Turkish-language and regionally targeted lure material suggests that BlueDelta tailored its content to increase credibility among specific professional and geographic audiences," Recorded Future's Insikt Group said . "These selections reflect a continued interest in organizations connected to energy research, defense cooperation, and government communication networks r...

Cybersecurity Predictions 2026: The Hype We Can Ignore (And the Risks We Can't)

Jan 09, 2026Artificial Intelligence / Enterprise Security

As organizations plan for 2026, cybersecurity predictions are everywhere. Yet many strategies are still shaped by headlines and speculation rather than evidence. The real challenge isn't a lack of forecasts—it's identifying which predictions reflect real, emerging risks and which can safely be ignored. An upcoming webinar hosted by Bitdefender aims to cut through the noise with a data-driven outlook on where organizations are already falling short, and what those failures signal for the year ahead. Rather than speculative scenarios, the session focuses on threats that are actively reshaping the attack landscape today. The webinar examines the convergence of three major trends. First, ransomware is evolving beyond opportunistic attacks toward targeted disruptions designed to maximize operational and business impact. Second, the rapid and often uncontrolled adoption of AI within organizations is creating an internal security crisis, eroding traditional perimeter assumptions and exp...

Traditional Firewalls Are Obsolete in the AI Era

ZscalerZero Trust / Cloud Security

It's time for a new security approach that removes your attack surface so you can innovate with AI.

Trend Micro Apex Central RCE Flaw Scores 9.8 CVSS in On-Prem Windows Versions

Jan 09, 2026Vulnerability / Endpoint Security

Trend Micro has released security updates to address multiple security vulnerabilities impacting on-premise versions of Apex Central for Windows, including a critical bug that could result in arbitrary code execution. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-69258 , carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10.0. The vulnerability has been described as a case of remote code execution affecting LoadLibraryEX. "A LoadLibraryEX vulnerability in Trend Micro Apex Central could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to load an attacker-controlled DLL into a key executable, leading to execution of attacker-supplied code under the context of SYSTEM on affected installations," the cybersecurity company said. Also patched by Trend Micro are two other flaws - CVE-2025-69259 (CVSS score: 7.5) - A message unchecked NULL return value vulnerability in Trend Micro Apex Central could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to create a denial-of-service condition on affected ins...

CISA Retires 10 Emergency Cybersecurity Directives Issued Between 2019 and 2024

Jan 09, 2026Government / Vulnerability Management

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday said it's retiring 10 emergency directives (Eds) that were issued between 2019 and 2024. The list of the directives now considered closed is as follows - ED 19-01: Mitigate DNS Infrastructure Tampering ED 20-02: Mitigate Windows Vulnerabilities from January 2020 Patch Tuesday ED 20-03: Mitigate Windows DNS Server Vulnerability from July 2020 Patch Tuesday   ED 20-04: Mitigate Netlogon Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability from August 2020 Patch Tuesday ED 21-01: Mitigate SolarWinds Orion Code Compromise ED 21-02: Mitigate Microsoft Exchange On-Premises Product Vulnerabilities ED 21-03: Mitigate Pulse Connect Secure Product Vulnerabilities   ED 21-04: Mitigate Windows Print Spooler Service Vulnerability   ED 22-03: Mitigate VMware Vulnerabilities ED 24-02: Mitigating the Significant Risk from Nation-State Compromise of Microsoft Corporate Email System   Stating that these directives were iss...

FBI Warns North Korean Hackers Using Malicious QR Codes in Spear-Phishing

Jan 09, 2026Mobile Security / Email Security

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Thursday released an advisory warning of North Korean state-sponsored threat actors leveraging malicious QR codes in spear-phishing campaigns targeting entities in the country. "As of 2025, Kimsuky actors have targeted think tanks, academic institutions, and both U.S. and foreign government entities with embedded malicious Quick Response (QR) codes in spear-phishing campaigns," the FBI said in the flash alert. "This type of spear-phishing attack is referred to as quishing." The use of QR codes for phishing is a tactic that forces victims to shift from a machine that's secured by enterprise policies to a mobile device that may not offer the same level of protection, effectively allowing threat actors to bypass traditional defenses. Kimsuky, also tracked as APT43, Black Banshee, Emerald Sleet, Springtail, TA427, and Velvet Chollima, is a threat group that's assessed to be affiliated with North Korea's...

WhatsApp Worm Spreads Astaroth Banking Trojan Across Brazil via Contact Auto-Messaging

Jan 08, 2026Malware / Financial Crime

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new campaign that uses WhatsApp as a distribution vector for a Windows banking trojan called Astaroth in attacks targeting Brazil. The campaign has been codenamed Boto Cor-de-Rosa by Acronis Threat Research Unit. "The malware retrieves the victim's WhatsApp contact list and automatically sends malicious messages to each contact to further spread the infection," the cybersecurity company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "While the core Astaroth payload remains written in Delphi and its installer relies on Visual Basic script, the newly added WhatsApp-based worm module is implemented entirely in Python, highlighting the threat actors' growing use of multi-language modular components." Astaroth, also called Guildma, is a banking malware that has been detected in the wild since 2015, primarily targeting users in Latin America, notably Brazil, to facilitate data theft. In 2024, two diffe...

China-Linked UAT-7290 Targets Telecoms with Linux Malware and ORB Nodes

Jan 08, 2026Malware / Threat Intelligence

A China-nexus threat actor known as UAT-7290 has been attributed to espionage-focused intrusions against entities in South Asia and Southeastern Europe. The activity cluster, which has been active since at least 2022, primarily focuses on extensive technical reconnaissance of target organizations before initiating attacks, ultimately leading to the deployment of malware families such as RushDrop, DriveSwitch, and SilentRaid, according to a Cisco Talos report published today. "In addition to conducting espionage-focused attacks where UAT-7290 burrows deep inside a victim enterprise's network infrastructure, their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and tooling suggest that this actor also establishes Operational Relay Box (ORBs) nodes," researchers Asheer Malhotra, Vitor Ventura, and Brandon White said . "The ORB infrastructure may then be used by other China-nexus actors in their malicious operations, signifying UAT-7290's dual role as an espionage-motiva...

ThreatsDay Bulletin: RustFS Flaw, Iranian Ops, WebUI RCE, Cloud Leaks, and 12 More Stories

Jan 08, 2026Cybersecurity / Hacking News

The internet never stays quiet. Every week, new hacks, scams, and security problems show up somewhere. This week's stories show how fast attackers change their tricks, how small mistakes turn into big risks, and how the same old tools keep finding new ways to break in. Read on to catch up before the next wave hits. Honeypot Traps Hackers Hackers Fall for Resecurity's Honeypot Cybersecurity company Resecurity revealed that it deliberately lured threat actors who claimed to be associated with Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters ( SLH ) into a trap, after the group claimed on Telegram that it had hacked the company and stolen internal and client data. The company said it set up a honeytrap account populated with fake data designed to resemble real-world business data and planted a fake account on an underground marketplace for compromised credentials after it uncovered a threat actor attempting to conduct malicious activity targeting its resou...

The State of Trusted Open Source

Jan 08, 2026DevSecOps / Compliance

Chainguard, the trusted source for open source, has a unique view into how modern organizations actually consume open source software and where they run into risk and operational burdens. Across a growing customer base and an extensive catalog of over 1800 container image projects, 148,000 versions, 290,000 images, and 100,000 language libraries, and almost half a billion builds, they can see what teams pull, deploy, and maintain day-to-day, along with the vulnerabilities and remediation realities that come hand in hand.  That's why they created The State of Trusted Open Source , a quarterly pulse on the open source software supply chain. As they analyzed anonymized product usage and CVE data, the Chainguard team noticed common themes around what open source engineering teams are actually building with and the risks associated.  Here's what they found:  AI is reshaping the baseline stack: Python led the way as the most popular open source image among Chainguard's glo...

Cisco Patches ISE Security Vulnerability After Public PoC Exploit Release

Jan 08, 2026Network Security / Vulnerability

Cisco has released updates to address a medium-severity security flaw in Identity Services Engine (ISE) and ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC) with a public proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20029 (CVSS score: 4.9), resides in the licensing feature and could allow an authenticated, remote attacker with administrative privileges to gain access to sensitive information. "This vulnerability is due to improper parsing of XML that is processed by the web-based management interface of Cisco ISE and Cisco ISE-PIC," Cisco said in a Wednesday advisory. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by uploading a malicious file to the application." Successful exploitation of the shortcoming could allow an attacker with valid administrative credentials to read arbitrary files from the underlying operating system, which the company said should be off-limits even to administrators. Bobby Gould of Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative h...

Researchers Uncover NodeCordRAT Hidden in npm Bitcoin-Themed Packages

Jan 08, 2026Malware / Cloud Security

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered three malicious npm packages that are designed to deliver a previously undocumented malware called NodeCordRAT . The names of the packages, all of which were taken down as of November 2025, are listed below. They were uploaded by a user named "wenmoonx." bitcoin-main-lib (2,300 Downloads) bitcoin-lib-js (193 Downloads) bip40 (970 Downloads) "The bitcoin-main-lib and bitcoin-lib-js packages execute a postinstall.cjs script during installation, which installs bip40, the package that contains the malicious payload," Zscaler ThreatLabz researchers Satyam Singh and Lakhan Parashar said. "This final payload, named NodeCordRAT by ThreatLabz, is a remote access trojan (RAT) with data-stealing capabilities." NodeCordRAT gets its name from the use of npm as a propagation vector and Discord servers for command-and-control (C2) communications. The malware is equipped to steal Google Chrome credentials, API tokens,...