The Hacker News

"First VPN dismantled in global takedown over use by 25 ransomware groups."

Views expressed in this cybersecurity, cyber crime update are those of the reporters and correspondents.  Accessed on 23 May 2026, 0216 UTC.

Content and Source:  "The Hacker News."

URL-- https://thehackernews.com/

Please check URL or scroll down to read your selections.  Thanks for joining us today.

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

First VPN Dismantled in Global Takedown Over Use by 25 Ransomware Groups

May 22, 2026Cybercrime / Infrastructure

Authorities in Europe and North America have announced the dismantling of a criminal virtual private network (VPN) service used by criminal actors to obscure the origins of ransomware attacks, data theft, scanning, and denial-of-service attacks. The disruption of First VPN Service was led by France and the Netherlands, with several other nations supporting the investigation since December 2021, including Luxembourg, Romania, Switzerland, Ukraine, the U.K., Canada, Germany, the U.S., Spain, Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Portugal. First VPN, per Europol , offered services designed specifically for criminal use, allowing anonymous payments and a hidden infrastructure that enabled paying customers to hide their identities when carrying out ransomware attacks, large-scale fraud, and data theft. It was promoted on Russian-speaking cybercrime forums such as Exploit[.]in and XSS[.]is as a tool to evade law enforcement. The international operation took place ...

Military Appreciation Month: 10% Off SANS Cybersecurity Training

SANS InstituteCybersecurity Training

Get 10% off SANS training this May—online or in person. Use code MILITARY10. U.S. only.

Ghostwriter Targets Ukraine Government Entities with Prometheus Phishing Malware

May 22, 2026Malware / Artificial Intelligence

The Belarus-aligned threat actor known as Ghostwriter (aka UAC-0057 and UNC1151Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council) has been observed using lures related to Prometheus, a Ukrainian online learning platform, to target government organizations in the country. The activity, per the Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA), involves sending phishing emails to government entities using compromised accounts. It's been active since the spring of 2026. "Typically, the email contains a PDF attachment with a link that, when clicked, leads to the download of a ZIP archive containing a JavaScript file," the agency said in a Thursday report. The JavaScript file, dubbed OYSTERFRESH, is designed to display a decoy document as a distraction mechanism, while stealthily writing an obfuscated and encrypted payload called OYSTERBLUES to the Windows Registry, as well as downloading and launching OYSTERSHUCK, which is responsible for decoding OYSTERBLUES. ...

Megalodon GitHub Attack Targets 5,561 Repos with Malicious CI/CD Workflows

May 22, 2026Supply Chain Attack / Cloud Security

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new automated campaign called Megalodon that has pushed 5,718 malicious commits to 5,561 GitHub repositories within a six-hour window. "Using throwaway accounts and forged author identities (build-bot, auto-ci, ci-bot, pipeline-bot), the attacker injected GitHub Actions workflows containing base64-encoded bash payloads that exfiltrate CI secrets, cloud credentials, SSH keys, OIDC tokens, and source code secrets to a C2 server at 216.126.225[.]129:8443," SafeDep said in a report. The complete list of data harvested by the malware is below - CI environment variables, /proc/*/environ, and PID 1 environment Amazon Web Services (AWS) credentials Google Cloud access tokens Instance role credentials obtained by querying AWS IMDSv2, Google Cloud metadata, and Microsoft Azure Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) endpoints SSH private keys Docker and Kubernetes configurations Vault tokens Terraform crede...

Making Vulnerable Drivers Exploitable Without Hardware - The BYOVD Perspective

May 22, 2026Vulnerability / Driver Security

1 Introduction This article provides a technical analysis of how many Windows kernel mode drivers can be interacted with from user mode without the hardware they were developed for. This work was motivated by driver-oriented vulnerability research and the need to evaluate the exploitability of individual findings, which frequently affect code whose reachability is hardware-gated. The methodology presented here should help anyone determine whether a particular Windows kernel mode driver vulnerability remains reachable - and thus potentially exploitable - even in the absence of the hardware the driver was developed for. The reader is expected to have basic Windows driver knowledge, especially regarding device objects. The rest of this article is written with the assumption that the reader is already familiar with the concepts described in the introduction article: Anatomy of Access: Windows Device Objects from a Security Perspective . Just like the introduction article, this resou...

Kimwolf DDoS Botnet Operator Arrested in Canada Over DDoS-for-Hire Attacks

May 22, 2026Cybercrime / Law Enforcement

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Thursday announced the arrest of a Canadian man in connection with allegedly operating a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) botnet known as Kimwolf . In tandem, Jacob Butler (aka Dort), 23, Ottawa, Canada, has been charged with offenses related to the development and operation of the botnet. Kimwolf is assessed to be a variant of AISURU. "Kimwolf targeted infected devices which were traditionally 'firewalled' from the rest of the internet, such as digital photo frames and web cameras," the DoJ said . "The infected devices were enslaved by the botnet operators." "The operators then used a 'cybercrime-as-a-service' model to sell access to the infected devices to other cybercriminals. The operators and their customers forced the victim devices to participate in DDoS attacks, targeting computers and servers located throughout the world, including Department of Defense Information Network (DoDIN) IP ad...

The Validation Gap: What Automated Pentesting Alone Cannot See

Picus SecurityAutomated Pentesting / Exposure Validation

This free guide maps the structural blind spots and gives you 3 diagnostic questions for any vendor conversation.

CISA Adds Exploited Langflow and Trend Micro Apex One Vulnerabilities to KEV

May 22, 2026Vulnerability / Cyber Attack

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added two security flaws impacting Langflow and Trend Micro Apex One to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerabilities in question are listed below - CVE-2025-34291 (CVSS score: 9.4) - An origin validation error vulnerability in Langflow that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code and achieve full system compromise. CVE-2026-34926 (CVSS score: 6.7) - A directory traversal vulnerability in on-premise versions of Trend Micro Apex One that could allow a pre-authenticated local attacker to modify a key table on the server to inject malicious code to deploy to agents on affected installations. In a report published in December 2025, Obsidian Security said CVE-2025-34291 exploits three combined weaknesses: overly Permissive CORS, lack of cross-site request forgery (CSRF) protection, and an endpoint that allows code execution...

Cisco Patches CVSS 10.0 Secure Workload REST API Flaw Enabling Data Access

May 22, 2026Vulnerability / Network Security

Cisco has rolled out updates for a maximum-severity security flaw impacting Secure Workload that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to access sensitive data. Tracked as CVE-2026-20223 (CVSS score: 10.0), the vulnerability arises from insufficient validation and authentication when accessing REST API endpoints. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability if they are able to send a crafted API request to an affected endpoint," Cisco said . "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to read sensitive information and make configuration changes across tenant boundaries with the privileges of the Site Admin user." The shortcoming impacts Cisco Secure Workload Cluster Software on SaaS and on-prem deployments, regardless of device configuration. Cisco said there are no workarounds that address the vulnerability. The issue has been addressed in the following versions - Cisco Secure Workload Release 3.9 and earlier (Migrate to a fixed releas...

Showboat Linux Malware Hits Middle East Telecom with SOCKS5 Proxy Backdoor

May 21, 2026Cyber Espionage / Threat Intelligence

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new Linux malware dubbed Showboat that has been put to use in a campaign targeting a telecommunications provider in the Middle East since at least mid-2022. "Showboat is a modular post-exploitation framework designed for Linux systems, capable of spawning a remote shell, transferring files, and functioning as a SOCKS5 proxy," Lumen Technologies Black Lotus Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. It's assessed that the malware has been employed by at least one, and possibly more, threat activity clusters affiliated with China, with correlations identified between command-and-control (C2) nodes and IP addresses geolocated to Chengdu, the capital city of the Chinese province of Sichuan. One such threat actor is Calypso (aka Bronze Medley and Red Lamassu), which is known to be active since at least September 2016, targeting state institutions in Brazil, India, Kazakhstan, Russia, Thailand, and Turkey. ...

ThreatsDay Bulletin: Linux Rootkits, Router 0-Day, AI Intrusions, Scam Kits and 25 New Stories

May 21, 2026Hacking News / Cybersecurity News

This week starts small. A token leaks. A bad package slips in. A login trick works. An old tool shows up again. At first, it feels like the usual mess. Then you see the pattern: attackers are not always breaking in. They are using the parts we already trust. That is what makes it worrying. The danger is in normal things now - updates, apps, cloud buttons, support chats, trusted accounts. AI does not make the attacks magic. It just helps people try more things, faster. Here's what showed up this week. 47 zero-days exposed 47 0-Days Discovered in Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 The Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 hacking contest has concluded, with security researchers collecting $1,298,250 in rewards after exploiting 47 zero-day flaws in various products from Windows, Linux, VMware, and NVIDIA. DEVCORE won the event with 50.5 Master of Pwn points and $505,000 in rewards throughout the three-day contest after hacking Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft E...

Microsoft Warns of Two Actively Exploited Defender Vulnerabilities

May 21, 2026Endpoint Security / Vulnerability

Microsoft has disclosed that a privilege escalation and a denial-of-service flaw in Defender has come under active exploitation in the wild. The former, tracked as CVE-2026-41091 , is rated 7.8 on the CVSS scoring system. Successful exploitation of the flaw could allow an attacker to gain SYSTEM privileges. "Improper link resolution before file access ('link following') in Microsoft Defender allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally," Microsoft said in an advisory. The second vulnerability under exploitation is CVE-2026-45498 (CVSS score: 4.0), a denial-of-service bug impacting Defender. The two vulnerabilities have been addressed in Microsoft Defender Antimalware Platform versions 1.1.26040.8 and 4.18.26040.7, respectively. Although Microsoft has not formally confirmed, the vulnerability descriptions for CVE-2026-41091 and CVE-2026-45498 overlap with that of RedSun and UnDefend , two Defender zero-days that were disclosed by Chaotic Eclips...

When Identity is the Attack Path

May 21, 2026Identity Security / AI Security

Consider a cached access key on a single Windows machine. It got there the way most cached credentials do - a user logged in, and the key stored itself automatically. Standard AWS behavior. No one misconfigured anything or violated a policy. Yet that single key, which was easily accessible to a minor-league attacker, could have opened a path to some 98% of entities in the company's cloud environment - nearly every critical workload the business depended on.  This real-world exposure was caught before an attacker could use it. But the takeaway is clear: identity itself, and every permission it carries, has become the attack path. Your environment runs on identity. Active Directory, cloud identity providers, service accounts, machine identities, and AI agents - all of these carry permissions that span systems and trust boundaries. A single stolen credential hands the attacker a legitimate identity - along with every permission attached to it.  Despite this, most security pro...

9-Year-Old Linux Kernel Flaw Enables Root Command Execution on Major Distros

May 21, 2026Linux / Vulnerability

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a vulnerability in the Linux kernel that remained undetected for nine years. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-46333 (CVSS score: 5.5), is a case of improper privilege management that could permit an unprivileged local user to disclose sensitive files and execute arbitrary commands as root on default installations of several major distributions like Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu. It's also codenamed ssh-keysign-pwn. According to Qualys, which discovered the flaw, the problem is rooted in the kernel's __ptrace_may_access() function and was introduced in November 2016. "The primitive is reliable and turns any local shell into a path to root or to sensitive credential material," Saeed Abbasi, senior manager of Threat Research Unit at Qualys, said . Successful exploitation of the flaw could permit a local attacker to disclose /etc/shadow and host private keys under /etc/ssh/*_key, as well as execute arbitrary...