A new Android malware named Manic targeting users in multiple European countries has a fallback mechanism for exfiltrating data through nearby infected devices. The malware has been active since at least February and combines spyware, banking fraud, and remote control capabilities. It targets at least 169 banking, government/eID, payment, crypto wallet, messaging, and authenticator/2FA apps, with users in Ukraine being the primary focus. Mobile security company ThreatFabric analyzed the Manic malware and found that it uses transparent overlays on the numeric keypads of legitimate applications to capture victims' taps and reproduce them through Android Accessibility, allowing the legitimate applications to continue functioning normally. After obtaining Accessibility and notification access permissions, the malware can capture the lock PIN/password, intercept notifications and SMS messages, collect files and location data, monitor the screen, and provide remote control to operators via WebRTC sessions.
U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds an MLflow vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added a Progress LoadMaster vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-64849 (CVSS score of 9.3), to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. CVE-2026-64849 is a critical server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerability in MLflow, a platform for managing machine-learning workflows. The issue affects MLflow versions before 3.15.0 and a remote attacker can exploit the issue without authentication. The vulnerability allows attackers to make requests from an exposed MLflow server to internal services, including cloud metadata endpoints, potentially exposing temporary cloud credentials. Attackers are actively exploiting CVE-2026-64849 to access cloud metadata services and steal credentials and secrets. Cybersecurity firm watchTowr also observed widespread scanning for exposed MLflow instances just hours after the CVE was assigned on August 17, 2026. “watchTowr Intel is observing in-the-wild exploitation of a critical unauthenticated Server-Side Request Forgery vulnerability in MLflow (CVE-2026-64849), the open-source platform for managing the machine learning and AI development lifecycle, with over 60 million monthly downloads.” watchTowr said in a post on LinkedIn. “Attackers are exploiting the vulnerability to reach cloud metadata services directly, and exfiltrating cloud credentials and secrets. Within hours of the CVE being assigned, Attacker Eye, our global honeypot network, detected attackers indiscriminately scanning for exposed MLflow systems online, capturing attempts against cloud-hosted instances.” Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CISA)
The US charged 17 Iranians over a years-long hacking campaign that stole 31TB from universities, companies and government agencies worldwide. Eight years after the original indictment first went public, US prosecutors just added eight more names to the list. The Justice Department unsealed a superseding indictment this week charging 17 members of the Mabna Institute, an Iran-based operation running hacking campaigns since at least 2013 on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other government and university clients. According to DoJ, the group compromised systems at 144 US universities and 178 foreign ones, plus at least 42 US private companies, 11 foreign companies, five federal and state government agencies, and two nongovernmental organizations. They pulled more than 31 terabytes of academic data and intellectual property out of those systems, along with entire employee email inboxes wherever they had access. “The Mabna Institute stole more than 31 terabytes of academic data and intellectual property from these universities, as well as the email accounts of employees at the private sector companies, government agencies, and NGOs.” reads the press release published by DoJ. “The defendants conducted many of these intrusions on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), one of several entities within the government of Iran responsible for gathering intelligence, as well as other Iranian government and university clients. Nine of the 17 defendants charged in the S2 indictment were previously charged in a 7-count indictment announced in March 2018. The case is assigned to U.S. District Judge Jesse M. Furman.” The hackers targeted more than 100,000 professor accounts worldwide and broke into about 8,000 of them in around 24 countries. They used stolen credentials to access research papers, theses, dissertations and academic journals, which were then sold online. The stolen material was offered through websites such as Megapaper.ir and Gigapaper.ir. Customers could buy academic resources or use compromised professor accounts to access university libraries. The operation turned stolen academic credentials and research into a profitable business. One name on the new charge sheet connects this case to something much more publicly memorable. Behzad Mesri, listed among the newly added defendants, was separately charged years ago with breaking into HBO’s systems, stealing proprietary data, and attempting to extort the company for roughly $6 million in Bitcoin. This indictment ties him and four co-defendants to that same intrusion as part of the broader Mabna Institute operation, connecting a headline-grabbing entertainment industry hack to a much larger state-linked espionage campaign. The financial damage extends well beyond stolen research. According to the indictment, other defendants ran password spray attacks against private companies and at least two government entities, causing victims to spend more than $20 million investigating and cleaning up after the intrusions. ““Today’s charges, which include eight additional defendants, reveal the broader network allegedly behind a sweeping, state-sponsored campaign to steal research and intellectual property from American universities, businesses, and government institutions,” said U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald for the Southern District of New York. “More than eight years after making the original indictment public, these charges make clear that the passage of time will not deter us from identifying and pursuing those who target the United States from abroad. Cyber operations have become a central instrument of national power, and attacks on American and allied institutions carry direct consequences for our security and economic strength. This office and our partners will continue to protect American innovation and pursue accountability for the individuals behind these attacks.”” Five of the newly charged defendants, Mesri, Galekuhi, Kahzadian, Fayaz, and Ballojeh, now carry a combined bounty attached to their names. The State Department’s Rewards for Justice program is offering up to $10 million for information leading to their location, funneled through a Tor-based tip line for anyone willing to share what they know. Given that most of these defendants are almost certainly still in Iran and unlikely to face a US courtroom anytime soon, that reward is really the only lever prosecutors currently have. An indictment isn’t a conviction, and every defendant here remains legally presumed innocent unless proven otherwise in court. But the FBI’s own framing of the case makes the intended message pretty clear regardless of what happens next: eight years between the original charges and this expanded version isn’t hesitation, it’s the department demonstrating that an open case file doesn’t have an expiration date, even when the people on it never set foot on American soil. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Iranians) Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Iranians)
A suspected ransomware affiliate is posing as a ransomware recovery service called "Ransom Busters," contacting victims before the attacks become public and claiming it can provide decryption keys and delete stolen data for a fee. GuidePoint Security's Research and Intelligence Team (GRIT) disclosed this activity after responding to several recent ransomware attacks in which victims received emails from Ransom Busters offering to help recover from the attack. The messages were suspicious because they were sent to victims before the attacks became public, raising questions about how they knew about the cyberattacks in the first place. Ransom Busters claimed it exploited vulnerabilities in administrative panels used by ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operations, giving it access to encryption keys and data stolen from victims.
A suspected ransomware affiliate is posing as a ransomware recovery service called "Ransom Busters," contacting victims before the attacks become public and claiming it can provide decryption keys and delete stolen data for a fee. GuidePoint Security's Research and Intelligence Team (GRIT) disclosed this activity after responding to several recent ransomware attacks in which victims received emails from Ransom Busters offering to help recover from the attack. The messages were suspicious because they were sent to victims before the attacks became public, raising questions about how they knew about the cyberattacks in the first place. Ransom Busters claimed it exploited vulnerabilities in administrative panels used by ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operations, giving it access to encryption keys and data stolen from victims.
Japanese cloud and data center service provider Sakura Internet disclosed that hackers accessed its sales management system, where customer contract and membership information is stored. In an update today to the initial notification from Monday, the company says the incident may have impacted up to 1,360,563 member accounts. However, as the investigation continues, the exact number of affected accounts remains to be determined. Sakura Internet is a major Japanese digital infrastructure company providing web hosting, VPS, public cloud, data-center, and GPU computing services. It has been selected as a domestic provider for Japan’s Government Cloud program, making it a strategic entity in the country that reduces dependence on foreign hyperscalers. According to the firm’s announcement, hackers accessed its IT system on August 9. The incident was discovered later during the investigation of a separate breach at the Sakura Rental Server service.
U.S. healthcare IT company CareCloud disclosed that the data breach incident it suffered earlier this year has impacted more than 3.7 million individuals. The healthcare technology organization is publicly traded and provides electronic health records, medical billing, practice management, and revenue-cycle services. The company disclosed the incident in March via a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), noting that the attack caused an 8-hour network disruption on its platform and cut access to one of its databases. At the time, the firm said the compromised environment contained patient data, indicating the risk of sensitive medical information being stolen. Following the incident, CareCloud launched an investigation to determine its scope and how many people were potentially impacted.
In a large-scale campaign that researchers dubbed CameraSwarm, hackers compromised more than 14,500 Dahua IP cameras mostly in Ukraine and Russia. The operation ran for at least 35 days between June 17 and July 22, compromising devices by exploiting vulnerabilities, brute-forcing logins, and using offline recovery codes from serial numbers for cloud-registered cameras. Researchers at threat intelligence company Hunt.io discovered the campaign after finding a working directory on an HTTP server that the operator left unprotected. Hunt.io recovered 407 MB of data comprising 2,616 files across 234 directories, including source code, logs, credentials, captured camera images, shell history, and exploitation results, which helped them map an impressive operation. According to their findings, the 35-day CameraSwarm campaign compromised 14,530 Dahua IP cameras using three attack methods in parallel:
U.S. cybersecurity agencies warn that threat actors are using AI-generated scripts to exploit Siemens S7 Series programmable logic controllers (PLCs) in U.S. critical infrastructure. PLCs are industrial computers used to automate and control machinery and physical processes in factories and other critical infrastructure. The NSA, CISA, FBI, Department of Energy, and Environmental Protection Agency issued the joint advisory Wednesday, saying the attacks are ongoing. "This advisory relates to an active threat to Siemens S7 Series programmable logic controllers (PLCs)," reads the advisory. "However, ongoing PLC targeting activity is broader than Siemens PLCs. All PLC owners and operators should apply relevant mitigations to reduce the risk to their devices and systems." The critical infrastructure sectors most targeted include Critical Manufacturing, Energy, Water and Wastewater Systems, Chemical, Food and Agriculture, and Commercial Facilities. The agencies also note that Siemens S7 PLCs are used in the Defense Industrial Base, which could also be targeted.
Microsoft tracked over 30 MacSync Stealer domains by focusing on behavioral patterns, revealing a campaign targeting passwords, keys, wallets and other data. Domain blocking is a losing game when the thing you’re blocking can register a new domain faster than you can add it to a list. That’s the exact problem Microsoft Defender Experts ran into while tracking MacSync Stealer, a macOS-focused information stealer that RST Cloud first flagged for swapping out its command-and-control infrastructure almost immediately after getting publicly outed. Microsoft detailed how its experts stopped chasing individual domains and started tracking the behaviors that stayed constant underneath them. Instead of tracking individual domains, Microsoft looked at recurring request patterns, HTTP headers and other behaviors. This allowed its researchers to link more than 30 domains to the same campaign and determine that the infrastructure was doing more than just sending commands to infected Macs. It was also being used to collect, stage and exfiltrate stolen data. “MacSync Stealer is a macOS-focused information stealer that relies on changing infrastructure to deliver payloads, communicate with compromised devices, and exfiltrate data. Earlier reporting by RST Cloud identified the threat through a limited set of domains and documented rapid command-and-control (C2) replacement after public disclosure.” reads the report published by Microsoft. “Microsoft Defender Experts expanded that view by correlating recurring endpoints and network behaviors across the activity. This behavior-led approach connected more than 30 domains and showed that the infrastructure supported more than C2 communication, extending into active collection, staging, and exfiltration.” The infection chain starts with a trick rather than an exploit. Victims get social-engineered through a technique known as ClickFix, tricked into pasting or running commands directly in macOS Terminal, and once that shell session fires, curl pulls down attacker-controlled payload content from a path formatted as /curl/[token]. Then, native macOS tools decode and unpack the payload, and an AppleScript-driven layer takes over, blending Unix commands like sh, cp, rm, and killall with osascript calls that make the whole chain look more like ordinary system scripting than malware. Once active, the stealer focuses on valuable data. The malicious code looks for macOS Keychain data, saved browser passwords and cookies, SSH keys, AWS credentials, Kubernetes configurations and files in common user folders. It also searches for Ledger and Trezor wallet data, showing that the malware targets users with valuable credentials and assets rather than simply collecting random browser history. What actually confirms exfiltration, rather than just suspicious traffic, is the upload mechanism itself. Collected data gets staged under temporary paths, compressed into an archive, split into chunks, and pushed out through HTTP PUT requests carrying parameters like upload_id, chunk_index, and total_chunks. “The staged archive was uploaded through rotating infrastructure using curl and HTTP PUT requests. Observed requests included –data-binary, API-key headers, macOS User-Agent string, upload_id values, chunk_index values, and total_chunks parameters.” states Microsoft. “These upload traits confirmed active data exfiltration and provided durable hunting pivots even when domains rotated. “ The researchers pointed out that the exfiltration method stays recognizable even when the destination keeps changing. RST Cloud’s follow-up work backs up how consistent this infrastructure actually is under the surface. Using the same recurring URI patterns, RST Cloud surfaced eleven additional candidate domains and found a static API-key value shared across four confirmed command-and-control domains, even while the build token attached to each deployment kept rotating. A shared static key sitting inside otherwise rotating infrastructure is exactly the kind of detail that makes automated evasion look less impressive up close. The attack wraps up with cleanup, deleting temporary archives, staging folders, and lock files after the upload completes. Microsoft notes this reduces what’s left sitting on disk, but it doesn’t erase the behavioral sequence itself. “After exfiltration, the malware removed temporary archives, staging folders, lock files, and other artifacts. Although this cleanup reduced on-disk evidence, the sequence of archive creation, chunked upload, and deletion can still provide a useful behavioral correlation for defenders.” concludes Microsoft. For anyone defending Mac fleets, the practical takeaway here isn’t a list of domains to block, since that list will be stale within days. It’s building detection around the recurring shape of the attack itself: shell sessions spawning curl with those specific flag patterns, osascript chaining rapidly into network activity, and archives appearing under /tmp/sync* right before outbound PUT traffic starts. Chase the pattern, not the address, because the address was never going to sit still long enough to matter. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, malware)
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