Security Affairs Malware newsletter includes a collection of the best articles and research on malware in the international landscape Malware Newsletter Akira Hits Safe Mode: Ransomware Rebooting Around EDR Multi-Functional Linux Botnet “Evooo1Bot” StubMaker RubyGems Campaign Delivers a Windows Infostealer Hunting MacSync Stealer infrastructure through behavioral pivots Manic: Blend between Banking Malware & Spyware Clop Returns with Custom Implant in Mass-Extortion Campaign The ToxicPanda Never Sleeps: ToxicPanda 2.0 Prepares its Next Strike on Mobile Striking gold: Inside the GoldDigger Android malware SilkParasite: Tracking a China-Nexus APT Across Central Asia Prompting the Payload: How an npm Supply Chain Attack Delivers the RedC2 AI-Powered Linux Implant The invisible passenger in your car Malware Crypting Services and the Threat Actors Who Sell Them Grandoreiro goes north: From Brazil to Mexico with a new DLL sideloading campaign Survival of~the~Stealthiest: Evolving Low-Entropy Ransomware via~Genetic Algorithms Malformer: A Multi-Modal Malware Detector Using Transformers XAI-Guided Graph-Based Feature Engineering and Heterogeneous Ensemble Learning for Android Malware Detection An Explainable Deep Learning Pipeline for Malware Family Classification: GAF Image Encoding and API-Grounded LLM Interpretation Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, newsletter)
The ToxicPanda Android malware has evolved with new malicious functionality, expanding its targeting to 349 applications and adding support for 167 remote commands. The malware now requests VPN service permissions to create a local interface that allows it to control network traffic passing through it. The feature enables ToxicPanda 2.0 to block communication from Google Play and Google Play Services. Control at the network level permits the malware to interfere with various security checks and actions, such as app verifications, updates, Play Protect communication, or legitimate disruptions designed to protect users. After obtaining VPN service permissions, ToxicPanda 2.0 blocks communications to Google Play before extracting and installing its payload, then requests Accessibility Service permissions.
Iran-linked hackers shut down a UK power plant for four days in the first confirmed attack of its kind, concurrent with water infrastructure attacks across 12 US states. Iran-linked hackers shut down a British power plant for four days in what The Telegraph describes as the most successful cyberattack of its kind against UK energy infrastructure. “Iran shut down a British power plant for four days in an unprecedented cyber attack, The Telegraph can disclose.” reads the report published by The Telegraph. “It is thought to be the first time that hackers affiliated to the Iranian regime have succeeded in closing down such a facility in the UK, and is believed to be the most successful cyber attack of its kind.” British officials did not name the power plant because of security concerns. Staff worked for four days to restore it, but the plant was small and the outage did not affect the UK’s wider power supply. Still, the government warned power companies and businesses about the incident and provided guidance on how to respond. The attack was reported to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), part of GCHQ, which helps protect the UK’s critical infrastructure. The NCSC did not comment on the specific incident. The US water infrastructure attacks hit dozens of wastewater treatment plants across 12 states, causing flooding and loss of pressure from taps. Authorities in affected areas told customers to boil water. The first reports came from Minnesota on July 26, followed by similar breaches in Michigan, Georgia, South Dakota, and New Jersey. The FBI attributed those incidents to “malicious cyber actors”; US government sources later confirmed the threat most likely originated in Tehran. The UK attack is not thought to have been designed to harm civilians. The more probable intent was to demonstrate that hackers linked to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps could gain access to UK infrastructure and shut it down at will. A four-day outage at a small generator that nobody outside the industry noticed is, from that perspective, a successful proof of concept. Iran has accelerated its cyberattacks on Western countries since the US and Israel began air strikes in February. Suspected Iranian operations have been reported in Germany, Poland, Finland, Belgium, and Albania, with Israel and other Middle Eastern countries remaining the most frequent targets. In March, the NCSC advised British organisations to review their security posture in light of the wider conflict. NCSC chief executive Richard Horne said in June that the agency had handled more than 200 attacks on critical national infrastructure in the previous year alone. The timing is awkward for the intelligence and security committee, which oversees UK spying agencies. “Experts have long warned that the UK is unprepared for the scale of the threat of malicious cyber attacks from foreign adversaries, and the intelligence and security committee, which oversees spying agencies, reported last year that the chance of an Iranian cyber attack on British infrastructure was “unlikely”.” continues the report. A Cabinet Office risk assessment published last month placed the probability of a serious and successful cyberattack on domestic infrastructure at between five and twenty-five percent. The same document warned that AI is making attacks faster and cheaper to run, and is lowering the technical bar for anyone wanting to attempt them. The government’s public response leaned hard on the size of the target. A government source told The Telegraph: “We have thresholds for important generators to legally notify us of cyber activity, and this site is nowhere near. It’s a very small-scale site, less than a rounding error compared to grid capacity.” A government spokesman said the UK has a strong and resilient energy system and that the incident never threatened the wider power network. While both statements are technically true, they do not answer a key question: should it be considered acceptable for even a small power plant to remain offline for four days? Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Iran-Linked Hackers)
A supply-chain attack targeting Android-based car head units is using a legitimate device-update app to spread malware that enlists compromised devices in a proxy botnet or uses them for ad fraud. Kaspersky researchers analyzed the malware and attributed the operation to the MoYu group, a threat actor previously associated with the BadBox malware botnet. The researchers note that this is the first documented case of a malware infection chain specifically created for the targeted car head unit. MoYu's operation targets systems from DoFun, a Chinese automotive software and hardware provider owned by Shenzhen Driving Control Technology Co., Ltd. DoFun is an automotive software, cloud services, and hardware provider that sells generic Android-based head units, which act as the command center for a car's infotainment, navigation, and settings systems.
UMass Amherst researchers showed expired Visa contactless cards can make real purchases by exploiting an unsigned expiry field in Visa’s EMV kernel. Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst demonstrated at USENIX Security 2026 in Baltimore that expired Visa contactless credit cards can complete real purchases, including transactions at live retail and grocery merchants, by exploiting a gap in how the payment protocol handles expiration dates. The paper is titled “Zombie Cards Back Online: Reviving Expired Credit Cards for Contactless Payments,” and the name is accurate. Raja Hasnain Anwar, Gerard DeCunha, and Muhammad Taqi Raza built the attack around a structural weakness in EMV, the contactless payment protocol used by Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover. “A central source of fragility is that the EMV contactless protocol is a selectively authenticated transaction flow. Many data objects are exchanged in plaintext between the card and terminal [2], and only a subset is later bound to cryptographic verification via Offline Data Authentication (ODA) and issuer-verified cryptograms.” reads the paper. “In consequence, an adversary who obtains a man-in-the-middle position on the NFC channel can tamper with decision-critical fields that are consumed by the terminal but are not end-to-end integrity protected. Prior NFC attacks [10–12, 44], including relay-based manin-the-middle techniques, exploit this gap by manipulating transaction-relevant objects in transit while leaving cryptographic checks intact.” The attack exploits a specific design decision in Visa’s Kernel 3, the software layer that implements the EMV protocol for Visa transactions. A Visa contactless transaction presents the expiration date twice: once in a field the payment terminal reads (tag 5F24, the Application Expiration Date) and once in a field the issuing bank reads (tag 57, Track 2 Equivalent Data). These two representations should be tied together by a cryptographic signature, but in Visa’s implementation they aren’t. The relay attack changes only the expiry date that the payment terminal sees, replacing it with a future date while leaving the data sent to the bank unchanged. The card’s digital signature remains valid because it does not cover the expiry date. As a result, the bank receives a transaction that appears legitimate and passes its normal security checks. In simple terms, an attacker can change the expiry date between the card and the terminal without breaking the card’s cryptographic protection. The relay itself is two NFC-capable Android phones running custom software over Wi-Fi: one emulates a card, one emulates a terminal. Each communication round trip added roughly 20 milliseconds for relay alone and about 50 milliseconds with the date modification, keeping the per-transaction average around 415 milliseconds, within Visa’s 500-millisecond command limit. None of the test hardware used EMV’s optional Relay Resistance Protocol, which would have detected the added latency by bounding permissible response times. Mastercard, American Express, and Discover all blocked the attack. Mastercard’s terminal checks consistency between the two expiry representations during record parsing and treats a mismatch as a card data error. American Express binds the expiration date into the data covered by offline authentication, so a modified value produces a hash mismatch. Discover’s kernel wraps the modified transaction objects into the verified transaction hash, and those also failed. Visa’s Kernel 3 does none of these things. The outcome also depended on the issuing bank. The researchers tested three banks with expired and replaced physical Visa cards and found three distinct policies, not a clean pass or fail split. Bank A accepted the modified transactions at $1.00, $100.00, and $500.00 in the lab, and completed purchases of $2.79 at a retail merchant and $3.19 at a grocery merchant on campus. Bank A also accepted transactions from both the expired original card and its replacement against the same account simultaneously, a separate finding that Anwar described as alarming. Bank B detected the modification but still accepted some transactions. A third bank tested on Discover’s kernel detected the edit and declined; however, it also showed the simultaneous-card problem without any modification at all. There is another finding that makes the issue more serious. Researchers changed the Consumer Device Cardholder Verification Method flag at five US banks, and the transactions worked at most of them. This flag controls how the terminal verifies the cardholder, and attackers can change it because the payment data can be modified while it travels between the card and the terminal. There is also another problem with Kernel 3. It sends the issuer a Terminal Verification Results value filled with zeros. This means the bank cannot tell whether the terminal checked the card’s expiry date or whether that check failed. The bank must therefore approve the transaction without seeing what the terminal actually detected. “Across all tests, the dominant factors that determine attack success or failure are: (i) the EMV kernel in use and whether expiry data fields are cryptographically bound to authenticated protocol outputs; (ii) issuer-side lifecycle enforcement, especially whether authorization is tied only to the active account and PAN or also to the specific card instrument and expiration date; and (iii) whether terminal-side validation results are visible to the issuer via TVR. In contrast, transaction amount1 , merchant category, and POS terminal brand did not independently determine the transaction outcome.” continues the paper. The researchers disclosed the findings to Visa in May 2025 and followed up in December 2025. The paper records that Visa acknowledged the report, said it passed initial triage, and indicated it was undergoing reproduction by Visa’s red team. No CVE has been assigned. Neither Visa nor any of the notified banks confirmed any mitigation as of the paper’s acceptance. The Register asked Visa for comment and received no response. The countermeasures the paper proposes sit at the kernel, terminal, and issuer layers: bind the expiry date cryptographically to an issuer-verifiable signature, require terminals to compare both expiry representations and make mismatches visible to the issuer, and have issuers authorize against the PAN-and-expiry combination rather than the PAN alone. For cardholders, the researchers recommend destroying the chip and magnetic stripe of expired cards rather than discarding them intact. Given that the attack requires only the expired physical card or sustained NFC proximity to it, that guidance is now slightly less hypothetical than it was before this paper. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Visa)
A previously unknown malware family dubbed SynkLoader is being distributed in Microsoft Teams phishing campaigns to steal credentials via a fake lock screen. The attacker impersonates the target company's IT help desk, a tactic Microsoft highlighted earlier this year as increasingly common in multi-stage attacks. Expel’s security researcher Marcus Hutchins explains that the attacks direct the victim to install a fake “PowerShell Cleaner” executable (.MSI) hosted in Microsoft Azure, making the download appear trustworthy. Analysis of the malware showed "compile dates and file timestamps indicating it was first compiled and distributed around July 28, 2026." The installer extracts a PowerShell script named cleaner.ps1 and a ZIP archive containing the Python framework, a malicious Python script, precompiled Python libraries, and several fake Microsoft runtime DLLs.
Using the same email, phone number, payment method, and other identifiers makes it easier for data brokers and attackers to profile your activity. Anonyome Labs explains how separate digital personas can reduce correlation and limit the impact of breaches, spam, and identity theft.
Cisco patched nine critical flaws, including six rated CVSS 10.0, found during internal testing. None are known to be exploited. Cisco released another batch of security fixes for its Crosswork platforms and Secure Workload software, part of what it’s calling an ongoing internal security review, and the CVSS scores in this round are unusually severe. “As part of Cisco’s ongoing commitment to proactive security and product quality, the Cisco Crosswork engineering team has conducted a comprehensive internal security review. This review resulted in a software hardening release that addresses multiple internally discovered vulnerabilities.” reads the advisory. “These vulnerabilities were found during internal testing and are not known to be actively exploited. To assist customers in patching and to streamline the disclosure process, Cisco has grouped these issues by their underlying vulnerability class – Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) – and assigned a single Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures Identifier (CVE ID) to each CWE grouping.” Four vulnerabilities affect Crosswork Data Gateway, Crosswork Network Controller, and Crosswork Planning, all impacting these products regardless of how they’re configured: CVE-2026-20030 (CVSS score: 10.0) – an SQL injection vulnerability that lets an attacker manipulate database queries directly. CVE-2026-20357 (CVSS score: 10.0) – a missing authentication for critical function vulnerability, meaning a sensitive operation can be triggered without ever proving who you are. CVE-2026-20358 (CVSS score: 10.0) – an external control of file system vulnerability, letting an outside actor influence which files the system reads or writes. CVE-2026-20359 (CVSS score: 9.9) – an insufficiently protected credentials vulnerability, where stored login material isn’t locked down the way it should be. Seeing three CVSS 10.0 vulnerabilities in a single Cisco advisory is unusual. The four flaws affect Crosswork 7.2.1 and earlier, and Cisco fixed them in version 7.2.1-SP. Five more vulnerabilities got patched in Cisco Secure Workload, spanning both its cloud SaaS and on-premises deployments: CVE-2026-20231 (CVSS score: 9.9) – a set of improper neutralization of special elements vulnerabilities covering command, operating system, and argument injection, essentially several different ways to smuggle unintended commands into the system. CVE-2026-20315 (CVSS score: 10.0) – a set of improper access control vulnerabilities spanning authorization, authentication, privileges, and bypasses, a broad category that generally means the system doesn’t reliably enforce who’s allowed to do what. CVE-2026-20317 (CVSS score: 10.0) – a set of improper authentication vulnerabilities covering missing authentication, authentication bypass, and reliance on untrusted inputs, another maximum-severity cluster centered on identity verification failing outright. CVE-2026-20318 (CVSS score: 9.6) – a set of improper input validation vulnerabilities spanning input validation, path traversal, and external path control, the kind of flaw that lets crafted input reach files or directories it was never meant to touch. CVE-2026-20319 (CVSS score: 7.5) – a set of improper restriction of operations within the bounds of a memory buffer vulnerabilities spanning buffer overflows and out-of-bounds writes, lower severity than the rest but still a genuine memory-safety problem. The networking giant addressed five vulnerabilities in Secure Workload Release 3.10.9.1 for the 3.10 branch and earlier, and 4.0.4.16 for the 4.0 branch. The company found these vulnerabilities during internal testing; it is not aware of attacks in the wild exploiting this issue. “The Cisco PSIRT is not aware of any public announcements or malicious use of the vulnerabilities that are described in this advisory.” conctinues the advisory. “Cisco says it found the vulnerabilities through internal security testing that also used advanced AI models.” Nobody’s reported active attacks against any of these nine flaws yet, and Cisco’s own review process caught them before an outside researcher or attacker did. If your organization runs Crosswork or Secure Workload in any configuration, this isn’t a patch to schedule for next month’s maintenance window. Perfect CVSS scores tend to attract attention fast once a vulnerability’s technical details start circulating, and Cisco’s internal discovery only buys you a head start if you actually use it. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Cisco)
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) ordered U.S. federal agencies to prioritize patching two actively exploited vulnerabilities in the TrueConf Server self-hosted communications platform. TrueConf Server is designed for secure corporate messaging and video conferencing and, unlike cloud-based software like Zoom or Microsoft Teams, it operates inside an organization's local network (LAN). The most severe is a critical missing authentication security flaw (tracked as CVE-2026-72529) that allows attackers without privileges to remotely execute arbitrary scripts on unpatched servers. "A remote unauthenticated attacker connecting to TrueConf Server over 4307/TCP can invoke an undocumented critical function and execute an arbitrary script on the server," the TrueConf security team explains.
Microsoft has patched a maximum-severity vulnerability in the Entra ID identity and access management (IAM) platform that has been exploited in attacks.
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