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:
Huntress observed a 155x increase in password spraying attacks in H1 2026, including a campaign that generated more than 81 million login attempts in two weeks. The attacks exploited legacy authentication and gaps in MFA policies that left some login flows unprotected.
Microsoft has reminded customers that systems running Home and Pro editions of Windows 11 24H2 will stop receiving updates in two months. "On October 13, 2026, Windows 11, version 24H2 Home and Pro editions, and Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2016 will reach end of updates," Microsoft warned in a message center update. "After this date, devices running these editions will no longer receive monthly security and non-security preview updates containing protections from the latest security threats." However, according to its support website, Windows 11 24H2 Enterprise and Education editions will remain under mainstream support until October 2027. Customers are advised to upgrade to Windows 11 25H2 (also known as the Windows 11 2025 Update), which has become generally available in September 2024 as a minor update installed through an enablement package.
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)
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said Tuesday that the Medusa ransomware gang has breached more than 500 critical infrastructure organizations in the United States since June 2021. This was revealed in a joint advisory in coordination with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). "As of April 2026, Medusa actors have impacted more than 500 victims across multiple critical infrastructure sectors, including Healthcare and Public Health, Defense Industrial Base, Critical Manufacturing, Government Services and Facilities, Information Technology, and Financial Services," they said. "Other victims include organizations in the medical, education, legal, insurance, technology, and manufacturing industries." This is an update to a joint report published in March 2025, which said the Medusa ransomware operation had impacted an estimated over 300 critical infrastructure organizations.
Cybersecurity researchers at Hunt.io have disclosed details of a campaign that they say compromised more than 14,530 Dahua devices between June 17 and July 22, 2026, using credential attacks, two authentication-bypass flaws, and a peer-to-peer (P2P) relay technique. The activity, codenamed Operation CameraSwarm, was reconstructed from a 407 MB exposed working directory containing 2,616 files
Most email defenses still do the job they did a decade ago. Scan the message, look for something malicious, block it. That worked when the danger sat in the payload, a bad link or an attachment. It stopped working when the danger moved into the message's intent, and it is failing now that the sender is no longer a person. From Bad Content to Bad Intent to AI on Both Sides Phishing 1.0 was bad
Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a global cybercrime operation that abuses thousands of hacked WordPress websites as infrastructure to disseminate malware, commandeer infected hosts, store stolen documents, screenshots, and activity logs created to track the status of the activity. "The operation doesn't rely on a single piece of malware, but on a whole toolkit of criminal software
A JavaServer Pages (JSP) web shell deployed following the exploitation of a critical security flaw in PTC Windchill and FlexPLM servers is specifically designed for the enterprise Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) software, according to new findings from ReliaQuest. The cybersecurity company characterized the web shell as a fully equipped extortion platform capable of mapping sensitive vault
A Heights Finance breach exposed personal and financial data of over 1.2 million people after hackers compromised a third-party cloud platform. Heights Finance is a U.S. consumer finance company that provides personal loans and related lending services, mainly to customers who may have limited access to traditional bank credit. It is part of Heights Finance Holdings Co. Heights Finance Holdings is notifying more than 1.2 million people that on May 7, 2026, Heights Finance discovered unauthorized access to a third-party cloud platform storing customer data. The company launched an investigation with external cybersecurity experts and notified federal law enforcement. “On May 7, 2026, Heights discovered that an unauthorized actor gained access to a cloud-based platform hosted by a third party that we use to store certain customer data. This activity was limited to the cloud-based platform only—it did not affect any of our loan management systems or other computer systems or networks. We immediately activated our incident response protocols, brought in outside cybersecurity specialists to investigate, and reported the incident to federal law enforcement.” reads the notice of data breach. “We have since confirmed that the cloud-based platform is secure and that there is no ongoing security threat. Our operations were not impacted by this incident and have continued safely and securely.” Heights said its internal systems and operations were not affected, the platform has been secured, and there is no ongoing threat. The compromised customer information included contact details, financial and bank account data, government IDs and dates of birth. The affected data varies by person and may involve Heights Finance customers, loan applicants, people who inquired about its products, or former borrowers of Curo Management and related brands. Heights Finance is offering affected individuals 24 months of free credit monitoring and identity protection. The company said dark web monitoring has found no evidence that the stolen data has been published. No threat actor has claimed responsibility, and no known ransomware or extortion group has been linked to the breach so far. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Heights Finance)
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