A fake browser update served over hijacked hotel Wi-Fi has been used to deliver CornFlake, a remote access trojan (RAT) that can capture webcam images, microphone audio, and keystrokes, Microsoft said in its latest report. Researchers track the operation as CaptiveCrunch and attribute it to Storm-2945. It assesses Storm-2945 to be an operational sub-cluster of Midnight Blizzard, also known as APT29 and Cozy Bear. The U.S. and U.K. governments attribute the broader actor to Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). On the compromised networks ReliaQuest investigated, the captive portal gateway also served as the DNS resolver assigned to connected devices. Administrative control of that gateway let the attackers forge Domain Name System (DNS) answers and redirect the resulting traffic. They could then redirect a laptop's automatic connectivity check to a fake browser or operating system update.
North Korea's state hackers are no longer content to type prompts into public chatbots. One of the country's main espionage groups has begun running artificial intelligence (AI) offline on its own servers, connecting document-search tools to files in its possession, and collecting the software parts needed to build AI into its malware. South Korean security firm Genians says it uncovered the setup after months of tracking and log analysis on infrastructure tied to Kimsuky, a hacking unit under North Korea's Reconnaissance General Bureau. Genians found no evidence that the group had trained an AI model of its own, and the firm does not offer that as reassurance. It describes an actor in a "research and knowledge acquisition" stage, assembling and testing existing tools rather than making new models, with the apparent aim of folding AI through the operation, from writing malware to analyzing data.
North Korea's state hackers are no longer content to type prompts into public chatbots. One of the country's main espionage groups has begun running artificial intelligence (AI) offline on its own servers, connecting document-search tools to files in its possession, and collecting the software parts needed to build AI into its malware. South Korean security firm Genians says it uncovered the The incident highlights how adversaries continue to evolve their tradecraft, combining increasingly accessible tooling with targeted social engineering to slip past traditional perimeter defenses. Finally, maintain offline, tested backups and a clear communication plan so that business continuity decisions are made ahead of time rather than under pressure.
The Computer Emergency Response Team of Ukraine (CERT-UA) has disclosed details of a new social engineering campaign orchestrated by Russian nation-state threat actors targeting IT workers in the country by masquerading as recruiters to trick them into installing malware. CERT-UA pinned the activity on a threat cluster it tracks as UAC-0145, which is a subgroup within Sandworm (aka APT44,
Microsoft released its monthly security updates on Tuesday, and one of the flaws it closed is already being used in attacks. The bug sits in a core Windows kernel driver that handles network socket operations. An attacker with code already running on a machine can use it to escalate to SYSTEM. That patch goes out first. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-68820 (CVSS score: 7.0) and is the only one in this month's release Microsoft flags as under active exploitation. Exploitation depends on triggering a race condition in the driver. Microsoft has not publicly attributed the exploitation. Check Point Research says Lazarus used the zero-day in its Operation Dream Job campaign. Four other flaws in the release need nothing at all from the victim: no account, no password, no click. They affect Windows DNS Server, Windows Deployment Services, Microsoft's implementation of the QUIC transport protocol, and High Performance Computing (HPC) Pack, and each carries a CVSS score of 9.8. None was flagged as exploited when the updates shipped.
Hackers associated with the Russian threat group Sandworm have been targeting system administrators and IT professionals through fake job offers since at least May. A report from the Ukrainian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) details a social engineering campaign attributed to UAC-0145, which is believed to be a sub-cluster of Sandworm (APT44). In the campaign, the threat actor targets victims while posing as IT companies and recruiters. The agency says that the attacker studies the targets' resumes uploaded on job sites and then initiates direct contact. Conversations are then moved to Telegram to arrange a video interview over Zoom. During the interview, which is conducted in English, the candidates receive mock technical assignments that require them to connect to a corporate VPN. In one case that CERT-UA observed, the attacker impersonated the international IT firm Sopra Steria using seemingly legitimate email addresses similar to the company’s office in Bulgaria.
North Korean hackers have been exploiting a Windows zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2026-68820) to target defense-sector companies as part of the Operation Dream Job campaign. Microsoft addressed the flaw in this month's Patch Tuesday security updates, marking it as actively exploited in the wild. Researchers found that the Lazarus threat group has been leveraging it since early July. Microsoft says that the vulnerability is a "use-after-free in Windows Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock (AFD.sys)" that allows an attacker to increase their local privileges. The tech giant added that a locally authenticated user could run a specially crafted application on an affected system to trigger a race condition, eventually gaining SYSTEM privileges without any user interaction. A recent wave of the long-standing Operation Dream Job campaign has been targeting defense, aerospace, and aviation organizations in Europe and India, using fraudulent recruitment offers to employees in target entities.
The North Korean threat actor known as Lazarus Group has been attributed to the zero-day exploitation of a newly patched security flaw impacting Microsoft Windows to deliver a never-before-seen backdoor targeting defense and aerospace companies across France, Germany, Brazil, and India. The activity, per Check Point Research, is part of Operation Dream Job, a long-running cyber espionage and
Lazarus targets defense professionals with fake Lockheed Martin jobs, exploiting a Windows zero-day to deploy backdoors and evade security controls. Check Point Research has uncovered a new wave of Operation Dream Job, the long-running North Korean campaign that lures defense and aerospace professionals with convincing fake job offers. This iteration is more dangerous than previous versions: it includes a previously unknown Windows vulnerability now patched as CVE-2026-68820, a newly documented backdoor called Troy, and command infrastructure built almost entirely from legitimate servers the attackers didn’t build, they hijacked them. Targets confirmed in France, Germany, Brazil, and India. “The attackers used a previously unknown vulnerability in Windows (CVE-2026-68820) to gain full control of infected computers and evade EDR visibility. Check Point reported the issue to Microsoft, which released a fix before this research was published” reads the report published by Check Point Research. “Rather than running their own servers, the attackers are hijacking legitimate but compromised websites and webmail servers to relay commands, making the malicious traffic harder to distinguish from normal activity” The vulnerability, CVE-2026-68820, is the same actively exploited zero-day that Microsoft patched on August 11 as part of Patch Tuesday, a privilege escalation flaw in AFD.sys, the kernel driver underlying Windows Sockets. Check Point reported the issue to Microsoft on July 28, Microsoft confirmed it three days later, and the fix shipped two weeks after that. The zero-day in this campaign and the zero-day under active exploitation are the same bug. The attack runs through two parallel infection chains. In the first, victims download an encrypted archive containing a legitimate signed PDF viewer and a malicious DLL. The DLL displays a convincing Lockheed Martin job description while silently loading MISTPEN, a lightweight downloader that communicates through Microsoft Graph API and OneDrive. MISTPEN then runs reconnaissance modules, triggers the AFD.sys exploit to achieve SYSTEM privileges, and deploys ForestTiger, a well-documented Lazarus backdoor, along with an updated version of the group’s kernel-mode rootkit, FudModule 3.1, which can now tamper with Windows Smart App Control to bypass software verification. “The second chain is more recent and shares several characteristics with a campaign described by ESET against the UAV sector in 2025. Victims are instructed to download SecurityPDF, a trojanized PDF viewer, from one of several websites impersonating Enveil, a legitimate privacy technology company with no actual connection to the attack. Once installed, the modified viewer inspects any PDF opened through it for a hidden marker.” continues the report. “When the marker is present, the application decrypts and launches an embedded payload that loads the Troy backdoor directly into memory.” Troy is a single DLL implant that supports 17 operator commands covering file operations, shell access, process termination, in-memory DLL injection, and configuration updates. Its name comes from a PDB path embedded in the binary that Check Point also observed in earlier Lazarus samples. Enveil has no connection to the campaign; its brand was simply borrowed because it sounds credible to defense sector professionals. The C2 infrastructure is built from compromised Roundcube webmail installations and WordPress sites, many vulnerable to CVE-2025-49113, infected with a previously undocumented PHP webshell called RelayShell. RelayShell functions as a relay rather than a traditional backdoor, exchanging commands and responses through simple text files. In at least one confirmed case, an already-breached French organization was used to send phishing messages to new victims — the attackers borrowed the company’s reputation to get past filters. Check Point identified at least 17 unique server identifiers in this relay network, with operators connecting through commercial VPNs to further obscure their location. The most urgent action is applying the August 2026 Patch Tuesday update, which contains the CVE-2026-68820 fix. For organizations running public-facing Roundcube or CMS installations, the secondary risk is becoming part of the relay infrastructure rather than the intended target: the servers used in this campaign were compromised through leaked credentials and a known unpatched vulnerability, not anything exotic. The full indicators of compromise are in Check Point’s report. “Given the combination of a zero day vulnerability that now have a patch, a new modular backdoor, and web based infrastructure designed to resemble legitimate traffic, security teams in these sectors should prioritize the August Patch Tuesday update, review the indicators of compromise published in Check Point Research publication, and apply the same level of scrutiny to unsolicited recruiting outreach that they would apply to any unverified download request.” concludes the report. Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Lazarus)
A new round of the weekly Security Affairs newsletter has arrived! Every week, the best security articles from Security Affairs are free in your email box. Enjoy a new round of the weekly SecurityAffairs newsletter, including international press. Crooks Are Buying Your Expired Domains and Using Them to Deliver MalwareSAP Commerce Cloud CVE-2026-58231 Exploited in the WildmacOS Screen Sharing Flaw Exploited to Deploy Monero MinersGeoServer Zero-Day Is Already Being Probed. 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Intelligence and Information Warfare Follow-Up Analysis of the 29 December 2025 Energy Sector Incident New Jersey, Alabama Join States Targeted in Water Cyberattacks Kimsuky Integrates AI into Attack Operations, From AI-Generated Decoy Documents to a Local LLM China-linked hackers hit Taiwan in unprecedented ‘autonomous’ AI cyber attack State Sponsored Hackers Use Fake Job Offers to Deliver New Zero Day Exploit Social engineering performed by UAC-0145: compromising in the employment process Jewelbug: APT Group Runs Espionage and Crypto Fraud Operations Side by Side PATCHCORD: New malware cluster targets Afghan telecom and South Asian critical infrastructure APT group HoneyMyte upgrades CoolClient: the backdoor gets a kernel-level Windows rootkit North Korean Remote Workers Are Infiltrating Government and Businesses: How to Expose Them Before Hiring How Tehran’s Use of Cyber Operations in the U.S.-Iran Conflict Has Evolved Cybersecurity How a small Israeli startup was linked to rogue AI hacks at OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Responding to the next frontier of critical cyber capabilities Facebook is paying controversial creators to produce rage-bait content Cisco Warns of High-Severity ClamAV Vulnerabilities With Public PoC The August 2026 Security Update Review Cyberattack on logistics giant CEVA delivers customer data into the wrong hands About Apple threat notifications and protecting against mercenary spyware If Apple sends you a push notification alerting you to a spyware attack, take it seriously AI isn’t changing how companies work. It’s changing what a company is Swarms of OpenAI systems set up their own chatrooms to discuss and carry out hacks, company reveals Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon Pierluigi Paganini (SecurityAffairs – hacking, newsletter)
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