- Mysterious hacking group Careto was run by the Spanish government
May 23, 2025
More than a decade ago, researchers at antivirus company Kaspersky identified suspicious internet traffic of what they thought was a known government-backed group, based on similar targeting and its phishing techniques. Soon, the researchers realized they had found a much more advanced hacking operation that was targeting the Cuban government, among others. Eventually the researchers were ...
- Europol and Microsoft disrupt world’s largest infostealer Lumma
May 21, 2025
Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre has worked with Microsoft to disrupt Lumma Stealer (“Lumma”), the world’s most significant infostealer threat. This joint operation targeted the sophisticated ecosystem that allowed criminals to exploit stolen information on a massive scale. Europol coordinated with law enforcement in Europe to ensure action was taken, leveraging intelligence provided by Microsoft. Between 16 ...
- Cocospy stalkerware apps go offline after data breach
May 19, 2025
A trio of phone surveillance apps, which was caught spying on millions of people’s phones earlier this year, has gone offline. Cocospy, Spyic, and Spyzie were three near-identical but differently branded stalkerware apps that allowed the person planting one of the apps on a target’s phone access to their personal data — including their messages, photos, ...
- DarkCloud Stealer: Comprehensive Analysis of a New Attack Chain That Employs AutoIt
May 14, 2025
In January 2025, Unit 42 researchers identified a series of attacks distributing DarkCloud Stealer. The latest attack chain incorporated AutoIt to evade detection and used a file-sharing server to host the malware. This article explores the chain of events from these recent campaigns and analyzes the characteristics of these attacks. DarkCloud employs multi-stage payloads and obfuscated ...
- Cyber Criminal Proxy Services Exploiting End of Life Routers
May 7, 2025
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is issuing this announcement to inform individuals and businesses about proxy services taking advantage of end of life routers that are susceptible to vulnerabilities. When a hardware device is end of life, the manufacturer no longer sells the product and is not actively supporting the hardware, which also means ...
- Lampion Is Back With ClickFix Lures
May 6, 2025
Unit 42 researchers recently uncovered a highly focused malicious campaign targeting dozens of Portuguese organizations, particularly in the government, finance and transportation sectors. This campaign was orchestrated by the threat actors behind Lampion malware, an infostealer that focuses on sensitive banking information. This malware family has been active since at least 2019. During our investigation, we ...
- Gremlin Stealer: New Stealer on Sale in Underground Forum
April 29, 2025
Unit 42 researchers have identified new information-stealing malware written in C#, called Gremlin Stealer. This stealer’s authors have actively advertised it on a Telegram group since mid-March 2025. This information-stealing malware exfiltrates data from its victims and uploads this information to its web server for publication. It can capture data from browsers, the clipboard and the ...
- Outlaw cybergang attacking targets worldwide
April 29, 2025
In a recent incident response case in Brazil, we dealt with a relatively simple, yet very effective threat focused on Linux environments. Outlaw (also known as “Dota”) is a Perl-based crypto mining botnet that typically takes advantage of weak or default SSH credentials for its operations. Previous research described Outlaw samples obtained from honeypots. In this ...
- Triada strikes back
April 25, 2025
Older versions of Android contained various vulnerabilities that allowed gaining root access to the device. Many malicious programs exploited these to elevate their system privileges and gain persistence. The notorious Triada Trojan also used this attack vector. With time, the vulnerabilities were patched, and restrictions were added to the firmware. Specifically, system partitions in recent ...
- Android malware turns phones into malicious tap-to-pay machines
April 24, 2025
Got an Android phone? Got a tap-to-pay card? Then you’re like millions of other users now at risk from a new form of cybercrime – malware that can read your credit or debit card and hand its data over to an attacker. A newly discovered malicious program effectively turns Android phones into malicious tap machines that ...