While supply chain threats have been quietly compounding over the past decade, the last 12–18 months have triggered a drastic shift in the scale and velocity of these attacks. Rather than just hunting for bugs in finished software, attackers are targeting the everyday tools and code developers rely on.
Unit 42 research shows this happening at every step of the building process. We’ve observed attackers spending years pretending to be helpful contributors just to hide backdoors in core software, as seen in the XZ Utils vulnerability (CVE-2024-3094). We’ve seen attackers hijack accounts to drop malware into popular libraries, like in the Axios supply chain attack. And we’ve seen them misuse setup scripts to automatically steal credentials using the Shai-Hulud npm worm.
Read more…
Source: Palo Alto Unit 42
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- CISA has expanded the scope of its alert on Iranian-affiliated hackers attacking critical infrastructure
July 23, 2026
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has expanded the scope of its alert on Iranian-affiliated hackers attacking critical infrastructure, including water and energy facilities. The original advisory focused on programmable logic controllers (PLCs) manufactured by Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley. The update warns that the activity may also target devices from Schneider Electric, Siemens, “and potentially other branded/manufactured PLCs.” The conflict between ...
- Millions of cars could be tracked and unlocked by a hidden security flaw
July 23, 2026
A car alarm vendor’s coding mistake has left millions of vehicles vulnerable to theft and location tracking. Thanks to the way dealers sell car alarms, many affected drivers don’t even know they have one installed. The device is the KARR Security System, a Bluetooth-enabled aftermarket alarm built by Acrisure Protection Group. It’s installed by dealers, primarily ...
- Russian State-Supported Cyber Actors Conduct Phishing Campaign Targeting Users of Zimbra Collaboration Suite
July 23, 2026
A group of Russian state-supported cyber actors has been targeting and compromising various Western government and commercial organizations using the Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) software since at least July 2025. The Russian state supported advanced persistent threat (APT) group’s activity is tracked in the cybersecurity community under several names (see Cybersecurity industry tracking), primarily as ...
- Experts warn hackers could shut down entire power grids by hijacking cloud accounts
July 21, 2026
Whenever an AI data center thinks really, really hard, it can increase its power consumption so much to trigger disruptions and possibly even blackouts and gear malfunctions. So, is it possible for a malicious actor to trigger this scenario deliberately, in order to cause physical harm? Multiple researchers from the Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, wrote ...
- Inside an Exposed WebDAV Malware Delivery Lab
July 20, 2026
An MDR alert recently led our team to an exposed server that was doing more than hosting payloads. It was functioning as a fully operational malware delivery lab. Containing over 1,000 artifacts, the infrastructure served as a QA hub where attackers systematically tested delivery paths, social engineering lures, and WebDAV execution methods. Our analysis reveals an ...
- FBI Warns of Scammers Impersonating the IC3
July 20, 2026
This Public Service Announcement contains updated information about an ongoing fraud scheme where criminal scammers are impersonating FBI personnel facilitating Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) complaints to deceive and revictimize individuals. This scheme combines several exploitation tactics to include the targeting of previous victims, the use of artificial intelligence (AI)-generated videos to create fictitious or misleading promotional ...