Emerging in early 2023, the Howling Scorpius ransomware group is the entity behind the Akira ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS), which has consistently ranked in recent months among the top five most active ransomware groups. Its double extortion strategy significantly amplifies the threat it poses.
Unit 42 researchers have been monitoring the Howling Scorpius ransomware group over the past year. Howling Scorpius targets small to medium-sized businesses in North America, Europe and Australia, across various sectors. Affected industries include education, consulting, government, manufacturing, telecommunications, technology and pharmaceuticals.
Read more…
Source: Palo Alto Unit 42
Related:
- PassiveNeuron: a sophisticated campaign targeting servers of high-profile organizations
October 21, 2025
Back in 2024, Kaspersky researchers gave a brief description of a complex cyberespionage campaign that we dubbed “PassiveNeuron”. This campaign involved compromising the servers of government organizations with previously unknown APT implants, named “Neursite” and “NeuralExecutor”. However, since its discovery, the PassiveNeuron campaign has been shrouded in mystery. For instance, it remained unclear how the implants ...
- Phantom Taurus: A New Chinese Nexus APT and the Discovery of the NET-STAR Malware Suite
September 30, 2025
Phantom Taurus is a previously undocumented nation-state actor whose espionage operations align with People’s Republic of China (PRC) state interests. Over the past two and a half years, Unit 42 researchers have observed Phantom Taurus targeting government and telecommunications organizations across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. Their observations show that Phantom Taurus’ main focus areas ...
- Notes of cyber inspector: three clusters of threat in cyberspace
September 10, 2025
Hacktivism and geopolitically motivated APT groups have become a significant threat to many regions of the world in recent years, damaging infrastructure and important functions of government, business, and society. In late 2022 Kaspersky predicted that the involvement of hacktivist groups in all major geopolitical conflicts from now on will only increase and this is what ...
- Deception in Depth: PRC-nexus espionage campaign hijacks web traffic to target diplomats
August 25, 2025
This blog post presents Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) findings and analysis of this espionage campaign, as well as the evolution of the threat actor’s operational capabilities. GTIG examine how the malware is delivered, how the threat actor utilized social engineering and evasion techniques, and technical aspects of the multi-stage malware payloads. In this campaign, the ...
- FBI: Russian Government Cyber Actors Targeting Networking Devices, Critical Infrastructure
August 20, 2025
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is warning the public, private sector, and international community of the threat posed to computer networks and critical infrastructure by cyber actors attributed to the Russian Federal Security Service’s (FSB) Center 16. The FBI detected Russian FSB cyber actors exploiting Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and end-of-life networking devices running ...
- Hackers breach and expose a major North Korean spying operation
August 12, 2025
Hackers claim to have compromised the computer of a North Korean government hacker and leaked its contents online, offering a rare window into a hacking operation by the notoriously secretive nation. The two hackers, who go by Saber and cyb0rg, published a report about the breach in the latest issue of Phrack magazine, a legendary cybersecurity ...