Supply Chain Attacks | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

What do a source code editor, a smart billboard, and a web server have in common? They've all become launchpads for attacks—because cybercriminals are rethinking what counts as "infrastructure." Instead of chasing high-value targets directly, threat actors are now quietly taking over the overlooked: outdated software, unpatched IoT devices, and open-source packages. It's not just clever—it's reshaping how intrusion, persistence, and evasion happen at scale. ⚡ Threat of the Week 5Socks Proxy Using IoT, EoL Systems Dismantled in Law Enforcement Operation — A joint law enforcement operation undertaken by Dutch and U.S. authorities dismantled a criminal proxy network, known as anyproxy[.]net and 5socks[.]net, that was powered by thousands of infected Internet of Things (IoT) and end-of-life (EoL) devices, enlisting them into a botnet for providing anonymity to malicious actors. The illicit platform, active since 2004, advertised more than 7,000 online proxies daily, with infected ...

A new set of malicious packages has been unearthed in the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository that masqueraded as cryptocurrency wallet recovery and management services, only to siphon sensitive data and facilitate the theft of valuable digital assets. "The attack targeted users of Atomic, Trust Wallet, Metamask, Ronin, TronLink, Exodus, and other prominent wallets in the crypto ecosystem," Checkmarx researcher Yehuda Gelb said in a Tuesday analysis. "Presenting themselves as utilities for extracting mnemonic phrases and decrypting wallet data, these packages appeared to offer valuable functionality for cryptocurrency users engaged in wallet recovery or management." However, they harbor functionality to steal private keys, mnemonic phrases, and other sensitive wallet data, such as transaction histories or wallet balances. Each of the packages attracted hundreds of downloads prior to them being taken down - atomicdecoderss (366 downloads) trondecoderss ...

Roblox developers are the target of a persistent campaign that seeks to compromise systems through bogus npm packages, once again underscoring how threat actors continue to exploit the trust in the open-source ecosystem to deliver malware. "By mimicking the popular 'noblox.js' library, attackers have published dozens of packages designed to steal sensitive data and compromise systems," Checkmarx researcher Yehuda Gelb said in a technical report. Roblox is an online game platform and game creation system with nearly 80 million daily active users , and thus makes for an attractive target for threat actors. It was launched in September 2006 for Windows, before debuting in other platforms, including iOS, Android, Xbox One, Meta Quest, and PlayStation 4. Details about the activity were first documented by ReversingLabs in August 2023 as part of a campaign that delivered a stealer called Luna Token Grabber, which it said was a "replay of an attack uncovered two ...

Cybersecurity researchers have found that it's possible for threat actors to exploit a well-known utility called command-not-found to recommend their own rogue packages and compromise systems running Ubuntu operating system. "While 'command-not-found' serves as a convenient tool for suggesting installations for uninstalled commands, it can be inadvertently manipulated by attackers through the snap repository, leading to deceptive recommendations of malicious packages," cloud security firm Aqua said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Installed by default on Ubuntu systems, command-not-found  suggests  packages to install in interactive bash sessions when attempting to run commands that are not available. The suggestions include both the Advanced Packaging Tool ( APT ) and  snap packages . While the tool uses an internal database ("/var/lib/command-not-found/commands.db") to suggest APT packages, it relies on the " advise-snap " comman...

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) misconfigurations discovered in the open-source  TensorFlow  machine learning framework could have been exploited to orchestrate  supply chain attacks . The misconfigurations could be abused by an attacker to "conduct a supply chain compromise of TensorFlow releases on GitHub and PyPi by compromising TensorFlow's build agents via a malicious pull request," Praetorian researchers Adnan Khan and John Stawinski  said  in a report published this week. Successful exploitation of these issues could permit an external attacker to upload malicious releases to the GitHub repository, gain remote code execution on the self-hosted GitHub runner, and even retrieve a GitHub Personal Access Token (PAT) for the  tensorflow-jenkins user . TensorFlow uses GitHub Actions to automate the software build, test, and deployment pipeline. Runners, which refer to machines that execute jobs in a GitHub Actions workflow, can ...

New research has found that over 15,000 Go module repositories on GitHub are vulnerable to an attack called repojacking. "More than 9,000 repositories are vulnerable to repojacking due to GitHub username changes," Jacob Baines, chief technology officer at VulnCheck,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "More than 6,000 repositories were vulnerable to repojacking due to account deletion." Collectively, these repositories account for no less than 800,000 Go module-versions. Repojacking , a portmanteau of "repository" and "hijacking," is an attack technique that allows a bad actor to take advantage of account username changes and deletions to create a repository with the same name and the pre-existing username to stage open-source software supply chain attacks. Earlier this June, cloud security firm Aqua  revealed  that millions of software repositories on GitHub are likely vulnerable to the threat, urging organizations that undergo...

North Korean threat actors have been linked to two campaigns in which they masquerade as both job recruiters and seekers to distribute malware and obtain unauthorized employment with organizations based in the U.S. and other parts of the world. The activity clusters have been codenamed Contagious Interview and Wagemole, respectively, by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42. While the first set of attacks aims to "infect software developers with malware through a fictitious job interview," the latter is designed for financial gain and espionage. "The first campaign's objective is likely cryptocurrency theft and using compromised targets as a staging environment for additional attacks," the cybersecurity company  said . The fraudulent job-seeking activity, on the other hand, involves the use of a GitHub repository to host resumes with forged identities that impersonate individuals of various nationalities. The Contagious Interview attacks pave the way for two hitherto undocumented cross-...