Threats Tagged 'mobile'

A joint Tenable-SentinelOne analysis of 93 CVE-actor attribution pairs reveals that both state-sponsored actors and cybercriminals independently converge on the same edge infrastructure. Special thanks to SentinelOne® Incident Readiness & Response for their contributions to this publication. It is the shared attack surface where state-sponsored threat actors and financially motivated criminal groups independently converge — not the province of a single adversary category, and not exclusively a nation-state problem, despite two years of headlines about China-nexus actors targeting Ivanti, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks. The data here tells a different and much broader story. One focused on vendors vs CVEs. Key Takeaways Two independent observation systems, Tenable exposure telemetry across thousands of customer containers and SentinelOne DFIR casework across 66 CVEs, converge 79% on the same vendor attack surfaces despite minimal CVE-level overlap. Twelve CVEs in the combined dataset have confirmed multi-nexus attribution: state-sponsored and criminal actors independently exploiting the same vulnerability, across five nexus categories (China, Russia, DPRK, Iran, ransomware). The exposure picture is flatter than the headlines suggest: Fortinet, the vendor most associated with edge-device attacks in the press, sits mid-pack on container-grain exposure (25%) — well behind F5 (54%) and in a tight 10-point band with Check Point, Ivanti, and Citrix. 54% of customer environments running F5 products have at least one exposed, actively-exploited CVE; Citrix customers show the slowest remediation patterns at 461 days median time to patch. Remediation complexity, particularly of high priority CVEs, leads to a statistically significant 24-day remediation gap, leaving large windows of opportunity for attackers. The same product lines get hit again and again: Ivanti EPMM and Ivanti Connect Secure each show a newly exploited CVE roughly every 8.5 to 13 months. Leverage multiple defense-in-depth strategies: patch as quickly as possible, but also minimize the attack surface (feature-set minimization) and run endpoints in protect mode to better stop lateral movement from attacks that gain initial access. The convergence is the story Twelve CVEs in the combined dataset have confirmed multi-nexus attribution: state-sponsored and criminal actors independently exploiting the same vulnerability, across five nexus categories. Four examples illustrate the pattern: CVE Product Actors (Nexus) Significance CVE-2026-15409 SonicWall SMA1000 UTA0533 (unattributed) + INC Ransomware Espionage-to-ransomware succession on an active zero-day CVE-2023-42793 JetBrains TeamCity APT29 (Russia) + Lazarus (DPRK) Two state-sponsored actors from different nations on the same CVE CVE-2024-3400 PAN-OS GlobalProtect UTA0218 (China) + INC Ransomware China-nexus zero-day reused by ransomware operators CVE-2024-24919 Check Point Quantum PurpleHaze (China) + Fox Kitten (Iran) China and Iran independently exploiting the same gateway vulnerability The remaining eight confirmed multi-nexus CVEs span Fortinet, Citrix, Cisco, and Ivanti product lines. State-sponsored actors and ransomware operators are not operating in separate vulnerability ecosystems. They share the same entry points into the same products. The breadth of the convergence, not any single actor's activity, is the finding. That pattern holds across the full combined analysis. Three conclusions emerge: Vendor attack surfaces are the persistent exploitation target. The same eleven vendors (i.e., Fortinet, Citrix, Ivanti, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, Juniper, VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, CrushFTP, and Meta's React framework ) appear in both observation systems at 79% convergence, and all seven edge-product vendors converge. Serial exploitation timing on Ivanti products shows the vulnerability-to-exploitation pipeline refreshing at 8.5 to 13-month intervals on the same product lines. This is structural, not episodic. Patch…

Manic is a newly discovered Android malware family that steals banking credentials, intercepts sensitive data, and allows remote control of infected devices. It uniquely exfiltrates stolen data even without an internet connection by exploiting Android Accessibility services to capture keystrokes and replay them on targeted apps. The malware targets banking apps, government apps, crypto wallets, and two-factor authentication apps across multiple European countries. Infection vectors likely include unofficial app stores, malicious APKs, and phishing links, with no evidence of distribution via Google Play. Manic abuses Accessibility permissions to spy on users, grant itself additional permissions, and prevent removal. It overlays an invisible keyboard to capture passwords and sensitive input. The malware has been active since at least May 2026 and continues to evolve to evade detection.

HighMalwareAustriaCzechiaEstonia+10#android#mobile#malware

Other noteworthy stories that might have slipped under the radar: Threema DDoS attack, Evooo1Bot Linux botnet, Crypto4A secures top-tier NIST certification. The post In Other News: Zombie Card Attack, T-Mobile Cut Cable to Stop Hackers, GitHub Denies AI Caused Bug appeared first on SecurityWeek .

It can be daunting to determine who’s responsible for showing ads on the websites we visit, or who’s harvesting data from the mobile apps we use every day. That information is already semi-public, but it is not easily parsed and traditionally much of it has remained walled away in the hands of large advertising platforms. Not anymore: A powerful and free new service called DecryptAds scrapes and correlates this adtech data and makes it simple to quickly learn a great deal about the entities that are tracking you. A Decryptads summary of the advertising partnerships declared by espn.com. The newly launched decryptads.com says it is constantly scraping the files that websites and apps make publicly available to disclose the companies that are permitted to run ads or collect user data. These files include: – ads.txt : all of the adtech companies and data brokers that may run ads or harvest data from the site; – app-ads.txt : entities that can harvest data from or display ads on mobile and smart TV apps; – buyers.json/sellers.json : the entities buying, selling or reselling ad inventory for a given site or app. Zach Edwards is chief research officer for DecryptAds and a threat researcher at the security company Infoblox . Edwards said he and two other founders decided the service was needed because the adtech data in these files is generally only useful when it can be cross-referenced to build a more complete picture of the advertising ecosystem for each website or app. “It’s an adtech tool but we’re trying to approach adtech from a security perspective,” Edwards said. “It’s really built for a lot of privacy and security use cases that have been dramatically underserved.” Those use cases, he said, include tracking down the source of malicious ads that try to foist malware on targeted users, identifying ad networks located in adversarial nations, and detecting the fast growing swarms of AI-generated slop websites and apps. And as decryptads.com demonstrates, these potential security and privacy threats are near impossible to detect just by viewing a single apps.txt or app-ads.txt file. “Supply-chain integrity issues rarely live in a single file,” the site explains . “They show up as broken cross-references between ads.txt, app-ads.txt, and sellers.json files; as cloned declaration sets across unrelated domains; as seller removals that only make sense when viewed across exchanges; and even as supply paths in bid logs that never actually appear in any given publisher’s authorized-seller list.” A search in DecryptAds for the hugely popular sports network espn.com reveals 143 ad partners and 19 registered data broker domains are listed within its ads.txt and app-ads.txt files. That data broker information is gradually becoming available because four states — California, Oregon, Texas and Vermont — have recently passed laws requiring data brokers to register if they buy or sell data on consumers from those states. DecryptAds reports that almost half of those data brokers are collecting geolocation data from espn.com visitors who aren’t blocking ads, while another three disclose that they collect device fingerprints and sensitive personal information. A visual representation of the complex ad supply chain declared by espn.com. Image: decryptads.com. HIGH-RISK AD PARTNERS DecryptAds also makes it easy to learn the beneficiaries and national origins of the advertising firms lurking in apps and websites, displaying a conspicuous warning when adtech partners of an app or website are based in “geo-risk” areas like China and Russia, or in countries with strong financial and political ties to both — such as Cyprus and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). According to DecryptAds, espn.com works with four different advertising entities that are based in either Russia, China or the UAE, including the adtech firm Between Digital , which lists a New York address. However, the dossier on Between Digital flags them as a Russian firm, showing that their pub…

Use after free in Windows Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally.

Adform, a major advertising platform, remained compromised for roughly 24 hours from late on July 26 through the evening of July 27 after being breached by unknown attackers. Few people outside the industry recognize the name, but Adform serves around 1.5 billion ad impressions every day across tens of thousands of websites. That means anyone visiting any site that runs Adform ads could have been targeted. The attackers weren’t trying to install malware. Instead, they ran a script in the victim’s browser that checked the clipboard every three seconds, and if it found a cryptocurrency wallet address had been copied, swapped it for the attackers’ own wallet address. So if someone had a site with the malicious ad open in one browser tab, and was making a crypto transaction in another tab or in a dedicated app, the funds could have ended up in the attackers’ pockets instead. Adform’s owners caught the attack and fixed the problem, but there’s no guarantee a similar incident won’t happen again — which is why every user should defend themselves against malvertising . Check out our tips at the end of this post. What we know about the attack on Adform There isn’t a lot of information out there, since the company’s official statement covers only what happened and when, without getting into the root cause of the incident. Independent research has dug up technical details about how ordinary users were targeted, but none of that explains how Adform itself was breached in the first place. What’s clear is that the attackers slipped their own code into the JavaScript that loaded on every site running Adform ads. Whenever an ad was about to display, the script would load from Adform’s server, pick the right ad, and show it — but the attackers had tacked on a set of malicious functions: monitoring the clipboard, sending data about the site where the encounter happened, and the victim’s IP address back to their own server, and swapping out Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tron wallet addresses. All it took to make it work was having any site with Adform-served ads open in one browser tab. It didn’t matter what kind of site it was, what the ad looked like, or which advertiser it belonged to. The one thing that mattered was whether the site ran over HTTP or HTTPS. According to Adform, the attack couldn’t succeed on a site loaded over HTTPS since the connection to the attackers’ server was blocked in this case. The company hasn’t shared any information on how many users were affected, or how many sites still serve their content and ads over HTTP. Malicious ads are an everyday occurrence Unfortunately, dangerous online ads have become a systemic problem. And we’re not just talking about sketchy supplement ads or gambling promos — we mean ads that spread malware or lead to sites designed to steal payment details and other valuable data. Attackers have built out industrial-scale infrastructure to pull this off, and they use several different approaches. Hacking and compromising ad servers. Adform isn’t an isolated case: attackers have previously breached Revive ad servers , for one, and spread malware through ads on PornHub . Hijacking the ad accounts of legitimate, reputable brands . All it takes is stealing a password from someone in marketing. From there, the cybercriminals run ads posing as the company they hacked, pushing fake app updates, bogus promotions, and similar scams. In the worst cases — like the account breaches at adtech.de and adxpansion.com — attackers managed to run ads that redirected victims straight into automatic malware installs ( drive-by downloads ). Buying ads directly. That’s right — attackers simply set up their own advertiser accounts and run ads for their phishing sites and malware, just like any other business online. Since ads show up practically everywhere — on websites, in apps, and on social media — these threats can turn up in pretty much any context. And you’ll find variations of this threat on both computers and mobile de…

For the latest discoveries in cyber research for the week of 10th August, please download our Threat Intelligence Bulletin. TOP ATTACKS AND BREACHES North Carolina Ports, the US authority operating the ports of Wilmington, Morehead City and others, has suffered a cyberattack that forced some operations onto manual processes. The authority claims it has contained the intrusion, but degraded systems caused delays while affected services were restored. Ryde, an electric scooter operator in Scandinavian countries, has disclosed a data breach affecting all 4.5 million customer accounts across Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Germany. Attackers copied phone numbers, email addresses, birth dates, partial payment card numbers, and payment histories. Full card numbers and ride histories were unaffected. Canadian hardware wallet maker Coinkite has disclosed a theft campaign exploiting a Coldcard firmware vulnerability, with at least 1,367 bitcoin worth about $88.6 million stolen from thousands of addresses. The company halted affected shipments, destroyed vulnerable inventory, and released patched firmware after confirming exploitation against customer wallets. Beacon, a UK provider of customer relationship management software for charities, has disclosed a data breach after attackers compromised an access key. The company notified around 1,500 nonprofit customers that database information, donation records, and stored attachments may have been downloaded. Payment and bank details were not affected. AI THREATS Check Point Research has demonstrated that Cloudflare Code Mode, which allows AI agents to write TypeScript against tools, inherited five vulnerabilities from the workerd runtime. The flaws could enable sandbox escape and cross-tenant data exposure. Cloudflare rated two issues Critical and fixed its managed Workers environment. Researchers have disclosed vulnerabilities in Google Gemini CLI and Anthropic Claude Code that could expose automation environments to code execution and API key theft. CVE-2026-12537, rated CVSS 10.0, affected Gemini CLI workflows, while CVE-2026-54316 affected Claude Code. Both vendors released patched versions. Researchers have detailed AI-enabled identity fraud kits that automate know-your-customer bypasses across banks, fintech companies, and cryptocurrency exchanges. Tools such as ProKYC can generate identity documents, selfie-with-ID images, spoofed location data, and synthetic video used against document, selfie, and liveness checks during remote onboarding. VULNERABILITIES AND PATCHES Cisco has released fixes for multiple critical vulnerabilities in Catalyst SD-WAN and IOS XE software disclosed on August 5. The highest-severity issues carry CVSS scores up to 9.9 and can enable privilege escalation, code execution, or system compromise. Cisco also addressed additional high and medium-severity flaws across network management products. WordPress has released version 7.0.3 to address CVE-2026-64638, a high-severity Core vulnerability known as XSS2Shell. The flaw can turn a failed login into pre-authentication cross-site scripting and, under specific conditions, remote code execution. Fixes were also backported for supported WordPress branches dating to version 4.7. TP-Link has addressed 15 vulnerabilities in its Omada provisioning ecosystem affecting controllers, network devices, mobile applications, and VIGI cameras. The flaws include device impersonation, credential exposure, and remote code execution risks during provisioning. 11 flaws received CVE identifiers, and patched firmware has been released for affected products. A vendor-installed backdoor has been identified across at least 20 Zbtlink router models sold under brands including Wiflyer and ZBT. The remote-management component contacts hardcoded servers and can accept unauthenticated commands with root privileges. Researchers reproduced the behavior by impersonating the vendor server and obtaining a root shell. THREAT INTELLIGENCE REPORTS Resear…

Robotic cleaners DEEBOT PRO M1 and DEEBOT PRO K1VAC, and mobile app ECOVACS PRO App developed by ECOVACS ROBOTICS contain multiple vulnerabilities. They are provided in Japan by Hellohas Robotics Inc.

For the latest discoveries in cyber research for the week of 27th July, please download our Threat Intelligence Bulletin. TOP ATTACKS AND BREACHES Minnesota IT Services has confirmed coordinated cyberattacks affecting more than 30 community water utilities across the state. The incidents briefly disrupted a treatment plant in Braham and affected industrial control systems. Officials reported that drinking water safety was not affected. While the attack was not officially attributed, federal officials previously posted warning regarding targeting of critical infrastructure by Iranian-affiliated threat actors. Bank of Baroda, a major Indian bank, has disclosed an email account compromise that exposed internal communications and attachments. Reports claim more than 700GB of customer files, loan documents, and audit records were leaked, although the bank has not confirmed the reported volume. Core banking systems were unaffected. Amgen, a US biotechnology company that develops medicines for serious illnesses, has confirmed a breach involving cloud environments operated by third-party providers. Attackers exfiltrated proprietary corporate information and patient health data. The company reported no disruption to manufacturing, financial reporting, products, or its ability to supply medicines. Angola’s largest telecommunications provider, Unitel, has suffered a cyberattack that disrupted voice, mobile data, and internet services for millions of customers. The outage also affected electronic payments shortly before the company’s stock market debut. Network data indicated that internal systems were disabled while external routers remained online. AI THREATS Anthropic has disclosed that Claude-based cybersecurity models gained unauthorized access to systems belonging to three outside organizations during controlled evaluations. The models moved beyond intended test environments and reached sensitive production assets. Anthropic identified the incidents while reviewing testing practices following separate autonomous AI security failures. Researchers have published details of CVE-2026-59726, a critical vulnerability in the Ruflo AI agent platform. An unauthenticated attacker could abuse its exposed Model Context Protocol bridge to execute commands, steal API keys, access conversations, and alter stored AI memory. Ruflo addressed the issue in version 3.16.3. Researchers surfaced a privacy issue in Anthropic’s Claude sharing feature that allowed publicly shared conversations and artifacts to be indexed by search engines. Indexed content reportedly included personal information, resumes, financial records, access codes, API keys, and clinical trial material that users may not have expected to become searchable. VULNERABILITIES AND PATCHES Cisco has addressed CVE-2026-20316, an actively exploited vulnerability in Secure Firewall Management Center. The flaw allows unauthenticated attackers to access a built-in low-privileged account and retrieve sensitive information from affected systems. Cisco released hotfixes after exploitation was identified, and the vulnerability was added to CISA’s catalog. Broadcom has released patches for five vulnerabilities affecting VMware vCenter, ESX, Workstation, and Fusion. Three critical flaws could allow authentication bypass, arbitrary code execution, or escape from a virtual machine to its host. The issues include CVE-2026-59309 and CVE-2026-59310, both carrying CVSS scores of 9.8. JetBrains has released fixes for CVE-2026-63077, a critical authentication bypass affecting all TeamCity On-Premises versions. A remote unauthenticated attacker could execute code with TeamCity server privileges and compromise connected build environments. The flaw is fixed in versions 2025.11.7 and 2026.1.3. TeamCity Cloud was not affected. Rails maintainers have patched CVE-2026-66066, a critical Active Storage vulnerability affecting applications that use libvips. An unauthenticated attacker could read sensitive server files…

Security experts have been sounding the alarm for years about the risks of using generic TV boxes that promise unlimited content streaming for a one-time fee, warning that they secretly rent the user’s Internet connection out to strangers. But a groundbreaking new analysis finds these devices also routinely spoof themselves as mobile phones clicking ads on AI-generated websites as part of a sprawling operation that seeks to defraud online merchants and advertising networks. Pedro Falé is a threat researcher with the security firm Bitsight . Falé told KrebsOnSecurity he was able to peer inside a vast and complex ad fraud network by registering an expired domain name that was used to coordinate fake ad clicks across a particularly popular brand of these streaming devices known as H96 . An H96 TV streaming device currently advertised for sale on Amazon. Falé said the domain he scooped up was previously used for telemetry, periodically collecting full hardware information and the entire list of installed apps from tens of thousands of H96 streaming sticks plugged into television sets around the globe. But upon inspecting the traffic being funneled to the domain, he discovered nearly all of the TV boxes transmitting data claimed to be mobile phone models from a variety of manufacturers, including Samsung, Vivo, Huawei, and Xiaomi. “We noticed something was wildly wrong,” Falé said. “Multiple devices reporting to this factory Android TV Box backdoor were ‘phones.'” Image: Bitsight. The researcher found all of the devices reported having the same two apps installed, and that those apps were made by a company called Zhejiang Fengwo IoT Technology Ltd , an entity founded in 2019 in mainland China which operates an ad-publishing portfolio under the name Fengwo Group . Further investigation into the Fengwo Group revealed it has registered multiple patents that match the inner workings of these apps. “Bitsight TRACE identified several Hong Kong, Singapore, and single person ‘legal’ shell identities used to collect the monetization and traced the operation back to a mainland China company known as Zhejiang Fengwo IoT Technology Co., Ltd, which operates under the Fengwo Group,” Falé wrote in a report released today about their findings. Falé said an analysis of the apps shows they help to coordinate an ad fraud network that uses these H96 devices as a captive traffic source to click on ads at AI-generated websites operated by the Fengwo Group. Bitsight discovered the websites contain machine-generated news articles and graphics across a range of categories, including finance, health, education, gaming, music and food blogs. But they also found none of those sites displayed ads unless the device visiting the page matched the spoofed mobile profile of these H96 devices. AI DIGITAL HUMANS The domain for the Fengwo Group — fwgcloud[.]com — claims the company is “redefining the boundaries of human-AI interaction,” and that it has created more than 120,000 “AI digital humans” available to rent for everything from emotional companionship to 24/7 customer service and creative design. The homepage for fwgcloud dot com. Falé said the Fengwo Group’s domain shared its SSL certificate data with other domains associated with the apps found on H96 devices, specifically the phone spoofing mechanism. He noted the domain also has an internal wiki platform that directly ties the Fengwo Group to a proprietary implementation of a Google-built visual programming language called Blockly , which was originally designed to help kids learn how to write software. According to Bitsight, the Fengwo Group’s employees use Blockly to build the sham websites, allowing low-skilled operators to drag blocks of code together in their Blockly editor — without any need to understand what the underlying code blocks do or how they work. The Blockly homepage. “An operator can drag blocks together in their Blockly editor, to define each fraud routine, given a task type,” reads Bitsi…