IT News Analysis

1

Cruciferra Crypter Uses BYOVD and Process Ghosting to Hide Windows Malware

The China-linked cybercrime group behind the use of income tax-related phishing lures targeting Indian taxpayers, tax professionals, and corporate finance teams has been observed using a sophisticated crypter service called Cruciferra . According to a new analysis by Proofpoint, Cruciferra has been utilized by various unrelated cybercriminal threat clusters to deliver a wide array of remote access trojans (RATs) and information stealer malware. "Cruciferra is written in Mono and features numerous techniques designed to evade detection, analysis, and incident response efforts," the enterprise security company said in an analysis published last week. "These include using indirect system calls, API and Import Address Table (IAT) unhooking, bring-your-own-vulnerable-driver ( BYOVD )-based EDR tampering, privilege escalation, persistence mechanisms, and a customized implementation of Process Ghosting used to execute payloads while minimizing forensic artifacts."...

Jul 27, 2026

2

TELESHIM Abuses Telegram for C2 in Attacks Against Middle East Governments

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged fresh malicious cyber activity by a threat actor with ties to East Asia targeting government entities in the Middle East. The intrusions have resulted in the deployment of previously unreported malware families dubbed TELESHIM, MIXEDKEY, and BINDCLOAK, according to Zscaler ThreatLabz. The cybersecurity firm said it detected the campaign earlier this month. "The campaign used a multi-stage attack chain to establish and maintain access on infected systems, with TELESHIM abusing the Telegram API for command-and-control (C2) communication to blend in with legitimate internet traffic," Sudeep Singh, senior manager of APT research at Zscaler ThreatLabz, said in a technical write-up published last week. The attack chain starts with an ISO file containing a legitimate executable ("RegSchdTask.exe") that's used to sideload a rogue DLL ("AsTaskSched.dll"), a 32-bit Windows backdoor called TELESHIM that then leverage...

Jul 27, 2026

3

How AI Is Rewriting the Cloud Security Playbook

Explore AI agents, Zero Trust, machine identities, and cloud security with Anthropic, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft, and SANS. Explore the Agenda.

4

GitHub Adds 3-Day Dependabot Cooldown to Limit Poisoned Package Adoption

GitHub has announced a new cooldown mechanism in Dependabot, allowing the tool to wait at least three days after a release is published before opening a pull request. "The cooldown configuration option in the dependabot.yml still controls the behavior, though, so you can choose a different cooldown parameter that fits your project," the Microsoft-owned subsidiary said . According to GitHub, the three-day cooldown default only applies to version updates, which are designed to keep software dependencies up-to-date. Security updates will continue to be pushed right away, permitting Dependabot to issue an alert and open a pull request to move the project to the patched version. With this update, the idea is to handle scenarios where a threat actor manages to push a poisoned version of a popular package, which then gets quickly pulled by downstream projects before that version is yanked from the registry. Although such trojanized packages are short-lived, the time period fo...

Jul 27, 2026

5

Malvertising Sends Malware in Pieces, Then Makes the Browser Build the Executable

A malvertising operation dubbed SourTrade is making victims' browsers build the final Windows executable themselves, using a legitimate Bun runtime as its base instead of serving one complete malicious file from a fixed URL. Confiant, which detailed the campaign on July 23, 2026, said it has operated since late 2024 and impersonated TradingView, Solana, and Luno to target retail traders and cryptocurrency investors across 12 countries in 25 languages. Its landing pages fingerprint visitors, showing suspected researchers and bots an empty page while selected targets receive a convincing copy of the impersonated service. The defense against that is the ordinary one: install trading and wallet software from the vendor's own site, not from an ad. The documented chain does not rely on a browser vulnerability or remove Mark of the Web (MotW). Confiant's analysis documents the delivery, not execution of the file inside the browser, and does not establish whether the fina...

Jul 25, 2026

6

Fastjson 1.x RCE Vulnerability Targeted in Attacks With No Patched Available

Security firms ThreatBook and Imperva say attackers are targeting a critical flaw in Fastjson, Alibaba's JSON library for Java. In affected Spring Boot applications, a malicious JSON request can execute code without authentication, with the privileges of the Java process. Tracked as CVE-2026-16723 , the vulnerability carries an Alibaba-assigned CVSS score of 9.0. The confirmed chain requires Fastjson 1.2.68 through 1.2.83, a Spring Boot executable fat-JAR, a network-reachable path that sends attacker-controlled JSON to an affected parser, and SafeMode left at its disabled default. AutoType can remain disabled, and no classpath gadget is required. As of July 25, Alibaba had not released a fixed Fastjson 1.x version. Organizations that cannot migrate immediately should enable SafeMode with -Dfastjson.parser.safeMode=true or use com.alibaba:fastjson:1.2.83_noneautotype . Alibaba lists migration to Fastjson2 as the long-term fix. Alibaba published its advisory on July 21 follo...

Jul 25, 2026

7

Five things successful IT teams get right about SaaS management

1Password blog: how IT teams can automate access reviews, reduce license spend, and surface shadow AI and IT.

8

Researcher Publishes GitLab RCE PoC Letting Authenticated Users Run Commands as Git

Security researchers at  depthfirst published working exploit code on July 24 for a GitLab flaw that GitLab patched six weeks earlier, on June 10. It runs commands as git on any self-managed 18.11.3 server that has not taken the update. Any authenticated user who can push to a project can run it. The attacker commits a crafted Jupyter notebook and opens its commit diff, which leaks a heap pointer. Enough of those and an automated probe can locate the libraries in memory. Two more notebooks then fire the payload. No administrator rights, no CI or runner access, no victim interaction, no access to anyone else's project. GitLab did not file the fix as a security fix. A review by The Hacker News found the Oj 3.17.3 bump listed under bug fixes in the June 10 patch release , not in the security-fix table. There is no CVE, no CVSS score, and no mention of the notebook-diff chain. Operators who triaged that release against the security table had no reason to treat it as urgent. ...

Jul 25, 2026

9

CTM360 Research Reveals How Insurance Phishing Has Evolved Into Real-Time Account Hijacking

For years, phishing campaigns targeting financial institutions followed the same playbook. Victims were tricked into entering usernames and passwords, attackers collected the credentials, and accounts were compromised later when an opportunity arose. That model is changing. Recent investigations into insurance-focused phishing operations reveal a more immediate approach. Instead of harvesting credentials for later use, attackers now synchronize their activity with victims in real time, authenticating against legitimate insurance portals as victims unknowingly complete the login process. The entire attack can unfold within a single browsing session. This shift highlights a broader trend across the cybersecurity landscape. As phishing campaigns become more sophisticated, simply identifying malicious websites and impersonation domains is no longer enough. Organizations increasingly need to understand the infrastructure, techniques, and operational workflows behind these attacks. ...

Jul 25, 2026

10

Cl0p Affiliates Target Internet-Exposed PTC Windchill and FlexPLM with Unauthenticated RCE

Threat actors linked to the Cl0p (aka Chubby Scorpius, FIN11, Graceful Spider, and Lace Tempest) ransomware campaign are exploiting flaws in internet-exposed PTC Windmill and FlexPLM deployments as part of a new data extortion campaign. "Attackers chain a pre-authentication information disclosure in the FlexPLM WSDL endpoint with a server-side flaw in the Windchill login servlet, enabling unauthenticated remote code execution and deployment of hex-named JSP web shells under /Windchill/login/," according to a new coordinated advisory released by Ransom-ISAC along with eCrime.ch and DEFUSED. Upon gaining an initial foothold, the attackers have been found to conduct file system enumeration, stage engineering/design data, and ultimately carry out double extortion data theft. Targets of the campaign include manufacturing, automotive, aerospace, and retail sectors. It's suspected that threat actors are exploiting CVE-2026-12569 (CVSS score: 9.3), a critical security fl...

Jul 25, 2026