Cyber Defense Advisors

Year: 2025

APT29 Deploys GRAPELOADER Malware Targeting European Diplomats Through Wine-Tasting Lures

The Russian state-sponsored threat actor known as APT29 has been linked to an advanced phishing campaign that’s targeting diplomatic entities across Europe with a new variant of WINELOADER and a previously unreported malware loader codenamed GRAPELOADER. “While the improved WINELOADER variant is still a modular backdoor used in later stages, GRAPELOADER is a newly observed […]

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Rogue npm Packages Mimic Telegram Bot API to Plant SSH Backdoors on Linux Systems

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered three malicious packages in the npm registry that masquerade as a popular Telegram bot library but harbor SSH backdoors and data exfiltration capabilities. The packages in question are listed below – node-telegram-utils (132 downloads) node-telegram-bots-api (82 downloads) node-telegram-util (73 downloads) According to supply chain 

Cyber News

ASUS Confirms Critical Flaw in AiCloud Routers; Users Urged to Update Firmware

ASUS has disclosed a critical security flaw impacting routers with AiCloud enabled that could permit remote attackers to perform unauthorized execution of functions on susceptible devices. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-2492, has a CVSS score of 9.2 out of a maximum of 10.0. “An improper authentication control vulnerability exists in certain ASUS router firmware series,” 

Cyber News

Friday Squid Blogging: Live Colossal Squid Filmed

A live colossal squid was filmed for the first time in the ocean. It’s only a juvenile: a foot long. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.  

Cyber News

Chinese Smishing Kit Powers Widespread Toll Fraud Campaign Targeting U.S. Users in 8 States

Cybersecurity researchers are warning of a “widespread and ongoing” SMS phishing campaign that’s been targeting toll road users in the United States for financial theft since mid-October 2024. “The toll road smishing attacks are being carried out by multiple financially motivated threat actors using the smishing kit developed by ‘Wang Duo Yu,’” Cisco Talos researchers […]

Cyber News

Multi-Stage Malware Attack Uses .JSE and PowerShell to Deploy Agent Tesla and XLoader

A new multi-stage attack has been observed delivering malware families like Agent Tesla variants, Remcos RAT, and XLoader. “Attackers increasingly rely on such complex delivery mechanisms to evade detection, bypass traditional sandboxes, and ensure successful payload delivery and execution,” Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 researcher Saqib Khanzada said in a technical write-up of the campaign. […]

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[Webinar] AI Is Already Inside Your SaaS Stack — Learn How to Prevent the Next Silent Breach

Your employees didn’t mean to expose sensitive data. They just wanted to move faster. So they used ChatGPT to summarize a deal. Uploaded a spreadsheet to an AI-enhanced tool. Integrated a chatbot into Salesforce. No big deal—until it is. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Most security teams are already behind in detecting how […]

Cyber News

Experts Uncover New XorDDoS Controller, Infrastructure as Malware Expands to Docker, Linux, IoT

Cybersecurity researchers are warning of continued risks posed by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) malware known as XorDDoS, with 71.3 percent of the attacks between November 2023 and February 2025 targeting the United States. “From 2020 to 2023, the XorDDoS trojan has increased significantly in prevalence,” Cisco Talos researcher Joey Chen said in a Thursday analysis.  

Cyber News

CVE-2025-24054 Under Active Attack—Steals NTLM Credentials on File Download

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added a medium-severity security flaw impacting Microsoft Windows to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, following reports of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2025-24054 (CVSS score: 6.5), is a Windows New Technology LAN Manager (NTLM) hash disclosure 

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