⚡ Weekly Recap: Nation-State Hacks, Spyware Alerts, Deepfake Malware, Supply Chain Backdoors

What if attackers aren’t breaking in—they’re already inside, watching, and adapting?

This week showed a sharp rise in stealth tactics built for long-term access and silent control. AI is being used to shape opinions. Malware is hiding inside software we trust. And old threats are returning under new names. The real danger isn’t just the breach—it’s not knowing who’s still lurking in your systems. If your defenses can’t adapt quickly, you’re already at risk.

Here are the key cyber events you need to pay attention to this week.

⚡ Threat of the Week

Lemon Sandstorm Targets Middle East Critical Infra — The Iranian state-sponsored threat group tracked as Lemon Sandstorm targeted an unnamed critical national infrastructure (CNI) in the Middle East and maintained long-term access that lasted for nearly two years using custom backdoors like HanifNet, HXLibrary, and NeoExpressRAT. The activity, which lasted from at least May 2023 to February 2025, entailed “extensive espionage operations and suspected network prepositioning – a tactic often used to maintain persistent access for future strategic advantage,” according to Fortinet.

Hackers Exploit Active Directory Flaws – Lock Them Down Before They Do

Active Directory misconfigurations give attackers the perfect entry point to escalate privileges and move laterally. One weak link is all it takes. Use this AD Security Checklist to identify and fix critical gaps before they’re exploited, Download now and secure your Active Directory.

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🔔 Top News

• Claude Abused in “Influence-as-a-Service” Operation — Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic has revealed that unknown threat actors leveraged its Claude chatbot for an “influence-as-a-service” operation to engage with authentic accounts across Facebook and X using over 100 fake personas. What’s novel about the operation is that it utilized Claude to make tactical engagement decisions such as determining whether social media bot accounts should like, share, comment on, or ignore specific posts created by other accounts based on political objectives aligned with their clients’ interests. The bot accounts were used to amplify their clients’ political narratives.
• SentinelOne Uncovers PurpleHaze Activity — Cybersecurity company SentinelOne has disclosed that a China-nexus threat cluster dubbed PurpleHaze conducted reconnaissance attempts against its infrastructure and some of its high-value customers. PurpleHaze is assessed to be a hacking crew with loose ties to another state-sponsored group known as APT15 and has also been observed targeting an unnamed South Asian government-supporting entity in October 2024, employing an operational relay box (ORB) network and a Windows backdoor dubbed GoReShell.
• RansomHub Ransomware Operation Goes Dark — In an interesting twist, RansomHub, an aggressive ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation that gained prominence over the past year by courting affiliates in the wake of law enforcement actions against LockBit and BlackCat, appears to have abruptly gone offline earlier in early April. The sudden cessation has raised speculations that cybercriminals associated with the ransomware scheme may have migrated to Qilin, which has had a resurgence in recent months. It’s also being claimed that RansomHub had moved its operations to DragonForce, a rival ransomware group that has announced the formation of a new “cartel.” Besides offering a multi-platform encryptor malware, RansomHub attracted attention for giving affiliates more autonomy to communicate directly with victims and to collect ransom payments from them. It also offered detailed guidance on how to extort ransom payments from victims.
• Meta Announces New Private Processing Feature for WhatsApp — In an attempt to balance privacy and artificial intelligence features, Meta announced a new WhatsApp setting it says is a privacy-oriented way to interact with Meta AI. Called Private Processing, the feature is optional and, launches in the coming weeks, and neither Meta, WhatsApp nor third-party companies will be able to see interactions that use it. The system Meta describes is very similar to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute (PCC). Like Apple, Meta says it will relay Private Processing requests through a third-party OHTTP provider to obscure users’ IP addresses. But one crucial difference is that all of WhatsApp’s AI requests are handled on Meta’s servers and its current architecture is purpose-built for WhatsApp. In a statement shared with WIRED, security researcher and cryptographer Matt Green said “any end-to-end encrypted system that uses off-device AI inference is going to be riskier than a pure end-to-end system” and that “more private data will go off the device, and the machines that process this data will be a target for hackers and nation-state adversaries.”
• TikTok Fined $601 Million By Ireland DPC — Ireland’s data privacy watchdog fined TikTok about $601 million for failing to guarantee that user data sent to China was protected from government access under Chinese laws related to espionage and cybersecurity. It also sanctioned TikTok for not being transparent with users in its privacy policy about where their personal data was being sent. The Data Protection Commission (DPC) ordered the social video app to stop transferring user data to China within six months if it can’t guarantee the same level of protection as in the E.U. The regulator also said TikTok previously claimed it did not store European user data on servers in China, but in April informed that it had discovered in February that “limited EEA User Data” had in fact been stored in China. The data is said to have been since deleted. The threat of Chinese government access to user data has been a persistent thorn in the side of TikTok on both sides of the Atlantic. While the platform was briefly banned in the U.S. at the start of the year, the service has continued to remain accessible as a deal is being worked out in the background. TikTok said it planned to appeal the E.U. fine, insisting it had “never received a request” from Chinese authorities for European users’ data. It is the second time TikTok has been reprimanded by the DPC. It was fined $368 million in 2023 for breaching privacy laws regarding the processing of children’s personal data in the E.U. This is the third-largest fine imposed by the DPC so far, after sanctioning Amazon with €746 million for its targeted behavioral advertising practices and Facebook with €1.2 billion for transferring data of E.U.-based users to the United States. The Irish watchdog serves as TikTok’s lead data privacy regulator in the E.U. because the company’s European headquarters is based in Dublin.

Trending CVEs

Attackers love software vulnerabilities—they’re easy doors into your systems. Every week brings fresh flaws, and waiting too long to patch can turn a minor oversight into a major breach. Below are this week’s critical vulnerabilities you need to know about. Take a look, update your software promptly, and keep attackers locked out.

This week’s list includes — CVE-2025-3928 (Commvault Web Server), CVE-2025-1976 (Broadcom Brocade Fabric OS), CVE-2025-46271, CVE-2025-46272, CVE-2025-46273, CVE-2025-46274, CVE-2025-46275 (Planet Technology), CVE-2025-23016 (FastCGI), CVE-2025-43864 (React Router), CVE-2025-21756 (Linux Kernel), CVE-2025-31650 (Apache Tomcat), CVE-2025-46762 (Apache Parquet), CVE-2025-2783 (Google Chrome), CVE-2025-23242, CVE-2025-23243 (NVIDIA Riva), CVE-2025-23254 (NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM), CVE-2025-3500 (Avast Free Antivirus), CVE-2025-32354 (Zimbra Collaboration Server), CVE-2025-4095 (Docker), CVE-2025-30194 (PowerDNS), CVE-2025-32817 (SonicWall Connect Tunnel Windows Client), CVE-2025-29953 (Apache ActiveMQ), CVE-2025-4148, CVE-2025-4149, CVE-2025-4150 (NETGEAR), CVE-2025-2082 (Tesla Model 3), CVE-2025-3927 (Digigram PYKO-OUT), CVE-2025-24522, CVE-2025-32011, CVE-2025-35996, CVE-2025-36558 (KUNBUS Revolution Pi), CVE-2025-35975, CVE-2025-36521 (MicroDicom DICOM Viewer), CVE-2025-2774 (Webmin), CVE-2025-29471 (Nagios), and CVE-2025-32434 (PyTorch).

📰 Around the Cyber World

• Europol Announces New Task Force to Combat Violence-as-a-Service — Europol has created a new operational task force designed to tackle a growing problem of youngsters being groomed or coerced into being recruited by criminal service provider groups that specialize in online and physical attacks. Known as OTF GRIMM, the task force seeks to disrupt violence-as-a-service and brings together law enforcement authorities from Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway. These schemes involve recruiting young people via social media platforms and messaging apps using coded language, memes, and gamified tasks, luring them with the promise of a luxurious lifestyle. The intention behind this deliberate act by criminal networks is to reduce their own risk and shield themselves from law enforcement. “The exploitation of young perpetrators to carry out criminal acts has emerged as a fast-evolving tactic used by organized crime,” the agency said. “Violence-as-a-service refers to the outsourcing of violent acts to criminal service providers — often involving the use of young perpetrators to carry out threats, assaults, or killings for a fee.”
• China Accuses the U.S. of Launching Cyber Attack — U.S. intelligence agencies reportedly launched cyber attacks against a major Chinese commercial cryptography provider in 2024, stealing 6.2 GB of critical project data, according to a report from China’s National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center (CNCERT/CC). The attack is said to have exploited an undisclosed vulnerability in the company’s customer relationship management system to gain access, implanting a custom trojan for remote control and data theft. “The compromised system contained over 600 user accounts, 8,000 customer profile records, and more than 10,000 contract orders, some involving key Chinese government entities,” Global Times reported. Earlier this January, the agency said it had “handled two incidents of cyber attacks [that] originated from the United States on China’s large-scale tech firms to steal trade secrets.” The activities targeted an advanced materials design and research institution in China in August 2024 and a large-scale high-tech firm in May 2023.
• BreachForums compromised in a zero-day attack on MyBB Software — BreachForums (breachforums[.]sx) has been resurrected after a previous version hosted on “breachforums[.]st” was taken offline through a MyBB zero-day exploit as part of a law enforcement action, the site’s new administrator Momondo claimed. The cybercrime forum was first taken down in 2023 and its original administrator Conor Brian Fitzpatrick (aka Pompompurin) arrested for operating the site. Since then, the site has resurfaced time and again using a revolving door of administrators and site addresses.
• Two Arrested in Connection With JokerOTP Operation — Two individuals, a 24-year-old man from Middlesbrough and a 30-year-old from the Oost-Brabant region of The Netherlands, have been arrested in a joint international operation dismantling JokerOTP, a sophisticated phishing tool used to intercept two-factor authentication (2FA) codes and steal over £7.5 million. “Over a two-year period, the tool is believed to have been used across 13 countries and over 28,000 times. It is suspected that financial accounts have been compromised, totaling £7.5 million,” Cleveland Police’s Cyber Crime Unit said.
• Microsoft Details CVE-2025-31191 macOS Flaw — Microsoft has shared details on CVE-2025-31191, a macOS vulnerability in Apple’s CoreServices component that could allow a malicious app to access sensitive user data. Apple addressed the issue in late March 2025 with macOS Sequoia 15.4. According to Microsoft researcher Jonathan Bar Or, the flaw could “allow specially crafted codes to escape the App Sandbox and run unrestricted on the system.” In other words, an attacker could create an exploit to escape the macOS sandbox without user interaction and perform further malicious actions like elevating privileges, exfiltrating data, and deploying additional payloads. The company also detailed an attack scenario wherein the exploit “could allow an attacker to delete and replace a keychain entry used to sign security-scoped bookmarks to ultimately escape the App Sandbox without user interaction.” Security-scoped bookmarks are a mechanism designed by Apple to specifically get around the App Sandbox rules using explicit, persistent user choices.
• New Supply Chain Attack Targets Magento Sites — In what has been described as a “coordinated supply chain attack,” hundreds of e-commerce stores running Magento have been backdoored since late April 2025. Sansec said it identified 21 application packages from vendors Tigren, Meetanshi, and MGS with the same backdoor. It has been found that the infrastructure associated with these vendors has been breached to inject backdoors into their download servers. “The backdoor consists of a fake license check in a file called License.php or LicenseApi.php,” Sansec said. “The evil is in the adminLoadLicense function, which executes $licenseFile as PHP.” Specifically, it includes code to upload arbitrary payloads like web shells, which could then be used to perform various malicious actions. The backdoor injections occurred six years ago, but it wasn’t until April 2025 that they were activated to take control of the servers.
• U.S. House Passes Bill to Study Router Risks — A bill requiring the U.S. Department of Commerce to study national security issues posed by routers and modems controlled by U.S. adversaries passed the House of Representatives. Called the Removing Our Unsecure Technologies to Ensure Reliability and Security (ROUTERS) Act, it aims to safeguard Americans’ communications networks from foreign-adversary controlled technology such as routers and modems. The proposed legislation mandates the Department of Commerce to assess the risks posed by routers, modems, and other devices developed, manufactured, or supplied by its adversaries like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, or Venezuela.
• New OpenEoX Framework Published to Coordinate Product End-of-Life Security Disclosures — Tech giants Cisco, Dell Technologies, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, and others have teamed up for a new OpenEoX framework that hopes to standardize end-of-life (EoL) and end-of-support (EoS) information to better protect the supply chain and combat cybersecurity risks linked to unsupported software and hardware. “OpenEoX introduces a much-needed, unified framework designed to streamline the exchange of end-of-life (EoL) and end-of-security-support (EoSSec) data that enables transparency and efficiency,” said Omar Santos, OpenEoX co-chair and Cisco Distinguished Engineer.
• Hackers Scan for Leaked Git Tokens and Secrets — Threat intelligence firm GreyNoise said it has observed a significant increase in crawling activity targeting Git configuration files between April 20 and 21, 2025, likely in an attempt to access internal codebases, developer workflows, and potentially sensitive credentials. Nearly 4,800 unique IP addresses have participated in the effort that mainly targeted Singapore, the U.S., Germany, the United Kingdom, and India. There have been four such spikes since September 2024, the other three instances being November 2024, December 2024, and early March 2024. The development comes as GreyNoise also said it has witnessed a “sharp and sustained decline” in opportunistic scanning of Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS GlobalProtect portals. “The majority of IPs involved in this activity are associated with the provider, 3xK Tech GmbH – accounting for nearly 20,000 of the 25,000+ IPs observed in the past 90 days,” it said.
• Garantex Likely Rebrands as Grinex — The now-sanctioned cryptocurrency exchange Garantex, which had its website seized in March 2025 by law enforcement, has likely rebranded as Grinex, TRM Labs revealed. “Days after Garantex’s takedown, Telegram channels affiliated with the exchange began promoting Grinex, a platform with a nearly identical interface, registered in Kyrgyzstan in December 2024,” the company said. Grinex has since announced it had entered into an agreement with Garantex to onboard its clients and was considering hiring former Garantex employees. It has also begun to distribute former Garantex user assets through a new token, A7A5. “From as early as January 2025, Garantex began moving funds into A7A5, a purported stablecoin pegged to the Russian ruble. Promoted as a means to recover frozen user assets, A7A5 appears engineered to evade sanctions, offering daily profit-sharing and anonymity through platforms like TRON and Ethereum,” TRM Labs said.
• Flaws Disclosed in Jan AI — Multiple security flaws (CVE-2025-2439, CVE-2025-2445, CVE-2025-2446, and CVE-2025-2447) have been disclosed in Menlo Research’s Jan AI, an offline ChatGPT alternative, that could be exploited by remote, unauthenticated attackers to manipulate systems, “With vulnerabilities ranging from missing CSRF protection of state-changing endpoints to command injection, an attacker can leverage these to take control of a self-hosted server or issue drive-by attacks against LLM developers,” Snyk said. The issues have since been addressed.
• New macOS Malware Families Detailed — Kandji researchers have flagged a new suspicious macOS program called PasivRobber that’s capable of gathering data from various apps like WeChat, QQ, web browsers, and email clients, among others through 28 different plugins. The tool is believed to be linked to a Chinese company called Meiya Pico, which develops forensic tools and was previously identified by the U.S. Treasury Department as one of the eight firms that “support the biometric surveillance and tracking of ethnic and religious minorities in China, particularly the predominantly Muslim Uyghur minority in Xinjiang.” The disclosure coincided with the discovery of another malware called ReaderUpdate that acts as a loader to serve the Genieo (aka DOLITTLE) adware, with variants of the malware written in Python, Crystal, Nim, Rust, and Go. The malware, first detected in 2020, has been distributed via free and third-party software download sites, in the form of package installers containing fake or trojanized utility applications. “Where compromised, hosts remain vulnerable to the delivery of any payload the operators choose to deliver, whether of their own or sold as Pay-Per-Install or Malware-as-a-Service on underground markets,” the company said.
• Apple Sends Out Notifications for Spyware Attacks — Apple has sent out threat notifications advising users in 100 countries that their phones may have been targeted by advanced commercial spyware. This included an Italian journalist and a Dutch activist, according to TechCrunch. It’s not yet clear what spyware campaign, if known, the Apple notifications relate to. Apple has been sending out such notices to those targeted in state-sponsored attacks since 2021. The news comes as the Meta-NSO Group case has moved to the next phase, with Meta asking the spyware company to pay over $440,000 in compensatory damages. NSO Group, in response, has accused Meta of inflating its damages and letting the malware remain on WhatsApp servers to “steal NSO’s trade secrets.”
• France Accuses Russia of Years of Cyber Attacks — France’s foreign ministry has accused Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency of mounting cyber attacks on a dozen entities including ministries, defense firms, research entities, and think tanks since 2021 in an attempt to destabilize the nation. The attacks have been linked to a hacking group called APT28 (aka BlueDelta or Fancy Bear). The ministry said APT28’s attacks on France go as far back as 2015, when French television channel TV5Monde was targeted, and that the formidable military intelligence hackers have sought to obtain strategic intelligence from entities across Europe and North America. The intrusions are said to have relied on phishing, vulnerability exploitation (e.g., CVE-2023-23397), poorly-secured edge devices, and brute-force attacks against webmail as initial access vectors, while also repeatedly targeting Roundcube email servers to exfiltrate inbox data and using phishing emails to distribute malware families like HeadLace and OCEANMAP, while attempting to evade detection by hiding behind low-cost and ready-to-use outsourced infrastructure. The development comes as Russia-aligned hacktivists like NoName057(16) have taken responsibility for large-scale DDoS attacks targeting Dutch organizations as a payback for sending €6 billion in military aid to Ukraine.
• Cloudflare Blocks 20.5M DDoS attacks in Q1 2025 — Speaking of DDoS attacks, Cloudflare said it blocked 20.5 million of them in the first quarter of 2025, a 358% year-over-year (YoY) increase and a 198% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ). In comparison, it blocked 21.3 million DDoS attacks during the calendar year 2024. “Of the 20.5 million DDoS attacks blocked in Q1, 16.8 million were network-layer DDoS attacks, and of those, 6.6M targeted Cloudflare’s network infrastructure directly,” it noted. “Another 6.9 million targeted hosting providers and service providers protected by Cloudflare.” These attacks were part of an 18-day multi-vector DDoS campaign comprising SYN flood attacks, Mirai-generated DDoS attacks, and SSDP amplification attacks. The web infrastructure company said it also blocked approximately 700 hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks that exceeded 1 Tbps or 1 Bpps. In late April 2025, the company revealed it mitigated a record-breaking DDoS attack peaking at 5.8 Tbps, which lasted for approximately 45 seconds. The previous record was a 5.6 Tbps DDoS attack that leveraged a Mirai-based botnet comprising 13,000 devices.
• Babuk2 Bjorka Represents Data Commoditization at Scale — Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a cybercrime operation called Babuk2 Bjorka that ostensibly masquerades as an evolution of the Babuk RaaS operation, but, in reality, is an “industrial scale data commoditization enterprise” that works by selling recycled stolen data from other ransomware groups on cybercrime forums. “The group is not just copying and pasting old leaks; they’re building a brand, establishing a market presence, and creating a sustainable operational model,” Trustwave SpiderLabs said.
• FBI Shares List of 42,000 LabHost Phishing Domains — The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has released a massive list of 42,000 phishing domains tied to the LabHost cybercrime platform, which was dismantled in April 2024. These domains, obtained from the backend servers, were registered between November 2021 and April 2024. “Though the LabHost domains are historical in nature, this list of over 42,000 domains may provide insight for network defenders and cyber threat intelligence personnel on adversary tactics and techniques,” the FBI said.
• Polish Police Disrupts Cybercrime Gang — Polish authorities have dismantled an international cybercrime group accused of defrauding dozens of victims out of nearly $665,000. Nine people aged between 19 to 51 have been arrested in connection with the case. The suspects are believed to have posed as bank employees and law enforcement officers to trick victims into transferring funds to accounts under their control. At least 55 people were targeted as part of the scam since April 2023.
• Critical Security Flaws in Browser Wallets — Security vulnerabilities have been identified in browser wallets such as Stellar Freighter, Frontier Wallet, and Coin98 that could permit attackers to drain funds without requiring any social engineering or phishing attempts. “Simply visiting the wrong site could silently expose your recovery phrase, allowing attackers to drain your funds whenever they want,” Coinspect said. “A malicious site could steal the secret recovery phrase even when the wallet was locked and without requiring any user approval to connect.” There is no evidence that the shortcomings were exploited in the wild.
• New Reverse NFCGate Technique Revealed — The legitimate NFCGate application, which is used to capture, analyze, or modify near-field communication (NFC) traffic from Android devices, has been misused to steal 40 million rubles from Russian bank customers as of January 2025, cybersecurity firm F6 has revealed. Fraudsters have been observed modifying the application, masking it as government and banking services to carry out their activities. Last month, it noted that the total amount of damage from attacks on customers of Russian banks using NFCGate-based malware for the first two months of 2025 is estimated at almost 200 million rubles. In March 2025, there were an estimated 180 thousand compromised devices in Russia, on which NFCGate and another malware called CraxsRAT were installed. But in what appears to be a further escalation of the threat actor’s tactics, a new attack scheme known as reverse NFCGate has come to light. The attacks seek to trick victims into downloading a malicious app to secure their accounts. Once installed and opened, the victims are notified via a pop-up window that they need to set the malware as the default application for contactless payments. The attack then directs them to the ATM to deposit money into their own accounts under various pretexts. “In the reverse version of NFCGate, the application uses the ability to relay NFC traffic to transmit the drop card data to the user’s device,” F6 said. “When, as a result of the fraudulent attack, the victim comes to the ATM to deposit money into their account, they will place their smartphone on the ATM’s NFC module, but instead of their card, they will log in with the drop card, to whom the entire amount will be sent.” As many as 175,000 compromised devices have been detected in the country as of March 2025, with over 1,000 confirmed attacks conducted on clients of leading Russian banks using the reverse version of NFCGate. The average amount of damage from attacks using the reverse version of NFCGate is 100 thousand rubles.

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🔒 Tip of the Week

Sandbox Your AI Agent — File Access Is the Silent Threat — Most AI agents don’t need access to your system files — but they often have it by default. That means if an attacker tricks your agent (via prompt injection, plugin abuse, or tool misuse), it could accidentally expose things like SSH keys, cloud credentials, or logs. This is one of the easiest ways for attackers to move deeper into your environment — and it often goes unnoticed.

Even if you’ve locked down API access or IAM roles, the local file system is still a weak spot. Your agent might be able to read .ssh/authorized_keys, .aws/credentials, or even environment files with secrets — just by asking the right question. And once that data is exposed, it’s game over.

You can fix this fast with sandboxing. Use tools like Firejail (Linux) to block access to sensitive folders. This blocks the agent from seeing key files, locks down temp folders, and adds guardrails — even if something inside the agent misbehaves.

Running your AI agent in a sandbox takes minutes, but massively reduces your attack surface. It’s a small move that closes a big gap — and it works even if everything else looks secure.

Conclusion

Every alert this week reinforces a simple truth: cybersecurity isn’t just about defense—it’s about detection, speed, and accountability. As threats grow quieter and more calculated, the margin for delay shrinks. Don’t just monitor. Measure. Map. Respond. Then ask yourself—where else could they be?

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