Hackers aren’t kicking down the door anymore. They just use the same tools we use every day — code packages, cloud accounts, email, chat, phones, and “trusted” partners — and turn them against us.
One bad download can leak your keys. One weak vendor can expose many customers at once. One guest invite, one link on a phone, one bug in a common tool, and suddenly your mail, chats, repos, and servers are in play.
Every story below is a reminder that your “safe” tools might be the real weak spot.
⚡ Threat of the Week
Shai-Hulud Returns with More Aggression — The npm registry was targeted a second time by a self-replicating worm that went by the moniker “Sha1-Hulud: The Second Coming,” affecting over 800 packages and 27,000 GitHub repositories. Like in the previous iteration, the main objective was to steal sensitive data like API keys, cloud credentials, and npm and GitHub authentication information, and facilitate deeper supply chain compromise in a worm-like fashion. The malware also created GitHub Actions workflows that allow for command-and-control (C2) and injected GitHub Actions workflow mechanisms to steal repository secrets. Additionally, the malware backdoored every npm package maintained by the victim, republishing them with malicious payloads that run during package installation. “Rather than relying solely on Node.js, which is more heavily monitored, the malware dynamically installs Bun during package installation, benefiting from its high performance and self-contained architecture to execute large payloads with improved stealth,” Endor Labs said. “This shift likely helps the malware evade traditional defenses tuned specifically to observe Node.js behavior.” GitGuardian’s analysis revealed a total of 294,842 secret occurrences, which correspond to 33,185 unique secrets. Of these, 3,760 were valid as of November 27, 2025. These included GitHub access tokens, Slack webhook URLs, GitHub OAuth tokens, AWS IAM keys, OpenAI Project API keys, Slack bot tokens, Claude API keys, Google API Keys, and GitLab tokens. Trigger.dev, which had one of its engineers installing a compromised package on their development machine, said the incident led to credential theft and unauthorized access to its GitHub organization. The Python Package Index (PyPI) repository said it was not impacted by the supply chain incident.
🔔 Top News
- ToddyCat Steals Outlook Emails and Microsoft 365 Access Tokens — Attackers behind the ToddyCat advanced persistent threat (APT) toolkit have evolved to stealing Outlook mail data and Microsoft 365 Access tokens. The APT group has refined its toolkit in late 2024 and early 2025 to capture not only browser credentials, as previously seen, but also victims’ actual email archives and access tokens. The activity marks the second major shift in ToddyCat’s tooling this year, following an April 2025 campaign where the group abused a vulnerability in ESET’s security scanner to deliver a previously undocumented malware codenamed TCESB.
- Qilin Attack Breaches MSP to Hack into Dozens of Financial Firms — South Korea’s financial sector has been targeted by what has been described as a sophisticated supply chain attack that led to the deployment of Qilin ransomware. “This operation combined the capabilities of a major Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) group, Qilin, with potential involvement from North Korean state-affiliated actors (Moonstone Sleet), leveraging Managed Service Provider (MSP) compromise as the initial access vector,” Bitdefender said. Korean Leaks took place over three publication waves, resulting in the theft of over 1 million files and 2 TB of data from 28 victims. To pull off these attacks, the Qilin affiliate is said to have breached a single upstream managed service provider (MSP), leveraging the access to compromise several victims at once.
- CISA Warns of Spyware Campaigns Using Spyware and RATs — The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an alert warning of bad actors actively leveraging commercial spyware and remote access trojans (RATs) to target users of mobile messaging applications. The cyber actors use social engineering techniques to deliver spyware and gain unauthorized access to a victim’s messaging app, facilitating the deployment of additional malicious payloads that can further compromise the victim’s mobile device, the agency said. The activity focuses on high-value individuals, primarily current and former high-ranking government, military, and political officials, along with civil society organizations and individuals across the United States, the Middle East, and Europe.
- Attack Exploits WSUS Flaw to Deploy ShadowPad — Unknown threat actors exploited a recently patched security flaw in Microsoft Windows Server Update Services (CVE-2025-59287) to distribute malware known as ShadowPad. The attackers have been found to weaponize the vulnerability to launch Windows utilities like “curl.exe” and “certutil.exe,” to contact an external server (“149.28.78[.]189:42306”) to download and install ShadowPad. It’s not clear who is behind the attack, but ShadowPad is a privately sold malware widely shared by Chinese hacking groups.
- A Blindspot in Microsoft Teams Guest Access — Cybersecurity researchers shed light on a “fundamental architectural gap” that allows attackers to bypass Microsoft Defender for Office 365 protections via the guest access feature in Teams. The issue is essentially that when users operate as guests in another tenant, their protections are determined entirely by that hosting environment, not by their home organization. Microsoft began rolling out guest access last month. “These advancements increase collaboration opportunities, but they also widen the responsibility for ensuring those external environments are trustworthy and properly secured,” Ontinue said.
️🔥 Trending CVEs
Hackers act fast. They can use new bugs within hours. One missed update can cause a big breach. Here are this week’s most serious security flaws. Check them, fix what matters first, and stay protected.
This week’s list includes — CVE-2025-12972, CVE-2025-12970, CVE-2025-12978, CVE-2025-12977, CVE-2025-12969 (Fluent Bit), CVE-2025-13207, CVE-2024-24481 (Tenda), CVE-2025-62164 (vLLM), CVE-2025-12816 (Forge), CVE-2025-59373 (ASUS MyASUS), CVE-2025-59366 (ASUS routers) CVE-2025-65998 (Apache Syncope), CVE-2025-13357 (HashiCorp Vault Terraform Provider), CVE-2025-33183, CVE-2025-33184 (NVIDIA Isaac-GR00T), CVE-2025-33187 (NVIDIA DGX Spark), CVE-2025-12571, CVE-2024-9183 (GitLab CE/EE), CVE-2025-66035 (Angular HttpClient), and an unauthenticated DoS vulnerability in Next.js (no CVE).
📰 Around the Cyber World
- Poland Detains Russian Citizen Over Hack — Polish authorities detained a Russian citizen suspected of hacking into the IT systems of local companies, marking the latest case that Warsaw has linked to Moscow’s sabotage and espionage efforts. The suspect is believed to have gained unauthorized access to an online retailer’s systems and manipulated its databases in an attempt to disrupt operations. The suspect’s identity has not been revealed.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has advised broadcasters to enhance the security of their networks following a series of cyber attacks that resulted in the broadcasting of inappropriate content and misuse of the Emergency Alert System. The attacks were traced back to compromised broadcast equipment, allowing threat actors to insert unauthorized content into broadcasts.
A critical vulnerability in Firefox’s WebAssembly engine was disclosed, potentially enabling remote code execution. The flaw, identified as CVE-2025-13016, was introduced in April 2025 but went unnoticed until October. The issue was addressed in Firefox 145.
Europol, in collaboration with authorities from Switzerland and Germany, shut down Cryptomixer, a cryptocurrency mixing service suspected of facilitating cybercrime and money laundering activities. The operation, named Olympia, resulted in the seizure of significant amounts of data and cryptocurrency funds.
A businessman in South Korea was sentenced to one year in prison for purchasing hacking tools from a North Korean hacker to operate illegal servers for online gaming.
An artificial intelligence company detected a sophisticated cyber attack utilizing its platform to automate malicious activities. The attack, attributed to a large group based in China, aimed to exploit free computing resources for criminal purposes.
Threat actors exploited the popularity of the Battlefield 6 game to distribute malware-infected versions, stealing sensitive information from users. The malicious payloads included stealers and command-and-control agents targeting various browsers and online services.
Collaboration among nation-state threat actors has become more prevalent, with shared infrastructure and operational patterns observed between different groups. The overlap in activities suggests potential collaboration between these threat actors in conducting cyber attacks.
Anthropic announced that its coding model, Claude Opus 4.5, offers improved protection against prompt injection attacks compared to other models in the industry. The model has demonstrated resilience against deceptive instructions aimed at manipulating AI systems into harmful behavior. Anthropic has enhanced its coding, computer use, and browser use environments by introducing new external and internal evaluations for malicious activities and prompt injection attacks. In a recent assessment, Opus 4.5 demonstrated a strong defense against malicious coding requests, rejecting 100% of the 150 requests in an agentic coding evaluation. When tested for compliance with activities such as malware creation, writing code for destructive DDoS attacks, and developing non-consensual monitoring software, the model refused approximately 78% of the requests. Moreover, it rejected over 88% of requests related to surveillance, data collection, and the dissemination of harmful content.
On a different note, critical security vulnerabilities have been discovered in the Uhale Android-based digital picture frames, which could potentially allow attackers to take control of the devices. These vulnerabilities include automatic malware delivery upon device boot, remote code execution flaws, arbitrary file write vulnerabilities, and improper file configuration. Uhale has addressed a majority of these issues in version 4.2.1, with further fixes planned in version 5.1.0.
Operation South Star has been identified as leveraging the ZipperDown vulnerability in attacks targeting mobile devices in China. This exploit involves triggering ZipperDown through email attachments, leading to the execution of malicious files for second-stage commands. Recent incidents have seen attackers using modified files to download additional malicious components and establish connections with a command and control server.
In a concerning development, threat actors are promoting malicious large language models (LLMs) like WormGPT 4 and KawaiiGPT, which can generate phishing emails, write polymorphic malware, and automate reconnaissance. These tools, while requiring some human intervention for optimal performance, lower the entry barrier for less skilled actors, enabling cybercrime at scale. Safeguards against such threats are crucial, as attackers may attempt to bypass security measures by posing as security researchers or participants in cybersecurity exercises.
Lastly, cybersecurity webinars are being held to educate professionals on detecting hidden risks in cloud environments, securing cloud infrastructure while maintaining compliance, and implementing effective patching strategies. Additionally, tools like LUMEN, a browser-based Windows Event Log analyzer, can aid in analyzing event logs for security purposes.
Enhancing Security with Offline Investigation Tools and Network-wide DNS Blocking
In the realm of cybersecurity, analysts have a powerful ally in the form of tools that allow for secure offline investigations and network-wide DNS blocking. These tools offer a range of functionalities designed to enhance security measures and protect against potential threats.
Offline Investigation Tool
An innovative tool enables analysts to upload multiple EVTX files, conduct SIGMA detections, correlate events into storylines, extract IOCs, and export findings—all while ensuring that data remains on the device. This tool is specifically tailored for secure offline investigations, supporting both curated and custom SIGMA rules, dashboards, and local session storage for efficient and privacy-focused log analysis.
Network-wide DNS Blocking with Pi-hole
Another valuable tool in the cybersecurity arsenal is Pi-hole, a network-wide DNS sinkhole that effectively blocks ads, trackers, and unwanted domains before they can reach devices on the network. Installed on local hardware or servers, Pi-hole filters all network traffic without the need for client software. It provides a user-friendly dashboard and CLI for monitoring, custom blocklists, and DNS control, offering an added layer of protection against malicious entities.
Disclaimer
Disclaimer: These tools are intended for educational and research purposes only and have not undergone comprehensive security testing. Improper use of these tools could result in harm. It is crucial to review the code, conduct testing in safe environments, and adhere to all rules and regulations.
Key Takeaways
This week’s theme underscores the fact that no entity is too small or insignificant to be a target for cyber threats. Oftentimes, it is the simplest vulnerabilities that are exploited by attackers—a neglected package, unquestioned vendor, unrevoked token, or unmonitored guest account. Attackers capitalize on these weaknesses because they are effective.
Therefore, it is essential not to overlook potential security risks. Take action today by implementing at least one security measure highlighted in this recap—whether it’s rotating encryption keys, tightening vendor access, reviewing guest accounts, securing update paths, or resolving high-risk vulnerabilities. Collaborate with your team to address these issues promptly, as the gap between acknowledging security measures and implementing them is where breaches occur most frequently.
