An IoT botnet tracked as Dysphoria has adopted blockchain-based name services and relays built from its own victims after a March law enforcement operation disrupted related botnet infrastructure. Rather than hardcoding servers, it resolves command-and-control details through Ethereum and Solana naming systems, with addresses hidden inside fake IPv6 strings and recovered by a custom algorithm, which makes conventional server seizure harder. A separate relay build drops the attack modules and instead shuttles traffic between outside connections and remote servers through compromised devices. It spreads mainly through weak Telnet and SSH passwords and known device flaws. Researchers put its size above 200,000 bots, though that count is not independently verified.
Researchers at JFrog found 148 npm packages that abused the registry not to attack developers but as free hosting for a booby-trapped web proxy aimed at students trying to bypass school filters. Anyone who opened one of the proxy sites had their browser quietly conscripted into a distributed denial-of-service botnet, flooding target servers with HTTP and WebSocket traffic, alongside injected ads and tracking. Crucially, the packages contained no install-time scripts and were never meant to be added to a project, so dependency scanners and install sandboxes, which watch what runs on install, would not catch them. The operators can re-arm the dormant attack code with a single commit.
Fortinet has uncovered a new botnet called C0XMO, built from the long-running Gafgyt malware family, that breaks into devices by exploiting an old flaw (CVE-2021-27137) in the UPnP service of DD-WRT router firmware. A booby-trapped network request gives the attacker code execution with no login needed. Once in, C0XMO digs in with hidden files and cron jobs that re-run it every 15 minutes, then hunts down and deletes rival botnets and even researchers' security tools to keep the device to itself. A separate scanner spreads it across many chip types (ARM, MIPS, x86, and more), and infected devices are wired up to launch 19 kinds of denial-of-service floods.
Krebs on Security reports that Jacob Butler, the 18-year-old Ottawa resident allegedly known online as 'Dort,' has been arrested and charged in both the US and Canada with running the Kimwolf IoT botnet. KrebsOnSecurity unmasked Butler as the operator on February 28 by tying together his email addresses, forum registrations, and public Telegram and Discord posts. Dort later threatened and swatted researchers including Synthient's Ben Brundage. Ontario Provincial Police executed a search warrant in Ottawa on March 19 and seized devices. Kimwolf competed with Aisuru, JackSkid, and Mossad for the same vulnerable-IoT population. Butler faces up to 10 years if extradited and convicted in the US.
After TeamPCP dumped the Shai-Hulud worm's source code on GitHub last week with the note 'Here We Go Again - Let the Carnage Continue,' a new actor under the npm name deadcode09284814 has published four malicious packages typosquatting Axios and friends. One package, chalk-tempalte, contains an almost-unmodified copy of the leaked worm, exfiltrating GitHub tokens, cloud configs, and crypto wallet data to a remote C2 and creating a public GitHub repo titled 'A Mini Sha1-Hulud has Appeared.' Another package, axois-utils, adds a Go-based DDoS bot called Phantom Bot that floods HTTP, TCP, and UDP. OXsecurity, which discovered the campaign, counted about 2,678 combined downloads.
TrustStrike Labs