Der Spiegel reported on April 25 that German government sources now blame Russia for a large-scale Signal phishing campaign that compromised the account of Bundestag President Julia Klöckner. At least 300 Signal accounts of German political figures were targeted; investigators say attackers accessed chat histories, files, and phone numbers. Chancellor Friedrich Merz was in the same CDU group chat as Klöckner but his device showed no signs of compromise. The attack used pure social engineering - operators posed as Signal support and asked victims to share verification codes or PINs.
ANY.RUN and Dark Reading published research on Mach-O Man, a new macOS malware kit Lazarus is deploying against fintech and crypto executives. The chain begins on Telegram with what looks like a legitimate meeting invite from a known contact, leading to a fake Zoom/Teams/Meet page that displays a fake 'connection issue' and instructs the executive to copy-paste a command into Mac Terminal. That ClickFix command grabs credentials, browser sessions, and Keychain data and exfiltrates over Telegram bot APIs. Lazarus has used the same template across the Drift and KelpDAO compromises, totaling more than $500M stolen in two weeks.
NASA's Office of Inspector General published a retrospective on April 24 detailing how Chinese national Song Wu, an engineer at a state-owned Chinese aerospace and defense conglomerate, ran a multi-year spear-phishing campaign from January 2017 to December 2021. Song impersonated real US engineers known to his targets and asked over email for copies of specific aerospace modeling software and source code that could design or modify weapons platforms. Targets included staff at NASA, US Air Force, Navy, Army, FAA, major universities, and private aerospace firms. Several victims, believing they were helping a friend, sent the requested software - inadvertently violating US export control laws.
Google's Mandiant team published a report on April 22 naming UNC6692, a previously untracked threat cluster running a high-conversion social engineering playbook against senior enterprise staff - 77% of observed targets were senior employees between March 1 and April 1, 2026. The attack opens with an email bombing burst, flooding the victim's inbox with spam to create urgency. The operator then sends a Microsoft Teams chat invite from an external account, posing as internal IT help, and offers to fix the spam problem via a link to a convincing phishing page called 'Mailbox Repair and Sync Utility v2.1.5'. The page forces Microsoft Edge via the microsoft-edge: URI scheme, harvests credentials through a fake 'Health Check' button, and downloads an AutoHotkey script from attacker-controlled AWS S3 that installs the SNOW malware family: SNOWBELT (a malicious Edge/Chromium extension disguised as 'MS Heartbeat' that holds persistence through Scheduled Tasks and a Startup-folder shortcut), SNOWGLAZE (a Python WebSocket tunneler wrapping traffic in Base64-encoded JSON), and SNOWBASIN (a Python bindshell for interactive remote control). Post-exploitation includes LSASS dumps, Pass-the-Hash lateral movement, PsExec and RDP over the SNOWGLAZE tunnel, and exfil via LimeWire.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence is warning of a surge in attacks where threat actors pose as IT or helpdesk staff in external Microsoft Teams cross-tenant chats to trick employees into granting remote access - then use legitimate tools to steal data while blending into normal IT activity. The attack chain has nine stages. First, the attacker opens an external Teams chat claiming to be internal IT addressing an account issue. They talk the target into starting a Quick Assist remote support session, giving the attacker direct control of the machine. From there they do quick recon via Command Prompt and PowerShell, drop a small payload in user-writable locations like ProgramData, and execute it through DLL side-loading using a trusted signed application (Autodesk, Adobe Reader, Windows Error Reporting, or even data loss prevention software - any binary with a valid Microsoft-trusted signature). HTTPS C2 blends into normal outbound traffic. They establish persistence via Windows Registry, then use Windows Remote Management (WinRM) to move laterally to domain controllers and high-value assets. Final stage: Rclone exfiltrates filtered data to external cloud storage. Microsoft's detection guidance is blunt - this blends into legitimate admin activity and is hard to distinguish from routine IT support.
The Axios supply chain attack we covered on March 31 has now been attributed to UNC1069, a North Korean threat group linked to BlueNoroff that specializes in financially motivated attacks against crypto exchanges and financial institutions. Google's Mandiant confirmed the attackers social-engineered the lead maintainer through a fake video call, deploying a RAT via the compromised npm account. Socket warns this wasn't a one-off - the same actors have compromised accounts spanning some of the most widely depended-upon packages in the npm registry.
Telehealth giant Hims & Hers - nearly $1 billion in annual revenue, millions of subscribers - disclosed that hackers stole customer support tickets from its Zendesk instance between February 4-7. The ShinyHunters extortion gang conducted the breach by compromising Okta SSO credentials through social engineering, then pivoting into the Zendesk platform. Stolen data includes names, contact information, and details from support requests. No medical records or doctor communications were compromised. The company took two months to disclose.
Apple shipped an undocumented security feature in macOS Tahoe 26.4 that directly targets ClickFix attacks - the social engineering technique behind the Infinity Stealer campaign we covered last week. When a user tries to paste a potentially harmful command into Terminal, macOS now intercepts it with a warning before anything executes. The feature only covers Apple's built-in Terminal app, not third-party alternatives like iTerm2. A 'Paste Anyway' option remains for power users.
A new macOS infostealer called Infinity Stealer tricks users through fake Cloudflare CAPTCHA pages - a technique called ClickFix. Victims paste a command into Terminal thinking they're verifying their identity, but it silently installs malware. The payload is compiled with Nuitka - turning Python into native macOS binaries that are much harder for security tools to detect. It steals browser credentials, Keychain data, and crypto wallets.
Thousands of fake Visual Studio Code vulnerability warnings are being posted across GitHub Discussions in automated waves - all from freshly created accounts. The posts use realistic titles like 'Severe Vulnerability - Immediate Update Required' with fabricated CVE IDs to pressure developers into downloading malware from Google Drive links. The payloads fingerprint victims before delivering secondary attacks, acting as a traffic distribution system.
TrustStrike Labs