HUMAN Security has detailed Trapdoor, an Android ad-fraud and malvertising operation that pushed 455 apps with more than 24 million combined Play Store downloads and drove an average of 659 million daily ad-bid requests, three-quarters of them from US devices. The operators run their own ad campaigns to recruit victims, then use legitimate install-attribution tools to switch on fraud only for users who came in through those campaigns, suppressing the bad behavior for anyone who installed organically - which kept Google's reviewers and most security researchers in the dark. Google has now removed all identified apps from the Play Store.
INTERPOL says a coordinated operation called Ramz, run across 13 Middle East and North Africa countries, has produced 201 arrests, seized 53 servers, and identified 3,867 victims. Algerian authorities took down a phishing-as-a-service operation; Moroccan officials seized hard drives loaded with banking data and phishing kits; and Jordanian police uncovered 15 people running a fraudulent trading platform who turned out to be trafficking victims forced into the work. Group-IB and Team Cymru contributed intelligence on over 5,000 compromised accounts, including some tied to government systems. Participating countries included Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Tunisia, and the UAE.
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.
SentinelOne has documented a new variant of the SHub macOS infostealer family called Reaper. Victims are lured through fake WeChat and Miro installers hosted on typo-squatted Microsoft domains, then prompted to run what looks like an Apple security update. Reaper avoids macOS Tahoe's new Terminal protections by routing its commands through the applescript:// URL scheme. Once running, it steals browser credentials, crypto wallets, dev configs, iCloud data, and Telegram sessions, replaces legitimate Exodus, Ledger, and Trezor wallet apps with backdoored copies, and installs a persistent fake Google Software Update LaunchAgent that gives the attacker an ongoing remote shell. Files larger than 85MB are uploaded in 70MB chunks.
US officials believe Iranian-affiliated actors broke into internet-exposed automatic tank gauge (ATG) systems at gas stations across multiple states, then changed the displayed fuel levels without altering the actual amounts. The intrusions caused no shortages, but falsified ATG readings could theoretically hide a real fuel leak. ATGs have been a known soft target for over a decade. The activity tracks with a broader Iranian push during the war that began in late February: disruptions at US oil, gas, and water sites, shipping delays at Stryker, and the leak of FBI Director Kash Patel's emails. Attribution is preliminary because intruders left almost no forensic evidence.
The Tycoon 2FA phishing-as-a-service kit, which Microsoft, Europol, Cloudflare and others tried to dismantle in March 2026, is back and has switched tactics. Instead of relaying credentials and MFA codes through a fake login page, operators now send victims to Microsoft's legitimate device-login page at microsoft.com/devicelogin and ask them to enter a code from the lure email. That single consent grants the attacker OAuth tokens for the victim's Exchange Online, OneDrive, and SharePoint through Microsoft's own Authentication Broker app, so it looks normal in Entra logs. eSentire spotted the late-April campaign and published IoCs, including AS45102 (Alibaba Cloud) operator infrastructure.
VulnCheck says attackers are chaining three critical bugs (CVE-2026-28515, CVE-2026-28517, CVE-2026-28516) in openDCIM, an open-source data center management web app, to drop PHP web shells on exposed installs. All three rate CVSS 9.3 and cover missing authorization, OS command injection, and SQL injection. They can be combined over five HTTP requests to land a reverse shell. The activity comes from a single Chinese IP using what VulnCheck describes as a customized version of Vulnhuntr, a public AI-driven vulnerability discovery tool. The campaign is one of the first publicly documented cases of an open-source AI vuln scanner being repurposed for real-world exploitation.
The Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 contest wrapped up Saturday at OffensiveCon, paying out $1,298,250 for 47 unique zero-days across three days. Taiwan's DEVCORE took the Master of Pwn title with 50.5 points and $505,000 in winnings. The headline Day 3 result came from DEVCORE researcher splitline, who chained two bugs into a successful exploit of Microsoft SharePoint, earning $100,000 and 10 points. SharePoint had survived a failed Rapid7 attempt on Day 2, making this a notable late-contest catch. Day 3 also saw attempts against VMware ESXi, Windows 11, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and OpenAI Codex. All disclosed bugs now enter ZDI's 90-day disclosure window.
Microsoft Threat Intelligence detailed how Turla, the Russian state actor attributed by CISA to the FSB's Center 16, has transformed its .NET Kazuar backdoor from a monolithic implant into a modular peer-to-peer botnet ecosystem. The new architecture splits responsibilities across three component types - Kernel, Bridge, and Worker - and uses a leader-election mechanism so only one infected host actually talks to the external C2 server, dramatically reducing observable network noise. Turla (also tracked as Secret Blizzard, Snake, Venomous Bear, Uroburos, WRAITH) has been targeting government, diplomatic, and defense organizations across Europe, Central Asia, and Ukraine since 2017; recent operations also leverage Gamaredon for initial access before deploying Kazuar v3.
Socket and StepSecurity confirmed three malicious node-ipc releases (9.1.6, 9.2.3, 12.0.1, with 12.0.1 tagged as 'latest') uploaded to npm on May 14, 2026 by co-maintainer account 'atiertant.' Each version carries a byte-identical 80KB obfuscated payload appended as an IIFE to node-ipc.cjs, so it fires on every require('node-ipc') without using install scripts. The malware fingerprints the host, sweeps for 100+ credential and config targets, archives them, and exfiltrates via DNS rather than HTTP. Permiso's Ian Ahl traced the likely attack chain: the maintainer's recovery domain atlantis-software[.]net expired in Jan 2025, was re-registered by an attacker on May 7, 2026, then used to reset the npm password.
TrustStrike Labs