Cybersecurity 101
A complete 2026 guide to malware: what it is, the main types from ransomware to infostealers, how it spreads and infects devices, the warning signs of an infection, and how to remove and prevent it.
Supply Chain Attack
A coordinated attack on Packagist, the PHP package registry, poisoned eight Composer packages by hiding malicious code in package.json — the JavaScript manifest — instead of composer.json, exploiting the blind spot where PHP and JavaScript toolchains coexist but are reviewed separately.
Supply Chain Attack
Researchers found more than 700 malicious version tags published across the Laravel-Lang PHP project on May 22-23, 2026 — yet the official repositories were never modified. The attacker pointed Git tags at a fork they controlled to drop a credential stealer.
Nation-State Cyber Threats
Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 is tracking Screening Serpens, an Iran-nexus APT that fuses DLL sideloading with AppDomainManager hijacking to make .NET applications switch off their own security mechanisms, then deploys six new RATs across the U.S., Israel, and the UAE.
Social Engineering
The Based Apparel merchandise site was pulled offline on May 22 after reports it served a ClickFix attack: a fake Cloudflare check whose copy button placed a hidden shell command on the clipboard for visitors to paste into their own terminal.
Nation-State Cyber Threats
Lumen's Black Lotus Labs disclosed Showboat, a modular Linux backdoor a China-affiliated espionage operation has used to sit inside Middle East and Central Asia telecom networks for roughly four years. A SOCKS5-proxy foothold inside a carrier is a persistent window into a region's traffic.
Nation-State Cyber Threats
ESET documented Webworm, a China-aligned APT that pivoted from Asia to European governments. Its two new backdoors — EchoCreep and GraphWorm — run command-and-control entirely on Discord and Microsoft OneDrive, hiding inside the trusted cloud traffic every enterprise allowlists.
Cyber Attacks
Tycoon2FA is back six weeks after the Microsoft/Europol takedown — now phishing OAuth device-code consents against M365 via a Trustifi-laundered relay.
Application Security
Three published versions of node-ipc — a package with 822,000 weekly downloads — hide an obfuscated stealer backdoor that exfiltrates 90 categories of developer and cloud secrets over DNS. The attacker hijacked a lapsed maintainer domain to publish them.
Threat Intelligence
Kaspersky found something unusual in a North Korean backdoor: comments that look written by an LLM, not a human. Combined with Kimsuky's expansion into defense targets across three countries, it is documented evidence that state malware development is borrowing AI.
Threat Intelligence
Microsoft's new Kazuar analysis names one capability that ties it to the other Russian Signal operation in the news: Kazuar steals Signal Desktop message files. Encryption protects the conversation in transit — not the database on a compromised laptop.
Cyber Attacks
Ghostwriter built operational security into its phishing lure. Send the campaign's malicious PDF to a Ukrainian IP and it triggers the attack chain. Send it anywhere else — including to the analysts investigating it — and they get a harmless document.