Cybersecurity Brief – 2025-07-16

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Major Incidents or Breaches

Century Support Services, a Pennsylvania-based debt settlement firm, disclosed a data breach impacting 160,000 individuals after its systems were compromised in November 2024.
US department store chain Belk was targeted by the DragonForce ransomware group, which claims to have stolen over 150GB of data during a May 2025 attack.
Abacus Market, a major Western darknet drug marketplace, has gone offline in a suspected exit scam, shutting down its public infrastructure.
McDonald’s hiring platform inadvertently exposed data of approximately 64 million job applicants due to the use of default credentials.
Several companies in Italy’s Lombardy region suffered business disruption after a Romanian ransomware group known as ‘Diskstation’ attacked NAS devices. The group was dismantled by international law enforcement.

Google released a security update for Chrome version 138, patching its fifth zero-day vulnerability of 2025.
Microsoft issued emergency update KB5064489 to address an issue preventing Azure virtual machines from launching when Trusted Launch is disabled and Virtualization-Based Security is enabled.

North Korean threat actors associated with the “Contagious Interview” campaign published 67 malicious packages to the npm registry, delivering the XORIndex malware loader to developer systems.
A state-backed group is targeting Southeast Asian government organizations with the novel HazyBeacon Windows backdoor, utilizing AWS Lambda for command-and-control and data exfiltration.
Attackers leveraged over 600 domains to distribute a trojanized Telegram Android app, stealing data from Chinese-speaking users, particularly those on older Android versions.
A new variant of the Android malware Konfety uses malformed APKs and obfuscation techniques to evade detection and analysis.
Threat actors are embedding obfuscated JavaScript in SVG files to enable browser-native redirection to malicious sites.

AsyncRAT, an open-source remote access trojan first released in 2019, has proliferated into a complex ecosystem of forks and variants, fueling global cybercrime and democratizing access to malware capabilities.
GLOBAL GROUP, a newly emerged ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) operation, is expanding its activities across Australia, Brazil, Europe, and the United States, employing AI-driven negotiation tools to enhance extortion processes.
Cloudflare reported mitigation of 7.3 million DDoS attacks in Q2 2025, with hyper-volumetric attacks reaching a record 7.3 Tbps. The company noted that the total number of DDoS attacks blocked in 2025 has already exceeded the total for 2024.
Criminal networks continue to exploit insider vulnerabilities within organizations, adapting rapidly to bypass traditional security measures.
Alternate Data Streams (ADS) in NTFS are being used by keylogger malware to hide captured data, providing stealth persistence.
AI prompt attacks and the security of agentic AI systems are highlighted as emerging concerns, with risks associated with high-privilege authentication and invisible identity access in automated workflows.

MITRE launched the AADAPT framework, designed to complement the ATT&CK framework, focusing on detection and response to cyberattacks targeting cryptocurrency assets and financial systems. The framework provides documentation for identifying, investigating, and mitigating weaknesses in digital asset payments.