Steganography

An active multi-stage phishing campaign distributes AsyncRAT and Remcos RATs through weaponized Excel attachments targeting sales, procurement, and vendor management staff globally. The infection chain uses VBA macros to retrieve HTA payloads via URL shorteners and Cloudflare Workers, with final payloads hidden via PNG steganography and loaded filelessly into memory via .NET assembly loading. The campaign demonstrates high-volume, automated payload generation with consistent obfuscation patterns including Base64 encoding, character substitution, and string reversal.

FortiGuard Labs identified an ongoing Ousaban banking Trojan campaign targeting users in Spain and Portugal, delivered via phishing PDFs that redirect victims to geofenced malicious webpages. The attack chain involves a VBS script extracting a ZIP payload from a steganographic image, with the final Ousaban EXE establishing persistence via registry Run keys and communicating with C2 servers resolved through daily-changing DDNS hostnames. The malware targets over 25 Spanish and Portuguese financial institutions and employs a custom encryption algorithm shared with the Casbaneiro family to evade detection.

2026-05-205 minCofensehigh

Threat actors are leveraging image steganography hosted on legitimate file-sharing platforms to deliver remote access trojans and information stealers. The attack chain utilizes a JavaScript dropper to extract a Base64-encoded DotNET loader from a seemingly benign image, which then injects the final payload into memory to evade endpoint detection.

2026-05-135 minElastic Security Labscritical

Suspected DPRK state actors compromised the highly popular Axios npm package by taking over a maintainer's account and publishing malicious versions that deployed a cross-platform RAT via a phantom dependency. Concurrently, a threat group named TeamPCP conducted a cascading supply chain attack affecting Trivy, LiteLLM, and Telnyx to harvest CI/CD credentials. These incidents underscore the critical need for automated package monitoring, rapid credential rotation, and delayed dependency updates.

2026-05-136 minSocketcritical

The official Telnyx Python SDK on PyPI was compromised by the threat actor TeamPCP, who published malicious versions (4.87.1 and 4.87.2) containing credential-harvesting malware. The malware executes upon module import, utilizing audio steganography to deliver OS-specific payloads: a fileless in-memory harvester for Linux/macOS and a persistent binary for Windows, with exfiltrated data secured via hybrid encryption.

2026-05-136 minAkamaicritical

Threat actor TeamPCP orchestrated a cascading supply chain attack by exploiting a misconfigured GitHub Actions workflow in Aqua Security's Trivy, harvesting credentials to compromise subsequent repositories including Checkmarx, LiteLLM, and Telnyx. The malicious packages deploy sophisticated, OS-specific remote access trojans (RATs) that utilize steganography, process hollowing, and ETW patching to evade detection while exfiltrating sensitive data.

2026-05-136 minTrend Microcritical

The TeamPCP threat actor compromised the Telnyx Python SDK on PyPI, injecting malicious code that executes upon import. The attack utilizes split-file injection and WAV audio steganography to deliver credential-stealing malware, establishing persistence on Windows systems and exfiltrating data via plaintext HTTP.

2026-05-136 minTrend Microcritical

The Russia-aligned APT group Pawn Storm has launched a sophisticated campaign deploying the PRISMEX malware suite against Ukrainian and NATO defense supply chains. The attack chain leverages two critical vulnerabilities, CVE-2026-21509 and CVE-2026-21513, to achieve zero-click execution, utilizing advanced steganography and COM hijacking to evade detection while communicating via legitimate cloud services.