News linked to both this project and an event.
According to Elastic Security Labs, threat actors impersonated venture capital firms and lured targets into opening malicious Obsidian note vaults via LinkedIn and Telegram. This attack leveraged Obsidian’s Shell Commands plugin to execute malicious payloads without exploiting any vulnerabilities when victims opened the note vaults. The PHANTOMPULSE malware discovered in this campaign is a previously undocumented Windows Remote Access Trojan (RAT) that uses Ethereum transaction data to achieve blockchain-based C2 communication. The macOS payload employs an obfuscated AppleScript dropper and uses a Telegram channel as a fallback C2. Elastic Defend detected and blocked the PHANTOMPULSE execution before it could run.
Zerion disclosed that some of its corporate hot wallets were recently targeted by an AI-driven social engineering attack linked to North Korean hackers, resulting in losses of approximately $100,000. Zerion stated that user funds, applications, and infrastructure remain unaffected and proactively disabled its web application to mitigate risk. This incident marks the second such attack this month, following the $280 million breach of Drift Protocol, underscoring how North Korean hackers are leveraging AI to refine social engineering tactics—primarily targeting employees and developers at crypto firms. The Security Alliance (SEAL) tracked the hacker group UNC1069, which conducts low-pressure, multi-week social engineering campaigns across platforms including Telegram, LinkedIn, and Slack, using AI tools to edit images and videos to enhance attack efficiency.