Fake Ledger pages near the top of Google search go after wallet recovery phrases
Fake Ledger sites in Google results are asking for recovery phrases while Ledger probes losses researchers put above $86 million. Nothing yet ties that sum to the pages, but the way the campaigns were built makes a top search result a working route into self-custody wallets.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+20
- Incentives
- Not scored
- Confidence50
TraderTraitor's trojanized Terraform provider runs its malware loader the moment Terraform loads it
Zscaler ThreatLabz says North Korea's TraderTraitor hid a malware loader inside a fake HashiCorp Terraform provider that runs the moment Terraform loads it. The crypto-theft group has pushed its operation into infrastructure-as-code, the tooling that provisions cloud environments.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+5
- Incentives35
- Confidence60
Ledger phishing ads ran under a verified Google advertiser and routed victims through Google Sites
Zscaler found Ledger phishing ads running under a verified Google advertiser, with Vercel redirect domains rotating every 15 to 20 minutes. The ad displayed google.com and the pages sat on Google and Vercel hosting, so domain reputation and the verified badge gave defenders little to catch.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap0
- Incentives35
- Confidence55
Zscaler counts a fifth fewer ransomware payments at a higher $432,000 average
Zscaler ThreatLabz logged 20.1% fewer ransomware payments in the year to March 2026, worth $327.8M in total, while the average payment rose 5.3% to $431,995. Leak-site listings fell just 3% over the same period, so the decline is in how many victims pay.
Reality
- Evidence45
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+25
- Incentives80
- Confidence50
2CLoader slips Vidar, Remus and XWorm past EDR with Hell's Gate indirect syscalls
Zscaler ThreatLabz says 2CLoader, found in August 2026, drops the Vidar and Remus stealers and XWorm RAT while routing six ntdll calls around EDR's inline hooks. Detection tuned only to those payloads misses the loader stage.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+10
- Incentives30
- Confidence58
Zscaler ThreatLabz traced August 2026 attacks on Indian and Afghan government and defense targets to a new Rust backdoor that takes orders from private GitHub repositories. Its encryption key is a hash of a token sitting in cleartext in the sample.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+5
- Incentives40
- Confidence64
APT36 hides Operation RapidRust command traffic inside private GitHub repositories
Zscaler ThreatLabz says the Pakistan-aligned group worked government and defense targets in India and Afghanistan with four undocumented tools, one of them a Rust backdoor that takes its orders from files in a private repo.
Reality
- Evidence40
- Adoption25
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives65
- Confidence45
Vidar now hides its strings behind a bytecode VM whose opcodes change with every build
Zscaler tracked three changes to Vidar's string encryption between early May and early September 2026, ending in a per-build virtual machine and stream cipher that make a key pulled from one sample useless against the next.
Reality
- Evidence70
- Adoption45
- Hype gap+10
- Incentives55
- Confidence60
SloppyRAT parks its backup C2 channel on the Polygon blockchain
Zscaler's ThreatLabz found SloppyRAT in June 2026 at the end of a ClickFix chain whose live hosts are all ordinary domains, with a Polygon JSON-RPC lookup held in reserve for when those domains stop answering.
Reality
- Evidence62
- Adoption18
- Hype gap+18
- Incentives60
- Confidence55
Symantec finds attackers installing the signed Node.js runtime to run their payloads
The Threat Hunter Team says the technique has hit government departments, technology firms and hotels since February 2026. In one case, the operators moved to node.exe only after their Cobalt Strike beacons kept getting blocked.
Reality
- Evidence57
- Adoption58
- Hype gap+16
- Incentives66
- Confidence56
C2Looper puts its C2 inside GitHub, and domain-reputation stacks will not care
Zscaler says a Rust backdoor tied to ransomware activity moved its command channel onto GitHub. The first version beaconed once a second to a bare HTTP endpoint. The second one does not need a domain at all.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption24
- Hype gap+12
- Incentives68
- Confidence52