“The group takes an interest in diplomatic communications, defense-related intelligence and the operations of critical governmental ministries,” the company said. “The timing and scope of the group’s operations frequently coincide with major global events and regional security affairs.”
This aspect is particularly revealing, not least because other Chinese hacking groups have also embraced a similar approach. For instance, a new adversary tracked by Recorded Future as RedNovember is assessed to have targeted entities in Taiwan and Panama in close proximity to “geopolitical and military events of key strategic interest to China.”
Phantom Taurus’ modus operandi also stands out due to the use of custom-developed tools and techniques rarely observed in the threat landscape. This includes a never-before-seen bespoke malware suite dubbed NET-STAR. Developed in. NET, the program is designed to target Internet Information Services (IIS) web servers.
Hackers are actively exploiting a critical vulnerability (CVE-2025–32463) in the sudo package that enables the execution of commands with root-level privileges on Linux operating systems.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added this vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, describing it as “an inclusion of functionality from untrusted control sphere.”
CISA has given federal agencies until October 20 to apply the official mitigations or discontinue the use of sudo.
A new phishing and malware distribution toolkit called MatrixPDF allows attackers to convert ordinary PDF files into interactive lures that bypass email security and redirect victims to credential theft or malware downloads.
The new tool was spotted by Varonis researchers, who told BleepingComputer that MatrixPDF was first spotted on a cybercrime forum. The seller also uses Telegram as an additional means of interacting with buyers.
The developer of MatrixPDF promotes the tool as a phishing simulation and blackteaming tool. However, Varonis researcher Daniel Kelley told BleepingComputer that it was first seen being offered on cybercrime forums.
AI scientists are emerging computational systems that serve as collaborative partners in discovery. These systems remain difficult to build because they are bespoke, tied to rigid workflows, and lack shared environments that unify tools, data, and analyses into a common ecosystem. In omics, unified ecosystems have transformed research by enabling interoperability, reuse, and community-driven development; AI scientists require comparable infrastructure. We present ToolUniverse, an ecosystem for building AI scientists from any language or reasoning model, whether open or closed. TOOLUNIVERSE standardizes how AI scientists identify and call tools, integrating more than 600 machine learning models, datasets, APIs, and scientific packages for data analysis, knowledge retrieval, and experimental design. It automatically refines tool interfaces for correct use by AI scientists, creates new tools from natural language descriptions, iteratively optimizes tool specifications, and composes tools into agentic workflows. In a case study of hypercholesterolemia, ToolUniverse was used to create an AI scientist to identify a potent analog of a drug with favorable predicted properties. The open-source ToolUniverse is available at https://aiscientist.tools.