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APT36 Targets Indian Government with Golang-Based DeskRAT Malware Campaign

A Pakistan-nexus threat actor has been observed targeting Indian government entities as part of spear-phishing attacks designed to deliver a Golang-based malware known as DeskRAT.

The activity, observed in August and September 2025 by Sekoia, has been attributed to Transparent Tribe (aka APT36), a state-sponsored hacking group known to be active since at least 2013. It also builds upon a prior campaign disclosed by CYFIRMA in August 2025.

The attack chains involve sending phishing emails containing a ZIP file attachment, or in some cases, a link pointing to an archive hosted on legitimate cloud services like Google Drive. Present within the ZIP file is a malicious Desktop file embedding commands to display a decoy PDF (“CDS_Directive_Armed_Forces.pdf”) using Mozilla Firefox while simultaneously executing the main payload.

Hackers launch mass attacks exploiting outdated WordPress plugins

A widespread exploitation campaign is targeting WordPress websites with GutenKit and Hunk Companion plugins vulnerable to critical-severity, old security issues that can be used to achieve remote code execution (RCE).

WordPress security firm Wordfence says that it blocked 8.7 million attack attempts against its customers in just two days, October 8 and 9.

The campaign expoits three flaws, tracked as CVE-2024–9234, CVE-2024–9707, and CVE-2024–11972, all rated critical (CVSS 9.8).

Amazon: This week’s AWS outage caused by major DNS failure

Amazon says a major DNS failure was behind a massive AWS (Amazon Web Services) outage that took down many websites and online services on Monday.

As BleepinComputer reported earlier this week, this incident impacted a critical Northern Virginia data center in the US-EAST-1 region, affecting users worldwide, including the United States and Europe, for over 14 hours.

According to a post-mortem published on Thursday, a race condition caused a major DNS failure in Amazon DynamoDB’s infrastructure, specifically within its DNS management system that controls how user requests are routed to healthy servers, which led to the accidental deletion of all IP addresses for the database service’s regional endpoint.

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