ThreatsDay Bulletin: $290M DeFi Hack, macOS LotL Abuse, ProxySmart SIM Farms +25 New Stories

You scroll past one incident and see another that feels familiar, like it should have been fixed years ago, but it still works with small changes. Same bugs. Same mistakes.

The supply chain is messy. Packages you did not check are stealing data, adding backdoors, and spreading. Attacking the systems behind apps is easier than breaking the apps themselves. The exploits are simple but still work, giving attackers easy access.

AI tools are also part of the problem now. They trust bad input and take real actions, which makes the damage bigger. Then there are quieter issues. Apps take data they should not. Devices behave in strange ways. Attackers keep testing what they can get away with. No noise. Just ongoing damage.

Here is the list for this week’s ThreatsDay Bulletin.

State-backed crypto heist Inter-blockchain communication protocol LayerZero has revealed that North Korean threat actors tracked TraderTraitor may have been behind the recent hack of decentralized finance (DeFi) project KelpDAO, resulting in the theft of $290 million. "The attack was specifically engineered to manipulate or poison downstream RPC infrastructure by compromising a quorum of the RPCs the LayerZero Labs DVN relied upon to verify transactions," LayerZero said. KelpDAO, in a post on X, said, "Two RPC nodes hosted by LayerZero were compromised. A simultaneous DDoS attack was launched against the third RPC node. This was an attack on LayerZero's infrastructure. Kelp's own systems were not involved in building or operating that infrastructure." Meanwhile, the Arbitrum Security Council has temporarily frozen the 30,766 ETH being held in the address on Arbitrum One that is connected to the KelpDAO exploit. It's worth noting that TraderTraiter was attributed to the mega Bybit hack in early 2025 that led to the theft of $1.5 billion in digital assets. Recently, Lazarus Group was also linked to the $285 million theft from the Drift Protocol.

Active RCE exploits Separately, VulnCheck has warned of attacks attempting to exploit two flaws in MajorDoMo, a smart home automation platform. While CVE-2026-27175 is a critical command injection vulnerability that started seeing exploitation on April 13, CVE-2026-27174 allows unauthenticated remote code execution via the PHP console in the admin panel and was first detected on April 18. "CVE-2026-27175 was exploited to drop a PHP webshell that delivers persistent backdoor access," VulnCheck said. "CVE-2026-27174 saw exploitation that ended in a Metasploit php/meterpreter/reverse_tcp staged payload." Other vulnerabilities that have witnessed exploitation efforts include CVE-2025-22952, an SSRF in Elestio Memos, and CVE-2024-57046, an authentication bypass in NETGEAR DGN2200 routers.

Supply chain malware surge A number of malicious packages have been discovered in the npm registry: ixpresso-core, forge-jsx, @genoma-ui/components, @needl-ai/common, rrweb-v1, cjs-biginteger, sjs-biginteger, bjs-biginteger, @fairwords/websocket, @fairwords/loopback-connector-es, @fairwords/encryption, js-logger-pack, and @kindo/selfbot. These packages come with features to steal sensitive data from compromised hosts, perform system reconnaissance, andimplant an SSH backdoor by injecting the attacker's public key into ~/.ssh/authorized_keys, deliver an information stealer, and spread the XWorm remote access trojan (RAT). The packages published under the "@fairwords" scope have also been found to self-propagate to all npm packages using the victim's token and attempt cross-ecosystem propagation to PyPI via .pth file injection. New versions of js-logger-pack have since been found to leverage the Hugging Face repository to poll for updates and use it as a data-theft destination. Also detected was the compromise of @velora-dex/sdk (version 9.4.1) to decode and execute a Base64 payload that fetches a shell script from a remote server that, in turn, downloads and persists a Go-based remote access trojan called minirat on macOS systems. Another legitimate package to be compromised was mgc (versions 1.2.1 through 1.2.4), which was injected with a dropper that detects the operating system and fetches a platform-specific RAT from a GitHub Gist to exfiltrate valuable data.

AI prompt injection surge Forcepoint has detected 10 new indirect prompt injection (IPI) payloads targeting artificial intelligence (AI) agents with malicious instructions designed to achieve financial fraud, data destruction, API key theft, and AI denial-of-service attacks. "Regardless of the specific payload technique or attacker intent, every case follows the same fundamental sequence: the attacker poisons web content, hides the payload from human view, waits for an AI agent to ingest the page, exploits the LLM's inability to distinguish trusted instructions from attacker-controlled content, and triggers a real-world action with a covert exfiltration return channel back to the attacker," the company said.

Covert browser data access The Claude desktop app has been found granting itself permission to access web browser data, even if some browsers haven't even been installed on a user's computer, web privacy expert Alexander Hanff said. The app has been spotted placing configuration files in preset locations for Chromium-based browsers like Brave, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Vivaldi. The Native Messaging manifest files pre-authorize Claude to interact with the browser even before the user installs it. The issue has been described as a case of dark pattern that violates privacy laws in the E.U.

Hardware display protection The U.K. National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has unveiled a new technology called SilentGlass that's designed to protect video connections from cyber attacks. "SilentGlass, a plug-and-play device, actively blocks anything unexpected or malicious between HDMI and Display Port connections and screens," NCSC said. "Already successfully deployed on Government estates, SilentGlass is now available for anyone to buy and use. It has been approved for use in the most high-threat environments."

Passkeys replace passwords In a related development, the NCSC also endorsed passkeys as the default authentication standard and the "first choice of login" for access to all digital services. "Passkeys are a newer method for logging into online accounts, which do much of the heavy lifting for users, only requiring user approval rather than needing to input a password," NCSC said. "This makes passkeys quicker and easier to use and harder for cyber attackers to compromise." It also said the majority of cyber harms to individuals begin with criminals stealing or compromising login details, which makes passkey adoption a "huge leap" in boosting resilience to phishing attacks. More than 50% of active Google services users in the U.K. are said to be already using passkeys.

Backdoor sabotage claims Reports from Iranian media have claimed that hardware made by Cisco, Juniper, Fortinet, and MikroTik either rebooted or disconnected during recent attacks on Iran, despite the country being cut off from the global internet. "The most striking and suspicious aspect of this incident is its precise timing and the lack of access to the international internet at that moment," Iranian news website Entekhab said. "This disruption occurred at a time when international gateways were effectively blocked or inaccessible; therefore, attributing this chain collapse to 'a simple cyber attack from beyond the borders' is not only unconvincing but also reveals the traces of deep-seated sabotage embedded within the equipment." The report hypothesizes the presence of hidden firmware backdoors or rogue implants within compromised devices, creating a dormant botnet that's activated when a certain event occurs without the need for internet access. The other possibility is a supply chain compromise.