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Backdoor in Notepad++

5 February 2026 at 13:00

Hackers associated with the Chinese government used a Trojaned version of Notepad++ to deliver malware to selected users.

Notepad++ said that officials with the unnamed provider hosting the update infrastructure consulted with incident responders and found that it remained compromised until September 2. Even then, the attackers maintained credentials to the internal services until December 2, a capability that allowed them to continue redirecting selected update traffic to malicious servers. The threat actor β€œspecifically targeted Notepad++ domain with the goal of exploiting insufficient update verification controls that existed in older versions of Notepad++.” Event logs indicate that the hackers tried to re-exploit one of the weaknesses after it was fixed but that the attempt failed.

Make sure you’re running at least version 8.9.1.

Telegram Hosting World’s Largest Darknet Market

5 January 2026 at 13:01

Wired is reporting on Chinese darknet markets on Telegram.

The ecosystem of marketplaces for Chinese-speaking crypto scammers hosted on the messaging service Telegram have now grown to be bigger than ever before, according to a new analysis from the crypto tracing firm Elliptic. Despite a brief drop after Telegram banned two of the biggest such markets in early 2025, the two current top markets, known as Tudou Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee, are together enabling close to $2 billion a month in money-laundering transactions, sales of scam tools like stolen data, fake investment websites, and AI deepfake tools, as well as other black market services as varied as pregnancy surrogacy and teen prostitution.

The crypto romance and investment scams regrettably known as β€œpig butchering”—carried out largely from compounds in Southeast Asia staffed with thousands of human trafficking victimsβ€”have grown to become the world’s most lucrative form of cybercrime. They pull in around $10 billion annually from US victims alone, according to the FBI. By selling money-laundering services and other scam-related offerings to those operations, markets like Tudou Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee have grown in parallel to an immense scale.

Autumn Dragon: China-nexus APT Group Targets South East Asia

By: Bart
19 November 2025 at 23:52

In this report, we describe how we tracked for several months a sustained espionage campaign against the government, media, and news sectors in several countries including Laos, Cambodia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia.


Since early 2025, China’s involvement in the Indo-Pacific has been more prolific, from escalating maritime tensions, to being peacebroker in Myanmar’s military junta and more recently, espionage activities on joint exercises the Philippines naval forces have been conducting together with the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

The attacker, which we believe is a China-nexus threat actor, showcases a love of DLL sideloading techniques in order to compromise their targets of interest. Governments and media are high-value targets because they shape policy, public opinion, and international alignment.

The report details the full attack chain of one particular compromise we discovered, and goes further into detail on victimology, other campaigns and finally lists indicators of compromise.

Β Link to the report: https://cyberarmor.tech/blog/autumn-dragon-china-nexus-apt-group-targets-south-east-asiaΒ 

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