Let’s talk about LANDFALL. That was an Android spyware campaign specifically targeted at Samsung devices. The discovery story is interesting, and possibly an important clue to understanding this particular bit of commercial malware. Earlier this year Apple’s iOS was patched for a flaw in the handling of DNG (Digital NeGative) images, and WhatsApp issued an advisory with a second iOS vulnerability, that together may have been used in attacks in the wild.

Researchers at Unit 42 went looking for real-world examples of this iOS threat campaign, and instead found DNG images that exploited a similar-yet-distinct vulnerability in a Samsung image handling library. These images had a zip file appended to the end of these malicious DNG files. The attack seems to be launched via WhatsApp messaging, just like the iOS attack. That .zip contains a pair of .so shared object files, that are loaded to manipulate the system’s SELinux protections and install the long term spyware payload.

The earliest known sample of this spyware dates to July of 2024, and Samsung patched the DNG handling vulnerability in April 2025. Apple patched the similar DNG problem in August of 2025. The timing and similarities do suggest that these two spyware campaigns may have been related. Unit 42 has a brief accounting of the known threat actors that could have been behind LANDFALL, and concludes that there just isn’t enough solid evidence to make a determination.

Not as Bad as it Looks

Watchtowr is back with a couple more of their unique vulnerability write-ups. The first is a real tease, as they found a way to leak a healthy chunk of memory from Citrix NetScaler machines. The catch is that the memory leak is a part of an error message, complaining that user authentication is disabled. This configuration is already not appropriate for deployment, and the memory leak wasn’t assigned a CVE.

There was a second issue in the NetScaler system, an open redirect in the login system. This is where an attacker can craft a malicious link that points to a trusted NetScaler machine, and if a user follows the link, the NetScaler will redirect the user to a location specified in the malicious link. It’s not a high severity vulnerability, but still got a CVE and a fix.

Worse than it Looks

And then there’s the other WatchTowr write-up, on Monsta FTP. Here, old vulnerabilities continue to work in versions released after the fix. The worst one here is an unauthenticated RCE (Remote Code Execution) that can be pulled off by asking the server nicely to connect to a remote SFTP server and download a file. In this case, the specified path for saving that file isn’t validated, and can be written anywhere to the Monsta FTP filesystem. Instant webshell. This time it did get fixed, within a couple weeks of WatchTowr sending in the vulnerability disclosure.

Imunify AV

Antivirus software Imunify just fixed an issue that threatened a few million servers. Imunify is an antivirus product that scans for malicious code. It sounds great. The problem is that it worked to deobfuscate PHP code, by calling an executeWrapper helper function. The short explanation is that this approach wasn’t as safe as had been hoped, and this deobfuscation step can be manipulated into running malicious code itself. Whoops.

Patchstack reported on this issue, and indicated that it had been publicly known since November 4th. Patches have since been issued, and a simple message has been published that a critical security vulnerability has been fixed. There is a PoC (Proof of Concept) for this vulnerability, that would be trivial to develop into a full webshell. The only challenge is actually getting the file on a server to be scanned. Either way, if your servers run Imunify, be sure to update!

IndonesianFoods

There’s another NPM worm on the loose, and this one has quietly been around for a couple years. This one is a bit different, and the “malicious” packages aren’t doing anything malicious, at least not by default.

[Paul McCarty] first spotted this campaign, and gave it the name “IndonesianFoods”, inspired by the unique names the fake packages were using. It appears that a handful of malicious accounts have spent time running a script that generates these fake packages with unique names, and uploads them to NPM. Downloading one of these packages doesn’t run the script on the victim machine, and in fact doesn’t seem to do anything malicious. So what’s the point?

Endor Labs picked up this thread and continued to pull. The point seems to be TEA theft. That’s the Blockchain tech that’s intended to reward Open Source project and contributions. It’s yet another abuse of NPM, which has had a rough year.

Rusty Sudo

Canonical made a bold decision with Ubuntu 25.04, shipping the uutils Rust rewrite of coreutils and sudo-rs. That decision was controversial, and has proven to be a cause of a few issues. Most recently, the sudo-rs utility has made news due to security vulnerabilities. We know the details on a few of the issues fixed in this update of those, CVE-2025-64170. It’s a quirk when a user types a password into the prompt, but never presses return. The prompt times out, and the typed characters are echoed back to the terminal.

Another issue doesn’t have a CVE assigned yet, but is available as a GitHub Security Advisory, and the patch is published. This one has the potential to be an authentication bypass. Sudo has the feature that tracks how long it has been since the user has last authenticated. The flaw was that this state was leaking between different users, allowing a login by one user to count as a login for other users, allowing that password skip.

Bits and Bytes

And finally, there’s a bit of good news, even if it is temporary. Google has taken action against one of the larger SMS scam providers. The group operates under the name Lighthouse, and seems to use normal cloud infrastructure to run the scams, simply flying under the radar for now. Google has combined legal action with technical, and with any luck, law enforcement can join in on the fun.