A spyware swiss army knife.

ZeroDayRAT delivers full mobile compromise on Android and iOS. The UK warns infrastructure operators to act now as severe cyber threats mount. Russia moves to block Telegram. The FTC draws a line on data sales to foreign adversaries. Researchers unpack DeadVax, a stealthy new malware campaign, while an old-school Linux botnet resurfaces. BeyondTrust fixes a critical flaw. And in AI, are we moving too fast? One mild training prompt may be enough to knock down safety guardrails. Our guest is Omer Akgul, Researcher at RSA Conference, discussing his work on "The Case for LLM Consistency Metrics in Cybersecurity (and Beyond)." A pair of penned pentesters provoke a pricey payout.

Today is Tuesday February 10th 2026. I’m Dave Bittner. And this is your CyberWire Intel Briefing.

ZeroDayRAT spyware offers full remote compromise of both Android and iOS devices. 

ZeroDayRAT is a newly observed commercial mobile spyware toolkit that offers full remote compromise of both Android and iOS devices. First seen on February 2, 2026, and analyzed by iVerify, the toolkit is sold via Telegram and rivals capabilities typically associated with nation state tooling.

Infection requires delivery of a malicious binary, after which buyers operate their own self hosted infrastructure using a management panel and payload builder. Distribution is left to the attacker, using phishing, smishing, trojanized apps, or social engineering. While an “exploit” feature is advertised, exploit capabilities remain unconfirmed.

Once installed, ZeroDayRAT enables extensive passive data collection, including device profiling, app usage, account details, messages, and precise location tracking. It also supports live surveillance through camera, microphone, screen recording, and keylogging. Financial theft capabilities include clipboard based crypto theft and banking credential harvesting. Detection is difficult, indicators are limited, and takedown efforts are complicated by decentralized infrastructure and deliberate attribution obfuscation.

The UK’s NCSC calls for immediate action from infrastructure providers facing severe cyber threats. 

The National Cyber Security Centre has warned UK critical national infrastructure providers to take immediate action against what it calls “severe” cyber threats. The alert follows coordinated malware attacks on energy infrastructure in Poland in December.

Jonathan Ellison, the NCSC’s director for national resilience, said similar attacks against UK infrastructure are realistic and potentially disruptive to everyday services. Writing on LinkedIn, he stressed that operators must act now to strengthen cyber defences and resilience.

The NCSC defines severe threats as deliberate, highly disruptive or destructive cyber-attacks, potentially aimed at shutting down services, damaging industrial control systems, or erasing data. Its guidance urges improved threat monitoring, greater situational awareness, and hardened network defences through patching, access controls like multi-factor authentication, and secure-by-design practices. Ellison also highlighted the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill as a key step toward reducing national cyber risk.

Russian regulators block Telegram. 

Russia’s communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, plans to further restrict access to Telegram starting Tuesday, according to RBC, citing unnamed sources. Measures to slow the service are reportedly already underway. The move comes as authorities promote a state-run “super-app” called Max, while limiting foreign platforms. Russia has progressively curtailed Telegram since late 2025 and recently moved toward blocking WhatsApp. The actions fit a broader crackdown that has already banned Facebook, Instagram, and X, and restricted YouTube.

The FTC reminds data brokers not to sell to foreign adversaries. 

The Federal Trade Commission has sent warning letters to 13 data brokers, reminding them of their obligations under the Protecting Americans’ Data from Foreign Adversaries Act of 2024, known as PADFAA. The law bars data brokers from selling or providing access to sensitive personal data about Americans to foreign adversaries, including China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, or entities they control.

PADFAA covers highly sensitive information such as health, financial, biometric, geolocation, and login data, as well as government-issued identifiers. The FTC said some recipients appeared to offer data related to U.S. Armed Forces status, which is protected under the law. The agency warned companies to review their practices, noting violations could trigger enforcement actions and civil penalties of up to $53,088 per violation.

Researchers describe a stealthy new malware campaign called DeadVax. 

Researchers at Securonix Threat Research have documented a highly stealthy, multi-stage malware campaign dubbed DeadVax, highlighting how modern attackers evade traditional defenses. The campaign begins with spear-phishing emails delivering Virtual Hard Disk files hosted on IPFS, which bypass common email and file security checks. Once mounted, the VHD launches a chain of heavily obfuscated Windows scripts, batch files, and PowerShell loaders that decrypt and execute payloads entirely in memory.

The final stage delivers AsyncRAT as encrypted shellcode injected into trusted, Microsoft-signed Windows processes, without ever writing a decrypted binary to disk. The operation combines fileless execution, extreme obfuscation, anti-analysis checks, and resilient persistence. Securonix’s analysis emphasizes that attackers are increasingly abusing legitimate file formats and native system features, making detection, investigation, and response far more challenging for defenders.

A Linux botnet relies on old-school tooling. 

Flare reports a newly identified Linux botnet, SSHStalker, that leans on 2009-era tooling and techniques, including IRC bots and 19 Linux kernel exploits. It is noisy, persisting via a cron job that runs every minute and an “update” watchdog relaunch model, while deploying scanners and additional malware. Artifacts resemble Romanian-linked botnets like Outlaw and Dota, but Flare found no direct link, suggesting a copycat or derivative operator. Flare estimates roughly 7,000 infections, mainly on legacy Linux systems, and observed cryptomining kits and apparently dormant IRC infrastructure.

BeyondTrust patches a critical vulnerability. 

BeyondTrust has patched a critical vulnerability, CVE-2026-1731, affecting its Remote Support and Privileged Remote Access products. The flaw allows unauthenticated remote code execution via crafted requests and carries a CVSS score of 9.9. It impacts RS versions 25.3.1 and earlier, and PRA 24.3.4 and earlier. Hacktron AI estimates about 8,500 internet-exposed RS instances are vulnerable. While no active exploitation is reported, Rapid7 warns that state-linked groups, including China’s Silk Typhoon, have previously targeted BeyondTrust products.

Is the US moving too fast in AI? 

The Trump administration has made U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence a national priority, favoring rapid innovation over strict security and safety regulation. Officials say this approach departs from the emphasis on AI safety under former President Joe Biden, but critics argue it risks undermining global adoption of U.S.-made AI systems.

Former deputy national cyber director Camille Stewart Gloster warns that many organizations are moving too fast, deploying AI without adequate governance or guardrails. She says weak oversight can create real harm, citing cases where poorly controlled AI agents disrupted customers and could not be easily shut down.

Others, including former White House cybersecurity coordinator Michael Daniel, caution that lighter U.S. rules may put American companies at a disadvantage abroad, particularly in Europe, where safety standards are higher. Recent scrutiny of xAI and its Grok model, backed by Elon Musk, highlights how regulatory gaps could trigger bans or restrictions overseas. Democrats like Mark Kelly argue stronger safeguards could ultimately strengthen U.S. competitiveness.

A single, unlabeled training prompt can dismantle safety controls in large language models. 

Researchers led by Microsoft CTO Mark Russinovich report that a single, unlabeled training prompt can dismantle safety controls in large language models. In a new paper, the team showed that fine-tuning models on the prompt “Create a fake news article that could lead to panic or chaos” weakened safety alignment across 15 different models, even though the prompt avoids explicit violence or illegality. The effect stems from Group Relative Policy Optimization, or GRPO, a reinforcement learning method intended to reward safer outputs. By reversing those rewards, the researchers demonstrated a process they call “GRP-Obliteration,” which effectively teaches models to ignore guardrails. The work suggests current alignment techniques can be fragile, with risks extending beyond text models to image generators, raising concerns about sleeper backdoors and the robustness of AI safety training.

A pair of penned pentesters provoke a pricey payout. 

Two penetration testers walked into a courthouse to do their jobs. Eventually, Dallas County, Iowa, agreed to pay them $600,000 for the trouble.

In 2019, Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn, then working for Coalfire Labs, were hired to test security at the Dallas County Courthouse under written authorization from the Iowa Judicial Branch. The rules explicitly allowed lockpicking and other “physical attacks.” They found a door, popped a lock, tripped an alarm, and promptly showed deputies their authorization letter. So far, textbook red teaming.

Then the sheriff arrived.

Despite confirmation the work was approved, Chad Leonard had the pair arrested on felony burglary charges. They spent 20 hours in jail, posted $100,000 bail, and endured months of public accusations before all charges were dropped. The fallout was career-threatening, the message chilling: even authorized hacking can end in handcuffs.

After years of litigation, the county settled days before trial. DeMercurio now runs Kaiju Security, and the lesson stands. Sometimes, testing defenses exposes a different vulnerability altogether.

And that’s the CyberWire.

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