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Chinese state hackers target telcos with new malware toolkit
A China-linked advanced persistent threat actor tracked as UAT-9244 has been targeting telecommunication service providers in South America since 2024, compromising Windows, Linux, and network-edge devices.
According to Cisco Talos researchers, the adversary is closely associated with the FamousSparrow and Tropic Trooper hacker groups, but is tracked as a separate activity cluster.
This assessment has high confidence and is based on similar tooling, tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), and victimology observed in attacks attributed to the threat actors.
Spyware-grade Coruna iOS exploit kit now used in crypto theft attacks
A previously undocumented set of 23 iOS exploits named “Coruna” has been deployed by multiple threat actors in targeted espionage campaigns and financially motivated attacks.
The Coruna kit contains five full iOS exploit chains, the most sophisticated leveraging non-public techniques and mitigation bypasses, for iOS versions 13.0 through 17.2.1 (released in December 2023).
Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) researchers first observed activity related to the Coruna exploit kit in February 2025, in activity attributed to a surveillance vendor customer.
WordPress membership plugin bug exploited to create admin accounts
Hackers are exploiting a critical vulnerability in the User Registration & Membership plugin, which is installed on more than 60,000 WordPress sites.
Developed by WPEverest, the plugin provides membership and user registration management features, including custom forms, payment integrations with PayPal and Stripe, bank transfers, and analytics.
The security vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2026–1492 and received a critical severity rating of 9.8. Because the plugin accepts a user-supplied role during membership registration, hackers can create administrator accounts without authentication.
Ribosome organization during stress!
“Surprisingly, the two ribosomes are not held together by proteins, as is common in bacteria. Instead, the connection is made by a specific piece of ribosomal RNA called an expansion segment”, explains one of the lead authors.
Expansion segments are long, flexible RNA “tentacles” that protrude from ribosomes and have grown larger over the course of evolution. Although they are a prominent feature of animal ribosomes, their functions only just started to emerge. This study now shows that one particular expansion segment, called “31b”, is both necessary and sufficient to link ribosomes together during stress. At the molecular level, the expansion segment forms a precise RNA-RNA interaction — a so-called “kissing loop” — in which identical RNA loops bind each other through complementary sequences. Disrupting this interaction prevents disome formation, stunts cellular growth and makes cells more sensitive to stress. Science Mission sciencenewshighlights.
Ribosomes, the cell’s protein-making factories, consume large amounts of energy as they build the proteins that keep cells alive and functioning. When cells experience stress — such as lack of nutrients or sudden drops in temperature — they quickly switch into survival mode. New research now reveals an unexpected way cells manage this transition: By pairing up inactive ribosomes using a ribosomal RNA link. This RNA-based mechanism reveals a previously unknown role for ribosomal RNA in the cellular stress response.
Ribosomes are large molecular machines made of protein and RNA that build all proteins in the cell. Because protein production is extremely energy-intensive, cells rapidly reduce protein synthesis when stressed. It has long been known that bacterial cells pair their inactive ribosomes into so-called “hibernating disomes” however, such structures had not previously been identified in animal cells.
Using advanced imaging techniques, the team discovered that stressed animal cells — including neurons — assemble inactive ribosomes into tightly linked pairs, known as disomes. These ribosome pairs are not accidental collisions or artifacts, but a regulated and reversible response to stress. The new study was published in Science.
Alzheimer’s may start with inflammation in the skin, lungs or gut
Alzheimer’s disease has long been viewed as something that originates inside the brain, but an in-depth genomic analysis suggests it may initially triggered by inflammation in distant organs like the skin, lungs or gut – perhaps decades before a person’s memory starts to decline.
This radical reframing of the disease may explain why Alzheimer’s drugs have been disappointing to date, because they act too late in the disease process. Instead, we may need to redirect our efforts towards addressing inflammation in other parts of the body.
“As neuroscientists, we tend to be very brain-centric, but this study really shines a spotlight on the fact that the brain is not disconnected from the rest of the body, and when changes happen in the rest of the body, it affects how the brain functions,” says Donna Wilcock at Indiana University, who wasn’t involved in the research. “Even though Alzheimer’s is a brain disease, we need to think about the whole body when we think about how it begins.”
Image: Alamy
The Alzheimer’s field is being turned on its head as mounting evidence points to the disease beginning outside the brain many years before symptoms start. This may mean we have to totally rethink how we approach preventing and treating the condition.
By Alice Klein
In older adults, AML often follows clonal hematopoiesis mutations
However, the pathogenic contribution of PTPN11 mutations has been unclear.
John C. Byrd & team reveal PTPN11 mutations in AML can be early events in the clonal evolution of disease development and are associated with variably differentiated myeloid cells, based on human and murine studies:
The figure shows lower survival of the Npm1cA/Ptpn11E76K mouse model.
1Medical Scientist Training Program, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA.
2Department of Internal Medicine, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA.
3Division of Experimental Hematology and Cancer Biology, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA.