Nate Nelson

New York

Writer and Editor at Freelance

Contributing Writer at Dark Reading

Senior Producer at Malicious Life

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Articles

'Earth Lamia' Exploits Known SQL, RCE Bugs Across Asia

4 weeks ago | darkreading.com | Nate Nelson

A China-nexus threat actor behind the recent exploitation of SAP's NetWeaver software is expanding its campaign, taking advantage of unpatched, Internet-exposed servers deployed by organizations across South and Southeast Asia. The group Trend Micro calls "Earth Lamia" (after a type of beetle) has been around since 2023, when it was carrying out attacks against financial services companies in South Asia.
New Botnet Plants Persistent Backdoors in ASUS Routers

4 weeks ago | darkreading.com | Nate Nelson

A newly discovered botnet has backdoored thousands of ASUS-brand routers. It persists through reboots and updates and may have registered infected devices to a much larger operational relay box (ORB) network in the process. ORBs consist of a far-flung network of virtual private servers (VPS) and compromised smart devices and routers. Researchers from Greynoise noticed in mid-March that a botnet was worming its way across unpatched and otherwise weakly protected ASUS routers.
'Everest Group' Extorts Global Orgs via SAP's HR Tool

4 weeks ago | darkreading.com | Nate Nelson

Extortionist-cum-information broker "Everest Group" has pulled off a swath of attacks against large organizations in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and North America, and is now extorting victims over records stolen from their human resources departments. This May, the long-overlooked threat actor advertised nine new cyberattacks. Victims ranged from healthcare organizations to construction and facilities management companies.
Critical Bugs Left Unpatched in Versa's Concerto Tool

1 month ago | darkreading.com | Nate Nelson

A trio of serious, now public vulnerabilities are lying in wait in dozens of large, exposed telco networks. Versa Networks is a 12-year-old secure access service edge (SASE) provider, which has enjoyed a good deal of funding and positive press in recent years. As a vendor for major organizations, however, it has also attracted the attention of high-level threat actors.
SideWinder APT Caught Spying on India's Neighbor Govts.

1 month ago | darkreading.com | Nate Nelson

A new spear-phishing campaign has emerged against governments and militaries in South Asia, including in Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Researchers from Acronis have attributed the activity to SideWinder (aka Razor Tiger), an espionage group first discovered in 2018 but dates back to around 2012.
GitLab's AI Assistant Opened Devs to Code Theft

1 month ago | darkreading.com | Nate Nelson

An indirect prompt injection flaw in GitLab's artificial intelligence (AI) assistant could have allowed attackers to steal source code, direct victims to malicious websites, and more. "Duo" is a built-in tool that users of the open source (OSS) repository can use to analyze and suggest changes to their code, automate some aspects of writing, testing, and merging code, and other functions, equivalent to GitHub's Copilot.
AI enters the physical world

1 month ago | urgentcomm.com | Timo Kistner |Iain Morris |John Yellig |Nate Nelson

Intelligent systems promise to transform manufacturing. By Timo Kistner, NvidiaUntil recently, artificial intelligence has been largely confined to the digital world, operating in software-based systems focused on text and code generation, chatbots, data analysis and virtual assistants. Humans have rapidly embraced these digital AI tools, using them to improve performance and productivity in business and everyday life.
Turkish APT exploits chat app zero-day to spy on Iraqi Kurds

1 month ago | threatbeat.com | Nate Nelson

Skip to content NEW Security news and analysis brought to you by the McCrary Institute | READ MORE → By Nate Nelson • May 19, 2025 For a year now, a Turkish espionage group has been using a vulnerability in a messaging app to spy on Kurdish military forces operating in Iraq. The app is Output Messenger — a multiplatform enterprise messaging service with north of 50,000 downloads from the Google Play store.
International crime rings defraud US government out of billions

1 month ago | urgentcomm.com | Nate Nelson

Fraudsters worldwide apply for money from the US government using stolen and forged identities, making off with hundreds of billions of dollars annually. New estimates suggest that international criminal outfits are stealing hundreds of billions of dollars from the US government every year. One of the loudest goals of the second Trump administration has been to cut what it perceives as government waste — thousands of jobs or federal funding programs, for example.
Coinbase Extorted, Offers $20M for Info on Its Hackers

1 month ago | darkreading.com | Nate Nelson

Coinbase has set aside $20 million dollars for information that might lead to the arrest of its recent extortionists. On May 11, America's largest cryptocurrency exchange received an unsolicited email. It came from an unknown threat actor, who claimed to possess information about some of the company's internal systems, plus sensitive personally identifying information (PII) belonging to a subset of its customers.