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Research lab

Zscaler ThreatLabz

Zscaler's in-house threat research team, which tracks malware, ransomware, and phishing campaigns and publishes analysis on emerging cyber threats.

Known aliases

  • ThreatLabz
  • Zscaler ThreatLabz

Current stories

investOne report1 publisher

Fake Ledger pages near the top of Google search go after wallet recovery phrases

Fake Ledger sites in Google results are asking for recovery phrases while Ledger probes losses researchers put above $86 million. Nothing yet ties that sum to the pages, but the way the campaigns were built makes a top search result a working route into self-custody wallets.

Publishers:crypto.news

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+20
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence50
securityOne report1 publisher

TraderTraitor's trojanized Terraform provider runs its malware loader the moment Terraform loads it

Zscaler ThreatLabz says North Korea's TraderTraitor hid a malware loader inside a fake HashiCorp Terraform provider that runs the moment Terraform loads it. The crypto-theft group has pushed its operation into infrastructure-as-code, the tooling that provisions cloud environments.

Publishers:zscaler.com

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+5
Incentives35
Confidence60
securityOne report1 publisher

Ledger phishing ads ran under a verified Google advertiser and routed victims through Google Sites

Zscaler found Ledger phishing ads running under a verified Google advertiser, with Vercel redirect domains rotating every 15 to 20 minutes. The ad displayed google.com and the pages sat on Google and Vercel hosting, so domain reputation and the verified badge gave defenders little to catch.

Publishers:zscaler.com

Reality

Evidence55
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap0
Incentives35
Confidence55
securityOne report1 publisher

Zscaler counts a fifth fewer ransomware payments at a higher $432,000 average

Zscaler ThreatLabz logged 20.1% fewer ransomware payments in the year to March 2026, worth $327.8M in total, while the average payment rose 5.3% to $431,995. Leak-site listings fell just 3% over the same period, so the decline is in how many victims pay.

Publishers:zscaler.com

Reality

Evidence45
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+25
Incentives80
Confidence50
securityOne report1 publisher

2CLoader slips Vidar, Remus and XWorm past EDR with Hell's Gate indirect syscalls

Zscaler ThreatLabz says 2CLoader, found in August 2026, drops the Vidar and Remus stealers and XWorm RAT while routing six ntdll calls around EDR's inline hooks. Detection tuned only to those payloads misses the loader stage.

Publishers:zscaler.com

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+10
Incentives30
Confidence58
securityOne report1 publisher

APT36 hides Operation RapidRust command traffic inside private GitHub repositories

Zscaler ThreatLabz says the Pakistan-aligned group worked government and defense targets in India and Afghanistan with four undocumented tools, one of them a Rust backdoor that takes its orders from files in a private repo.

Publishers:scworld.com

Reality

Evidence40
Adoption25
Hype gap+18
Incentives65
Confidence45
securityOne report1 publisher

Vidar now hides its strings behind a bytecode VM whose opcodes change with every build

Zscaler tracked three changes to Vidar's string encryption between early May and early September 2026, ending in a per-build virtual machine and stream cipher that make a key pulled from one sample useless against the next.

Publishers:zscaler.com

Reality

Evidence70
Adoption45
Hype gap+10
Incentives55
Confidence60
securityOne report1 publisher

SloppyRAT parks its backup C2 channel on the Polygon blockchain

Zscaler's ThreatLabz found SloppyRAT in June 2026 at the end of a ClickFix chain whose live hosts are all ordinary domains, with a Polygon JSON-RPC lookup held in reserve for when those domains stop answering.

Publishers:zscaler.com

Reality

Evidence62
Adoption18
Hype gap+18
Incentives60
Confidence55
securityOne report1 publisher

Symantec finds attackers installing the signed Node.js runtime to run their payloads

The Threat Hunter Team says the technique has hit government departments, technology firms and hotels since February 2026. In one case, the operators moved to node.exe only after their Cobalt Strike beacons kept getting blocked.

Reality

Evidence57
Adoption58
Hype gap+16
Incentives66
Confidence56
securityOne report1 publisher

C2Looper puts its C2 inside GitHub, and domain-reputation stacks will not care

Zscaler says a Rust backdoor tied to ransomware activity moved its command channel onto GitHub. The first version beaconed once a second to a bare HTTP endpoint. The second one does not need a domain at all.

Publishers:zscaler.com

Reality

Evidence58
Adoption24
Hype gap+12
Incentives68
Confidence52