Ravie LakshmananAug 12, 2026Vulnerability / Cyber Espionage
The North Korean threat actor known as Lazarus Group has been attributed to the zero-day exploitation of a newly patched security flaw impacting Microsoft Windows to deliver a never-before-seen backdoor targeting defense and aerospace companies across France, Germany, Brazil, and India.
The activity, per Check Point Research, is part of Operation Dream Job, a long-running cyber espionage and social engineering campaign orchestrated by Pyongyang-backed hackers to target professionals worldwide with fake-but-compelling job offers at firms like Lockheed Martin and Enveil to steal sensitive data and install malware by approaching them on platforms like LinkedIn, pretending to be recruiters in an attempt to build trust.
The attacks have been found to exploit CVE-2026-68820 (CVSS score: 7.0), a privilege escalation flaw affecting Windows Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock ("AFD.sys") that was patched by Microsoft as part of its Patch Tuesday updates for August 2026.
As observed in prior campaign waves, victims are lured through bogus recruiter messages and tricked into opening a malicious PDF or installing a trojanized PDF viewer, which is then used to install a new backdoor called Troy that grants remote access to the compromised machine. The end goal of these intrusions is to seize complete control of infected computers and bypass security controls.
