A recent security analysis has uncovered critical vulnerabilities in the infotainment systems of KIA vehicles, raising alarm across the automotive cybersecurity community.
These flaws allow attackers to inject and execute malicious code through specially crafted PNG image files, potentially compromising vehicle safety and user privacy.
Security researchers, during an in-depth examination of KIA’s head unit and its underlying Real-Time Operating System (RTOS), found that the infotainment firmware failed to properly validate certain image file formats—most notably PNG files.
By exploiting this weakness, attackers could embed executable payloads inside images that, when processed by the infotainment system, triggered remote code execution.
he attack leverages a buffer overflow vulnerability in the image parsing library used by KIA’s infotainment system.
When a malicious PNG file is loaded—either via USB, Bluetooth, or over-the-air update—the system’s parser mishandles the image data, allowing the attacker’s code to overwrite critical memory regions.
Attack Chain
A deep investigation by DeepSpecter.com uncovered a multi-year data exposure involving Uffizio, the software provider behind a widely used white-label GPS fleet management platform. Despite claiming GDPR compliance, Uffizio’s software — and its deployment by hundreds of global resellers — leaked sensitive fleet data across at least 12 countries for over five years, continuing even after a public CVE disclosure and an internal GDPR audit.
The leaked data included SIM identifiers, license plates, company names, tracker IMEIs, and real-time activity — effectively mapping the movement of thousands of vehicles, including those operated by police, ambulances, municipal fleets, and even nuclear energy providers. The fact that Uffizio was quick to patch its software while exposure continued elsewhere underscores a broader issue: the delivery chain was broken, and we’ll expose that in a dedicated follow-up.
This case makes one thing clear — compliance is not enough. Businesses responsible for real-world assets and lives cannot afford to treat security as a checkbox. When fleet systems tie directly to public safety and critical infrastruc data-leakture, the absence of active monitoring turns regulatory compliance into a false sense of protection. The risk is real, the impact is human, and silence is no longer an option.
NSFOCUS Fuying Lab's Global Threat Hunting System has discovered a new botnet family called "hpingbot" that has been quickly expanding.
This cross-platform botnet, built from scratch using the Go programming language, targets both Windows and Linux/IoT environments and supports multiple processor architectures including amd64, mips, arm, and 80386.
Unlike derivatives of well-known botnets like Mirai or Gafgyt, hpingbot showcases remarkable innovation by leveraging unconventional resources for stealth and efficiency, such as using the online text storage platform Pastebin for payload distribution and the network testing tool hping3 to execute Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
According to the Report, this approach not only enhances its ability to evade detection but also significantly reduces the costs associated with development and operation, making hpingbot a formidable and evolving threat in the digital realm.
Hpingbot’s operational strategy is notably distinct, as it employs Pastebin to host and dynamically update malicious payloads, allowing attackers to adjust their load distribution frequently.
DDoS Attacks
Attack method
Monitoring data from Fuying Lab indicates that Pastebin links embedded in the botnet have shifted content multiple times since mid-June 2025, from hosting IP addresses to providing scripts for downloading additional components.
This flexibility is paired with the botnet’s reliance on hping3, a versatile command-line tool typically used for network diagnostics, to launch a variety of DDoS attacks such as SYN, UDP, and mixed-mode floods.
Interestingly, while the Windows version of hpingbot cannot utilize hping3 for DDoS attacks due to environmental limitations, its persistent activity underscores a broader focus on downloading and executing arbitrary payloads, hinting at intentions beyond mere network disruption.
Arctic Wolf has observed a search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning and malvertising campaign promoting malicious websites hosting trojanized versions of legitimate IT tools such as PuTTY and WinSCP.
Malware analyst discovered a new version of the Atomic macOS info-stealer (also known as 'AMOS') that comes with a backdoor, to attackers persistent access to compromised systems.
Malware analyst discovered a new version of the Atomic macOS info-stealer (also known as 'AMOS') that comes with a backdoor, to attackers persistent access to compromised systems.
The new component allows executing arbitrary remote commands, it survives reboots, and permits maintaining control over infected hosts indefinitely.
MacPaw's cybersecurity division Moonlock analyzed the backdoor in Atomic malware after a tip from independent researcher g0njxa, a close observer of infostealer activity.
"AMOS malware campaigns have already reached over 120 countries, with the United States, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and Canada among the most affected," the researchers say.
"The backdoored version of Atomic macOS Stealer now has the potential to gain full access to thousands of Mac devices worldwide."
www.nsb.gov.tw
In recent years, the international community has shown growing concerns over cybersecurity issues deriving from China-developed mobile applications (apps). Governments and independent research institutions worldwide have already issued warnings concerning data breaches in users’ communication security. To prevent China from illegally acquiring personal data of Taiwan’s nationals, National Security Bureau (NSB) has reviewed cybersecurity reports from countries around the world and organized relevant information, as per the National Intelligence Work Act. Subsequently, the NSB informed and coordinated with the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau (MJIB) and the Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB) under the National Police Agency to conduct random inspection on several China-developed mobile apps. The results indicate the existence of security issues, including excessive data collection and privacy infringement. The public is advised to exercise caution when choosing mobile apps.
The 5 China-developed apps selected for inspection, consisting of rednote, Weibo, TikTok, WeChat, and Baidu Cloud, are widely used by Taiwanese nationals. The MJIB and CIB adopted the Basic Information Security Testing Standard for Mobile Applications v4.0 announced by the Ministry of Digital Affairs, and evaluated the apps against 15 indicators under 5 categories of violation, consisting of personal data collection, excessive permission usage, data transmission and sharing, system information extraction, and biometric data access.
All 5 apps have shown serious violations across multiple inspection indicators. Notably, the rednote fails to meet all 15 inspection standards. Weibo and TikTok violate 13 indicators, separately, as well as 10 for WeChat and 9 for Baidu Cloud. These findings suggest that the said China-made apps present cybersecurity risks far beyond the reasonable expectations for data-collection requirement taken by ordinary apps.
All 5 China-made apps are found to have security issues of excessively collecting personal data and abusing system permissions. The violations include unauthorized access to facial recognition data, screenshots, clipboard contents, contact lists, and location information. As to the category of system information extraction, all apps were found to collect data such as application lists and device parameters. Furthermore, as far as biometric data are concerned, users’ facial features may be deliberately harvested and stored by those apps.
With regard to data transmission and sharing, the said 5 apps were found to send packets back to servers located in China. This type of transmission has raised serious concerns over the potential misuse of personal data by third parties. Under China’s Cybersecurity Law and National Intelligence Law, Chinese enterprises are obligated to turn over user data to competent authorities concerning national security, public security, and intelligence. Such a practice would pose a significant security breach to the privacy of Taiwanese users, which could lead to data collection by specific Chinese agencies.
A wide range of countries, such as the US, Canada, the UK, and India, have already publicly issued warnings against or bans on specific China-developed apps. The European Union has also launched investigations under the General Data Protection Regulation framework into suspected data theft involving certain China-made apps. Substantial amount of fines are imposed in those cases. In response to the cybersecurity threats, the Taiwanese government has prohibited the use of Chinese-brand products regarding computer and communications technology within official institutions. Both software and hardware are included.
The NSB coordinates with the MJIB and CIB to test the 5 inspected China-developed apps, and confirms that widespread cybersecurity vulnerabilities indeed exist. The NSB strongly advises the public to remain vigilant regarding mobile device security and avoid downloading China-made apps that pose cybersecurity risks, so as to protect personal data privacy and corporate business secrets.
techradar.com - 4 july
Almost a year later, the company comes forward with more details
The organization confirmed the news after an extensive investigation that took almost a year, noting in a data breach notification letter sent earlier to affected individuals the attack most likely took place on October 4 2024, when cybercriminals accessed its network and stole sensitive information on current and former employees, current and former support service contractors, and their dependents.
We don’t know exactly how many people were affected by this attack, or what the nature of the data is. IdeaLab just said the attackers took people’s names, in combination with “variable data”.
Categories: U.S. Federal Law, Cybersecurity, Enforcement
In a surprising development in the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (“SEC’s”) ongoing securities fraud case against SolarWinds Corp. (“SolarWinds”) and its former chief information security officer (“CISO”), Timothy Brown, all three parties have petitioned the judge for a stay pending final settlement. Until the SEC’s four commissioners can vote to approve the settlement, the parties have requested the stay until at least September 12, 2025.
As we previously reported, in October 2023, the SEC sued software developer SolarWinds and its former CISO, alleging that SolarWinds misled investors about a series of heavily publicized cyberattacks that targeted the company, culminating in the December 2020 Sunburst malware attack. In addition to alleging securities fraud and violations of SEC reporting provisions, the SEC also alleged that SolarWinds violated Sarbanes-Oxley internal control provisions.
In July 2024, U.S. District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer granted SolarWinds’ and the company’s former CISO’s motions to dismiss on most claims. A single set of fraud claims survived concerning alleged misstatements and omissions in a “Security Statement” that was published on SolarWinds’ website. The Security Statement described the company’s various cybersecurity practices, which the SEC alleges painted an incomplete and misleading picture. As recently as June 2025, the SEC indicated it was ready to try the case and filed a motion in opposition to the defendants’ motion to dismiss the remaining claim.
On July 2, 2025, all three parties—the SEC, SolarWinds and the company’s former CISO—sent a joint letter to the judge indicating they had reached an agreement in principle to settle the case. Any settlement is subject to approval of the four SEC commissioners. As noted above, the parties’ joint letter requested a stay until at least September 12, 2025 to give the SEC commissioners time to review the matter. Two of the sitting commissioners have been critical of the SEC’s case.
It is difficult to speculate what the final terms of settlement may be. Unrelated to this case, with the change in presidential administration, the SEC has dismissed numerous enforcement cases targeting the cryptocurrency industry on the grounds that the cases were imprudently brought. It is possible this philosophy has now been extended to the SolarWinds case, and the SEC may seek to drop the case entirely. It also is possible that this movement by the SEC staff is more in line with other settled cases, and could simply entail reduced charges and remedies acceptable to all parties. The fact that the SEC enforcement staff still needs approval by the SEC commissioners may imply that this latter scenario is more likely. Like any plaintiff, the SEC does from time to time settle enforcement cases after they have entered litigation for any number of reasons.
An ongoing outage at IT giant Ingram Micro is caused by a SafePay ransomware attack that led to the shutdown of internal systems, BleepingComputer has learned.
Update 7/6/25: Added Ingram Micro's confirmation it suffered a ransomware attack below. Also updated ransom note with clearer version.
An ongoing outage at IT giant Ingram Micro is caused by a SafePay ransomware attack that led to the shutdown of internal systems, BleepingComputer has learned.
Ingram Micro is one of the world's largest business-to-business technology distributors and service providers, offering a range of solutions including hardware, software, cloud services, logistics, and training to resellers and managed service providers worldwide.
Since Thursday, Ingram Micro's website and online ordering systems have been down, with the company not disclosing the cause of the issues.
BleepingComputer has now learned that the outages are caused by a cyberattack that occurred early Thursday morning, with employees suddenly finding ransom notes created on their devices.
The ransom note, seen by BleepingComputer, is associated with the SafePay ransomware operation, which has become one of the more active operations in 2025. It is unclear if devices were actually encrypted in the attack.
It should be noted that while the ransom note claims to have stolen a wide variety of information, this is generic language used in all SafePay ransom notes and may not be true for the Ingram Micro attack.
Don’t trust mystery digits popping up in your search bar
Scammers are hijacking the search results of people needing 24/7 support from Apple, Bank of America, Facebook, HP, Microsoft, Netflix, and PayPal in an attempt to trick victims into handing over personal or financial info, according to Malwarebytes senior director of research Jérôme Segura.
It's a variation of SEO or search poisoning, in which the attackers manipulate the search engine algorithms to promote what is usually a malicious website masquerading as the real deal. In this new scam, the fraudster pays for a sponsored ad on Google and crafts a malicious URL that embeds a fake phone number into the real site's legitimate search functionality.
Because the ad resolves to the authentic Netflix domain, reputation-based browser filters, such as Chrome's Safe Browsing, won't flag it as malicious.
When someone searches "24/7 Netflix support," for example, the digital thieves' ad pops up as one of the top results, and when the unwitting victim clicks on the URL, it takes them to the help page of the brand's website.
The page looks real — because it is — but displays a phone number pre-populated in the search bar on that page. This purports to be the legitimate help-desk phone number, but in reality it's a fake, controlled by the attackers.
As the anti-malware security firm explains:
This is able to happen because Netflix's search functionality blindly reflects whatever users put in the search query parameter without proper sanitization or validation. This creates a reflected input vulnerability that scammers can exploit.
Security experts are dismissing a pro-Iranian hacktivist group's claim to have breached Indian nuclear secrets in reprisal for the country's support of Israel.
The LulzSec Black group last week claimed to have hacked "the company responsible for Indian nuclear reactors" and to have stolen 80 databases, of which it was now selling 17 databases containing 5.2 gigabytes of data. The group claimed the information detailed the precise location of India's nuclear reactors, numerous chemical laboratories, employee personally identifiable information, industrial and engineering information, precise details of guard shifts and "other sensitive data related to infrastructure."
LulzSec Black, named after the notorious hacktivist collective that committed a string of high-profile hits in 2011, claims to be a group of "Palestinian hackers." Previous attacks tied to the group include disruptions targeting Israel, as well as countries that support Israel, including France and Cyprus.
Threat intelligence firm Resecurity said the group's nuclear claims vary from being dramatically overstated to outright lies.
"This activity is related to the 'pseudo-hacktivist' activities by Iran" designed to provoke fear, uncertainty and doubt, Resecurity told Information Security Media Group. "Many of their statements are overstatements, having no connection to reality. For example, they clearly do not have '80 databases' or even 5.2 GB of data."
LulzSec Black's claims arrive amidst U.S. government alerts of the "heightened threat environment" facing critical infrastructure networks and operational technology environments, following Israel launching missile strikes against Iran on June 13 (see: Infrastructure Operators Leaving Control Systems Exposed).
While the resulting regional war appears to now be moderated by a fragile ceasefire, many governments are still bracing for reprisals (see: Israel-Iran Ceasefire Holding Despite Fears of Cyberattacks).
What LulzSec Black may actually possess is identity and contact information for nuclear specialists, likely stolen from third-party HR firms and recruitment websites such as the CATS Software applicant tracking system and recruitment software, Resecurity said. This can be seen in the long list of various job titles - "security auditor, heavy water unit," "nuclear engineer, analysis lab, tritium gas," and "radiation officer, fuel fabrication, uranium dioxide" - in a sample of dumped data.
In that data, tags such as "Top Secret," appear, which Resecurity said likely either reflect clearances held by job candidates, or were added by the hackers themselves "so it will look like it is from some nuclear energy facility."
Building automation giant Johnson Controls is notifying individuals whose data was stolen in a massive ransomware attack that impacted the company's operations worldwide in September 2023.
Johnson Controls is a multinational conglomerate that develops and manufactures industrial control systems, security equipment, HVAC systems, and fire safety equipment for buildings. The company employs over 100,000 people through its corporate operations and subsidiaries across 150 countries, reporting sales of $27.4 billion in 2024.
As BleepingComputer first reported, Johnson Controls was hit by a ransomware attack in September 2023, following a breach of the company's Asian offices in February 2023 and subsequent lateral movement through its network.
"Based on our investigation, we determined that an unauthorized actor accessed certain Johnson Controls systems from February 1, 2023 to September 30, 2023 and took information from those systems," the company says in data breach notification letters filed with California's Attorney General, redacted to conceal what information was stolen in the attack.
"After becoming aware of the incident, we terminated the unauthorized actor's access to the affected systems. In addition, we engaged third-party cybersecurity specialists to further investigate and resolve the incident. We also notified law enforcement and publicly disclosed the incident in filings on September 27, 2023; November 13, 2023; and December 14, 2023."
A criminal has been sentenced at Inner London Crown Court to over a year in prison for operating a SMS Blaster to conduct a mass smishing campaign against victims with the intent to harvest their personal details to be used in fraud.
The sentencing follows an investigation and arrest by the Dedicated Card and Payment Crime Unit (DCPCU), a specialist banking industry sponsored police unit.
The conviction was achieved thanks to the officers from the DCPCU working with mobile network operators including BT, Virgin Media O2, VodafoneThree and Sky as well as the National Cyber Security Centre and Ofcom.
Between 22 and 27 March 2025 Ruichen Xiong, a student from China had installed an SMS Blaster in his vehicle to commit smishing fraud, targeting tens of thousands of potential victims.
Xiong drove around the Greater London area in a Black Honda CR-V. This vehicle was used to hold and transport an SMS Blaster around in the boot.
An SMS Blaster allows offenders to send fraudulent text messages to phones within the vicinity of the equipment and acts as an illegitimate phone mast to send messages. The blaster will draw mobile devices away from legitimate networks by appearing to have a stronger signal. By doing so, the criminal is then able to send a text message to the victim's phone.
The equipment was programmed to send out SMS messages to victims within a nearby radius of the blaster, designed to look like trustworthy messages from genuine organisations, such as government bodies, where the victim was encouraged to click a link. The link would subsequently take them to a malicious site that was designed to harvest their personal details.
Be careful if you want to play Call of Duty: WW2 through Game Pass on PC – some users have been reporting falling victim to RCE (Remote Command Execution) hacks. The earliest reports of this surfaced just a few hours ago, with players taking to social media to share some concerning stories, while others stressed this has been a problem ‘for years’ in COD WW2.
therecord.media - Cybercriminals are extorting the German humanitarian aid group Welthungerhilfe (WHH) for 20 bitcoin. The charity said it will not pay.
Deutsche Welthungerhilfe (WHH), the German charity that aims to develop sustainable food supplies in some of the world’s most impoverished countries, has been attacked by a ransomware gang.
The charity, whose name literally translates as World Hunger Help, reached 16.4 million people in 2023. It is currently providing emergency aid to people in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and other countries and regions where there is an urgent need for food, water, medicine and basic necessities.
A spokesperson confirmed to Recorded Future News that WHH had been targeted by a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) group which recently listed the charity on its darknet leak site.
The cybercriminals are attempting to sell data stolen from the charity for 20 bitcoin, equivalent to around $2.1 million, although it is not clear whether WHH’s computer networks have also been encrypted. The charity said it would not be making an extortion payment to the criminals behind the attack.
“The affected systems were shut down immediately and external IT experts who specialise in such cases were called in. We have also further strengthened the security of our systems with additional technical protective measures,” said a WHH spokesperson.
“We have informed the relevant data protection authority, consulted our data protection officer and involved the police authorities. We continue to liaise closely with the authorities,” they added.
The charity stressed it was “continuing our work in our project countries unchanged. We continue to stand by the side of the people who need our support. In view of the many humanitarian crises worldwide, our work is more important than ever.”
The RaaS group that is extorting WHH was previously responsible for attacks on multiple hospitals — including The Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago and hospitals run by Prospect Medical Holdings — and last year also attempted to extort the disability nonprofit Easterseals.
The spyware operation's exposed customer email addresses and passwords were shared with data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned.
A security vulnerability in a stealthy Android spyware operation called Catwatchful has exposed thousands of its customers, including its administrator.
The bug, which was discovered by security researcher Eric Daigle, spilled the spyware app’s full database of email addresses and plaintext passwords that Catwatchful customers use to access the data stolen from the phones of their victims.
Catwatchful is spyware masquerading as a child monitoring app that claims to be “invisible and cannot be detected,” all the while uploading the victim’s phone’s private contents to a dashboard viewable by the person who planted the app. The stolen data includes the victims’ photos, messages, and real-time location data. The app can also remotely tap into the live ambient audio from the phone’s microphone and access both front and rear phone cameras.
Spyware apps like Catwatchful are banned from the app stores and rely on being downloaded and planted by someone with physical access to a person’s phone. As such, these apps are commonly referred to as “stalkerware” (or spouseware) for their propensity to facilitate non-consensual surveillance of spouses and romantic partners, which is illegal.
Catwatchful is the latest example in a growing list of stalkerware operations that have been hacked, breached, or otherwise exposed the data they obtain, and is at least the fifth spyware operation this year to have experienced a data spill. The incident shows that consumer-grade spyware continues to proliferate, despite being prone to shoddy coding and security failings that expose both paying customers and unsuspecting victims to data breaches.
According to a copy of the database from early June, which TechCrunch has seen, Catwatchful had email addresses and passwords on more than 62,000 customers and the phone data from 26,000 victims’ devices.
Most of the compromised devices were located in Mexico, Colombia, India, Peru, Argentina, Ecuador, and Bolivia (in order of the number of victims). Some of the records date back to 2018, the data shows.
The Catwatchful database also revealed the identity of the spyware operation’s administrator, Omar Soca Charcov, a developer based in Uruguay. Charcov opened our emails, but did not respond to our requests for comment sent in both English and Spanish. TechCrunch asked if he was aware of the Catwatchful data breach, and if he plans to disclose the incident to its customers.
Without any clear indication that Charcov will disclose the incident, TechCrunch provided a copy of the Catwatchful database to data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned.
BRASILIA, July 2 (Reuters) - Brazil's central bank said on Wednesday that technology services provider C&M Software, which serves financial institutions lacking connectivity infrastructure, had reported a cyberattack on its systems.
The bank did not provide further details of the attack, but said in a statement that it ordered C&M to shut down financial institutions' access to the infrastructure it operates.
C&M Software commercial director Kamal Zogheib said the company was a direct victim of the cyberattack, which involved the fraudulent use of client credentials in an attempt to access its systems and services.
C&M said critical systems remain intact and fully operational, adding that all security protocol measures had been implemented. The company is cooperating with the central bank and the Sao Paulo state police in the ongoing investigation, added Zogheib.
Brazilian financial institution BMP told Reuters that it and five other institutions experienced unauthorized access to their reserve accounts during the attack, which took place on Monday.
BMP said the affected accounts are held directly at the central bank and used exclusively for interbank settlement, with no impact on client accounts or internal balances.
The Scattered Spider hacking group has caused chaos among retailers, insurers, and airlines in recent months. Researchers warn that its flexible structure poses challenges for defense.
Empty grocery store shelves and grounded planes tend to signal a crisis, whether it’s an extreme weather event, public health crisis, or geopolitical emergency. But these scenes of chaos in recent weeks in the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada were caused instead by financially motivated cyberattacks—seemingly perpetrated by a collective of joyriding teens.
A notorious cybercriminal group often called Scattered Spider is known for using social engineering techniques to infiltrate target companies by tricking IT help desk workers into granting them system access. Researchers say that the group seems to gain expertise about the backend systems commonly used by businesses in a particular industry and then uses this knowledge to hit a cluster of targets before moving on to another sector. The group often deploys ransomware or conducts data extortion attacks once it has compromised its victims.
Amid increasing pressure from law enforcement last year, which culminated in charges and arrests of five suspects allegedly linked to Scattered Spider, researchers say that the group was less active in 2024 and seemed to be attempting to lay low. The group’s escalating attacks in recent weeks, though, have shown that, far from being defeated, Scattered Spider is emboldened once again.
“There are some uniquely skilled actors in Scattered Spider when it comes to social engineering, and they have identified a major gap in our security systems that they’re successfully taking advantage of,” says John Hultquist, chief analyst in Google’s threat intelligence group. “This group is carrying out serious attacks on our critical infrastructure, and I hope that we’re not missing the opportunity to address the most imminent threat.”
Though a number of incidents have not been publicly attributed, an overwhelming spree of recent attacks on UK grocery store chains, North American insurers, and international airlines has broadly been tied to Scattered Spider. In May, the UK’s National Crime Agency confirmed it was looking at Scattered Spider in connection to the attacks on British retailers. And the FBI warned in an alert on Friday that it has observed “the cybercriminal group Scattered Spider expanding its targeting to include the airline sector.” The warning came as North American airlines Westjet and Hawaii Airlines said they had been victims of cybercriminal hacks. On Wednesday, the Australian airline Qantas also said it had been hit with a cyberattack, though it was not immediately clear if this attack was part of the group’s campaign.
North Korean state-backed hackers have been using a new family of macOS malware called NimDoor in a campaign that targets web3 and cryptocurrency organizations.
Researchers analyzing the payloads discovered that the attacker relied on unusual techniques and a previously unseen signal-based persistence mechanism.
The attack chain, which involves contacting victims via Telegram and luring them into running a fake Zoom SDK update, delivered via Calendly and email, resembles the one Huntress managed security platform recently linked to BlueNoroff.
Advanced macOS malware
In a report today, researchers at cybersecurity company SentinelOne says that the threat actor used C++ and Nim-compiled binaries (collectively tracked as NimDoor ) on macOS, which "is a more unusual choice."
One of the Nim-compiled binaries, 'installer', is responsible for the initial setup and staging, preparing directories and config paths. It also drops other two binaries - 'GoogIe LLC,' 'CoreKitAgent', onto the victim's system.
GoogIe LLC takes over to collect environment data and generate a hex-encoded config file, writing it to a temp path. It sets up a macOS LaunchAgent (com.google.update.plist) for persistence, which re-launches GoogIe LLC at login and stores authentication keys for later stages.
The most advanced componentused in the attack is CoreKitAgent, the main payload of the NimDoor framework, which operates as an event-driven binary, using macOS's kqueue mechanism to asynchronously manage execution.
It implements a 10-case state machine with a hardcoded state transition table, allowing flexible control flow based on runtime conditions.
The most distinctive feature is its signal-based persistence mechanisms, where it installs custom handlers for SIGINT and SIGTERM.
CERTFR-2025-CTI-009
Date de la dernière version 01 juillet 2025
In September 2024, ANSSI observed an attack campaign seeking initial access to French entities’ networks through the exploitation of several zero-day vulnerabilities on Ivanti Cloud Service Appliance (CSA) devices. French organizations from governmental, telecommunications, media, finance, and transport sectors were impacted. ANSSI’s investigations led to the conclusion that a unique intrusion set was leveraged to conduct this attack campaign. The Agency named this intrusion set « Houken ». Moderately sophisticated, Houken can be characterized by an ambivalent use of resources. While its operators use zero-day vulnerabilities and a sophisticated rootkit, they also leverage a wide number of open-source tools mostly crafted by Chinese-speaking developers. Houken’s attack infrastructure is made up of diverse elements - including commercial VPNs and dedicated servers.
ANSSI suspects that the Houken intrusion set is operated by the same threat actor as the intrusion set previously described by MANDIANT as UNC5174. Since 2023, Houken is likely used by an access broker to gain a foothold on targeted systems, which could eventually be sold to entities interested in carrying out deeper post-exploitation activities. Though already documented for its opportunistic exploitation of vulnerabilities on edge devices, the use of zero-days by a threat actor linked to UNC5174 is new to ANSSI’s knowledge. The operators behind the UNC5174 and Houken intrusion sets are likely primarily looking for valuable initial accesses to sell to a state-linked actor seeking insightful intelligence. However, ANSSI also observed one case of data exfiltration as well as an interest in the deployment of cryptominers, indicating straight-forward profit-driven objectives.
2.1 The attack campaign in a nutshell
At the beginning of September 2024, an attacker repeatedly exploited vulnerabilities CVE-2024-
8190, CVE-2024-8963, and CVE-2024-9380 vulnerabilities to remotely execute arbitrary code
on vulnerable Ivanti Cloud Service Appliance devices [1, 2, 3, 4]. These vulnerabilities were
exploited as zero-days, before the publication of the Ivanti security advisory [5, 6, 7].
The attacker opportunistically chained these vulnerabilities to gain initial access on Ivanti CSA
appliances, with the intention of:
• Obtaining credentials through the execution of a base64 encoded Python script1
.
• Ensuring persistence, by:
– deploying or creating PHP webshells;
– modifying existing PHP scripts to add webshells capabilities;
– occasionally installing a kernel module which acts as a rootkit once loaded.
Likely in an effort to prevent exploitation by additional unrelated actors, the attacker attempted
to self-patch web resources affected by the vulnerabilities.
On occasions, and after establishing a foothold on victim networks through the compromise
of Ivanti CSA devices, the attacker performed reconnaissance activities and moved laterally.
In-depth compromises allowed the attacker to gather additional credentials and deploy further
persistence mechanisms. Most recent activities around this attack campaign were observed
at the end of November 2024 by ANSSI.
Several incidents affecting French entities, and linked to this attack campaign, were observed
by ANSSI at the end of 2024. The campaign targeted french organizations from governmental,
telecommunications, media, finance, and transport sectors.
In three cases, the compromise of Ivanti CSA devices was followed by lateral movements toward
the victims’ internal information systems. The malicious actor also collected credentials and
attempted to establish a persistence on these compromised networks. Attacker’s operational
activities time zone was UTC+8, which aligns with China Standard Time (CST).
ANSSI provided significant support to these entities, a
