by Sansec Forensics Team - sansec.io
Published in Threat Research − September 08, 2025
Adobe released an out-of-band emergency patch for SessionReaper (CVE-2025-54236). The bug may hand control of a store to unauthenticated attackers. Automated abuse is expected and merchants should act immediately.
Article updated: Sep 9th, 2025 13:48 UTC
Adobe broke their regular release schedule to publish a fix for a critical (9.1) flaw in all versions of Adobe Commerce and Magento. The bug, dubbed SessionReaper and assigned CVE-2025-54236, allows customer account takeover and unauthenticated remote code execution under certain conditions. Sansec was able to simulate the attack and so may less benign parties. It does not help that the Adobe patch was accidentally leaked last week, so bad actors may already be working on the exploit code.
Adobe's official advisory describes the impact as "an attacker could take over customer accounts," which does not mention the risk of remote code execution. The vulnerability researcher who discovered CVE-2025-54236 confirmed this on Slack:
"Blaklis
BTW, this is a potential preauth RCE, whatever the bulletin is saying.
Please patch ASAP"
SessionReaper is one of the more severe Magento vulnerabilities in its history, comparable to Shoplift (2015), Ambionics SQLi (2019), TrojanOrder (2022) and CosmicSting (2024). Each time, thousands of stores got hacked, sometimes within hours of the flaw being published.
Timeline
Aug 22nd: Adobe internally discusses emergency fix
Sep 4th: Adobe privately announces emergency fix to selected Commerce customers
Sep 9th: Adobe releases emergency patch for SessionReaper - CVE-2025-54236 in APSB25-88What merchants should do
If you are already using Sansec Shield, you are protected against this attack.
If you are not using Sansec Shield, you should test and deploy the patch as soon as possible. Because the patch disables internal Magento functionality, chances are that some of your custom/external code will break. Adobe published a developer guide with instructions.
If you cannot safely apply the patch within the next 24 hours, you should activate a WAF for immediate protection. Only two WAFs block this attack right now: Adobe Fastly and Sansec Shield.
If you did deploy the patch but not within 24 hours of publication, we recommend to run a malware scanner like eComscan to find any signs of compromise on your system. We also recommend to rotate your secret crypt key, as leaking it would allow attackers to update your CMS blocks indefinitely.
How the attack works
Our security team successfully reproduced one possible avenue to exploit SessionReaper, but there are likely multiple vectors. While we cannot disclose technical details that could aid attackers, the vulnerability follows a familiar pattern from last year's CosmicSting attack. The attack combines a malicious session with a nested deserialization bug in Magento's REST API.
The specific remote code execution vector appears to require file-based session storage. However, we recommend merchants using Redis or database sessions to take immediate action as well, as there are multiple ways to abuse this vulnerability.
Active exploitation
Sansec tracks ecommerce attacks in real-time around the globe. We have not seen any active abuse yet but will update this section when we do.
Follow live ecommerce attacks here.Acknowledgements
Credits to Blaklis for discovering the flaw.
Thanks to Scott Robinson, Pieter Hoste and Tu Van for additional research.
Sansec is not affiliated with Adobe and runs unbiased security research across the eCommerce ecosystem. Sansec protects 10% of all Magento stores worldwide.
SAP has addressed 21 new vulnerabilities affecting its products, including three critical severity issues impacting the NetWeaver software solution.
SAP NetWeaver is the foundation for SAP's business apps like ERP, CRM, SRM, and SCM, and acts as a modular middleware that is broadly deployed in large enterprise networks.
In its security bulletin for September, the provider of enterprise resource planning (ERP) software lists a vulnerability with a maximum severity score of 10 out of 10 that is identified as CVE-2025-42944.
The security issue is an insecure deserialization vulnerability in SAP NetWeaver (RMIP4), ServerCore 7.50.
An unauthenticated attacker could exploit it to achieve arbitrary OS command execution by sending to an open port a malicious Java object through the RMI-P4 module.
RMI-P4 is the Remote Method Invocation protocol used by SAP NetWeaver AS Java for internal SAP-to-SAP communication, or for administration.
Though the P4 port is open on the host, some organizations may inadvertently expose it to wider networks, or the internet, due to firewall or other misconfigurations.
According to the security bulletin, the second critical flaw SAP fixed this month is CVE-2025-42922 (CVSS v3.1 score: 9.9), an insecure file operations bug impacting NetWeaver AS Java (Deploy Web Service), J2EE-APPS 7.50.
An attacker with non-administrative authenticated access can exploit a flaw in the web service deployment functionality to upload arbitrary files, potentially allowing full system compromise.
The third flaw is a missing authentication check in NetWeaver, tracked under CVE-2025-42958 (CVSS v3.1 score: 9.1).
This vulnerability allows unauthorized high-privileged users to read, modify, or delete sensitive data and access administrative functionality.
SAP also addressed the following new high-severity flaws:
CVE-2025-42933 (SAP Business One SLD): Insecure storage of sensitive data (e.g., credentials) that could be extracted and abused.
CVE-2025-42929 (SLT Replication Server): Missing input validation allowing malicious input to corrupt or manipulate replicated data.
CVE-2025-42916 (S/4HANA): Missing input validation in core components, risking unauthorized data manipulation.
SAP products, deployed by large organizations and often handling mission-critical data, are often targeted by threat actors seeking high-value compromises.
Earlier this month, it was revealed that hackers were exploiting a critical code injection vulnerability tracked as CVE-2025-42957, impacting S/4HANA, Business One, and NetWeaver products.
System administrators are recommended to follow the patching and mitigation recommendations for the three critical flaws, available here (1, 2, 3) for customers with a SAP account.
forums.plex.tv Important Notice of Security Incident - Announcements - Plex Forum
We have recently experienced a security incident that may potentially involve your Plex account information. We believe the actual impact of this incident is limited; however, action is required from you to ensure your account remai
What happened
An unauthorized third party accessed a limited subset of customer data from one of our databases. While we quickly contained the incident, information that was accessed included emails, usernames, securely hashed passwords and authentication data.
Any account passwords that may have been accessed were securely hashed, in accordance with best practices, meaning they cannot be read by a third party. Out of an abundance of caution, we recommend you take some additional steps to secure your account (see details below). Rest assured that we do not store credit card data on our servers, so this information was not compromised in this incident.
What we’re doing
We’ve already addressed the method that this third party used to gain access to the system, and we’re undergoing additional reviews to ensure that the security of all of our systems is further strengthened to prevent future attacks.
What you must do
If you use a password to sign into Plex: We kindly request that you reset your Plex account password immediately by visiting https://plex.tv/reset. When doing so, there’s a checkbox to “Sign out connected devices after password change,” which we recommend you enable. This will sign you out of all your devices (including any Plex Media Server you own) for your security, and you will then need to sign back in with your new password.
If you use SSO to sign into Plex: We kindly request that you log out of all active sessions by visiting https://plex.tv/security and clicking the button that says ”Sign out of all devices”. This will sign you out of all your devices (including any Plex Media Server you own) for your security, and you will then need to sign back in as normal.
Additional Security Measures You Can Take
We remind you that no one at Plex will ever reach out to you over email to ask for a password or credit card number for payments. For further account protection, we also recommend enabling two-factor authentication on your Plex account if you haven’t already done so.
Lastly, we sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this situation may cause you. We take pride in our security systems, which helped us quickly detect this incident, and we want to assure you that we are working swiftly to prevent potential future incidents from occurring.
For step-by-step instructions on how to reset your password, visit:https://support.plex.tv/articles/account-requires-password-reset
securityweek.com ByIonut Arghire| September 2, 2025 (11:02 AM ET)
Updated: September 3, 2025 (2:45 AM ET)
Cloudflare on Monday said it blocked the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack ever recorded, at 11.5 Tbps (Terabits per second).
In a short message on X, Cloudflare only shared that the attack was a UDP flood mainly sourced from Google Cloud infrastructure, which lasted approximately 35 seconds.
“Cloudflare’s defenses have been working overtime. Over the past few weeks, we’ve autonomously blocked hundreds of hyper-volumetric DDoS attacks, with the largest reaching peaks of 5.1 Bpps and 11.5 Tbps. The 11.5 Tbps attack was a UDP flood that mainly came from Google Cloud,” the company said.
In a Tuesday update, Cloudflare said that Google Cloud was one source of attack, but not the majority, and that several IoT and cloud providers were used to launch the assault.
“Defending against this class of attack is an ongoing priority for us, and we’ve deployed numerous strong defenses to keep users safe, including robust DDoS detection and mitigation capabilities,” a Google Cloud spokesperson told SecurityWeek.
“Our abuse defenses detected the attack, and we followed proper protocol in customer notification and response. Initial reports suggesting that the majority of traffic came from Google Cloud are not accurate,” the spokesperson said.
A UDP flood attack consists of a high volume of UDP (User Datagram Protocol) packets being sent to a target, which becomes overwhelmed and unresponsive when attempting to process and respond to them.
Because UDP packets are small and the receiver spends resources trying to process them, the attackers also increased the packet rate to 5.1 Bpps (billion packets per second) to deplete those resources and take down the target.
This record-setting DDoS attack takes the lead as the largest in history roughly three months after Cloudflare blocked a 7.3 Tbps DDoS attack.
Seen in mid-May, the assault targeted a hosting provider and lasted for only 45 seconds. Approximately 37.4 Tb of traffic, or the equivalent of over 9,000 HD movies, was delivered in the timeframe.
The same as the newly observed attack, the May DDoS assault mainly consisted of UDP floods. It originated from over 122,000 IP addresses.
Cloudflare mitigated 27.8 million DDoS attacks in the first half of 2025, a number that surpassed the total observed in 2024 (21.3 million HTTP and Layer 3/4 DDoS attacks).
*Updated with statement from Google Cloud Cloudflare
techcrunch.com
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
9:11 AM PDT · September 2, 2025
The Israeli spyware maker now faces the dilemma of whether to continue its relationship with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and help fuel its mass deportations program.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signed a contract last year with Israeli spyware maker Paragon worth $2 million.
Shortly after, the Biden administration put the contract under review, issuing a “stop work order,” to determine whether the contract complied with an executive order on commercial spyware, which restricts U.S. government agencies from using spyware that could violate human rights or target Americans abroad.
Almost a year later, when it looked like the contract would just run out and never become active, ICE lifted the stop work order, according to public records.
“This contract is for a fully configured proprietary solution including license, hardware, warranty, maintenance, and training. This modification is to lift the stop work order,” read an update dated August 30 on the U.S. government’s Federal Procurement Data System, a database of government contracts.
Independent journalist Jack Poulson was the first to report the news in his newsletter.
Paragon has for years cultivated the image of being an “ethical” and responsible spyware maker, in contrast with controversial spyware purveyors such as Hacking Team, Intellexa, and NSO Group. On its official website, Paragon claims to provide its customers with “ethically based tools, teams, and insights.”
The spyware maker faces an ethical dilemma. Now that the contract with ICE’s Information Technology Division is active, it’s up to Paragon to decide whether it wants to continue its relationship with ICE, an agency that has dramatically ramped up mass deportations and expanded its surveillance powers since Donald Trump took over the White House.
Emily Horne, a spokesperson for Paragon, as well as executive chairman John Fleming, did not respond to a request for comment.
In an attempt to show its good faith, in February of this year, Fleming told TechCrunch that the company only sells to the U.S. government and other unspecified allied countries.
Paragon has already had to face a thorny ethical dilemma. In January, WhatsApp revealed that around 90 of its users, including journalists and human rights workers, had been targeted with Paragon’s spyware, called Graphite. In the following days and weeks, Italian journalist Francesco Cancellato and several local pro-immigration activists came forward saying they were among the victims.
In response to this scandal, Paragon cut ties with the Italian government, which had in the meantime launched an inquiry to determine what happened. Then, in June, digital rights research group Citizen Lab confirmed that two other journalists, an unnamed European and a colleague of Cancellato, had been hacked with Paragon’s spyware.
An Italian parliament committee concluded that the spying of the pro-immigration activists was legal, but it also claimed that there was no evidence that Italy’s intelligence agencies, former Paragon customers, had targeted Cancellato.
John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, who has investigated cases of spyware abuse for more than a decade, told TechCrunch that “these tools were designed for dictatorships, not democracies built on liberty and protection of individual rights.”
The researcher said that even spyware is “corrupting,” which is why “there’s a growing pile of spyware scandals in democracies, including with Paragon’s Graphite. Worse, Paragon is still shielding spyware abusers. Just look at the still-unexplained hacks of Italian journalists.”
bleepingcomputer.com
By Sergiu Gatlan
September 3, 2025
Update September 04, 06:27 EDT: Updated the list of cybersecurity companies whose Salesforce instances were breached in the Salesloft supply chain attack.
Workiva, a leading cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) provider, notified its customers that attackers who gained access to a third-party customer relationship management (CRM) system stole some of their data.
The company's cloud software helps collect, connect, and share data for financial reports, compliance, and audits. It had 6,305 customers at the end of last year and reported revenues of $739 million in 2024.
Its customer list includes 85% of the Fortune 500 companies and high-profile clients such as Google, T-Mobile, Delta Air Lines, Wayfair, Hershey, Slack, Cognizant, Santander, Nokia, Kraft Heinz, Wendy's, Paramount, Air France KLM, Mercedes-Benz, and more.
According to a private email notification sent to affected Workiva customers last week and seen by BleepingComputer, the threat actors exfiltrated a limited set of business contact information, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, and support ticket content.
"This is similar to recent events that have targeted several large organizations. Importantly, the Workiva platform and any data within it were not accessed or compromised," the company explained. "Our CRM vendor notified us of unauthorized access via a connected third-party application."
Workiva also warned impacted customers to remain vigilant, as the stolen information could be used in spear-phishing attacks.
"Workiva will never contact anyone by text or phone to request a password or any other secure details. All communications from Workiva come through our trusted official support channels," it said.
Salesforce data breaches
While Workiva didn't share more details regarding this attack, BleepingComputer has learned that this incident was part of the recent wave of Salesforce data breaches linked to the ShinyHunters extortion group that impacted many high-profile companies.
Most recently, Cloudflare disclosed that it was forced to rotate 104 Cloudflare platform-issued tokens stolen by ShinyHunters threat actors, who gained access to the Salesforce instance used for customer support and internal customer case management in mid-August.
ShinyHunters has been targeting Salesforce customers in data theft attacks using voice phishing (vishing) since the start of the year, impacting companies such as Google, Cisco, Allianz Life, Farmers Insurance, Workday, Qantas, Adidas, and LVMH subsidiaries, including Dior, Louis Vuitton, and Tiffany & Co.
More recently, the extortion group has shifted to using stolen OAuth tokens for Salesloft's Drift AI chat integration with Salesforce to gain access to customer Salesforce instances and extract sensitive information, such as passwords, AWS access keys, and Snowflake tokens, from customer messages and support tickets.
Using this method, ShinyHunters also gained access to a small number of Google Workspace accounts in addition to stealing Salesforce CRM data and breaching the Salesforce instances of multiple cybersecurity companies, including Zscaler, Tenable, CyberArk, Elastic, BeyondTrust, Proofpoint, JFrog, Rubrik, Cato Networks, and Palo Alto Networks.
Huawei has already ‘built an ecosystem entirely independent of the United States’, according to a senior executive.
South China Morning Post scmp.com Coco Fengin Guangdong
Published: 9:00pm, 29 Aug 2025
China has virtually overcome crippling US tech restrictions, according to a senior executive at Huawei Technologies, as mainland-developed computing infrastructure, AI systems and other software now rival those from the world’s largest economy.
Shenzhen-based Huawei, which was added to Washington’s trade blacklist in May 2019, has already “built an ecosystem entirely independent of the United States”, said Tao Jingwen, president of the firm’s quality, business process and information technology management department, at an event on Wednesday in Guiyang, capital of southwestern Guizhou province.
Tao highlighted the privately held company’s resilience at the event, as he discussed some of the latest milestones in its journey towards tech self-sufficiency.
That industry-wide commitment to tech self-reliance would enable China to “surpass the US in terms of artificial intelligence applications” on the back of the country’s “extensive economy and business scenarios”, he said.
His remarks reflected Huawei’s efforts to surmount tightened US control measures and heightened geopolitical tensions, as the company pushes the boundaries in semiconductors, computing power, cloud services, AI and operating systems.
Tao’s presentation was made on the same day that Huawei said users of token services on its cloud platform had access to its CloudMatrix 384 system, which is a cluster of 384 Ascend AI processors – spread across 12 computing cabinets and four bus cabinets – that delivers 300 petaflops of computing power and 48 terabytes of high-bandwidth memory. A petaflop is 1,000 trillion calculations per second.
salesforce.com Eoghan Casey
August 27, 2025
Learn how to detect, investigate, and respond to Salesforce security incidents with logs, permissions, and backups.
A guide to investigating Salesforce security incidents with logs, permissions, and backups to strengthen response and resilience.
I am increasingly asked by customers how to investigate potential security incidents in their Salesforce environments. Common questions are: What did a specific user do during that time? and What data was impacted? Every organization and incident is unique, and the answer to these questions depends on the specific situation, but there is some general guidance I can provide.
Three key sources of information for investigating a security incident in Salesforce environments are activity logs, user permissions, and backup data.
bbc.com Chris VallanceSenior Technology Reporter andTheo Leggett International Business Correspondent 3.09.2025
Staff were sent home and the company shut down its IT systems in an effort to minimise the damage done.
A cyber-attack has "severely disrupted" Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) vehicle production, including at its two main UK plants.
The company, which is owned by India's Tata Motors, said it took immediate action to lessen the impact of the hack and is working quickly to restart operations.
JLR's retail business has also been badly hit at a traditionally a popular time for consumers to take delivery of a new vehicle - but there is no evidence any customer data had been stolen, it said.
The attack began on Sunday as the latest batch of new registration plates became available on Monday, 1 September.
The BBC understands that the attack was detected while in progress, and the company shut down its IT systems in an effort to minimise any damage.
Workers at the company's Halewood plant in Merseyside were told by email early on Monday morning not to come into work while others were sent home, as first reported by the Liverpool Echo.
The BBC understands the attack has also hit JLR's other main UK manufacturing plant at Solihull, with staff there also sent home.
The company said: "We took immediate action to mitigate its impact by proactively shutting down our systems. We are now working at pace to restart our global applications in a controlled manner."
It added: "At this stage there is no evidence any customer data has been stolen but our retail and production activities have been severely disrupted."
It is not yet known who is responsible for the hack, but it follows crippling attacks on prominent UK retail businesses including Marks & Spencer and the Co-op.
In both cases, the hackers sought to extort money.
While JLR's statement makes no mention of a cyber-attack, a separate filing by parent company Tata Motors to the Bombay Stock Exchange referred to an "IT security incidence" causing "global" issues.
The National Crime Agency said: "We are aware of an incident impacting Jaguar Land Rover and are working with partners to better understand its impact."
In 2023, as part of an effort to "accelerate digital transformation across its business", JLR signed a five-year, £800m deal with corporate stablemate Tata Consultancy Services to provide cybersecurity and a range of other IT services.
The halt in production is a fresh blow to the firm which recently revealed a slump in profits attributed to increasing in costs caused by US tariffs.
helpnetsecurity.com Zeljka Zorz, Editor-in-Chief, Help Net Security
September 2, 2025
Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks, PagerDuty, Tanium, and SpyCloud say their Salesforce instances were accessed following the Salesloft breach.
The companies noted that attackers had only limited access to Salesforce databases, not to other systems or resources. They warned, however, that the stolen customer data could be used for convincing phishing and social engineering attacks.
The Salesloft breach
Salesloft is the company behind a popular sales engagement platform of the same name.
The company’s Drift application – an AI chat agent – can be integrated with many third-party platforms and tools, including Salesforce.
On August 26, Salesloft stated that from August 8 to August 18, 2025, attackers used compromised OAuth credentials to exfiltrate data from the Salesforce instances of customers that have set up the Drift-Saleforce integration.
Several days later, the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) confirmed that the compromise impacted other integrations, as well.
“On August 28, 2025, our investigation confirmed that the actor also compromised OAuth tokens for the ‘Drift Email’ integration. On August 9, 2025, a threat actor used these tokens to access email from a very small number of Google Workspace accounts,” GTIG analysts shared.
Astrix Security researchers have confirmed that the attackers used the Drift Email OAuth application for Google Workspace to exfiltrate emails and that – at least in one case – they tried to access S3 buckets whose names have been likely extracted from compromised Salesforce environments.
Similarly, WideField threat researchers have observed suspicious log event activity across multiple customers using its security platform, pointing to attackers rifling through Salesforce databases and Gmail accounts.
Salesloft breach victims Zscaler
How UNC6395 accessed emails (Source: WideField)
Zscaler, Palo Alto Networks and the other companies mentioned above are just some of the 700+ companies impacted by this breach.
While the stolen customer information can be valuable, GTIG analysts say that the attackers were focused on searching for AWS access keys, passwords, and Snowflake-related access tokens, which can (and likely have been) further misused by the attackers.
What to do if your organization is on the victims list?
Salesloft has yet to reveal how the attackers managed to get their hands on the OAuth tokens they used, but the company has engaged cybersecurity experts from (Google’s) Mandiant and Coalition to help them investigate and remediate the compromise.
“We are recommending that all Drift customers who manage their own Drift connections to third-party applications via API key, proactively revoke the existing key and reconnect using a new API key for these applications. This only relates to API key-based Drift integrations. OAuth applications are being handled directly by Salesloft,” the company said on August 27, and outlined the process for updating the API keys.
Salesforce has, for the moment, disabled all integrations between Salesforce and Salesloft technologies, including the Drift app.
“Disabling the connection is a precautionary measure to help safeguard customer environments while we continue to assess and address the situation. We recognize this change may cause disruption and will provide further updates as more information becomes available,” the company noted.
Likewise, Google has disabled the integration functionality between Google Workspace and Salesloft Drift pending further investigation, and has advised organizations to “review all third-party integrations connected to their Drift instance, revoke and rotate credentials for those applications, and investigate all connected systems for signs of unauthorized access.”
Google Mandiant incident responders have provided extensive advice on how organizations can investigate for compromise and scan for exposed secrets and hardcoded credentials.
Astrix researchers have shared additional indicators of compromise and described AWS-specific activity to look out for. WideField threat analysts have provided guidance useful to both their customers and other affected organizations.
blog.checkpoint.com ByAmit Weigman | Office of the CTO September 2, 2025
Researchers analyze Hexstrike-AI, a next-gen AI orchestration framework linking LLMs with 150+ security tools—now repurposed by attackers to weaponize Citrix NetScaler zero-day CVEs in minutes.
Key Findings:
The emergence of Hexstrike-AI now provides the clearest embodiment of that model to date. This tool was designed to be a defender-oriented framework: “a revolutionary AI-powered offensive security framework that combines professional security tools with autonomous AI agents to deliver comprehensive security testing capabilities”, their website reads. In this context, Hexstrike-AI was positioned as a next-generation tool for red teams and security researchers.
But almost immediately after release, malicious actors began discussing how to weaponize it. Within hours, certain underground channels discussed application of the framework to exploit the Citrix NetScaler ADC and Gateway zero-day vulnerabilities disclosed last Tuesday (08/26).
This marks a pivotal moment: a tool designed to strengthen defenses has been claimed to be rapidly repurposed into an engine for exploitation, crystallizing earlier concepts into a widely available platform driving real-world attacks.
Figure 1: Dark web posts discussing HexStrike AI, shortly after its release.
The Architecture of Hexstrike-AI
Hexstrike-AI is not “just another red-team framework.” It represents a fundamental shift in how offensive cyber operations can be conducted. At its heart is an abstraction and orchestration layer that allows AI models like Claude, GPT, and Copilot to autonomously run security tooling without human micromanagement.
Figure 2: HexStrike AI MCP Toolkit.
More specifically, Hexstrike AI introduces MCP Agents, an advanced server that bridges large language models with real-world offensive capabilities. Through this integration, AI agents can autonomously run 150+ cyber security tools spanning penetration testing, vulnerability discovery, bug bounty automation, and security research.
Think of it as the conductor of an orchestra:
The AI orchestration brain interprets operator intent.
The agents (150+ tools) perform specific actions; scanning, exploiting, deploying persistence, exfiltrating data.
The abstraction layer translates vague commands like “exploit NetScaler” into precise, sequenced technical steps that align with the targeted environment.
This mirrors exactly the concept described in our recent blog: an orchestration brain that removes friction, decides which tools to deploy, and adapts dynamically in real time. We analyzed the source code and architecture of Hexstrike-AI and revealed several important aspects of its design:
MCP Orchestration Layer
The framework sets up a FastMCP server that acts as the communication hub between large language models (Claude, GPT, Copilot) and tool functions. Tools are wrapped with MCP decorators, exposing them as callable components that AI agents can invoke. This is the orchestration core; it binds the AI agent to the underlying security tools, so commands can be issued programmatically.
Tool Integration at Scale
Hexstrike-AI incorporates core network discovery and exploitation tools, beginning with Nmap scanning and extending to dozens of other reconnaissance, exploitation, and persistence modules. Each tool is abstracted into a standardized function, making orchestration seamless.
Figure 3: the nmap_scan tool is exposed as an MCP function.
Here, AI agents can call nmap_scan with simple parameters. The abstraction removes the need for an operator to run and parse Nmap manually — orchestration handles execution and results.
Automation and Resilience
The client includes retry logic and recovery handling to keep operations stable, even under failure conditions. This ensures operations continue reliably, a critical feature when chaining scans, exploits, and persistence attempts.
Figure 4: Hexstrike-AI’s automated resilience loop
Intent-to-Execution Translation
High-level commands are abstracted into workflows. The execute_command function demonstrates this. Here, an AI agent provides only a command string, and Hexstrike-AI determines how to execute it, turning intent into precise, repeatable tool actions.
Figure 5: Hexstrike-AI’s execute_command function.
Why This Matters Right Now
The release of Hexstrike-AI would be concerning in any context, because its design makes it extremely attractive to attackers. But its impact is amplified by timing.
Last Tuesday (08/26), Citrix disclosed three zero-day vulnerabilities affecting NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway appliances, as follows:
CVE-2025-7775 – Unauthenticated remote code execution. Already exploited in the wild, with webshells observed on compromised appliances.
CVE-2025-7776 – A memory-handling flaw impacting NetScaler’s core processes. Exploitation not yet confirmed, but high-risk.
CVE-2025-8424 – An access control weakness on management interfaces. Also unconfirmed in the wild but exposes critical control paths.
Exploiting these vulnerabilities is non-trivial. Attackers must understand memory operations, authentication bypasses, and the peculiarities of NetScaler’s architecture. Such work has historically required highly skilled operators and weeks of development.
With Hexstrike-AI, that barrier seems to have collapsed. In underground forums over the 12 hours following the disclosure of the said vulnerabilities, we have observed threat actors discussing the use of Hexstrike-AI to scan for and exploit vulnerable NetScaler instances. Instead of painstaking manual development, AI can now automate reconnaissance, assist with exploit crafting, and facilitate payload delivery for these critical vulnerabilities.
Figure 6: Top Panel: Dark web post claiming to have successfully exploited the latest Citrix CVE’s using HexStrike AI, originally in Russian;
Bottom Panel: Dark web post translated into English using Google Translate add-on.
Certain threat actors have also published vulnerable instances they have been able to scan using the tool, which are now being offered for sale. The implications are profound:
A task that might take a human operator days or weeks can now be initiated in under 10 minutes.
Exploitation can be parallelized at scale, with agents scanning thousands of IPs simultaneously.
Decision-making becomes adaptive; failed exploit attempts can be automatically retried with variations until successful, increasing the overall exploitation yield.
The window between disclosure and mass exploitation shrinks dramatically. CVE-2025-7775 is already being exploited in the wild, and with Hexstrike-AI, the volume of attacks will only increase in the coming days.
Figure 7: Seemingly vulnerable NetScaler instances curated by HexStrike AI.
Action Items for Defenders
The immediate priority is clear: patch and harden affected systems. Citrix has already released fixed builds, and defenders must act without delay. In our technical vulnerability report, we have listed technical measures and actions defenders should take against these CVEs, mostly including hardening authentications, restricting access and threat hunting for the affected webshells.
However, Hexstrike-AI represents a broader paradigm shift, where AI orchestration will increasingly be used to weaponize vulnerabilities quickly and at scale. To defend against this new class of threat, organizations must evolve their defenses accordingly:
Adopt adaptive detection: Static signatures and rules will not suffice. Detection systems must ingest fresh intelligence, learn from ongoing attacks, and adapt dynamically.
Integrate AI-driven defense: Just as attackers are building orchestration layers, defenders must deploy AI systems capable of correlating telemetry, detecting anomalies, and responding autonomously at machine speed.
Shorten patch cycles: When the time-to-exploit is measured in hours, patching cannot be a weeks-long process. Automated patch validation and deployment pipelines are essential.
Threat intelligence fusion: Monitoring dark web discussions and underground chatter is now a critical defensive input. Early signals, such as the chatter around Hexstrike-AI and NetScaler CVEs, provide vital lead time for professionals.
Resilience engineering: Assume compromise. Architect systems with segmentation, least privilege, and robust recovery capabilities so that successful exploitation does not equate to catastrophic impact.
Conclusion
Hexstrike-AI is a watershed moment. What was once a conceptual architecture – a central orchestration brain directing AI agents – has now been embodied in a working tool. And it is already being applied against active zero days.
For defenders, we can only reinforce what has already been said in our last post: urgency in addressing today’s vulnerabilities, and foresight in preparing for a future where AI-driven orchestration is the norm. The sooner the security community adapts, patching faster, detecting smarter, and responding at machine speed, the greater our ability to keep pace in this new era of cyber conflict.
The security community has been warning about the convergence of AI orchestration and offensive tooling, and Hexstrike-AI proves those warnings weren’t theoretical. What seemed like an emerging possibility is now an operational reality, and attackers are wasting no time putting it to use.
bleepingcomputer.com
By Sergiu Gatlan
September 2, 2025
Cloudflare is the latest company impacted in a recent string of Salesloft Drift breaches, part of a supply-chain attack disclosed last week.
The internet giant revealed on Tuesday that the attackers gained access to a Salesforce instance it uses for internal customer case management and customer support, which contained 104 Cloudflare API tokens.
Cloudflare was notified of the breach on August 23, and it alerted impacted customers of the incident on September 2. Before informing customers of the attack, it also rotated all 104 Cloudflare platform-issued tokens exfiltrated during the breach, even though it has yet to discover any suspicious activity linked to these tokens.
"Most of this information is customer contact information and basic support case data, but some customer support interactions may reveal information about a customer's configuration and could contain sensitive information like access tokens," Cloudflare said.
"Given that Salesforce support case data contains the contents of support tickets with Cloudflare, any information that a customer may have shared with Cloudflare in our support system—including logs, tokens or passwords—should be considered compromised, and we strongly urge you to rotate any credentials that you may have shared with us through this channel."
The company's investigation found that the threat actors stole only the text contained within the Salesforce case objects (including customer support tickets and their associated data, but no attachments) between August 12 and August 17, after an initial reconnaissance stage on August 9.
These exfiltrated case objects contained only text-based data, including:
The subject line of the Salesforce case
The body of the case (which may include keys, secrets, etc., if provided by the customer to Cloudflare)
Customer contact information (for example, company name, requester's email address and phone number, company domain name, and company country)
"We believe this incident was not an isolated event but that the threat actor intended to harvest credentials and customer information for future attacks," Cloudflare added.
"Given that hundreds of organizations were affected through this Drift compromise, we suspect the threat actor will use this information to launch targeted attacks against customers across the affected organizations."
Wave of Salesforce data breaches
Since the start of the year, the ShinyHunters extortion group has been targeting Salesforce customers in data theft attacks, using voice phishing (vishing) to trick employees into linking malicious OAuth apps with their company's Salesforce instances. This tactic enabled the attackers to steal databases, which were later used to extort victims.
Since Google first wrote about these attacks in June, numerous data breaches have been linked to ShinyHunters' social engineering tactics, including those targeting Google itself, Cisco, Qantas, Allianz Life, Farmers Insurance, Workday, Adidas, as well as LVMH subsidiaries Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Tiffany & Co.
While some security researchers have told BleepingComputer that the Salesloft supply chain attacks involve the same threat actors, Google has found no conclusive evidence linking them.
Palo Alto Networks also confirmed over the weekend that the threat actors behind the Salesloft Drift breaches stole some support data submitted by customers, including contact info and text comments.
The Palo Alto Networks incident was also limited to its Salesforce CRM and, as the company told BleepingComputer, it did not affect any of its products, systems, or services.
The cybersecurity company observed the attackers searching for secrets, including AWS access keys (AKIA), VPN and SSO login strings, Snowflake tokens, as well as generic keywords such as "secret," "password," or "key," which could be used to breach more cloud platforms to steal data in other extortion attacks.
therecord.media | The Record from Recorded Future News
September 1st, 2025
Last week, a contract worth €10 million ($11.7 million) had been awarded to the Spanish multinational Telefónica to use Huawei kit to upgrade the RedIRIS network, effectively more than 16,000km of infrastructure. On Friday, the government reversed course for “reasons of digital strategy and strategic autonomy,” as reported by El País.
The RedIRIS upgrade using Huawei equipment had been negotiated directly with Telefónica as the company had an existing €5.5 million contract from 2020 to boost the network. The Ministry of Digital Transformation argued the new upgrade was urgent due to the demands of new digital services, supercomputing projects and the network’s connections to Spain’s defense establishment.
It was partially driven by a need to improve the RedIRIS network’s resilience to cyberattacks, despite concerns that the use of equipment provided by Chinese vendors could increase the risk of cyberattacks to Western infrastructure.
These fears are often expressed in the context of Beijing’s offensive cyber espionage activities and China’s National Intelligence Law of 2017, which allows the state to “compel anyone in China to do anything,” as summarized by Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre. Huawei has consistently argued that such criticisms are illegitimate.
The company is currently restricted from most 5G networks across the European Union, although Spain has opted out of imposing such restrictions, and faces varying levels of bans in networks of NATO allies such as the United States and the United Kingdom.
Despite the apparent political hesitation regarding restricting Huawei equipment, Spain was among more than a dozen allies who last week warned about Chinese companies compromising global critical infrastructure.
The cancellation of the Telefoníca contract comes amid alarm from Madrid’s allies about the prevalence of the Chinese company’s equipment within the Spanish telecommunications infrastructure, including the core of Telefoníca’s 5G network.
In July, the chairs of the U.S. House and Senate Intelligence panels asked the country’s spy chief to scrutinize any intelligence information the U.S. shares with Spain after the disclosure the country’s wiretap system is underpinned by Huawei technology.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who has been among the EU’s most supportive leaders regarding Huawei, has pushed back against the bloc’s efforts to restrict it from 5G networks. Huawei has opened research facilities in Madrid and is a major employer as a technology contractor for a number of public administrations.
Natasha Buckley, a researcher at RUSI and lecturer in cybersecurity at Cranfield University, previously told Recorded Future News that Spain’s approach to the company stood in stark contrast to that of other NATO allies and many EU member states.
“Spain’s stance on high-risk technology vendors places greater emphasis on supply chain reliability than on geopolitical considerations, setting it apart from more restrictive approaches seen in countries like the UK, the Netherlands and Poland.
“While the EU’s 5G Cybersecurity Toolbox recommends limiting or excluding high-risk Chinese suppliers like Huawei, Spain’s implementation has been uneven. Huawei is restricted from some public 5G projects, yet its servers have been approved to store sensitive police wiretap data. The result is a case-by-case approach that falls short of a clearly defined policy towards high-risk vendors,” Buckley said.
justice.gov District of New Mexico | U.S. Government Seizes Online Marketplaces Selling Fraudulent Identity Documents Used in Cybercrime Schemes | United States Department of Justice
Thursday, August 28, 2025
The operators of VerifTools produced and sold counterfeit driver’s licenses, passports, and other identification documents that could be used to bypass identity verification systems and gain unauthorized access to online accounts.
ALBUQUERQUE – The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Mexico announced today the seizure of two marketplace domains and one blog used to sell fraudulent identity documents to cybercriminals worldwide. The operators of VerifTools produced and sold counterfeit driver’s licenses, passports, and other identification documents that could be used to bypass identity verification systems and gain unauthorized access to online accounts.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) began investigating in August 2022 after discovering a conspiracy to use stolen identity information to access cryptocurrency accounts. The investigation revealed that VerifTools offered counterfeit identification documents for all 50 U.S. states and multiple foreign countries for as little as nine dollars, payable in cryptocurrency.
The FBI used the VerifTools marketplace to generate and purchase counterfeit New Mexico driver’s licenses, which were paid for with cryptocurrency. The FBI has identified the equivalent of approximately $6.4 million of illicit proceeds linked to the VerifTools marketplace. The following counterfeit documents are an example of New Mexico driver’s licenses obtained from VerifTools.
“The internet is not a refuge for criminals. If you build or sell tools that let offenders impersonate victims, you are part of the crime,” said Acting U.S. Attorney Ryan Ellison. “We will use every lawful tool to disrupt your business, take the profit out of it, and bring you to justice. No one operation is bigger than us together. With our partners at every level of law enforcement we will protect New Mexicans and defend those who stand up for our community.”
"The removal of this marketplace is a major step in protecting the public from fraud and identity theft crime," said Philip Russell, Acting Special Agent in Charge of the FBI Albuquerque Division. "Together with our partners, we will continue to target and dismantle the platforms that criminals depend on, no matter where they operate."Acting U.S. Attorney Ryan Ellison and Acting Special Agent in Charge Philip Russell of the FBI’s Albuquerque Field Office made the announcement today.
The FBI’s Albuquerque Field Office investigated this case. The Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs provided valuable assistance.
The Justice Department collaborated closely with investigators and prosecutors from multiple jurisdictions in this investigation, including the District of New Mexico, Eastern District of Virginia, the Dutch National Police and the Netherlands Public Prosecution Service.
zscaler.com August 30, 2025
Zscaler swiftly mitigates a security incident impacting Salesloft Drift, and ensuring robust protection against potential vulnerabilities.
At Zscaler, protecting your data and maintaining transparency are core to our mission to secure, simplify and accelerate businesses transformation. We are committed to keeping you informed about key developments that may impact your organization.
What Happened?
Zscaler was made aware of a campaign targeted at Salesloft Drift (marketing software-as-a-service) and impacting a large number of Salesforce customers. This incident involved the theft of OAuth tokens connected to Salesloft Drift, a third-party application used for automating sales workflows that integrates with Salesforce databases to manage leads and contact information.
The scope of the incident is confined to Salesforce and does not involve access to any of Zscaler's products, services or underlying systems and infrastructure.
As part of this campaign, unauthorized actors gained access to Salesloft Drift credentials of its customers including Zscaler. Following a detailed review as part of our ongoing investigation, we have determined that these credentials have allowed limited access to some Zscaler Salesforce information.
What Information May Be Affected?
The information accessed was limited to commonly available business contact details for points of contact and specific Salesforce related content, including:
Names
Business email addresses
Job titles
Phone numbers
Regional/location details
Zscaler product licensing and commercial information
Plain text content from certain support cases [this does NOT include attachments, files, and images]After extensive investigation, Zscaler has currently found no evidence to suggest misuse of this information. If anything changes, we will provide further communications and updates.
What Did Zscaler Do?
Zscaler acted swiftly to address the incident and mitigate risks. Steps taken include:
Revoking Salesloft Drift’s access to Zscaler’s Salesforce data
Out of an abundance of caution, rotating other API access tokens.
Launching a detailed investigation into the scope of the event, working closely with Salesforce to assess and understand impacts as they continue investigating.
Implementing additional safeguards and strengthening protocols to defend against similar incidents in the future.
Immediately launched a third party risk management investigation for third party vendors used by Zscaler.
Zscaler Customer Support team has further strengthened customer authentication protocol when responding to customer calls to safeguard against potential phishing attacks.What You Can Do
Although the incident’s scope remains limited (as stated above) and no evidence of misuse has been found, we recommend that customers maintain heightened vigilance. Please be wary of potential phishing attacks or social engineering attempts, which could leverage exposed contact details.
Given that other organizations have suffered similar incidents stemming from Salesloft Drift, it’s crucial to exercise caution regarding unsolicited communications, including emails, phone calls, or requests for sensitive information. Always verify the source of communication and never disclose passwords or financial data via unofficial channels.
Zscaler Support will never request authentication or authorization details through unsolicited outreach, including phone calls or SMS. All official Zscaler communications come from trusted Zscaler channels. Please exercise caution and report any suspicious phishing activity to security@zscaler.com.
futurism.com Aug 27, 5:05 PM EDT by Noor Al-Sibai
OpenAI has authorized itself to call law enforcement if users say threatening enough things when talking to ChatGPT.
Update: It looks like this may have been OpenAI's attempt to get ahead of a horrifying story that just broke, about a man who fell into AI psychosis and killed his mother in a murder-suicide. Full details here.
For the better part of a year, we've watched — and reported — in horror as more and more stories emerge about AI chatbots leading people to self-harm, delusions, hospitalization, arrest, and suicide.
As the loved ones of the people impacted by these dangerous bots rally for change to prevent such harm from happening to anyone else, the companies that run these AIs have been slow to implement safeguards — and OpenAI, whose ChatGPT has been repeatedly implicated in what experts are now calling "AI psychosis," has until recently done little more than offer copy-pasted promises.
In a new blog post admitting certain failures amid its users' mental health crises, OpenAI also quietly disclosed that it's now scanning users' messages for certain types of harmful content, escalating particularly worrying content to human staff for review — and, in some cases, reporting it to the cops.
"When we detect users who are planning to harm others, we route their conversations to specialized pipelines where they are reviewed by a small team trained on our usage policies and who are authorized to take action, including banning accounts," the blog post notes. "If human reviewers determine that a case involves an imminent threat of serious physical harm to others, we may refer it to law enforcement."
That short and vague statement leaves a lot to be desired — and OpenAI's usage policies, referenced as the basis on which the human review team operates, don't provide much more clarity.
When describing its rule against "harm [to] yourself or others," the company listed off some pretty standard examples of prohibited activity, including using ChatGPT "to promote suicide or self-harm, develop or use weapons, injure others or destroy property, or engage in unauthorized activities that violate the security of any service or system."
But in the post warning users that the company will call the authorities if they seem like they're going to hurt someone, OpenAI also acknowledged that it is "currently not referring self-harm cases to law enforcement to respect people’s privacy given the uniquely private nature of ChatGPT interactions."
While ChatGPT has in the past proven itself pretty susceptible to so-called jailbreaks that trick it into spitting out instructions to build neurotoxins or step-by-step instructions to kill yourself, this new rule adds an additional layer of confusion. It remains unclear which exact types of chats could result in user conversations being flagged for human review, much less getting referred to police. We've reached out to OpenAI to ask for clarity.
While it's certainly a relief that AI conversations won't result in police wellness checks — which often end up causing more harm to the person in crisis due to most cops' complete lack of training in handling mental health situations — it's also kind of bizarre that OpenAI even mentions privacy, given that it admitted in the same post that it's monitoring user chats and potentially sharing them with the fuzz.
To make the announcement all the weirder, this new rule seems to contradict the company's pro-privacy stance amid its ongoing lawsuit with the New York Times and other publishers as they seek access to troves of ChatGPT logs to determine whether any of their copyrighted data had been used to train its models.
OpenAI has steadfastly rejected the publishers' request on grounds of protecting user privacy and has, more recently, begun trying to limit the amount of user chats it has to give the plaintiffs.
Last month, the company's CEO Sam Altman admitted during an appearance on a podcast that using ChatGPT as a therapist or attorney doesn't confer the same confidentiality that talking to a flesh-and-blood professional would — and that thanks to the NYT lawsuit, the company may be forced to turn those chats over to courts.
In other words, OpenAI is stuck between a rock and a hard place. The PR blowback from its users spiraling into mental health crises and dying by suicide is appalling — but since it's clearly having trouble controlling its own tech enough to protect users from those harmful scenarios, it's falling back on heavy-handed moderation that flies in the face of its own CEO's promises.
aws.amazon.com by CJ Moses on 29 AUG 2025
Amazon’s threat intelligence team has identified and disrupted a watering hole campaign conducted by APT29 (also known as Midnight Blizzard), a threat actor associated with Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). Our investigation uncovered an opportunistic watering hole campaign using compromised websites to redirect visitors to malicious infrastructure designed to trick users into authorizing attacker-controlled devices through Microsoft’s device code authentication flow. This opportunistic approach illustrates APT29’s continued evolution in scaling their operations to cast a wider net in their intelligence collection efforts.
The evolving tactics of APT29
This campaign follows a pattern of activity we’ve previously observed from APT29. In October 2024, Amazon disrupted APT29’s attempt to use domains impersonating AWS to phish users with Remote Desktop Protocol files pointed to actor-controlled resources. Also, in June 2025, Google’s Threat Intelligence Group reported on APT29’s phishing campaigns targeting academics and critics of Russia using application-specific passwords (ASPs). The current campaign shows their continued focus on credential harvesting and intelligence collection, with refinements to their technical approach, and demonstrates an evolution in APT29’s tradecraft through their ability to:
Compromise legitimate websites and initially inject obfuscated JavaScript
Rapidly adapt infrastructure when faced with disruption
On new infrastructure, adjust from use of JavaScript redirects to server-side redirects
Technical details
Amazon identified the activity through an analytic it created for APT29 infrastructure, which led to the discovery of the actor-controlled domain names. Through further investigation, Amazon identified the actor compromised various legitimate websites and injected JavaScript that redirected approximately 10% of visitors to these actor-controlled domains. These domains, including findcloudflare[.]com, mimicked Cloudflare verification pages to appear legitimate. The campaign’s ultimate target was Microsoft’s device code authentication flow. There was no compromise of AWS systems, nor was there a direct impact observed on AWS services or infrastructure.
Analysis of the code revealed evasion techniques, including:
Using randomization to only redirect a small percentage of visitors
Employing base64 encoding to hide malicious code
Setting cookies to prevent repeated redirects of the same visitor
Pivoting to new infrastructure when blocked
Image of compromised page, with domain name removed.
Image of compromised page, with domain name removed.
Amazon’s disruption efforts
Amazon remains committed to protecting the security of the internet by actively hunting for and disrupting sophisticated threat actors. We will continue working with industry partners and the security community to share intelligence and mitigate threats. Upon discovering this campaign, Amazon worked quickly to isolate affected EC2 instances, partner with Cloudflare and other providers to disrupt the actor’s domains, and share relevant information with Microsoft.
Despite the actor’s attempts to migrate to new infrastructure, including a move off AWS to another cloud provider, our team continued tracking and disrupting their operations. After our intervention, we observed the actor register additional domains such as cloudflare[.]redirectpartners[.]com, which again attempted to lure victims into Microsoft device code authentication workflows.
Protecting users and organizations
We recommend organizations implement the following protective measures:
For end users:
Be vigilant for suspicious redirect chains, particularly those masquerading as security verification pages.
Always verify the authenticity of device authorization requests before approving them.
Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) on all accounts, similar to how AWS now requires MFA for root accounts.
Be wary of web pages asking you to copy and paste commands or perform actions in Windows Run dialog (Win+R).
This matches the recently documented “ClickFix” technique where attackers trick users into running malicious commands.
For IT administrators:
Follow Microsoft’s security guidance on device authentication flows and consider disabling this feature if not required.
Enforce conditional access policies that restrict authentication based on device compliance, location, and risk factors.
Implement robust logging and monitoring for authentication events, particularly those involving new device authorizations.
Indicators of compromise (IOCs)
findcloudflare[.]com
cloudflare[.]redirectpartners[.]com
Sample JavaScript code
Decoded JavaScript code, with compromised site removed: "[removed_domain]"
Decoded JavaScript code, with compromised site removed: “[removed_domain]”
hole campaign using compromised websites to redirect visitors to malicious infrastructure designed to trick users into authorizing attacker-controlled devices […]
ncsc.gov.uk The NCSC and international partners share technical details of malicious activities and urge organisations to take mitigative actions.
GCHQ’s National Cyber Security Centre and international partners link three China-based companies to campaign targeting foreign governments and critical networks.
Commercial cyber ecosystem with links to the Chinese intelligence services has enabled global malicious activity.
New advisory supports UK organisations in critical sectors bolster their security against China state-sponsored cyber activity
Network defenders urged to proactively hunt for activity and take steps to mitigate threat from attackers exploiting avoidable weaknesses
The UK and international allies have today (Wednesday) publicly linked three technology companies based in China with a global malicious cyber campaign targeting critical networks.
In a new advisory published today, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) – a part of GCHQ - and international partners from twelve other countries have shared technical details about how malicious cyber activities linked with these China-based commercial entities have targeted nationally significant organisations around the world.
Since at least 2021, this activity has targeted organisations in critical sectors including government, telecommunications, transportation, lodging, and military infrastructure globally, with a cluster of activity observed in the UK.
The activities described in the advisory partially overlaps with campaigns previously reported by the cyber security industry most commonly under the name Salt Typhoon.
The data stolen through this activity can ultimately provide the Chinese intelligence services the capability to identify and track targets’ communications and movements worldwide.
The advisory describes how the threat actors have had considerable success taking advantage of known common vulnerabilities rather than relying on bespoke malware or zero-day vulnerabilities to carry out their activities, meaning attacks via these vectors could have been avoided with timely patching.
Organisations of national significance in the UK are encouraged to proactively hunt for malicious activity and implement mitigative actions, including ensuring that edge devices are not exposed to known vulnerabilities and implementing security updates.
NCSC Chief Executive Dr Richard Horne said:
“We are deeply concerned by the irresponsible behaviour of the named commercial entities based in China that has enabled an unrestrained campaign of malicious cyber activities on a global scale.
“It is crucial organisations in targeted critical sectors heed this international warning about the threat posed by cyber actors who have been exploiting publicly known – and so therefore fixable – vulnerabilities.
“In the face of sophisticated threats, network defenders must proactively hunt for malicious activity, as well as apply recommended mitigations based on indicators of compromise and regularly reviewing network device logs for signs of unusual activity.”
The UK has led globally in helping to improve cyber risk management with leading legislation including the Telecommunications (Security) Act 2021 and the associated Code of Practice, for which the NCSC was the technical authority.
The government's forthcoming Cyber Security and Resilience Bill will further strengthen the UK’s cyber defences, protecting the services the public rely on to go about their normal lives.
The NCSC and government partners have previously warned about the growing range of cyber threats facing critical sectors and provides a range of guidance and resources to improve resilience.
The NCSC's Early Warning service provides timely notifications about potential security issues, including known vulnerabilities, and malicious activities affecting users’ networks. All UK organisations can sign up to this free service.
The three China-based technology companies provide cyber-related services to the Chinese intelligence services and are part of a wider commercial ecosystem in China, which includes information security companies, data brokers and hackers for hire.
The named entities are: Sichuan Juxinhe Network Technology Co Ltd, Beijing Huanyu Tianqiong Information Technology Co, and Sichuan Zhixin Ruijie Network Technology Co Ltd.
The NCSC has co-sealed this advisory alongside agencies from the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain.
nytimes.com By Farnaz FassihiRonen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti 2025/08/30
Israel was able to track the movements of key Iranian figures and assassinate them during the 12-day war this spring by following the cellphones carried by members of their security forces.
The meeting was so secret that only the attendees, a handful of top Iranian government officials and military commanders, knew the time and location.
It was June 16, the fourth day of Iran’s war with Israel, and Iran’s Supreme National Security Council gathered for an emergency meeting in a bunker 100 feet below a mountain slope in the western part of Tehran. For days, a relentless Israeli bombing campaign had destroyed military, government and nuclear sites around Iran, and had decimated the top echelon of Iran’s military commanders and nuclear scientists.
The officials, who included President Masoud Pezeshkian, the heads of the judiciary and the intelligence ministry and senior military commanders, arrived in separate cars. None of them carried mobile phones, knowing that Israeli intelligence could track them.
Despite all the precautions, Israeli jets dropped six bombs on top of the bunker soon after the meeting began, targeting the two entrance and exit doors. Remarkably, nobody in the bunker was killed. When the leaders later made their way out of the bunker, they found the bodies of a few guards, killed by the blasts.
The attack threw Iran’s intelligence apparatus into a tailspin, and soon enough Iranian officials discovered a devastating security lapse: The Israelis had been led to the meeting by hacking the phones of bodyguards who had accompanied the Iranian leaders to the site and waited outside.
Israel’s tracking of the guards has not been previously reported. It was one part of a larger effort to penetrate the most tightly guarded circles of Iran’s security and intelligence apparatus that has had officials in Tehran chasing shadows for two months.
According to Iranian and Israeli officials, Iranian security guards’ careless use of mobile phones over several years — including posting on social media — played a central role in allowing Israeli military intelligence to hunt Iranian nuclear scientists and military commanders and the Israeli Air Force to swoop in and kill them with missiles and bombs during the first week of the June war.
“We know senior officials and commanders did not carry phones, but their interlocutors, security guards and drivers had phones; they did not take precautions seriously, and this is how most of them were traced,” said Sasan Karimi, who previously served as the deputy vice president for strategy in Iran’s current government and is now a political analyst and lecturer at Tehran University.
The account of Israel’s strike on the meeting, and the details of how it tracked and targeted Iranian officials and commanders, is based on interviews with five senior Iranian officials, two members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and nine Israeli military and intelligence officials.
The security breakdowns with the bodyguards are just one component of what Iranian officials acknowledge has been a long-running and often successful effort by Israel to use spies and operatives placed around the country as well as technology against Iran, sometimes with devastating effect.
Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Iran and Israel? , and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
Following the most recent conflict, Iran remains focused on hunting down operatives that it fears remain present in the country and the government.
“Infiltration has reached the highest echelons of our decision making,” Mostafa Hashemi Taba, a former vice president and minister, said in an interview with Iranian media in late June.
This month Iran executed a nuclear scientist, Roozbeh Vadi, on allegations of spying for Israel and facilitating the assassination of another scientist. Three senior Iranian officials and a member of the Revolutionary Guards said Iran had quietly arrested or placed under house arrest dozens of people from the military, intelligence and government branches who were suspected of spying for Israel, some of them high-ranking. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied a connection to those so accused.
Spy games between Iran and Israel have been a constant feature of a decades-long shadow war between the two countries, and Israel’s success in June in killing so many important Iranian security figures shows just how much Israel has gained the upper hand.
President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran attending a protest in Tehran on June 22, following the U.S. attacks on nuclear sites in Iran. Mr. Pezeshkian himself escaped an attack on a bunker on June 16.
Credit...
Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Israel had been tracking senior Iranian nuclear scientists since the end of 2022 and had weighed killing them as early as last October but held off to avoid a clash with the Biden administration, Israeli officials said.
From the end of last year until June, what the Israelis called a “decapitation team” reviewed the files of all the scientists in the Iranian nuclear project known to Israel, to decide which they would recommend to kill. The first list contained 400 names. That was reduced to 100, mainly based on material from an Iranian nuclear archive that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, had stolen from Iran in 2018. In the end, Iran said the Israelis focused on and killed 13 scientists.
At the same time, Israel was building its capacity to target and kill senior Iranian military officials under a program called “Operation Red Wedding,” a play on a bloody “Game of Thrones” episode. Brig. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ Aerospace Force, was the first target, one Israeli official said.
Ultimately, Israeli officials said, the basic idea in both operations was to locate 20 to 25 human targets in Iran and hit all of them in the opening strike of the campaign, on the assumption that they would be more careful afterward, making them much harder to hit.
In a video interview with an Iranian journalist, the newly appointed head of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, said that although Israel had human operatives and spies in the country, it had tracked senior officials and scientists and discovered the location of sensitive meetings mostly through advanced technology.
“The enemy gets the majority of its intelligence through technology, satellites and electronic data,” General Vahidi said. “They can find people, get information, their voices, images and zoom in with precise satellites and find the locations.”
From the Israeli side, Iran’s growing awareness of the threat to senior figures came to be seen as an opportunity. Fearing more assassinations on the ground of the sort that Israel had pulled off successfully in the past, the supreme Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered extensive security measures including large contingents of bodyguards and warned against the use of mobile phones and messaging apps like WhatsApp, which is commonly used in Iran.
Those bodyguards, Israel discovered, were not only carrying cellphones but even posting from them on social media.
“Using so many bodyguards is a weakness that we imposed on them, and we were able to take advantage of that,” one Israeli defense official said.
Iranian officials had long suspected that Israel was tracking the movements of senior military commanders and nuclear scientists through their mobile phones. Last year, after Israel detonated bombs hidden inside thousands of pagers carried by Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, Iran banned many of its officials in particularly sensitive jobs from using smartphones, social media and messaging apps.
Smartphones are now completely off limits for senior military commanders, nuclear scientists and government officials.
The protection of senior officials, military commanders and nuclear scientists is the responsibility of an elite brigade within the Revolutionary Guards called Ansar al-Mehdi. The commander in chief of Ansar, appointed last August after the new government came into office, is Gen. Mohamad Javad Assadi, one of the youngest senior commanders in the Guards.
General Assadi had personally warned several senior commanders and a top nuclear scientist, Mohammad Mehdi Tehranchi, that Israel was planning to assassinate them at least a month before they were killed on the first day of the war, according to two senior Iranian officials with knowledge of the conversation. He had also called a meeting with the team leaders of security details asking them to take extra precautions, the officials said.
The cellphone ban initially did not extend to the security guards protecting the officials, scientists and commanders. That changed after Israel’s wave of assassinations on the first day of the war. Guards are now supposed to carry only walkie-talkies. Only team leaders who do not travel with the officials can carry cellphones.
But despite the new rules, according to officials who have held meetings with General Assadi about security, someone violated them and carried a phone to the National Security Council meeting, allowing the Israelis to carry out the pinpoint strike.
Hamzeh Safavi, a political and military analyst whose father is the top military adviser to Ayatollah Khamenei, said that Israel’s technological superiority over Iran was an existential threat. He said Iran had no choice but to conduct a security shakedown, overhaul its protocols and make difficult decisions — including arrests and prosecution of high-level spies.
“We must do whatever it takes to identify and address this threat; we have a major security and intelligence bug and nothing is more urgent than repairing this hole,” Mr. Safavi said in a telephone interview.
Iran’s minister of intelligence said in a statement this month that it had foiled an Israeli assassination attempt on 23 senior officials but did not provide their names or details of their positions and ranks. It said in the months leading up to the war, Iran had discovered and foiled 13 plots by Israel that aimed to kill 35 senior military and government officials. (An Israeli intelligence official disputed the Iranian account, saying that Israel had not been carrying out operations ahead of the surprise attack in June that could have led to heightened alertness on the part of Iran.)
The statement also said that security forces had identified and arrested 21 people on charges of spying for the Mossad and working as field and support operators in at least 11 provinces around Iran.
Iran has also accelerated efforts to recruit its own spies in Israel since the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, which ignited the war in the Gaza Strip and triggered aggressive Israeli military operations in Iran and Lebanon.
Over the past year, Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence service, has arrested dozens of Israelis and charged them with being paid agents of Iran, accused of helping collect intelligence about potential targets for Iranian strikes on Israel.
Israel has made killing Iran’s top nuclear scientists an urgent priority as a way to set back the nation’s nuclear program, even poisoning two young upcoming scientists.
As Iran made steady progress over the years toward enriching its uranium stockpile into near-weapons grade material, Israeli military and intelligence officials concluded that the campaign of sabotage and explosions in the enrichment apparatus, which the Mossad had been engaged in for many years, had only a marginal impact.
In 2021, according to three Israeli security officials, the focus turned to what Israeli officials called “the weapon group” — a cadre of Iranian scientists who the Israelis believed met regularly to work on building a device to trigger the enriched uranium and cause a nuclear explosion. This is one of the most technologically difficult parts of a nuclear project. (Iran has said its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, and the U.N.’s atomic watchdog and American intelligence agencies have long assessed that Iran has not weaponized its nuclear project.)
It was this group of scientists that became the focus of what Israel called Operation Narnia, the military plan to kill off scientists during the war’s early days this spring.
By the time of the June 16 national security meeting of top Iranian officials, Israel had already killed a number of high-profile figures associated with the nuclear program, including Mr. Tehranchi and Fereydoun Abbasi, another nuclear scientist, both killed just days earlier. The cellphones of their bodyguards helped Israel target all of them.
But Israel was also targeting a wide variety of Iranian leaders, including the heads of government branches at the national security meeting, and killed at least 30 senior military commanders through strikes during the war.
General Hajizadeh, the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ air force, assembled his leadership team, accompanied by their security units, at the very start of the war to monitor intelligence about possible Israeli strikes. Israeli warplanes swooped in and carried out a pinpoint strike on the bunker where General Hajizadeh had taken refuge, killing him and other top commanders.
Mr. Hajizadeh’s son Alireza has said that his father took extra caution with phones. On a video published on Iranian media, he said that “when my father wanted to discuss something important he would tell us to take the phones and smart devices out of the room and place it far away.”
The ability to track the bodyguards also helped lead the Israelis to the June 16 meeting. The attendees, in addition to Mr. Pezeshkian, the Iranian president, included the speaker of Parliament, Gen. Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, and the head of the judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei. Also on hand were the ministers of the interior, defense and intelligence and military commanders, some brand-new to their jobs after their bosses had been killed in previous strikes.
The attack destroyed the room, which soon filled with debris, smoke and dust, and the power was cut, according to accounts that emerged afterward. Mr. Pezeshkian found a narrow opening through the debris, where a sliver of light and oxygen was coming through, he has said publicly.
Three senior officials said the president dug through the debris with his bare hands, eventually making enough of a space for everyone to crawl out one by one. Mr. Pezeshkian had a minor leg injury from a shrapnel wound and the minister of interior was taken to the hospital for respiratory distress, officials said.
“There was only one hole, and we saw there was air coming and we said, we won’t suffocate. Life hinges on one second,” Mr. Pezeshkian said recently, recounting the attack in a meeting with senior clerics, according to a video published in Iranian media. He said if Israel had succeeded in killing the country’s top officials it would have created chaos in the country.
“People,” he said, “would have lost hope.”
infosecurity-magazine James Coker
Deputy Editor, Infosecurity Magazine 29 Aug 2025
Recorded Future highlighted the vast capabilities of state actors to rapidly weaponize newly disclosed vulnerabilities for geopolitical purposes
The majority (53%) of attributed vulnerability exploits in the first half 2025 were conducted by state-sponsored actors for strategic, geopolitical purposes, according to a new report by Recorded Future’s Insikt Group.
The researchers said the findings demonstrate the growing ability of well-resourced state-sponsored groups to weaponize flaws rapidly following disclosure. Geopolitical purposes, such as espionage and surveillance, are the key motives for these threat actors.
“The significant state-sponsored involvement also implies that these threats are not just random or opportunistic but often targeted and persistent campaigns aiming at specific sectors or high-value systems,” they noted.
The majority of state-sponsored campaigns were conducted by Chinese state-sponsored actors. These groups primarily targeted edge infrastructure and enterprise solutions, a tactic that has continued since 2024.
Read now: Chinese Tech Firms Linked to Salt Typhoon Espionage Campaigns
The suspected China-linked group UNC5221 exploited the highest number of vulnerabilities in H1 2025. It demonstrated a preference for Ivanti products, including Endpoint Manager Mobile, Connect Secure and Policy Secure.
Financially motivated groups accounted for the remaining 47% of vulnerability exploits – 27% were made up of those actors involved in theft and fraud but not linked to ransomware and 20% attributed to ransomware and extortion groups.
The researchers predicted that the exploitation of edge security appliances, remote access tools and other gateway-layer software will remain a top priority for both state-sponsored and financially-motivated groups.
“The strategic value of these systems – acting as intermediaries for encrypted traffic and privileged access – makes them high-reward targets,” they noted.
Microsoft was the most targeted vendor, with the tech giant’s products accounting for 17% of exploitations.
Most Vulnerability Exploits Required No Authentication
Insikt Group’s H1 2025 Malware and Vulnerability Trends report, published on August 28, found that the total number of disclosed common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) grew 16% year-over-year.
Attackers exploited 161 distinct vulnerabilities in the six-month period, up from 136 in H1 2024.
Of the 161 flaws, 69% required no authentication to exploit, while 48% could be exploited remotely over a network.
“This heavy tilt toward unauthenticated, remote exploits means that attacks can be launched directly from the internet against vulnerable hosts, with no credentials or insider access needed,” the researchers commented.
Additionally, 30% of the exploited CVEs enabled remote code execution (RCE), which often grants an attacker full control over the target system.
ClickFix Becomes a Favored Initial Access Technique
The report observed that ransomware actors adopted new initial access techniques in H1 2025.
This included a significant increase in ClickFix social engineering attacks. ClickFix involves the use of a fake error or verification message to manipulate victims into copying and pasting a malicious script and then running it.
The tactic preys on users’ desire to fix problems themselves rather than alerting their IT team or anyone else. Therefore, it is effective at bypassing security protections as the victim infects themselves.
The Interlock gang was observed using ClickFix in campaigns in January and February 2025.
The group has also leveraged FileFix in later attacks. This tactic is an evolution on ClickFix, where users are tricked into pasting a malicious file path into a Windows File Explorer’s address bar rather than using a dialog box.
Inskit group assess that the success of ClickFix means this method will remain a favored initial access technique through the rest of 2025 unless widespread mitigations reduce its effectiveness.
Post-compromise, ransomware groups have increased their use of endpoint detection and response (EDR) evasion via bring-your-own-installer (BYOI) techniques, and custom payloads using just-in-time (JIT) hooking and memory injection to bypass detection.