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The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), on July 22, 2025, added two Microsoft SharePoint flaws, CVE-2025-49704 and CVE-2025-49706, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. To that end, Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies are required to remediate identified vulnerabilities by July 23, 2025. "CISA is aware of active exploitation of a spoofing and RCE vulnerability chain involving CVE-2025-49706 and CVE-2025-49704, enabling unauthorized access to on-premise SharePoint servers," the agency said in an updated advisory. The inclusion of the two shortcomings, a spoofing vulnerability and a remote code execution vulnerability collectively tracked as ToolShell, to the KEV catalog comes after Microsoft revealed that Chinese hacking groups like Linen Typhoon and Violet Typhoon leveraged these flaws to breach on-premises SharePoint servers since July 7, 2025. As of writing, the tech...

Microsoft has formally tied the exploitation of security flaws in internet-facing SharePoint Server instances to two Chinese hacking groups called Linen Typhoon and Violet Typhoon as early as July 7, 2025 , corroborating earlier reports. The tech giant said it also observed a third China-based threat actor, which it tracks as Storm-2603, weaponizing the flaws as well to obtain initial access to target organizations. "With the rapid adoption of these exploits, Microsoft assesses with high confidence that threat actors will continue to integrate them into their attacks against unpatched on-premises SharePoint systems," the tech giant said in a report published today. A brief description of the threat activity clusters is below - Linen Typhoon (aka APT27 , Bronze Union, Emissary Panda, Iodine, Lucky Mouse, Red Phoenix, and UNC215), which is active since 2012 and has been previously attributed to malware families like SysUpdate, HyperBro, and PlugX Violet Typhoon (aka ...

The recently disclosed critical Microsoft SharePoint vulnerability has been under exploitation as early as July 7, 2025, according to findings from Check Point Research. The cybersecurity company said it observed first exploitation attempts targeting an unnamed major Western government, with the activity intensifying on July 18 and 19, spanning government, telecommunications, and software sectors in North America and Western Europe. Check Point also said the exploitation efforts originated from three different IP addresses – 104.238.159[.]149, 107.191.58[.]76, and 96.9.125[.]147 – one of which was previously tied to the weaponization of security flaws in Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) appliances ( CVE-2025-4427 and CVE-2025-4428 ). "We're witnessing an urgent and active threat: a critical zero-day in SharePoint on-prem is being exploited in the wild, putting thousands of global organizations at risk," Lotem Finkelstein, Director of Threat Intelligence at Chec...

The China-linked cyber espionage group tracked as APT41 has been attributed to a new campaign targeting government IT services in the African region. "The attackers used hardcoded names of internal services, IP addresses, and proxy servers embedded within their malware," Kaspersky researchers Denis Kulik and Daniil Pogorelov said . "One of the C2s [command-and-control servers] was a captive SharePoint server within the victim's infrastructure." APT41 is the moniker assigned to a prolific Chinese nation-state hacking group that's known for targeting organizations spanning multiple sectors, including telecom and energy providers, educational institutions, healthcare organizations and IT energy companies in more than three dozen countries. What makes the campaign noteworthy is its focus on Africa, which, as the Russian cybersecurity vendor noted, "had experienced the least activity" from this specific threat actor. That said, the findings line u...

A Chinese national has been arrested in Milan, Italy, for his alleged links to a state-sponsored hacking group known as Silk Typhoon and for carrying out cyber attacks against American organizations and government agencies. The 33-year-old, Xu Zewei , has been charged with nine counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to cause damage to and obtain information by unauthorized access to protected computers, as well as committing aggravated identity theft. Details of the arrest were first reported by Italian media. Xu is alleged to have been involved in the U.S. computer intrusions between February 2020 and June 2021, including a mass attack spree that leveraged then-zero-day flaws in Microsoft Exchange Server, a cluster of activity the Windows maker designed as Hafnium . The suspect is also accused of participating in China's espionage efforts during the COVID-19 pandemic, attempting to gain access to vaccine research at various U.S. universities, including the University of Texas....

Threat hunters have discovered a network of more than 1,000 compromised small office and home office (SOHO) devices that have been used to facilitate a prolonged cyber espionage infrastructure campaign for China-nexus hacking groups. The Operational Relay Box (ORB) network has been codenamed LapDogs by SecurityScorecard's STRIKE team. "The LapDogs network has a high concentration of victims across the United States and Southeast Asia, and is slowly but steadily growing in size," the cybersecurity company said in a technical report published this week. Other regions where the infections are prevalent include Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, with victims spanning IT, networking, real estate, and media sectors. Active infections span devices and services from Ruckus Wireless, ASUS, Buffalo Technology, Cisco-Linksys, Cross DVR, D-Link, Microsoft, Panasonic, and Synology.  LapDogs' beating heart is a custom backdoor called ShortLeash that's engineered...

A China-linked threat actor known as Mustang Panda has been attributed to a new cyber espionage campaign directed against the Tibetan community. The spear-phishing attacks leveraged topics related to Tibet, such as the 9th World Parliamentarians' Convention on Tibet (WPCT), China's education policy in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), and a recently published book by the 14th Dalai Lama, according to IBM X-Force. The cybersecurity division of the technology company said it observed the campaign earlier this month, with the attacks leading to the deployment of a known Mustang Panda malware called PUBLOAD . It's tracking the threat actor under the name Hive0154. The attack chains employ Tibet-themed lures to distribute a malicious archive containing a benign Microsoft Word file, along with articles reproduced by Tibetan websites and photos from WPCT, into opening an executable that's disguised as a document. The executable, as observed in prior Mustang Panda atta...

A new campaign has been observed leveraging fake websites advertising popular software such as WPS Office, Sogou, and DeepSeek to deliver Sainbox RAT and the open-source Hidden rootkit. The activity has been attributed with medium confidence to a Chinese hacking group called Silver Fox (aka Void Arachne), citing similarities in tradecraft with previous campaigns attributed to the threat actor. The phishing websites ("wpsice[.]com") have been found to distribute malicious MSI installers in the Chinese language, indicating that the targets of the campaign are Chinese speakers. "The malware payloads include the Sainbox RAT, a variant of Gh0st RAT, and a variant of the open-source Hidden rootkit," Netskope Threat Labs researcher Leandro Fróes said . This is not the first time the threat actor has resorted to this modus operandi. In July 2024, eSentire detailed a campaign that targeted Chinese-speaking Windows users with fake Google Chrome sites to deliver Gh0st...

The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have issued an advisory warning of cyber attacks mounted by the China-linked Salt Typhoon actors to breach major global telecommunications providers as part of a cyber espionage campaign. The attackers exploited a critical Cisco IOS XE software ( CVE-2023-20198 , CVSS score: 10.0) to access configuration files from three network devices registered to a Canadian telecommunications company in mid-February 2025. The threat actors are also said to have modified at least one of the files to configure a Generic Routing Encapsulation ( GRE ) tunnel, enabling traffic collection from the network. The name of the targeted company was not disclosed. Stating that the targeting likely goes beyond the telecommunications sector, the agencies said the targeting of Canadian devices may permit the threat actors to collect information from the compromised networks and use them as leverage to breach additiona...

The Czech Republic on Wednesday formally accused a threat actor associated with the People's Republic of China (PRC) of targeting its Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In a public statement, the government said it identified China as the culprit behind a malicious campaign targeting one of the unclassified networks of the Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The extent of the breach is presently not known. "The malicious activity [...] lasted from 2022 and affected an institution designated as Czech critical infrastructure," it added . The attack has been attributed to a state-sponsored threat actor tracked as APT31 , which also overlaps with threat clusters known as Altaire, Bronze Vinewood, Judgement Panda, PerplexedGoblin, RedBravo, Red Keres, and Violet Typhoon (formerly Zirconium). The hacking group, publicly associated with the Ministry of State Security (MSS) and the Hubei State Security Department, is assessed to be active since at least 2010, per the U.S. Departme...

Threat hunters have exposed a novel campaign that makes use of search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning techniques to target employee mobile devices and facilitate payroll fraud. The activity, first detected by ReliaQuest in May 2025 targeting an unnamed customer in the manufacturing sector, is characterized by the use of fake login pages to access the employee payroll portal and redirect paychecks into accounts under the threat actor's control. "The attacker's infrastructure used compromised home office routers and mobile networks to mask their traffic, dodging detection and slipping past traditional security measures," the cybersecurity company said in an analysis published last week. "The adversary specifically targeted employee mobile devices with a fake website impersonating the organization's login page. Armed with stolen credentials, the adversary gained access to the organization's payroll portal, changed direct deposit information, and re...

A Chinese-speaking threat actor tracked as UAT-6382 has been linked to the exploitation of a now-patched remote-code-execution vulnerability in Trimble Cityworks to deliver Cobalt Strike and VShell. "UAT-6382 successfully exploited CVE-2025-0944, conducted reconnaissance, and rapidly deployed a variety of web shells and custom-made malware to maintain long-term access," Cisco Talos researchers Asheer Malhotra and Brandon White said in an analysis published today. "Upon gaining access, UAT-6382 expressed a clear interest in pivoting to systems related to utility management." The network security company said it observed the attacks targeting enterprise networks of local governing bodies in the United States starting January 2025. CVE-2025-0944 (CVSS score: 8.6) refers to the deserialization of untrusted data vulnerability affecting the GIS-centric asset management software that could enable remote code execution. The vulnerability, since patched, was added to ...

A recently patched pair of security flaws affecting Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) software has been exploited by a China-nexus threat actor to target a wide range of sectors across Europe, North America, and the Asia-Pacific region. The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2025-4427 (CVSS score: 5.3) and CVE-2025-4428 (CVSS score: 7.2), could be chained to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable device without requiring any authentication. They were addressed by Ivanti last week. Now, according to a report from EclecticIQ, the vulnerability chain has been abused by UNC5221 , a Chinese cyber espionage group known for its targeting of edge network appliances since at least 2023. Most recently, the hacking crew was also attributed to exploitation efforts targeting SAP NetWeaver instances susceptible to CVE-2025-31324. The Dutch cybersecurity company said the earliest exploitation activity dates back to May 15, 2025, with the attacks targeting healthcare, telecommunications, avia...

Threat hunters have exposed the tactics of a China-aligned threat actor called UnsolicitedBooker that targeted an unnamed international organization in Saudi Arabia with a previously undocumented backdoor dubbed MarsSnake. ESET, which first discovered the hacking group's intrusions targeting the entity in March 2023 and again a year later, said the activity leverages spear-phishing emails using flight tickets as lures to infiltrate targets of interest. "UnsolicitedBooker sends spear-phishing emails, generally with a flight ticket as the decoy, and its targets include governmental organizations in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East," the company said in its latest APT Activity Report for the period ranging from October 2024 to March 2025. Attacks mounted by the threat actor are characterized by the use of backdoors like Chinoxy, DeedRAT, Poison Ivy, and BeRAT, which are widely used by Chinese hacking crews. UnsolicitedBooker is assessed to share overlaps with a clu...

At least two different cybercrime groups BianLian and RansomExx are said to have exploited a recently disclosed security flaw in SAP NetWeaver tracked as CVE-2025-31324 , indicating that multiple threat actors are taking advantage of the bug. Cybersecurity firm ReliaQuest, in a new update published today, said it uncovered evidence suggesting involvement from the BianLian data extortion crew and the RansomExx ransomware family, which is traced by Microsoft under the moniker Storm-2460. BianLian is assessed to be involved in at least one incident based on infrastructure links to IP addresses previously identified as attributed to the e-crime group. "We identified a server at 184[.]174[.]96[.]74 hosting reverse proxy services initiated by the rs64.exe executable," the company said. "This server is related to another IP, 184[.]174[.]96[.]70, operated by the same hosting provider. The second IP had previously been flagged as a command-and-control (C2) server associat...

A recently disclosed critical security flaw impacting SAP NetWeaver is being exploited by multiple China-nexus nation-state actors to target critical infrastructure networks. "Actors leveraged CVE-2025-31324 , an unauthenticated file upload vulnerability that enables remote code execution (RCE)," EclecticIQ researcher Arda Büyükkaya said in an analysis published today. Targets of the campaign include natural gas distribution networks, water and integrated waste management utilities in the United Kingdom, medical device manufacturing plants oil and gas exploration and production companies in the United States, and government ministries in Saudi Arabia that are responsible for investment strategy and financial regulation. The findings are based on a publicly exposed directory uncovered on attacker-controlled infrastructure ("15.204.56[.]106") that contained event logs capturing the activities across multiple compromised systems. The Dutch cybersecurity company h...