From Log4j to IIS, China's Hackers Turn Legacy Bugs into Global Espionage Tools
Nov 07, 2025
Cyber Espionage / Malware
A China-linked threat actor has been attributed to a cyber attack targeting an U.S. non-profit organization with an aim to establish long-term persistence, as part of broader activity aimed at U.S. entities that are linked to or involved in policy issues. The organization, according to a report from Broadcom's Symantec and Carbon Black teams, is "active in attempting to influence U.S. government policy on international issues." The attackers managed to gain access to the network for several weeks in April 2025. The first sign of activity occurred on April 5, 2025, when mass scanning efforts were detected against a server by leveraging various well-known exploits, including CVE-2022-26134 (Atlassian), CVE-2021-44228 (Apache Log4j), CVE-2017-9805 (Apache Struts), and CVE-2017-17562 (GoAhead Web Server). No further actions were recorded until April 16, when the attacks executed several curl commands to test internet connectivity, after which the Windows command-lin...
