Google and an assortment of partners shut down a botnet that an approved Android device manufacturer purposefully deployed across more than 1.3 million TV set-top boxes, the company said Monday. 

Videostrong Technology Co., a China-based Android original equipment and device manufacturer, implanted a backdoor into multiple devices it sold. Those backdoors established XCPE, an expansive botnet that cybercriminals used to conduct ad fraud, steal data and route malicious traffic through residential proxy networks, according to a Google Threat Intelligence Group report.

Google took legal action to shut down the domains and servers Videostrong used to control the botnet. The company also took down command-and-control domains that more than a dozen malware families ran as modules through the XCPE backdoor, claiming it disrupted access to at least 10 million additional compromised devices from various manufacturers.

Videostrong sold Android devices with pre-installed malware for years, slipping by Google’s security tests by loading the malicious code after the device’s first boot. “The XCPE operators constantly evolved its configurations to evade Google’s pre and post-launch detections,” Charley Snyder, head of disruption operations at GTIG, told CyberScoop.

Snyder declined to say when or how Google first became aware of the approved vendor running a botnet on Android-powered devices. 

“We found this malicious software built directly into many different device models and brands over multiple years, supported by dedicated infrastructure and constantly evolving configurations to evade detection and manage their affiliates,” Google researchers wrote in the report. “We believe this campaign wasn’t an isolated rogue insider or a development oversight.”

Google banned Videostrong and any future subsidiaries from building or selling certified Android devices, and said it changed its review process to detect and stop similar activities in the future. Yet, Snyder said the company isn’t sharing specifics on these changes because it doesn’t want to provide threat actors insights that might help them circumvent these additional protections.

Most of the devices comprising the XCPE botnet were Android TV set-top boxes, but researchers also observed infected Android-based telehealth devices, karaoke machines and digital signs. 

“Without users’ knowledge or consent, infected devices were offered as a distribution mechanism for a wide array of criminal actors,” researchers wrote in the report. “This led to a variety of malicious activities being conducted on and through the devices, including ad-fraud, data exfiltration, and routing malicious network traffic through the devices.”

The botnet spanned more than 170 countries, with the largest concentration of infected devices based in Malaysia, Brazil, Iraq, Mexico and Taiwan, according to TrendAI researchers. Nearly 44,000 infected devices were based in the United States between June and October.

Google also partnered with Japan’s National Police Agency, Lumen Technologies, Human Security, Plume and Synthient to study and disrupt the botnet. 

The company said the dismantling of XCPE “seriously impacted over a dozen malicious actors,” yet it warned that the underlying market for backdoors, ad fraud and residential proxy networks are resilient and operating as an interconnected supply chain.

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A China state-backed threat group is using ARTEX, the automated agentic AI penetration testing framework, to achieve remarkable speed, scale and success in a campaign that already compromised about 140 sensitive targets in 11 days, according to CrowdStrike. 

The threat group, which CrowdStrike tracks as Vapor Panda, targeted more than 200 organizations in at least 14 countries since Oct. 17, the security company said in a threat report Thursday. Targets and confirmed victims include foreign ministries, a European country’s presidency and prime minister’s office, defense and intelligence agencies; 19 U.S.-based organizations in the pharmaceutical, semiconductor, defense, nuclear and financial sectors; and telecom providers in the United States, Belgium and the Philippines. 

CrowdStrike told CyberScoop about 70% of Vapor Panda’s targets were confirmed compromised or had evidence indicating moderate confidence of a successful intrusion. 

Vapor Panda’s use of ARTEX, paired with DeepSeek, allowed it to accomplish more tasks with shocking speed — requests occurring as often as every 10 seconds — and pursue multiple attack paths concurrently. 

“This is the first time that we’re seeing an agentic adversary nation-state threat actor at this scale, and I think that this is probably, unfortunately, something we’ll see more of,” Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop.

Hands-on-keyboard activity tracked by CrowdStrike for the past 15 years typically involved up to 40 commands per hour. “Now, with ARTEX, we could see it exceed 1,500 commands an hour,” Meyers said.

“If you diversify that across 200 targets, it costs them very little to run a mass-exploitation campaign and drop a websell,” he added. “They can hit more targets in a faster period of time.”

Vapor Panda’s broad-access campaign, which remains active, has targeted think tanks and government agencies spanning defense, justice, finance and diplomacy.

“I would characterize it as a diverse operational mission that tends to focus on sectors and geographies that Beijing considers economically or politically important,” Meyers said.

The active campaign attributed to Vapor Panda is separate from the ARTEX activity Microsoft Threat Intelligence attributed to Storm-0940 earlier this month, including a supply-chain attack targeting ConnectWise customers. 

Adversarial use of AI is relatively new, yet also quickly becoming the new normal, Meyers said. “We’re scrambling because we’re seeing so many of these agentic adversaries.”

Agentic AI use for malicious purposes is growing month-over-month at a rate of almost threefold. CrowdStrike observed roughly 45 agentic adversary attacks in September and it’s already at 126 for October, and climbing.

Adversarial use of agentic AI isn’t an intractable problem, but rather another reminder that organizations need visibility into their endpoints, identities and cross-domain capabilities, Meyers said. 

These attacks aren’t showcasing anything new, “it’s just doing it at a speed and scale that we’re unaccustomed to,” he said. “It’s not hopeless, but you’ve got to take action. You can’t put your head in the sand.”

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A defense contractor with top secret security clearance pleaded guilty to aiding North Korea’s remote worker scheme by allowing co-conspirators to use his identity to apply for jobs, including positions with national security implications, the Justice Department said Wednesday. 

John Allen Kurrle Jr. participated in a short-lived but prolific conspiracy that spanned at least 88 job applications at U.S.-based companies, resulting in nine job offers, according to court records.

The 62-year-old allowed co-conspirators to use his identity and government clearance for prospective sensitive work, often with U.S. government contractors. The nine job offers Kurrle’s co-conspirators received between June and October 2025 had annual salary ranges of $120,000 to $190,000.

The scheme had a limited success rate. The longest and most lucrative job a co-conspirator landed under Kurrle’s identity lasted about three weeks, netting a total pay of $4,800.

His identity was also used to gain employment as a software engineer at a Ventura, California-based company to work on a generative AI project for a component of the U.S. military. The company sent a laptop to Kurrle’s residence in Gainesville, Virginia, where he received and hosted laptops shipped by multiple victim companies, enabling co-conspirators to remotely access the devices from outside the United States.

Yet, during a video call to verify employment eligibility, the company noticed that the person who appeared on the video call did not match Kurrle’s age or physical characteristics, according to court records. The unnamed company terminated the employment of Kurrle’s co-conspirator before he did any work on the military contract and Kurrle shipped the laptop back to the company. 

The company paid Kurrle’s co-conspirator almost $2,200 for 32 hours of onboarding, which Kurrle is now ordered to pay in restitution along with the $4,800 received from the other company. 

Kurrle also, as part of his plea agreement, admitted to using the identity of a third person, without their consent, to apply for some remote work positions. He doesn’t dispute that the scheme likely benefitted North Korea, but claims he wasn’t aware of the connections to North Korea during the duration of his involvement in the conspiracy.

Michael Barnhart, nation state investigator at DTEX, said researchers previously identified Kurrle as a facilitator for North Korea’s remote worker scheme. Yet, until recently, he wasn’t sure if Kurrle was a victim or impersonated. 

The case underscores North Korea’s efforts to gain access to roles with a strategic intelligence requirement, as it focuses on contractor roles because those present the path of least resistance.

Kurrle joins a growing list of people who have been charged or jailed for supporting the North Korea regime’s scheme that generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually for the country’s military and organizations involved in its weapons programs.

Authorities have been cracking down on the malicious insider activity by seizing cryptocurrency linked to the theft, and targeting U.S.-based facilitators who provided forged or stolen identities and hosted laptop farms for North Korean operatives. 

Some of that money is also funneling through a web of front companies and intermediaries, including sanctioned entities, that partly fund Russia’s war effort against Ukraine, DTEX said in a report in July. This includes manufacturing weapons and supplying them to Russia’s military, according to the security firm.

The countermeasures are stacking up, but the scheme is widespread and has infiltrated an undetermined number of businesses, including hundreds of Fortune 500 companies.

Federal judges previously sentenced other people to prison for their involvement in the scheme, including Matthew Issac Knoot and Erick Ntekereze Prince; Keija Wang and Zhenxing Wang; Audricus Phagnasay, Jason Salazar and Alexander Paul Travis; Oleksandr Didenko and Christina Chapman. 

Kurrle pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and faces up to 20 years in prison upon sentencing, which is currently scheduled for Jan. 28, 2027.

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Authorities seized the domain of Virtualine, a bulletproof hosting provider that cybercriminals used to commit a large-scale sextortion scheme, ransomware, data theft, malware hosting and money laundering, the Justice Department said Tuesday. 

Virtualine facilitated prolific criminal activity, including the distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), the Justice Department said. The Russian-speaking bulletproof hosting provider was among the most active this year in crypto-related crime in particular, researchers said. 

The site and its associated infrastructure stands out among the dozens of bulletproof hosting providers currently tracked by TRM Labs. “It was not among the largest by total inflows, but it received the most illicit-attributed value in 2026 to date,” the blockchain and cryptocrime research firm wrote in a blog post.

Virtualine received almost one-fifth of all illicit-attributed inflow among bulletproof hosting providers tracked by TRM this year to date.

A Russian drug marketplace accounted for nearly 44% of the direct payments Virtualine received from customers and attributed counterparties so far this year, according to TRM. A sextortion scheme accounted for nearly 17% of direct payments to Virtualine, followed by a cryptocurrency mixer at almost 13%, ransomware at nearly 5%, cybercrime services at 3% and malware at 2%.

“Virtualine is another example of Russia’s illicit economy at work: darknet markets, ransomware groups, non-compliant exchanges, and brokers all feeding the same ecosystem,” Ari Redbord, global head of policy at TRM Labs, said in a prepared statement. 

“Bulletproof hosting is the connective tissue. Seizing a domain matters, but the blockchain record doesn’t disappear with it. It shows who is paying, who is getting paid, and where they go next,” he added. 

Virtualine attracted many criminals as customers. Ransomware groups, including Coinbase Cartel, The Gentlemen, INC, DragonForce and Qilin all paid the site’s operators, according to TRM. The bulletproof hosting provider also received payments from the StealC infostealer, the Matanbuchu loader, bot and malware-distribution services and sites linked to CSAM. 

The FBI and prosecutors got a court order to seize Virtualine’s primary domain, which was also known as Secury, Massgod, Spamhouse, Lanedo and Omegatech.

Officials said Virtualine continued hosting services for a customer that distributed CSAM and a hack-for-hire service after it received numerous notices from law enforcement in Germany, Canada, Australia, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and a victim’s attorney.

TRM underscores that Virtualine was disrupted, but not completely shut down. “A domain seizure disrupts how customers find and access a service,” researchers wrote. “It does not, by itself, establish that the operator has stopped working, or that customers have lost access to all underlying infrastructure.”

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Volt Typhoon, a China-government backed hacking group that has infiltrated America’s critical infrastructure networks for years, has consistently built and dismantled ephemeral malicious infrastructure to burrow into hundreds of sensitive systems undetected, Lumen Technologies’ Black Lotus Labs said in a Wednesday report.

The covert access operation that researchers call “Silent Train” isn’t a standalone network, but rather a series of compromised small office home office (SOHO) routers, internet of things (IoT) devices and enterprise infrastructure that Volt Typhoon has rapidly rotated through since late 2023. 

The Chinese threat group has used this chain of short-lived compromised infrastructure to exploit additional vulnerabilities, including zero-days, in network edge devices and gain deeper, persistent access into victim networks, researchers said. 

“Individual chains are assembled and dismantled every day, with infrastructure continually refreshed,” Michael Horka, principal information security engineer at Black Lotus Labs, told CyberScoop. “Volt Typhoon demonstrated a repeatable capability to rebuild a new chain with different infrastructure in less than two minutes, making the number of nodes at any one moment effectively close to zero.”

Black Lotus Labs has notified hundreds of victims since it first identified Silent Train activity, including telecom providers, government entities, defense contractors, communication services, universities and IT firms. Other victims spanning critical infrastructure include organizations in the water, energy, transportation, maritime, rail, aviation and emergency services sectors.

“The ephemeral nature of the framework means our observations should not be interpreted as a complete census of Volt Typhoon activity,” said Horka, who also was the lead researcher on the report.

The nation-state group’s investment in operational security and preserving access is remarkable, according to Black Lotus Labs.

“We observed infrastructure assembled in under two minutes, sessions averaging roughly four hours, extensive cleanup, compartmentalization and continued development of new access vectors,” Horka said. “That is considerable effort devoted not even to get into their end targets, but purely to making important operations difficult to discover and trace.”

Volt Typhoon relied more heavily on Silent Train after the FBI and Justice Department disrupted the KV Botnet in early 2024, researchers said. Earlier this year, U.S. and global authorities warned about a widespread shift in Chinese hacking groups’ use of covert networks riding on compromised common devices.

The reach of those efforts is extensive and ongoing. Volt Typhoon has exploited and abused more than 27 device classes in Silent Train operations, including edge devices, enterprise management tools, identity and access management systems, networking infrastructure and other technologies. 

“The diversity matters, but the discipline matters even more,” Horka said. “Specific device types were consistently reserved for particular positions in the chain. It operated less like a collection of randomly compromised devices and more like an organized inventory of capabilities.”

The threat group has successfully compromised devices and technologies from Fortinet, Cisco, ManageEngine, Ivanti, F5, Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, ServiceNow, TP-Link, Netgear and ArcGIS, researchers said. Black Lotus Labs also observed confirmed zero-day campaigns targeting Versa Director, N-Able N-Central, Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN and VeloCloud Orchestrator. 

“The exploitation patterns, victimology, and geographic targeting observed throughout our investigation point to a sustained focus on communications, defense, government, and critical infrastructure environments of enduring strategic value,” Black Lotus Labs researchers wrote in the report. “Through repeated targeting of centralized management platforms and control-plane technologies, Silent Train shows how Volt Typhoon systematically pursues and preserves access to some of the most consequential networks in the United States.”

Silent Train’s ephemerality and operational discipline means it can’t be measured in size. These attributes also make it “fundamentally difficult to disrupt because there isn’t one network to take down,” Horka said. 

“What exists today will be completely different tomorrow,” he added. “You can try to remove individual pieces, but removing the actor’s ability to continuously rebuild them is a much harder problem to solve.”

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Even OpenAI is admitting there is a lot of AI slop in the security space. 

An executive for the frontier AI company said Tuesday that AI-generated vulnerability reports are overwhelming open-source maintainers, leading some to stop accepting submissions as the workload exceeds their capacity to review them.

Michael Aiello, OpenAI’s cyber executive in residence, described the problem during a question-and-answer session Tuesday at the DataTribe Challenge in Washington, D.C., when he was asked how he viewed OpenAI’s Patch the Planet program versus open-source maintainers banning AI-based submissions because of concerns about quality and clarity. 

“It’s an ecosystem problem where that [maintainer] is just not going to respond to hundreds and hundreds of AI-submitted vulnerabilities,” Aiello said. 

He contrasted the volume against his company’s own program, which partners with security research organizations to identify vulnerabilities, develop fixes and help bring them into the affected projects. According to the company’s website, 661 patches have been developed and tested, with 458 of them accepted by maintainers for inclusion in the projects they oversee. 

However, Aiello said those involved with Daybreak often coordinate with maintainers, as opposed to just sending a message into GitHub and hoping for the best. 

He further described the broader burden on maintainers, who are often tasked with running through hundreds of AI-generated reports to determine validity, the security implications and evaluate the proposed fix.

“In most cases, they’re likely real bugs of some degree,” he said. “It’s, ‘Are they critical bugs?’ And are they bugs worth the time of the maintainers?…The result is they’ve just stopped taking” submissions.

Aiello further laid out advice for those that do create vulnerability disclosures for open-source maintainers, including more work in establishing the quality of the finding, writing an understandable report and allocating resources to coordinate disclosure once a report is filed.

“Make sure they’re really high quality, make sure it’s consumable and readable by a single person, and then spend your own resources coordinating vulnerability disclosure,” he said. “You need to now coordinate the vulnerability disclosure across the whole ecosystem, which is itself another project.”

Aiello used OpenAI’s work on the recent PHP vulnerabilities as an example of that coordination. He said a partner research organization discovered the flaw, and OpenAI worked with the PHP Foundation to validate it, develop a fix and coordinate its release.

“You have to work with response partners, and you have to work with the operators to actually issue the patch,” he said.

The process involved coordinating with a broad group of organizations, extending the work from technical review through patch release. Aiello acknowledged difficulties in carrying out the entire process.

“Now, did it go perfectly? No,” he said. “We’re learning as we do this over time.”

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Alarm bells ratcheted up yet again about an AI-discovered vulnerability that could — if exploited in the wild — destabilize vast stretches of the internet. 

The critical defect — CVE-2026-111497 — affects the Google-developed Brotli decompression library that’s bundled into many components, applications and cloud services riding on open-source software. The buffer overflow vulnerability, which OpenAI Codex Security discovered and Node.js disclosed in a Oct. 21 security advisory, can trigger system crashes and remote code execution. 

Researchers haven’t observed any active exploitation of the defect in real networks, but concerns are mounting. Multiple vendors and software packages, including Microsoft and Python, that rely on vulnerable versions of Brotli have rushed emergency patches out to address the risk of exploitation in their respective systems.

Wiz researchers warned that “91% of cloud environments have resources vulnerable to CVE-2026-111497 and 82% of cloud environments have publicly exposed Node.js instances.”

The attack surface is “extremely broad and vast, but much of the impact of exploitation depends entirely on its implementation and how it is used within that piece of software,” said Jake Knott, head of threat intelligence at watchTowr.

Christiaan Beek, vice president at Rapid7 Intelligence, said the Brotli vulnerability is especially concerning because it’s effectively hiding out in the open, as are many open-source software libraries.

“Most businesses have no idea how deeply components like Brotli are embedded in their technology. A vulnerability in a compression library sounds almost boring until you realize it could affect applications your business depends on every day,” he said. “That’s the uncomfortable reality of modern software: a small component can create a very large business risk.”

The defect, dubbed “Node2Shell” or “Broccoli2Shell,” is the latest in a series of vulnerabilities that have provoked an emergency response. Defenders and researchers were on heightened alert last week over a pair of critical PHP vulnerabilities dubbed “PHP2Shell” that also have yet to be exploited in the wild as of Monday afternoon.

These cyclical and increasingly recurring so-called emergencies are putting organizations and defenders at a significant disadvantage. 

“After being part of numerous channels and message threads full of defenders trying to discern what’s real and what’s BS over the past several months — and especially the past week — I can say unequivocally that the human cost of these events is real, pronounced, and will have downstream impacts far beyond what the community can immediately predict,” Caitlin Condon, vice president of research at VulnCheck, told CyberScoop.

“None of this — high-profile vulnerability disclosures, the overblown exploitability assumptions, the community arguments, the race to weaponize — is new,” she added. 

“What’s changed now is that AI is pumping out complex — and often not clearly explained — finds at a much higher rate, exponentially increasing noise levels and making it much more difficult both to debunk overhyped vulnerability discoveries and to determine which vulnerabilities are broadly exploitable in real-world production configurations.” 

Researchers acknowledge the additional stress defenders and organizations are in because of this always-in-emergency mode.

“We’ve reached a point where everything seems to be an emergency. And when everything is critical, businesses risk losing sight of what actually matters,” Beek said. “The real cost isn’t just patching. It’s the constant disruption to operations, the diversion of resources, and the difficult decisions about which business systems deserve immediate attention.”

Experts also consider this the new normal as more high-impact vulnerabilities with far-reaching potential consequences are found. 

“We suspect in the very near future, defenders may lose the ability to tell what is a true emergency versus a loud and prevalent vulnerability in a ubiquitous product or library,” Knott said. 

Experts advise organizations to focus on their specific risk, weighing the Brotli vulnerability’s potential impact in their environment. 

“Attackers don’t care about CVSS scores,” Beek said. “They care about what they can compromise, disrupt, or monetize and that’s exactly how we should prioritize our defenses.”

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Microsoft researchers attributed the recent supply-chain attack targeting ConnectWise customers’ Microsoft 365 environments to a China-state aligned threat actor it tracks as Storm-0940.

“As early as September 2026, Storm-0940 used the agentic AI penetration testing framework ARTEX to automate attacks targeting hundreds of organizations globally across a broad range of industries,” Microsoft Security Research wrote in a blog post Wednesday. 

The nation-state group, which has been active since 2021, targeted organizations in aerospace and defense, automotive, chemicals, energy, financial services, government, legal, manufacturing, media, military, semiconductors, software, technology, think tanks and non-profits. 

Storm-0940 initiated a widespread, but ultimately unsuccessful, password-spraying campaign immediately preceding the compromise of ConnectWise’s Cloud Backup service. During a four-day stretch ending Oct. 14, Storm-0940 targeted 327 Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online accounts across eight organizations, researchers said.

During that short campaign, Microsoft observed more than 151,000 failed logon attempts, peaking at 2,900 failures per minute. Storm-0940 set its sights on ConnectWise the next day, using AI agents and the same malicious infrastructure to compromise a series of ConnectWise Cloud Backup customers’ Microsoft 365 environments. 

Storm-0940 gained significant advantages in the ConnectWise supply-chain campaign by using ARTEX to accelerate scanning, conduct password-spray attacks and abuse OAuth applications in downstream victims, according to Microsoft. 

“In some of these environments, the AI agents (on behalf of the threat actor) progressed beyond authentication to Microsoft Graph and directory operations, including reconnaissance, application credential modifications to establish persistence, and changes involving identities, groups, and privileged roles,” researchers wrote. “Microsoft identified multiple customer environments with evidence of follow-on activity, highlighting how a compromised third-party application with high privileges could provide access beyond its originally intended purpose.”

Microsoft Threat Intelligence said multiple threat actors from various regions are using ARTEX to strengthen capabilities and speed up the tempo of attacks. 

The open-source penetration testing framework works with any AI model to automate various offensive security workflows, the company said. “ARTEX is a system of LLM-driven agents that run an autonomous penetration test from reconnaissance through data exfiltration with little needed human interaction.”

In the ConnectWise campaign, Microsoft said “Storm-0940 used ARTEX to reach more than 2,250 tenants at 2,900 sign-in attempts per minute, a pace that leaves defenders with little time to detect and respond.”

Microsoft did not say how many customers were compromised, adding that successful authentication doesn’t necessarily indicate Storm-0940 accessed or stole data. Yet, researchers said the threat group’s AI agents could also gain persistent access and establish backdoors by modifying credentials in targeted victims’ environments. 

ConnectWise, which temporarily shut down services Saturday in the wake of the attacks, said it began restoring services in phases Wednesday. The company advised customers to keep connections disabled and said it expects the recovery process to take several days.

“Since early October, a wave of AI-driven cyberattacks has been ongoing,” Igor Tsyganskiy, executive vice president at Microsoft, wrote in a LinkedIn post Wednesday. The ConnectWise supply-chain attack is just “one of many,” he added.

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Russian government-connected hackers compromised two defense firms and a law enforcement agency in North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries as part of an espionage campaign, Symantec researchers said in a blog post Tuesday.

The infamous group behind hacks of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 election cycle was behind the attacks that Symantec identified in recent months: Swallowtail, also known as APT28, Fancy Bear and Forest Blizzard, notorious for its links to the Russian military agency GRU.

The hackers apparently chose the targets of their attacks carefully, including a naval shipbuilder, a manufacturer of military aircraft engines and the law enforcement agency. In the attack on the shipbuilder, Symantec saw “hands-on-keyboard” activity as the hackers repeatedly returned to a compromised host over the course of a week to steal credentialed material.

“Hands-on-keyboard activity means a human operator is choosing what to do next, rather than malware running a fixed routine,” Dick O’Brien, principal intelligence analyst at the Symantec Threat Hunter Team, told CyberScoop. “It’s essentially confirmation that the organization is a genuine target for the operators, not an accidental infection. It also confirms that further exploitation beyond the initial infection was at least attempted.”

O’Brien said the campaign reflected broader intelligence collection aimed at European government and defense targets, but its motive wasn’t certain. He speculated that it could have been part of campaigns to target nations aiding Ukraine in its war against Russia.

The hackers made use of the Hookedge backdoor first identified in August by Recorded Future’s Insikt Group. That firm saw attacks dating back to September of last year by the same group using the same backdoor on defense and diplomatic targets in Romania, Spain and Turkey.

Symantec also observed the hackers deploying a previously undocumented loader.

“What surprised us was that the attackers then moved their most sensitive follow-up activity onto a dedicated server, when Recorded Future had expected them to keep hopping between free services,” O’Brien said. “The loader, ld.exe, hadn’t been publicly documented. It decrypts its payload in memory, and it needs a key supplied only at runtime on the command line. Without both the encrypted file and the key, the payload can’t be recovered. We didn’t recover it, so we don’t know its function.”

This spring, researchers and U.S. government agencies said they quashed a Forest Blizzard espionage campaign. Western governments warned last year about the group targeting companies supporting Ukraine.

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A portion of ConnectWise’s customers have been adrift for days, and hundreds are compromised, as the company’s efforts to restore its Cloud Backup service remain underway with no confirmed timeline for when customers can regain access.

The company temporarily shut down multiple services Saturday after a threat actor gained access to a highly sensitive credential that allowed its customers to connect the vendor’s application with Microsoft 365 environments. 

The threat actor, which hasn’t been identified, used the application programming interface (API) secret to compromise a series of ConnectWise Cloud Backup customers’ Microsoft 365 applications, including Exchange Online, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online, Cloud Backup, MS Graph and Partner Center, according to Huntress.

Researchers observed an initial wave of attacks Friday, and by late Saturday Huntress “had seen sign-in activity from the malicious infrastructure across almost 1,000 Entra tenants, with more than 300 of those sign-ins appearing to succeed,” Jonathan Semon, principal security operations analyst at Huntress, told CyberScoop.

The cybersecurity company, which primarily supports small- to mid-sized businesses, confirmed unauthorized sign-ins in 162 tenants and said additional compromises beyond its telemetry are likely. 

ConnectWise suspended its Cloud Backup, SaaS Security and Cloud Management services about two days after researchers observed an initial wave of unauthorized sign-ins. 

“ConnectWise is continuing its investigation and remediation following unauthorized access to application identities associated with ConnectWise Cloud Backup, formerly known as SkyKick,” a company spokesperson wrote in an email.

“We are monitoring our entire environment around the clock,” the company said in a security advisory. “Since mitigations began on October 17 at 05:00 UTC, we have not observed successful threat activity in the environments we monitor. This does not establish whether individual partner or customer Microsoft 365 tenants were affected; each potentially affected tenant still requires review.”

Microsoft Threat Intelligence said it observed broad successful sign-ins from a malicious IP address on Oct. 15. “Follow-on activity included Microsoft Graph API reconnaissance and attempts to add additional credentials on the related service principal in target tenants to maintain direct access as a backdoor,” the company said in a LinkedIn post. 

The root cause of the breach and ensuing fallout remains under investigation, and the company declined to answer questions about how attackers obtained the credential for ConnectWise Cloud Backup.

Researchers at Huntress and Todyl, which conducted its own investigation, characterized the secret and its chain of command as critical.

“Because it’s a multi-tenant application, anyone holding that credential can request access tokens in any tenant where the application is installed, without any action by the customer,” Semon said.

Sign-ins, which were performed by an automated tool, also gave the attacker the technical ability to read and write mail and files across various Microsoft 365 applications, Todyl wrote in a blog post. 

Highly privileged access granted by the credential for ConnectWise Cloud Backup allowed attackers to bypass security controls, including multi-factor authentication, and establish additional access.

“In the tenants where we saw post-compromise activity, the account associated with the application elevated its own privileges and added new credentials to other applications in the tenant. That would let someone keep access even after the original application was disabled,” Semon said.

ConnectWise and researchers haven’t attributed the attacks to any known threat actors and none have publicly claimed responsibility. The company said restoration efforts remain underway, but it hasn’t provided a timeline for when customers can regain access.

ConnectWise and researchers shared indicators of compromise to help potentially exposed customers hunt for malicious activity in their systems. Yet, the vendor and third-party companies responding to confirmed attacks, encouraged customers to disable any affected applications even if they don’t see anything unusual in their logs.

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Suspected Chinese hackers with a proven knack for exploiting zero-days in security products are at it again, targeting BeyondTrust customers in attacks that researchers have traced back to late August. 

Mandiant researchers said a likely Chinese government-backed espionage group it previously tracked as UNC5221, and now calls Armory Castle, exploited the critical defect — CVE-2026-102764 — then showcased multiple tactics to escalate privileges, hop around the compromised network and evade detection. 

The same threat group has repeatedly exploited a series of defects in Ivanti products since 2023, a Citrix NetScaler zero-day widely known as CitrixBleed, and last year’s Brickstorm campaign that had an average dwell time of 400 days — all resulting in sweeping attack sprees.

“We are aware of only a small number of impacted organizations at this time, but given the stealth of the activity, and the use of a zero-day, it is possible that additional organizations were also compromised prior to the disclosure,” Kelli Vanderlee, senior analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, said in an email.

Mandiant warned organizations to “prepare for potential widespread exploitation,” adding that Armory Castle and other threat groups previously conducted broad, opportunistic exploitation following public vulnerability disclosures.

Mandiant and GTIG released their analysis of Armory Castle and its latest campaign as BeyondTrust publicly disclosed the vulnerability in its Remote Support product Thursday. The company’s security said it released a patch for the exploited defect for self-hosted customers Oct. 8 and automatically applied the update to cloud-based versions of the product that same day.

BeyondTrust, which conducted its own investigation and coordinated with Mandiant on an investigation involving a self-hosted customer that was compromised, noted Armory Castle’s prowess.

“This threat actor rotates its infrastructure and tooling for every victim, so attribution here rests on behavior. The indicators from one intrusion rarely survive to the next,” the company’s security team wrote in a blog post. “The threat actor has historically demonstrated a high degree of operational security awareness, professional practices, and tradecraft.”

A BeyondTrust spokesperson declined to answer questions about how many customers are already compromised or why it didn’t publicly disclose the actively exploited zero-day sooner, and instead referred back to its security advisory. 

The company said the first known instance of zero-day exploitation occurred Aug. 29, which it detected and contained Sept. 28. 

BeyondTrust also said it detected the malicious activity after zero-days were confirmed to be exploited in another security vendor’s product Sept. 27. That timing matches a round of zero-days Citrix NetScaler disclosed, following nearly two days of rampant worry and unconfirmed rumors. 

BeyondTrust did not say if there is any link or overlap between the attacks targeting Citrix NetScaler, which went undetected for more than three weeks, and its remote access product. 

GTIG researchers said there isn’t enough evidence to assess an overall targeting trend, but encouraged all potentially vulnerable organizations to apply the patch and hunt for pre-disclosure activity. 

The threat group’s previous targets include business-process outsourcers, government, legal services, technology companies and software-as-a-service providers.

“Armory Castle remains one of the most prominent China-nexus threat actors due to its persistent targeting of various edge device technologies, use of zero-day vulnerabilities for widespread exploitation across multiple industries and regions, and its continuously expanding and evolving arsenal of tools,” said Dan Perez, technical lead at GTIG.

“This is a well-established pattern for Armory Castle,” Vanderlee said. “Targeting edge devices, which typically do not support endpoint detection and response (EDR), allows the threat actor to minimize opportunities for detection and maintain stealthy, persistent access to targeted networks.”

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Microsoft’s streak of record-breaking vulnerability disclosures continued with a mega Patch Tuesday, containing 1,413 defects affecting the company’s various enterprise products and services. 

The monthly batch of patches surpassed the company’s previous annual record of 1,261 common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) set in 2020. 

“Hundreds of CVEs in a single release used to be the exception — now it’s the baseline,” Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at TrendAI’s Zero Day Initiative, wrote in an email. AI is partly to blame, he added, but it “isn’t creating these bugs out of thin air; it’s just shortening the time between a vulnerability existing and someone noticing it.”

Yet, for defenders understandably overwhelmed by the surge of defects found in Microsoft products, actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities aren’t growing in kind.

“If there’s solace to be had, it’s in the fact that only one of these bugs is under active attack,” Childs wrote in a blog post. “If you go back to the hot 0-day summer of 2023, there were 17 Microsoft 0-days between January and October as opposed to 15 this year during the same period.”

Microsoft disclosed one actively exploited zero-day affecting Windows Shell — CVE-2026-96951 — that allows unauthorized attackers to bypass a security feature. The high-severity defect is the third Windows Shell vulnerability exploited this year, according to Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable. 

“There have been 26 Windows Shell vulnerabilities patched in 2026 through October, a staggering figure compared to previous years, with only 3 Windows Shell CVEs in 2025 and just one in 2024 and 2022,” he added.

The vast majority of defects Microsoft disclosed in this month’s security update affect Windows, its ubiquitous operating system , spanning 1,102 vulnerabilities combined. The update also included 134 vulnerabilities in Office, 61 in various developer tools and 36 in SharePoint Server. 

Microsoft tried to address the toll this monthly flood of vulnerabilities has on its customers by introducing “risk cohorts.” These groups of vulnerabilities don’t necessarily share a root cause or severity rating, but generally require a similar customer assessment that could guide prioritization efforts, the company said. 

“The volume isn’t the real story anymore,” Childs added. “What matters is that discovery is scaling faster than exploitation, so teams that triage by sheer CVE count instead of exploitability are burning cycles on the wrong bugs. Patch what’s proven, prioritized, and public, and treat everything else as this month’s new normal.”

The full list of vulnerabilities addressed this month is available in Microsoft’s Security Response Center.

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Members of Congress are pressing the Trump administration to expand the federal government’s role in securing artificial intelligence, wanting new safety standards and regulations, independent testing of models and more “aggressive” use of AI for defensive cybersecurity purposes.

In a letter, Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Mike Rounds, R-S.D., said that multiple incidents of frontier AI models escaping sandbox protections and breaching real companies, organizations and governments necessitate a stronger federal role in regulating the technology.

Recent revelations that hundreds, and possibly “tens of thousands,” of such incidents may have occurred for months without OpenAI’s staff detecting them makes the need for federal intervention even more urgent, the senators argued.

“These incidents come as AI systems are becoming dramatically more capable at discovering software vulnerabilities, writing and executing code, using digital tools, and operating autonomously,” the senators wrote.

The letter, addressed to Jay Clayton, director of national intelligence and new White House “AI czar” and Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, urges the federal government “to bring its full capacities to bear on this challenge, building a coordinated national response around standards, testing, auditing, and defensive AI.”

The Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence (CAISSI), housed within the Department of Commerce, has become the Trump administration’s main body for evaluating and testing AI models. In the letter, the senators are seeking to expand the center’s resources and mandate.

Under the Trump administration, testing of frontier models has been voluntary and focused on evaluating model capabilities, not restricting them. The administration has since said it has reached a safety testing framework with OpenAI, Anthropic and other AI companies to govern safety testing, but has not made the agreement public.

The senators call for CAISSI to spearhead the development of “technically grounded and measurable standards and risk management frameworks for advanced AI safety and security.” Those standards would address potential risks like cyberattacks, automated attacks on critical infrastructure and other threats.

“The standards should also address the security of the environments in which advanced AI systems are developed, trained, tested, and used internally, including protections against agents escaping testing environments, gaining unauthorized access to external systems, or taking actions beyond their intended permissions,” the senators wrote.

The letter argues the center and federal technology hubs like the National Institute of Standards and Technology should hire additional expertise in AI, cybersecurity, model evaluation and national security.

It also calls for a much broader community of independent and third-party testers. Currently, that testing is done almost entirely by AI companies and hand-selected auditors, like Model Evaluation and Threat Research (METR), Redwood Research and others.

Last month, Chris Painter, president of METR, told Congress that the firm’s investigation of the Hugging Face hacking incident was at the invitation of OpenAI, which tightly controls which organizations and testers get access to its unreleased models. While they are permitted to publicize some findings, such as those that relate to potentially catastrophic risks to humanity, researchers are otherwise restricted from discussing other parts of their investigation through nondisclosure agreements.

Additionally, Painter suggested that frontier companies are relying too heavily on their own technology, rather than technical controls, to monitor and restrain their models in testing.

“Because of the scale and speed at which AI agents are deployed, companies depend on AI monitoring and controls instead of human supervision, to prevent unwanted agent behavior,” Painter said. “That is, monitoring of AI is now in large part done by other AI systems.”

The senators call for CAISSI, national laboratories and the Department of Energy to become federal testing sites. There, the government would evaluate AI models for advanced cyber capabilities, biological or chemical threats, threats to critical infrastructure, sandbox evasion techniques and other autonomous rule-breaking behavior. They also want testing opened to universities, independent research organizations and “qualified third-party evaluators,” including private sector companies.

Other federal bodies, like the National Security Agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and National Science Foundation can help develop new standards and testbeds for AI tools used in defensive cybersecurity that can then be shared across government and with the public.

“The recent incidents make clear that the security infrastructure surrounding advanced AI must advance as quickly as the technology itself,” the senators wrote. “The United States has an opportunity to lead both sides of this challenge: building the standards, testing, and auditing infrastructure needed for increasingly powerful AI, while harnessing those same capabilities to make American networks harder to attack.”

You can read the full letter here.

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Microsoft collaborated with Japanese authorities, Health-ISAC and several cybersecurity companies to dismantle an expansive, seemingly disconnected ecosystem of Chinese-language cybercrime tools and services, the company announced Wednesday.

Since the start of the year, a vast collection of customized phishing kits developed and sold by Chinese-speaking threat actors — a cluster Microsoft tracks as Storm-2990 — have delivered more than 1 billion phishing emails and SMS messages to more than 75,000 organizations globally. More than three-quarters of those malicious messages targeted Microsoft customers, the company said.

Cybercriminals purchased the phishing kits, tools and infrastructure from an interconnected network Microsoft and Japanese authorities started investigating in early 2025. The kits were used to target individuals and organizations in healthcare, financial services, logistics and IT predominantly in the United States and Japan.

Microsoft said it and Health-ISAC, working with a federal court order, seized and redirected domains that powered the underlying infrastructure of these cybercrime tools and services known as YAM Store, CoGUI and Iron Man. 

The company said it also disabled more than 20,000 accounts connected to YAM Store and continues to disrupt the operation by removing infrastructure hosted on its services and blocking more than 100,000 domains used for impersonation and fraud.

“Most people have opened their messages to find a suspicious alert urgently telling them that a package cannot be delivered, a toll remains unpaid, a bank account needs attention, or a tax bill is overdue. The details may change, but the goal is the same: to get someone to click, share personal information, or pay,” Steven Masada, general counsel and general manager of Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, wrote in a blog post.

“These messages are relentless,” he added. “Delete and block one, and another takes its place. Ignore them, and more will follow. Fall for one, and the floodgates open. What appears to be a simple scam message is often the visible end of a much larger transnational cybercriminal operation.”

The phishing kids included templates impersonating legitimate brands that cybercriminals used to facilitate high-volume campaigns. Researchers said similar infrastructure and overlapping activity suggested the tools shared development origins, code reuse or close collaboration among developers.

Microsoft said cybercriminals used the phishing kits to steal credentials, financial data and abuse the device code authentication process to obtain authentication tokens and access compromised accounts. Researchers said cybercriminals primarily used the tools for financial fraud, typically using stolen payment data to make fraudulent purchases of high-end goods or transactions on legitimate financial platforms. 

Resecurity, which aided the investigation, gained access to Iron Man’s infrastructure and found 2,360 phishing templates impersonating banks, retailers, healthcare providers, transportation authorities, police departments and government agencies across 130 countries. Cloudflare, Oracle, Proofpoint and TRM Labs also provided research and investigative support.

“What began with scam activity targeting people and organizations in Japan led investigators to an underground service economy supplying criminals around the world,” Masada wrote. 

“YAM Store, CoGUI and Iron Man are only part of that larger criminal network, but disrupting them makes it harder for criminals to obtain the accounts, tools and infrastructure they rely on,” he added. “The scam message is often the only part victims see. The businesses behind it are what make it possible.”

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Ivanti customers are in familiar territory, responding to yet another actively exploited zero-day affecting one of the vendor’s most commonly targeted security products. 

Volexity researchers, which discovered in-the-wild exploitation earlier this month, said attackers actually exploited three zero-days in a chain that allowed them to bypass authentication, execute code remotely and escalate privileges. 

Ivanti disclosed and issued a patch for the authentication bypass and remote-code execution components of the exploit chain as a single vulnerability in Ivanti Connect Secure. The company said it initially discovered a portion of the high-severity vulnerability — CVE-2026-104935 — during internal security checks in June.

A threat actor, which Volexity tracks as UTA0576, exploited the defects before Ivanti addressed them and issued a patch.

“Because the issue was discovered internally, was not being actively exploited, and did not meet the threshold for an out-of-band release, a fix was scheduled for inclusion in our normal product release cycle,” an Ivanti spokesperson wrote in response to questions.

“Successful exploitation requires chaining multiple vulnerabilities and Ivanti has fully addressed the unauthenticated remote code execution component of that chain, eliminating the primary exploitation path,” the spokesperson added. “We are also developing additional updates to address the remaining vulnerability and further strengthen product security.”

The full scope of compromise remains under investigation. The company, in a security advisory, said a “limited number of customers” were already compromised prior to disclosure. 

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added the defect to its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog Tuesday.

Sean Koessel, vice president of professional services at Volexity, said the earliest confirmed instance of exploitation occurred Oct. 1. Yet, “it wouldn’t surprise us if there was activity toward the end of September,” he added.

Volexity researchers observed a series of post-exploitation activities during an investigation involving a customer’s compromised Ivanti Connect Secure VPN appliance earlier this month. “UTA0576 repeatedly exploited these vulnerabilities to compromise the ICS VPN appliance and run commands on it,” the company wrote in a blog post. 

The threat actor extracted credentials stored on the device, dumped and stole Active Directory metadata, and deployed multiple custom and malicious tools capable of facilitating follow-on attacks, credential testing and hunting for administrator passwords, recovery keys and other passwords.

“Based on Volexity’s observations, UTA0576 primarily focused on credential theft, data exfiltration, log tampering, and network reconnaissance,” the company added.

Ivanti encouraged potentially vulnerable customers to act immediately by upgrading to the latest version of software, running the company’s Integrity Checker Tool regularly, and reviewing indicators of compromise published by Volexity.

CISA also urged Ivanti customers to patch the vulnerability quickly, as it dissuaded customers from relying on the company’s Integrity Checker Tool.

“Organizations seeking to determine whether they were compromised will need to conduct network and memory forensics to identify evidence of exploitation,” the agency said in an alert Tuesday. “Ivanti’s Integrity Checker Tool may not detect evidence of exploitation of CVE-2026-104935 because threat actor commands execute in memory.”

Ivanti products, including Ivanti Connect Secure, are a frequent target for attackers of various motivations in the network edge space. 

CISA has flagged 36 Ivanti defects on its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog since late 2021. At least 6 defects across Ivanti products have been exploited since late January.

“Edge devices are a valuable initial foothold and often enable attackers to pivot further into targeted networks,” Koessel said. “It would be fair to expect widespread exploitation, this is a common theme with most vulnerabilities in edge devices.”

Other researchers also expect exploitation to pick up rapidly. 

“Given the history of attacker attention and focus Ivanti Connect Secure has previously drawn — and the trivial nature of the authentication bypass — widespread, indiscriminate exploitation is inevitable as attackers begin reviewing patches and public information,” said Yordan Ganchev, principal threat intelligence specialist at watchTowr.

“The race condition required for code execution offers little resistance, as an unauthenticated attacker can repeatedly attempt exploitation until it succeeds,” he added.

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Flock, the controversial public safety company entangled in controversy amid recurring law enforcement abuse of its products, gained authority to assign CVE IDs to vulnerabilities in its own products and grade those defects as a CVE Numbering Authority.

The manufacturer of various surveillance systems, including automated license plate readers (ALPRs) and AI-powered cameras, said it joined the global footprint of more than 550 CNAs to assess, coordinate and prioritize response to vulnerabilities internally.

“It allows us to move faster when researchers report findings, eliminate confusion from duplicate or conflicting vulnerability entries and give our customers a single, trusted source for security information about our products,” Chris Castaldo, chief information security officer at Flock, said in a statement. 

Security experts acknowledge that many vendors are granted CNA authority for good reason. Separately, Flock’s business has drawn considerable public and legal scrutiny over privacy concerns, along with multiple reports of police abusing the technology.

Controversies stemming from such misuse have impacted Flock’s credibility and could cloud how security researchers view the company as a CNA. The development also highlights the limitations of the CVE program, including what constitutes a vulnerability. 

“The measure of Flock as a CNA is whether its records give cities, police departments, and the public enough detail and accuracy to let people track specific risks by product version, the nature of the vulnerability, and ideally how to mitigate or fix it,” Katie Moussouris, founder at CEO at Luta Security, told CyberScoop.

Flock declined to answer questions or make an executive available for an interview, and instead referred back to a blog post.

The company published its vulnerability disclosure policy in August and recently created a security advisories page where it will publish all newly discovered and confirmed vulnerabilities going forward.

Zach Edwards, a security and privacy researcher, noted that numerous activists have done technical teardowns of Flock’s products and said he expects some researchers to continue disclosing Flock vulnerabilities without coordinating with the company.

Researchers last year reported multiple defects in Flock’s license-plate reader and gunshot detection system, which the company submitted for inclusion in the National Vulnerability Database, but deemed not material because the vulnerabilities require physical access to the device. 

“These cameras sit on poles on public streets,” Moussouris said.

Because CNAs are “essentially grading their own homework,” as Edwards put it, credibility and trust have to be earned consistently by properly addressing every defect that meets a reasonable threshold.

“Vendors make sense as CNAs for their own products if they can be trusted to maintain accurate records. They know the code, they can confirm the flaw, and they can tie the record to affected versions and the fix,” Moussouris said. 

“The conflict of interest manifests when they lack the organizational and technical maturity to correctly assess the flaws and their impact,” she added. “A vendor in the CNA role writes the description and often sets the severity score, so an immature vendor may inaccurately represent an issue, either through ignorance or in a misdirected effort to downplay it.”

Flock’s vulnerability disclosure policy specifically disallows testing against live customer deployments, accessing law enforcement or investigative data, physical attacks, denial-of-service testing or social engineering. The company does not run a paid bug bounty program.

“Flock stands out as a CNA because its products track drivers’ movements, its customers are police, and its policy reserves the right to hold back publication if it decides disclosure would create a safety risk to law enforcement or the public,” Moussouris said. “The latter may lead to an abuse in their authority and control of CVEs unless they embrace a more mature customer-safety-first stance of timely, transparent, and accurate vulnerability disclosure.”

Edwards is also dubious about Flock’s position as a CNA, but adds that many vendors, including some offering similar products, are already in the program. 

There are also relatively few norms in how CNAs operate because the responsibility ultimately comes down to each participating vendor. Some companies granted CNA authority are incredibly active while others haven’t publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in their products for years.

“Only time will tell how Flock operates their CVE program and if they issue CVEs for vulnerabilities publicly disclosed,” Edwards said. “But, if their recent history is any indication, they will probably screw it up in some epic way that somehow unites people across the United States to demand CVE issuing reform.”

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Malware that takes technical cues from a poem to assemble a growing botnet by targeting open-source AI services has compromised more than 3,400 servers since April, Lumen Technologies’ Black Lotus Labs said in a report Wednesday. 

The poem, which a threat actor wrote and posted on a GitHub repository, seems innocuous but it’s driving a stealthy piece of malware researchers call PoeLLM. Four specific words extracted from the poem, which have been changed at least a dozen times, are converted into a command-and-control server address through a hard-coded dictionary embedded in the malware — a framework that bolsters PoeLLM’s resiliency.

“The most interesting piece of the poem approach is that the IP address used for C2 communications is invisible outside of the victim’s netflow. In other malware samples, there might be a hard-coded fallback C2 address, or URL which points to an IP address written elsewhere on the internet,” Ryan English, information security engineer at Black Lotus Labs, told CyberScoop.

“To anyone who comes across it, this is simply a poem on GitHub. It has no links, no files to download, no encrypted text that could easily be flagged as malicious, even by advanced models,” he added. “There would be no reason for any security researcher to identify this poem as malicious — or know about the IP address hidden within it — unless they had access to the malware referencing it.”

Researchers first encountered PoeLLM infrastructure in June during an investigation into a maximum-severity defect affecting Ivanti’s secure mobile gateway product, Sentry. That discovery uncovered a sweeping exploit-scanning and cryptocurrency-mining botnet linked to multiple compromised services and tools, including LiteLLM, Ollama, Gotenberg and Gitea.

While “PoeLLM has been extremely successful in compromising multiple AI-related services at scale,” the threat actor’s achievements beyond exploit scanning and cryptomining remain under investigation, English said. 

The malware contains functionality that can allow for remote code execution, potentially allowing a threat actor to abuse AI models on victim servers, along with public-facing services for downstream compromise, he added.

“Through the growth of this botnet, the actor has effectively created a private army of AI-enabled proxies, which will continue to multiply and provide additional vectors for attack, credential theft, token abuse and more,” English said.

The botnet has continued to grow by converting compromised servers into attackers and shifting through C2 infrastructure, leaving fewer traces across the internet.

“If one exploit server gets reported by the security community, the attacker can easily pivot and start proxying attacks through hundreds of other compromised victims,” English said. 

The poem serves as a dynamic lookup table for this infrastructure rotation. When the malware retrieves the updated poem from GitHub, it extracts four specific words based on their positions relative to fixed text anchors within the verse. Each extracted word is then matched against a hard-coded dictionary in the malware, where individual words map to sets of IP addresses. The four numbers combine to form the current C2 server address. This means the threat actor can change the entire poem, and thus the C2 location, without updating the malware itself.

“Many of the C2s used in this campaign were never detected on crowd-sourced security tools, indicating that this layer of obfuscation was very helpful in improving the resilience of a C2,” English said.

For instance, the first stanza of the poem, as it was observed last month, reads: “In the silent hum of driver, the machines begin to speak, each pulse of diode threading light through copper veins. We taught the dark to carry meaning, byte by byte — a language built from lightning, cold and clean.”

The malware extracts four specific words from the poem and matches each to a number in a hard-coded dictionary — for example, “driver” equals 92, “diode” equals 119, “decryption” equals 165, and “string” equals 74, combining to form the C2 address. When the threat actor changes the poem’s keywords, the malware automatically calculates a new C2 address without needing to update itself. This keeps the infrastructure invisible to network monitoring tools unless the malware code is directly analyzed.

Black Lotus Labs said the threat actor behind PoeLLM is likely Italian or speaks Italian. Researchers observed multiple comments in the malware code written in Italian and said the threat actor has relied on Italy-based servers for testing and C2 infrastructure. 

Researchers said they don’t know how many people are involved in the PoeLLM’s operation, and they haven’t observed any connections to other groups or campaigns.

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Citrix customers just got through back-to-back weekends filled with varying levels of uncertainty and worry, as yet another actively exploited zero-day vulnerability was discovered in Citrix NetScaler products.

Researchers and security experts said the vulnerability — CVE-2026-88779 — is less concerning because exploitation triggers denial of service and only impacts instances that have SAML (security assertion markup language) enabled. 

“This means it doesn’t work out of the box against every NetScaler deployment,” Jake Knott, head of threat intelligence at watchTowr, told CyberScoop. “While this is very inconvenient, it doesn’t have organizations scrambling to trigger incident response.”

Citrix was much quicker and consistent in alerting customers to the emerging threat Friday, and followed up the next day with a more detailed blog post and security advisory that contained a patch for the high-severity defect. 

“After we were alerted to this issue we immediately developed and published a mitigation while concurrently developing, testing and deploying a fix,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. “The fix for this issue is available, and we urge all customers to quickly apply it to their NetScaler instance.”

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added the defect to its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog Sunday.

The vendor’s response also provided some relief for customers and researchers who spent much of the previous weekend rushing to assess widespread rumors of other defects in the assailed network edge gateways. In that case, Citrix took most of the weekend to confirm attackers were actively exploiting a pair of NetScaler zero-days, some of which researchers said remained undetected for at least three weeks.

“Citrix did a better job with their response to this vulnerability,” and took steps that enabled customers to make their own risk-based decisions with more currently available information, said Joe Toomey, vice president of underwriting security at insurance provider Coalition. 

“Although it’s difficult to celebrate given this is the third publicly-exploited NetScaler zero-day vulnerability in a two-week window, it is a step in the right direction,” he added. 

Citrix declined to say how many customers are impacted by the latest zero-day or when the first instance of exploitation occurred. Yet, Knott at watchTowr said exploitation likely began Friday. 

The newer defect doesn’t share any technical links with the pair of zero-days Citrix disclosed less than a week prior, but it can accelerate one of those vulnerabilities — CVE-2026-88771 — by intentionally crashing machines to speed up exploitation, Knott said.

While risk is currently perceived low for CVE-2026-88779, it is “incredibly simple to trigger, with a single specially crafted request being all that is needed to knock an appliance offline,” Knott added. “Exploitation is already occurring in the wild, and disrupting an authentication gateway can prevent legitimate users from accessing the services behind it.”

Toomey also described the denial-of-service vulnerability as less serious than the previous week’s actively exploited zero-days. Yet, he noted, exploitation attempts of CVE-2026-88779 “clearly contain shellcode that implies that the threat actor believes they can use this vulnerability, or chain it with another vulnerability, in order to achieve remote-code execution.”

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Attackers remained undetected for more than three weeks as they exploited a critical zero-day vulnerability affecting Citrix NetScaler appliances en masse. 

The earliest known instance of CVE-2026-88772 exploitation occurred Sept. 3, Mandiant researchers told CyberScoop Tuesday. 

The besieged security vendor and researchers didn’t confirm the attacks until late last week. By then, Mandiant says, organizations in North America and Europe spanning the government, financial services, education, telecom, legal and professional services sectors were already likely compromised.

“We are aware of dozens of impacted organizations,” Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at Mandiant Consulting, wrote in a LinkedIn post. He attributed the attacks to “advanced and suspected state-sponsored threat actors.”

The three-week gap — at minimum — between initial exploitation and confirmed in-the-wild attacks gave attackers a significant advantage. 

Mandiant warned that the gap could be even wider. “We are still responding to active intrusions, and new evidence may change our understanding of the campaign timeline,” researchers who published a threat intelligence report on the attacks Tuesday told CyberScoop in an email. 

The incident response firm’s analysis on the latest zero-day attack spree targeting Citrix customers underscores the multi-layered mess network defenders have been responding to since Saturday.

The zero-day exploits in Mandiant’s report only cover half of the problem. Attackers have also exploited a second Citrix NetScaler zero-day — CVE-2026-88771 — since at least Sept. 24, according to GreyNoise, but researchers said that campaign likely started earlier as well.

It’s unclear to what extent the pair of zero-days are linked. But, nearly two days after the first unconfirmed rumors of the attacks surfaced, Citrix disclosed both of the actively exploited defects in a security advisory Sunday, releasing patches for them and six additional vulnerabilities.

Mandiant researchers uncovered multiple novel tools and tactics attackers used to exploit CVE-2026-88772, gain privileged access to compromised environments, hop around the network and steal sensitive data. A threat actor in one observed intrusion routed traffic through novel tunneler malware to “manually conduct internal reconnaissance and credential theft,” researchers wrote. 

Researchers at watchTowr also published technical analysis of CVE-2026-88782 Tuesday.

The attacks from multiple fronts, involving two zero-days, reflect an alarming and sustained pattern of malicious activity targeting so-called edge devices, such as virtual private network gateways and firewalls. 

Vulnerabilities in these devices accounted for 48% of the enterprise-related zero-days last year, according to Google Threat Intelligence Group.

“Our previous research corroborates that both cyber espionage and financially motivated threat actors prioritize exploiting vulnerabilities in edge devices and security appliances,” Mandiant researchers wrote in response to questions on their report. 

“Because most edge devices do not support endpoint detection and response (EDR) monitoring, targeting them, particularly through exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities, provides threat actors with an infection vector that is difficult to detect and prevent, and the opportunity to scale a campaign as long as the exploit remains undiscovered,” the researchers added. 

Carmakal, in his LinkedIn post, warned that Mandiant expects “broad and opportunistic exploitation” of both of the Citrix NetScaler zero-days by a variety of threat actors in the near term.

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Citrix took most of the weekend to confirm that attackers were actively exploiting the newest round of NetScaler zero-days, leaving network defenders and threat hunters to react without official confirmation. 

Yet, behind the scenes, multiple CERTs, advisory firms, insurance providers, researchers and chatty security professionals warned their respective peers and communities of a live and serious threat. 

Nearly two days after the first unconfirmed rumors, Citrix published a security advisory Sunday disclosing the exploited zero-days, CVE-2026-88771 and CVE-2026-88772, releasing patches for them and six additional defects.

By then, criticism was at a fever pitch, and for some NetScaler customers the warning came too late. 

“The information vacuum was most striking. Customers were receiving warnings through unofficial channels while Citrix remained publicly silent,” Ben Harris, founder and CEO at watchTowr, told CyberScoop. 

“Customers were left without communication, guidance, or even acknowledgement that the vulnerability that was rumored to exist was real. Citrix could have warned customers that active exploitation was occurring and provided immediate defensive guidance without disclosing technical details that would help attackers,” he added. 

“When active exploitation is underway, hours matter,” Harris said.

Citrix did not directly answer questions about the lengthy communication delay. 

“We recently identified critical vulnerabilities in Citrix NetScaler ADC and Citrix NetScaler Gateway that led us to immediately develop and release a new version of the software that addresses the issues,” the company said in a prepared statement.

The critical defects are both rated 9.5 on the CVSS scale and allow attackers to achieve remote code execution. 

Researchers are particularly concerned about CVE-2026-88771, a command-injection vulnerability that affects all NetScaler appliances in a default configuration. That gives attackers a broad pool of targets and a better chance at successful exploitation. A proof-of-concept exploit for the vulnerability is also publicly available. 

Palo Alto Networks said it identified more than 50,000 publicly exposed instances of Citrix NetScaler devices potentially vulnerable to both of the zero-days as of Sunday. 

The earliest known exploitation attempt occurred Sept. 24 when GreyNoise said it observed an unsuccessful exploitation attempt against a Citrix NetScaler Gateway under its control for malicious activity scanning purposes. But researchers warn that exploitation likely started before then.

Citrix did not say how many customers have been compromised thus far and researchers are still assessing the fallout.

Citrix said it is making generic indicators of compromise available to customers in their user consoles, and the company referred to previously issued guidance for customers who suspect compromise. 

Attribution for the attacks is also still under investigation, yet NetScaler products are a common, recurring target for financially-motivated cybercriminals and state-sponsored espionage groups. 

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued an alert Sunday after Citrix publicly confirmed the attacks on its customers, and added CVE-2026-88771 and CVE-2026-88772 to its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog. The vendor has appeared on the agency’s list of vulnerabilities known to be exploited five times this year, and a total of 26 times since late 2021.

Security leaders across the industry — including Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at Mandiant Consulting, and Wendi Whitmore, chief security intelligence officer at Palo Alto Networks — also sprung into action Sunday, with direct warnings on LinkedIn about the urgent threat. 

The information vacuum that persisted through most of the weekend put cybersecurity professionals in sometimes unique positions. Joe Toomey, vice president of underwriting security at insurance provider Coalition, said the company notified potentially vulnerable customers with limited official data and no confirmation from CISA or Citrix.

In a LinkedIn post Sunday, he called Citrix “unconscionably irresponsible” for remaining silent for more than 36 hours after word began circulating about in-the-wild exploitation.

“I fully understand a vendor embargoing specific details about a vulnerability when a patch has not yet been published, but once the vuln is exploited in the wild, some of those rules no longer apply,” Toomey wrote.

Citrix and its customers are in familiar territory. The vendor’s products have been widely targeted in previous attack sprees, often involving zero-day exploits and some infamously referred to as CitrixBleed and CitrixBleed 2.

“Citrix has a history of delaying the publication of vulnerabilities, even when they’re being exploited in the wild and affecting customers. Citrix eventually released patches and an advisory, but an adequate response also requires timely, clear communication,” Harris said. 

“Customers shouldn’t have to rely on unofficial warnings, security researchers, and third parties to learn that critical infrastructure may already be compromised,” he added. “This latest incident raises serious questions about whether Citrix has learned from previous crises and meaningfully improved how it protects and informs customers.”

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