The Justice Department and FBI announced that they had seized two hacking tools connected to the Chinese government-linked group Flax Typhoon and a China-based company that the U.S. government has repeatedly taken action against, including with a new multi-agency advisory Thursday.

The domain name seizures were meant to deny hackers access to the vulnerability scanning tool Microscan and the spearphishing tool FishHub created by the Chinese firm Integrity Technology Group, which the United States sanctioned last year. The U.S. government in 2024 also made the company the focus of a takedown operation, saying it was behind a massive botnet.

Authorities were granted the court-authorized seizures in the Western District of Pennsylvania, the FBI and DOJ announced Thursday in unsealing documents in the case.

U.S. agencies paired the announcement of the seizures with an advisory from the FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and National Security Agency.

“Chinese government-linked cyber threat actors, enabled by the Integrity Technology Group, are combining automated scanning tools, large-scale botnets, and hands-on exploitation techniques to target and steal sensitive data from organizations worldwide, including U.S. critical infrastructure sectors,” the advisory reads. “These actors exploit vulnerabilities by using scanning tools, cross-site scripting attacks, and password spraying on Microsoft Exchange servers, while establishing persistence through VPN software and exfiltrating emails and credentials using scripts.”

Similar to previous allegations, law enforcement said Integrity Tech leaned on a Mirai-variant botnet of internet-of-things devices, in this case to facilitate Microscan.

Microscan targets have included a South Carolina power company, airports in Japan and Poland, critical infrastructure companies and universities in Taiwan and others, according to the FBI and DOJ. Victims of FishHub, which downloads malware on their networks after gaining access through spearphishing, include Taiwanese universities.

“Chinese government-affiliated actors continue to position themselves within critical infrastructure networks, including operational technology (OT) systems, with the aim of disrupting critical functions at a future time of their choosing,” said Chris Butera, acting executive assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA. 

“Under the FBI Cyber Strategy, we pursue both the actors who threaten critical infrastructure and the enterprises that support them,” said Brett Leatherman, head of the FBI’s Cyber Division. “Integrity Technology Group, a China-based company with ties to the Chinese government, is one of those enterprises, acquiring or developing cyber tools and hosting infrastructure for actors targeting networks worldwide.”

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The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency published a paper Wednesday that lays out its plan for improving the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program, a contract for which nearly ended last year before a last-minute reprieve.

The white paper outlines the components of a “Quality Era” for the program, widely used as the definitive clearinghouse for data on vulnerabilities in software and other products, even as the number of CVEs surges. 

“CISA remains committed to leading, growing and sustaining the CVE Program into the foreseeable future, just as we’ve done for more than 25 years without fail,” said Chris Butera, acting executive assistant director for cybersecurity. “Informed by CVE community feedback, this whitepaper communicates CISA’s effort to support and enable stronger participation and governance, a program-wide maturation effort.”

The CVE program has been in a “Growth Era,” according to CISA. Over 67,000 new CVEs have been published in 2026 as of last week, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology National Vulnerability Database program has seen a 263% increase in CVE submissions between 2020 and 2025. Artificial intelligence has furthered the rise.

“These pressures intensify quality challenges across the CVE ecosystem,” the white paper states. “While faster discovery and reporting can improve the value of vulnerability information when records are complete, consistent, timely, and actionable, the same acceleration can expose gaps in processes, tooling, coordination, and accountability — especially when the quality of the submissions is uneven.” 

The plan calls for advancing data quality across four key dimensions: transparent and effective program governance, broad and active participation across the global software community, data infrastructure that supports CVE operational functions and reliable CVE record content.

Some vulnerability experts have questioned whether other organizations should take over CISA’s stewardship, given budget cuts at the agency.

Butera invited further feedback from the CVE community on the white paper, which stems from an earlier strategy document on the future of the program.

Some CVE experts that CyberScoop spoke to were supportive of what CISA wants to achieve, but skeptical about elements of the white paper.

“We’ve been working around long-standing quality issues in CVE reports for decades. Incomplete or inconsistent records create real downstream work for the security tools, developers, and organizations trying to determine whether they’re actually affected and what to do next,” said Sonatype’s co-founder and chief technology officer Brian Fox. “So it’s good to see CISA acknowledge that quality has to extend beyond the record itself to governance, infrastructure, and participation across the ecosystem.”

But, he added, “I’ll believe we’ve entered a ‘Quality Era’ when we can see the improvement in the actual data and in the decisions that data enables.”

Tom Alrich, who leads the OWASP PURL Expansion Working Group that’s focused on establishing a protocol for creating Product URLs for commercial software, said CISA’s white paper ignores a particularly important and growing issue.

“I support everything mentioned. I also support the flag, motherhood and apple pie,” he said. “However, nothing in there is going to affect the CVE program’s most important problem: that a huge and growing percentage of new CVE records don’t contain a machine-readable software identifier.”

Caitlin Condon, VulnCheck’s vice president of security research, said that “CISA and the CVE program are well-positioned to both observe challenges in this space and to create (and enforce) standards that explicitly state what ‘quality’ means in CVE records.”

But she said the white paper was more the basis for a future framework than a full-fledged framework in itself.

“Many of the potential success metrics suggested in the document can be measured today, but simply aren’t shared publicly,” Condon said. “In future iterations on the framework, I’d hope to see more transparency on CVE metrics as they stand today, along with reasoning on why those metrics are the right ones (versus simply the things that are easiest to measure qualitatively or quantitatively).”

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For the first time, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is advising critical infrastructure owners and operators on how to set up phony systems, accounts and data to deceive would-be hackers into being distracted and discovered.

The Wednesday guidance, “Using Cyber Decoys to Strengthen Detection and Response,” arose from internal discussions with CISA’s threat hunters and penetration testers about how decoys can be a cheap, effective way to disrupt attackers, said Chris Butera, acting executive director of the cybersecurity division.

‘We’ve been looking at it for a while, and we believe that decoys can be both a very low-cost but actually high-fidelity way to detect an adversary who’s already gained access to networks,” Butera told CyberScoop at Google Cloud’s Cyber Defense Summit 26.

It’s especially complementary for zero-trust (maintaining that no user or device is trustworthy by default) and assume-compromise (assuming that hackers have already gotten into a network) approaches, Butera said.

While the guidance is “really relevant for everyone,” it’s something that can be especially useful in critical infrastructure sectors that don’t have the most personnel or money, he said.

“This could be something to prioritize as a lower cost solution,” Butera said. “You can create your own honey tokens yourself.”

The 22-page guidance includes decoy principles and goals, definitions of the different kinds of decoys and how to use them and scenarios for deployment.

Honeytokens, for instance, are “Data elements or logical objects with no legitimate business use (e.g., fake records, credentials, or files) planted to detect unauthorized access or exfiltration. Any interaction strongly suggests malicious or otherwise unauthorized activity.”

“Cyber decoys used in a proactive cyber defense strategy help make critical infrastructure networks unfriendly places for adversaries and enhance resilience to compromise, even against living-off-the-land techniques,” Butera said in a news release. “With this guide, CISA is raising awareness of cyber decoy techniques and enabling any defensive team regardless of skill level to understand the value and steps to implementing decoy operations. CISA encourages critical infrastructure organizations to review this guide and implement a cyber decoy strategy.” 

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