Vercel said the fallout from an attack on its internal systems hit more customers than previously known, as ongoing analysis uncovered additional evidence of compromise. 

The company, which makes tools and hosts cloud infrastructure for developers, maintains a “small number” of accounts were impacted, but it has yet to share a number or range of known incidents linked to the attack. Vercel created and maintains Next.js, a platform supporting AI agents that’s downloaded more than 9 million times per week, and other popular open-source projects. 

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch said the company and partners have analyzed nearly a petabyte of logs across the Vercel network and API, and learned malicious activity targeting the company and its customers extends beyond an initial attack that originated at Context.ai. 

“Threat intel points to the distribution of malware to computers in search of valuable tokens like keys to Vercel accounts and other providers,” Rauch said in a post on X. 

“Once the attacker gets ahold of those keys, our logs show a repeated pattern: rapid and comprehensive API usage, with a focus on enumeration of non-sensitive environment variables,” he added.

The attack exemplifies the widespread and compounded risk posed by interconnected systems that rely on OAuth tokens, trusted relationships and overly privileged permissions linking multiple services together.

“The real vulnerability was trust, not technology,” Munish Walther-Puri, head of critical digital infrastructure at TPO Group, told CyberScoop. “OAuth turned a productivity app into a backdoor. Every AI tool an employee connects to their work account is now a potential attack surface.”

An attacker traversed Vercel’s internal systems to steal and decrypt customer data, including environment variables it stored, posing significant downstream risk. 

The company insists the breach originated at Context.ai, a third-party AI tool used by one of its employees. Researchers at Hudson Rock previously said the seeds of that attack were planted in February when a Context.ai employee’s computer was infected with Lumma Stealer malware after they searched for Roblox game exploits, a common vector for infostealer deployments. 

Vercel has not specified the systems and customers data compromised, nor has it described the threat eradicated or contained. The company said it’s found no evidence of tampering across the software packages it publishes, concluding “we believe the supply chain remains safe.” 

The company fueled further intrigue in its updated security bulletin, noting that it also identified a separate “small number of customers” that were compromised in attacks unrelated to the breach of its systems. 

“These compromises do not appear to have originated on Vercel systems,” the company said. “This activity does not appear to be a continuation or expansion of the April incident, nor does it appear to be evidence of an earlier Vercel security incident.”

It’s unclear how Vercel became aware of those attacks and why it’s disclosing them publicly. 

Vercel declined to answer questions, and Mandiant, which is running incident response and an investigation into the attack, referred questions back to Vercel. 

Vercel has not attributed the breach to any named threat group or described the attackers’ objectives. 

An online persona identifying themselves as ShinyHunters took responsibility for the attack and is attempting to sell the stolen data, which they claim includes access keys, source code and databases. Austin Larsen, principal threat analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, said the attacker is “likely an imposter,” but emphasized the risk of exposure is real.

Walther-Puri warned that the downstream blast radius from the attack on its systems remains undefined. “Stolen API keys and source code snippets from internal views are potentially keys to customer production environments,” he said.

The stolen data attackers claim to have “sounds almost boring … but it’s infrastructure intelligence,” Walther-Puri added. “The right environment variable doesn’t just unlock a system — it lets adversaries become that system, silently, from the inside.”

The post Vercel attack fallout expands to more customers and third-party systems appeared first on CyberScoop.

Vercel customers are at risk of compromise after an attacker hopped through multiple internal systems to steal credentials and other sensitive data, the company said in a security bulletin Sunday. 

The attack, which didn’t originate at Vercel, showcases the pitfalls of interconnected cloud applications and SaaS integrations with overly privileged permissions. 

An attacker traversed third-party systems and connections left exposed by employees before it hit the San Francisco-based company that created and maintains Next.js and other popular open-source libraries. 

Researchers at Hudson Rock said the seeds of the attack were planted in February when a Context.ai employee’s computer was infected with Lumma Stealer malware after they searched for Roblox game exploits, a common vector for infostealer deployments.

Each of the companies are pinning at least some blame for the attack on the other vendor.

Context.ai on Sunday said that breach allowed the attacker to access its AWS environment and OAuth tokens for some users, including a token for a Vercel employee’s Google Workspace account. Vercel is not a Context customer, but the Vercel employee was using Context AI Office Suite and granted it full access, the artificial intelligence agent company said. 

“The attacker used that access to take over the employee’s Vercel Google Workspace account, which enabled them to gain access to some Vercel environments and environment variables that were not marked as sensitive,” Vercel said in its bulletin. 

The company said a limited number of its customers are impacted and were immediately advised to rotate credentials. Vercel, which declined to answer questions, did not specify which internal systems were accessed or fully explain how the attacker gained access to Vercel customers’ credentials. 

Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch said customer data stored by the company is fully encrypted, yet the attacker got further access through enumeration, or by counting and inventorying specific variables. 

“We believe the attacking group to be highly sophisticated and, I strongly suspect, significantly accelerated by AI,” he said in a post on X. “They moved with surprising velocity and in-depth understanding of Vercel.”

A threat group identifying itself as ShinyHunters took responsibility for the attack in a post on Telegram and is attempting to sell the stolen data, which they claim includes access keys, source code and databases.

The attacker “is likely an imposter attempting to use an established name to inflate their notoriety,” Austin Larsen, principal threat analyst at Google Threat Intelligence, wrote in a LinkedIn post. “Regardless of the threat actor involved, the exposure risk is real.”

Vercel also warned that the attack on Context’s Google Workspace OAuth app “was the subject of a broader compromise, potentially affecting its hundreds of users across many organizations.” It published indicators of compromise and encouraged customers to review activity logs, review and rotate variables containing secrets.

Context and Vercel said their separate and coordinated investigations into the attack aided by CrowdStrike and Mandiant remain underway.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Mandiant is responding to a major, ongoing supply-chain attack involving the compromise of Trivy, a widely used open-source tool from Aqua Security that’s designed to find vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in code repositories.

The fallout from the attack spree, which was first detected March 19, is extensive and poses substantial risk for follow-on compromises and threatening extortion attempts. 

“We know over 1,000 impacted SaaS environments right now that are actively dealing with this particular threat campaign,” Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at Mandiant Consulting said during a threat briefing held in conjunction with the RSAC 2026 Conference. “That thousand-plus downstream victims will probably expand into another 500, another 1,000, maybe another 10,000.”

Attackers stole a privileged access token and established a foothold in Trivy’s repository automation process by exploiting a misconfiguration in the tool’s GitHub Actions environment in late February, Aqua Security said in a blog post. 

On March 1, the company tried to block an ongoing breach by changing its credentials. They later realized the attempt failed, which allowed the attacker to stay in the system using valid logins. Attackers published malicious releases of Trivy on March 19.

“While this activity initially appeared to be an isolated event, it was the result of a broader, multi-stage supply-chain attack that began weeks earlier,” Aqua Security said in the blog post.

By compromising the tool, attackers gained access to secrets for many organizations, Carmakal said. “There will likely be many other software packages, supply-chain attacks and a variety of other compromises as a result of what’s playing out right now.”

Mandiant expects widespread breach disclosures, follow-on attacks and a variety of downstream impacts to play out over the next several months. 

The attackers, which the incident response firm has yet to name, are collaborating with multiple threat groups mostly based in the United States, Canada and United Kingdom. These cybercriminals “are known for being exceptionally aggressive with their extortion,” Carmakal said. “They’re very loud, they’re very aggressive.”

Mandiant is still working to identify the root of the initial attack. “We can’t quite tell how those credentials were stolen, because it is our belief that those credentials were not stolen from that victim’s environment,” Carmakal said. 

The credentials were likely stolen from another cloud environment, a business process outsourcer, partner or the personal computer of an engineer, he added. 

Aqua said Sygnia, which is investigating the attack and assisting in remediation efforts, identified additional suspicious activity Sunday involving unauthorized changes and repository changes — activity that is consistent with the attacker’s previously observed behavior.

“This development suggests that the incident is part of an ongoing and evolving attack, with the threat actor reestablishing access. Our investigation is actively focused on validating that all access paths have been identified and fully closed,” the company said.

Aqua, in its latest update Tuesday, said it is continuing to revoke and rotate credentials across all environments and claimed there is still no indication its commercial products are affected. 

Many attackers are currently weaponizing access and likely targeting additional victims, yielding to potential extortion attempts and the compromise of additional software, Carmakal said. 

“It’s going to be a different outcome for a lot of different organizations,” he said. “This will be a very concentrated focus of the adversaries and their expansion group of partners that they’re collaborating with right now.”

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The latest M-Trends report is based on insights from over 500,000 hours of Mandiant incident response investigations in 2025.

The post M-Trends 2026: Initial Access Handoff Shrinks From Hours to 22 Seconds appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Voice-based phishing, a form of social engineering where attackers call employees or IT help desks under false pretenses in an attempt to gain access to victim networks, surged in 2025, Mandiant said Monday in its annual M-Trends report. 

These points of intrusion, which have been a hallmark of attacks attributed to members of the cybercrime collective The Com, including offshoots such as Scattered Spider, accounted for 11% of all incidents Mandiant investigated last year.

Exploited vulnerabilities remained the top initial access vector for the sixth-consecutive year, giving attackers footholds in 32% of all incidents last year, the company said. Yet, the rise of voice phishing marks a concerning shift in tactics, especially in large-scale attacks with sweeping impacts.

“This type of social engineering attack is extremely powerful. It is more time consuming, obviously it requires skills and impersonation skills that the threat actors need to have, especially when they contact their IT help desk,” Jurgen Kutscher, vice president at Mandiant, told CyberScoop. “We’ve clearly seen several threat actors being very specialized and very successful with this type of attack.”

Voice-based phishing was at the root of multiple attack sprees Mandiant responded to last year, including campaigns targeting Salesforce customers attributed to threat groups Google Threat Intelligence Group tracks as UNC6040 and UNC6240.

This global shift in attacks was most clearly seen in the sharp drop in email-based phishing., For years, phishing has been a popular method because it’s cheap and requires little technical skill. It works much like high-volume advertising — a spray-and-pray strategy focused on reaching as many people as possible rather than specific targeting.

Email phishing is no longer a top initial access vector, according to Mandiant. The incident response firm said it was only responsible for 6% of intrusions last year, down from 14% in 2024 and 22% in 2022.

“The higher the investment, the higher the payout needs to be,” Kutscher said. “[Interactive phishing] takes a significant amount of time and investment. So as an attacker, you’ve got to do that when you believe that there’s a significant return.”

These techniques are difficult to defend against because they’re designed to exploit human instincts and bypass many security controls. “We’ve always said, unfortunately the human tends to be the weakest link,” Kutscher said. 

Social engineering, of course, wasn’t the only way attackers gained access to victim networks last year. Exploited defects remain a persistent problem.

The top three vulnerabilities Mandiant observed as the initial access vector in 2025 include CVE-2025-31324 in SAP NetWeaver, CVE-2025-61882 in Oracle E-Business Suite and CVE-2025-53770 in Microsoft SharePoint.

Attackers of various origins and objectives exploited all three of the vulnerabilities en masse and as zero-days. 

Mandiant clocked 500,000 combined hours of incident response investigations globally last year, up from 450,000 hours in 2024.

Technology companies were the most frequently attacked in 2025, accounting for 17% of all incidents. The following most-targeted industries included finance at 14.6%, business and professional services at 13.3% and health care at 11.9%.

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Ransomware remains a scourge that shows some signs of relenting, but incident responders and threat hunters are busier than ever as more financially-motivated attackers lean exclusively on data theft for extortion.

Attacks that only involve data theft for extortion may not be more prevalent than traditional ransomware when attackers encrypt systems, but momentum is moving in that direction, Genevieve Stark, head of cybercrime intelligence at Google Threat Intelligence Group, told CyberScoop.

“When you look at the actors in the English-speaking underground, those actors are almost all just focusing on data-theft extortion right now,” Stark added. This includes groups like Scattered Spider, ShinyHunters, Clop and other groups that have been responsible for some of the largest and farthest-reaching attacks over the past few years.

Google Threat Intelligence Group’s research report on ransomware, which it shared exclusively and discussed with CyberScoop prior to release, underscores how the evolution and spread of cybercrime can cloud a collective understanding of ransomware, or attacks that use malware to encrypt or lock systems. 

Ransomware attacks also often include data theft as an additional pressure point for extortion — occurring in 77% of ransomware intrusions Google observed last year, up from 57% in 2024 — but it’s not technically ransomware unless encryption is involved. 

“Over the past several years we’ve seen a gradual increase in the overall percentage of directly observed financially motivated incidents that involved only data theft extortion incidents, growing from around 2% of incidents in 2020 to more than 15% of incidents in 2025,” said Bavi Sadayappan, senior threat intelligence analyst at GTIG.

“In the same time span, the percentage of incidents involving ransomware deployment has fluctuated. We’ve seen a decrease in ransomware incidents in the past year, with 39% of incidents involving ransomware in 2024 compared to 31% in 2025,” she added.

The company declined to say how many ransomware attacks it responded to in 2025. “We hesitate sharing the number of cases that we work on, in terms of a quantitative number, because it’s so difficult for everybody to agree on what constitutes one incident versus two,” said Chris Linklater, practice leader at Mandiant. “Anecdotally, we’re staying very busy.”

Stark acknowledged that significant challenges prevent the industry from developing a clear, comprehensive picture of ransomware’s true scale and impact. Insight is largely confined to what individual incident response firms see in their own cases, and what information is shared is typically provided case by case rather in a centralized way.

“We’re not doing a great job as an industry in looking at the volume. I think that we’re overly dependent on things like the volume of data-leak sites, which have a lot of problems,” she said.

The increase in data extortion is likely driving an increase in these posts. At the same time, some threat clusters are making non-credible claims or recycling previous breaches and claiming them as their own work. “Data-leak sites as a measure is actually pretty poor, and I think that as an industry we’ve over relied on that,” Stark said.

Yet, the data is still useful for gauging certain trends, such as shifts in targeting or an increase in alleged attacks on specific sectors or regions, researchers said.

For what it’s worth, Google said the amount of posts on data leak sites jumped 48% from the year prior to 7,784 posts in 2025. Meanwhile, the number of unique data leak sites climbed almost 35% over the same period to 128 sites with at least one post.

Google’s report also focuses on the tactics and shifts it observed during its response to ransomware attacks last year, including the most common ways attackers broke into systems, the most prominent ransomware families and increased targeting of virtualization infrastructure.

Exploited vulnerabilities was the top initial access vector in ransomware attacks last year, accounting for a third of all incidents, followed by various forms of web compromise and stolen credentials. Attackers most commonly exploited vulnerabilities in widely used virtual private networks and firewalls from Fortinet, SonicWall, Palo Alto Networks and Citrix, researchers said.

Zach Riddle, principal threat intelligence analyst at GTIG, said this doesn’t reflect a growing trend as much as a recurring cycle of different initial access vectors, which rise and fall year to year for various reasons.

Google specifically called out 13 vulnerabilities, many disclosed years ago, ranking those defects among the top exploited vulnerabilities for ransomware attacks last year. Three of those vulnerabilities affect Fortinet products, followed by two from Microsoft, two from Veritas, and one each from SonicWall, Citrix, SAP, Palo Alto Networks, CrushFTP and Zoho.

Stolen credentials were the initial access point in 21% of ransomware intrusions last year, and attackers often used those credentials to authenticate to a victim’s VPN or Remote Desktop Protocol login, Google said in the report.

Attackers are also confronting more challenges in deploying ransomware once they break into victim networks. “We’re actually seeing a decrease in successful ransomware deployment,” Sadayappan said. Google observed a year-over-year decline from 54% in 2024 to 36% last year.

Another landmark change reflected in ransomware activity in 2025 involves increased targeting of virtualization infrastructure, such as VMware ESXi hypervisors. Attackers targeted these environments in 43% of ransomware intrusions last year, up from 29% in 2024.

“It lets the attacker hit a huge number of systems with a very small amount of effort,” Linklater said, adding that “it makes the investigation significantly harder to accomplish, because a lot more of the forensic evidence is lost when those hypervisors are attacked.”

The most prominent ransomware families in 2025 included Agenda, Redbike, Clop, Playcrypt, Safepay, Inc, RansomHub and Fireflame, according to Google. The most active ransomware brands last year included Qilin, Akira, Clop, Play, Safepay, Inc, Lynx, RansomHub, DragonForce and Sinobi.

The post The ransomware economy is shifting toward straight-up data extortion appeared first on CyberScoop.

Threat hunters and a collection of unconfirmed victims are responding to a series of attacks targeting Salesforce customers, which the vendor disclosed in a security advisory Saturday. 

“Salesforce is actively monitoring threat activity targeting public-facing Experience Cloud sites, including attempts to take advantage of overly permissive guest user configurations,” the company said in the alert.

The campaign marks the third widespread attack spree targeting Salesforce customers in about six months. 

The number of victims ensnared by the latest attacks is unverified, but ShinyHunters, the threat group asserting responsibility for the attacks, claims about 100 companies have already been impacted. 

Researchers told CyberScoop they are confident the threat group behind the campaign is associated with ShinyHunters, an outfit that’s previously stolen data from Salesforce instances for extortion attempts.

Salesforce did not attribute the attacks, but pinned blame on a “known threat actor group,” adding that the issue is not due to a vulnerability in the company’s platform.

The company said the threat activity reflects a broader trend of identity-based targeting, in this case customer-configured guest user settings that expose publicly accessible Experience Cloud sites to potential attacks.

“We are aware of a threat actor attempting to identify misconfigurations within Salesforce Experience Cloud instances,” Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at Mandiant Consulting, said in a statement. “We are working closely with Salesforce and our customers to provide the necessary telemetry and detection rules to mitigate potential risk.”

Salesforce said the threat actor is using a modified version of the Mandiant-developed open-source tool AuraInspector to scan for public-facing Experience Cloud sites and steal data from instances with a guest user profile. 

This setting is designed to provide unauthenticated users access to data intended for public consumption. Yet, guest profiles with excessive permissions allow attackers to view additional data by directly querying Salesforce CRM objects without logging in, the company explained.

Salesforce did not say when or how it became aware of the latest campaign targeting its customers, nor how many companies have already been impacted. “We don’t have anything further to add at this time,” said Nicole Aranda, senior manager of corporate communications at Salesforce. 

The company advised customers to ensure guest user configurations are properly restricted.

“Any system exposed to the internet must be configured with the expectation that it will be continuously scanned,” Shane Barney, chief information security officer, at Keeper Security, said in an email. 

“At its core, this is an access governance issue,” he added. “Guest accounts, service accounts and API integrations must be treated with the same discipline as privileged users. Applying least privilege, restricting API access and continuously auditing permissions are foundational security controls.”

Salesforce customers confronted a pair of attack sprees involving third-party vendors last year. Google Threat Intelligence Group at the time said it was aware of more than 200 potentially affected Salesforce instances linked to malicious activity in Gainsight applications connected to Salesforce customer environments in November.

A more extensive downstream attack spree discovered in August impacted more than 700 companies who integrated the AI chat agent Salesloft Drift into their Salesforce environments. ShinyHunters or threat clusters affiliated with the extortion group were involved in both of those campaigns as well.

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A prolific data ransom gang that calls itself Scattered Lapsus ShinyHunters (SLSH) has a distinctive playbook when it seeks to extort payment from victim firms: Harassing, threatening and even swatting executives and their families, all while notifying journalists and regulators about the extent of the intrusion. Some victims reportedly are paying — perhaps as much to contain the stolen data as to stop the escalating personal attacks. But a top SLSH expert warns that engaging at all beyond a “We’re not paying” response only encourages further harassment, noting that the group’s fractious and unreliable history means the only winning move is not to pay.

Unlike traditional, highly regimented Russia-based ransomware affiliate groups, SLSH is an unruly and somewhat fluid English-language extortion gang that appears uninterested in building a reputation of consistent behavior whereby victims might have some measure of confidence that the criminals will keep their word if paid.

That’s according to Allison Nixon, director of research at the New York City based security consultancy Unit 221B. Nixon has been closely tracking the criminal group and individual members as they bounce between various Telegram channels used to extort and harass victims, and she said SLSH differs from traditional data ransom groups in other important ways that argue against trusting them to do anything they say they’ll do — such as destroying stolen data.

Like SLSH, many traditional Russian ransomware groups have employed high-pressure tactics to force payment in exchange for a decryption key and/or a promise to delete stolen data, such as publishing a dark web shaming blog with samples of stolen data next to a countdown clock, or notifying journalists and board members of the victim company. But Nixon said the extortion from SLSH quickly escalates way beyond that — to threats of physical violence against executives and their families, DDoS attacks on the victim’s website, and repeated email-flooding campaigns.

SLSH is known for breaking into companies by phishing employees over the phone, and using the purloined access to steal sensitive internal data. In a January 30 blog post, Google’s security forensics firm Mandiant said SLSH’s most recent extortion attacks stem from incidents spanning early to mid-January 2026, when SLSH members pretended to be IT staff and called employees at targeted victim organizations claiming that the company was updating MFA settings.

“The threat actor directed the employees to victim-branded credential harvesting sites to capture their SSO credentials and MFA codes, and then registered their own device for MFA,” the blog post explained.

Victims often first learn of the breach when their brand name is uttered on whatever ephemeral new public Telegram group chat SLSH is using to threaten, extort and harass their prey. According to Nixon, the coordinated harassment on the SLSH Telegram channels is part of a well-orchestrated strategy to overwhelm the victim organization by manufacturing humiliation that pushes them over the threshold to pay.

Nixon said multiple executives at targeted organizations have been subject to “swatting” attacks, wherein SLSH communicated a phony bomb threat or hostage situation at the target’s address in the hopes of eliciting a heavily armed police response at their home or place of work.

“A big part of what they’re doing to victims is the psychological aspect of it, like harassing executives’ kids and threatening the board of the company,” Nixon told KrebsOnSecurity. “And while these victims are getting extortion demands, they’re simultaneously getting outreach from media outlets saying, ‘Hey, do you have any comments on the bad things we’re going to write about you.”

In a blog post today, Unit 221B argues that no one should negotiate with SLSH because the group has demonstrated a willingness to extort victims based on promises that it has no intention to keep. Nixon points out that all of SLSH’s known members hail from The Com, shorthand for a constellation of cybercrime-focused Discord and Telegram communities which serve as a kind of distributed social network that facilitates instant collaboration.

Nixon said Com-based extortion groups tend to instigate feuds and drama between group members, leading to lying, betrayals, credibility destroying behavior, backstabbing, and sabotaging each other.

“With this type of ongoing dysfunction, often compounding by substance abuse, these threat actors often aren’t able to act with the core goal in mind of completing a successful, strategic ransom operation,” Nixon wrote. “They continually lose control with outbursts that put their strategy and operational security at risk, which severely limits their ability to build a professional, scalable, and sophisticated criminal organization network for continued successful ransoms – unlike other, more tenured and professional criminal organizations focused on ransomware alone.”

Intrusions from established ransomware groups typically center around encryption/decryption malware that mostly stays on the affected machine. In contrast, Nixon said, ransom from a Com group is often structured the same as violent sextortion schemes against minors, wherein members of The Com will steal damaging information, threaten to release it, and “promise” to delete it if the victim complies without any guarantee or technical proof point that they will keep their word. She writes:

A key component of SLSH’s efforts to convince victims to pay, Nixon said, involves manipulating the media into hyping the threat posed by this group. This approach also borrows a page from the playbook of sextortion attacks, she said, which encourages predators to keep targets continuously engaged and worrying about the consequences of non-compliance.

“On days where SLSH had no substantial criminal ‘win’ to announce, they focused on announcing death threats and harassment to keep law enforcement, journalists, and cybercrime industry professionals focused on this group,” she said.

Nixon knows a thing or two about being threatened by SLSH: For the past several months, the group’s Telegram channels have been replete with threats of physical violence against her, against Yours Truly, and against other security researchers. These threats, she said, are just another way the group seeks to generate media attention and achieve a veneer of credibility, but they are useful as indicators of compromise because SLSH members tend to name drop and malign security researchers even in their communications with victims.

“Watch for the following behaviors in their communications to you or their public statements,” Unit 221B’s advisory reads. “Repeated abusive mentions of Allison Nixon (or “A.N”), Unit 221B, or cybersecurity journalists—especially Brian Krebs—or any other cybersecurity employee, or cybersecurity company. Any threats to kill, or commit terrorism, or violence against internal employees, cybersecurity employees, investigators, and journalists.”

Unit 221B says that while the pressure campaign during an extortion attempt may be traumatizing to employees, executives, and their family members, entering into drawn-out negotiations with SLSH incentivizes the group to increase the level of harm and risk, which could include the physical safety of employees and their families.

“The breached data will never go back to the way it was, but we can assure you that the harassment will end,” Nixon said. “So, your decision to pay should be a separate issue from the harassment. We believe that when you separate these issues, you will objectively see that the best course of action to protect your interests, in both the short and long term, is to refuse payment.”

Researchers uncovered more worrying details about a long-running cyber espionage campaign suspected to be backed by the Chinese government, exemplifying how such attacks often go undetected until they’ve already caused significant damage.

Google Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant said the Chinese threat group UNC6201 has been exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines since at least mid-2024. The group overlaps with UNC5221, also known as Silk Typhoon, which has been burrowing into critical infrastructure and government agency networks undetected since at least 2022.

The zero-day exploitation marks an escalation from this particular cluster of actors.  State-sponsored attackers spent years implanting Brickstorm malware into networks before the campaign was finally detected last summer. By September, however, the attackers had replaced Brickstorm with Grimbolt, a more advanced malware that’s harder to detect, Google security researchers said Tuesday.

The zero-day vulnerability — CVE-2026-22769 — hinges on a hardcoded administrator password in Dell RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines that was pulled from Apache Tomcat. It carries a 10/10 CVSS rating. The Chinese threat group has been using the hardcoded password, which triggers the vulnerability and allows unauthenticated remote attackers to gain full system access with root-level persistence for at least 18 months, Google said. 

Dell Technologies disclosed and released a patch for the vulnerability Tuesday. A company spokesperson urged customers to follow guidance in its security advisory.

“We are aware of less than a dozen impacted organizations, but because the full scale of this campaign is unknown we recommend that organizations previously targeted by Brickstorm look out for Grimbolt in their environments,” Austin Larsen, principal analyst at GTIG, told CyberScoop.

When the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency unveiled new details about the campaign in December, Google said dozens of U.S. organizations, not including downstream victims, had already been impacted by Brickstorm. 

“The actor is likely still active in unpatched and remediated environments, and because exploitation has been occurring since mid-2024, they have had significant time to establish persistence and carry out long-term espionage,” Larsen added.

The campaign — one of many concurrent efforts by China state-sponsored groups to embed themselves into networks for long-term access, disruptions and potential sabotage — remains a top area of concern for national security.

CISA, the National Security Agency and Canadian Centre for Cyber Security released new analysis on Brickstorm last week to share indicators and compromise that could help potential victims detect malicious activity on their networks.

Yet, the China-linked groups involved in this campaign have already moved on to Grimbolt, in some cases replacing older Brickstorm binaries with the new backdoor that’s more difficult to reverse engineer, according to Google.

Marci McCarthy, director of public affairs at CISA, told CyberScoop the agency will share further information on Wednesday.

Google’s fresh research on the China state-sponsored campaign demonstrates how the threat group’s tenacity, and ability to dwell undetected in networks longer than 400 days, keeps defenders and cyber authorities at a disadvantage.

The threat groups typically target edge applications and devices running on systems without endpoint detection and response, but researchers don’t know how attackers broke into the networks of the most recently discovered victims. 

Researchers only have a narrow view of the threat groups’ activities at large. 

“We suspect a significant portion of UNC5221 and UNC6201’s activity likely remains unknown, and there is a strong probability that they are developing or using undiscovered zero-days and malware,” Larsen said. “The most concerning aspect of this campaign is that additional organizations were likely compromised as part of this campaign and do not know it yet.”

The post Chinese hackers exploited a Dell zero-day for 18 months before anyone noticed appeared first on CyberScoop.

Threat hunters and researchers are racing to contain a wave of voice-phishing attacks targeting single sign-on tools, already leading to data theft and extortion attempts. Multiple cybercrime groups are combining voice calls and advanced phishing kits to trick victims into handing over access — including a group identifying itself as ShinyHunters, which has publicly named alleged targets and posted samples of stolen data.

The attacks share common characteristics with previous campaigns attributed to ShinyHunters, which has abused third-party vendors to gain initial access to multiple company networks, including the attack spree that impacted more than 700 Salesforce customer environments last fall.

“Mandiant is tracking a new, ongoing ShinyHunters-branded campaign using evolved voice phishing techniques to successfully compromise SSO credentials from victim organizations, and enroll threat actor controlled devices into victim multifactor authentication solutions,” Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at Mandiant Consulting, said in an email to CyberScoop.

“This is an active and ongoing campaign,” Carmakal added. “After gaining initial access, these actors pivot into SaaS environments to exfiltrate sensitive data. An actor that identifies as ShinyHunters has approached some of the victim organizations with an extortion demand.”

Cybercriminals are registering custom domains that mimic legitimate single sign-on portals used by targeted companies, then deploying tailored voice-phishing kits to call victims while remotely controlling which pages appear in the victim’s browser. This lets the attackers sync their spoken prompts with multifactor-authentication requests in real time, increasing the likelihood the victim approves or enters the needed codes on cue.

Okta, one of the single sign-on providers targeted by this campaign, released threat intelligence on phishing kits observed in this campaign and others Thursday. Attackers appearing to be aligned with ShinyHunters have attempted to extort targeted organizations on behalf of a specific initial access broker that used one of these phishing kits.

Brett Winterford, vice president at Okta Threat Intelligence, said researchers have observed at least two phishing kits that demonstrate the real-time capability to mimic the authentication flows of identity providers. 

“This creates a more compelling pretext for asking the user to share credentials and accept multifactor authentication challenges,” he told CyberScoop.

“Okta Threat Intelligence has observed multiple phishing kits developed for the needs of voice phishing operators, each with dedicated panels for impersonation of Google, Microsoft and Okta sign-in flows, as well as cryptocurrency providers,” Winterford added.

A spokesperson for Microsoft said the company has nothing to share on the campaign. Meanwhile, a Google spokesperson said: “At this time, we have no indication that Google itself or its products are affected by this campaign.”

Security experts noted the attacks don’t involve a vulnerability in single sign-on vendors’ products or infrastructure, but rather a persistent weak point in identity and access management. Targeted victims are once again being duped into sharing their credentials with attackers.

These phishing kits allow cybercriminals without deep technical skills to buy the tooling and focus on targeting people and processes, said Cynthia Kaiser, senior vice president of Halcyon’s ransomware research center. 

“While these campaigns occur often, the difference here is the amount of success in the recent campaign is slightly higher. That’s likely because of the believable content and the use of voice phishing versus just phishing,” she said.

“If you’re getting a call and it’s personalized and it’s changing in real time — that feels believable, that’s a different element that people don’t necessarily have their guard up for.”

Investigation ongoing into scope

It’s unclear how many organizations have been impacted by the campaign. A ShinyHunters-branded data leak site, which is currently down, previously listed at least three victims, including two companies that publicly confirmed they were impacted by recent attacks.

SoundCloud said some personally identifiable data on about 20% of its user base, roughly 36 million people, was compromised by an attack it first discovered in mid-December. The company insists sensitive data wasn’t exposed and did not name the attackers, but said users, employees and partners have been flooded with threatening emails. 

“We are aware that a threat actor group has published data online allegedly taken from our organization,” Sade Ayodele, senior director of communications at SoundCloud, said in an email. “Our security team — supported by leading third-party cybersecurity experts — is actively reviewing the claim and published data.”

Betterment, a financial services company, said an attacker gained access to some of its systems via social engineering on Jan. 9. The company said customer data was stolen, but no accounts were accessed and customer credentials weren’t compromised.

The attacker also quickly used access to Betterment’s systems to send a fraudulent cryptocurrency offer to some customers. Betterment did not respond to a request for comment.

Threat intelligence suggests additional victims have been targeted and potentially impacted. Sophos researchers are tracking a cluster of about 150 malicious domains established starting last month, including some used in voice phishing campaigns resulting in data theft and ransom notes demanding a payment, said Rafe Pilling, director of threat intelligence at Sophos Counter Threat Unit.

“We can’t confirm that they have all been used but the threat actors are creating target-specific domains, themed to reflect single-sign on services and impersonating authentication providers like Okta,” Pilling said. The fake domains impersonate organizations in the education, real estate, energy, financial services and retail sectors.

While one of the groups behind this campaign identifies itself as ShinyHunters, researchers have yet to confirm that claim or formally attribute the attacks to a specific group or person. 

“ShinyHunters typically has a mix of real victims and recycled information or exaggerated claims,” Kaiser said. 

Moreover, the names adopted or reused by some cybercriminals has lost relevance, said Ian Gray, vice president of intelligence at Flashpoint. 

A cybercriminal or group can use any username they choose and apply that to a data-leak site, but that doesn’t prove a direct link. 

“While ShinyHunters have claimed credibility for the campaign,” Gray said, “it is equally important that we examine the tactics, techniques and procedures being employed and how they relate to previous campaigns.”

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Ransomware negotiation is a dark but widely acknowledged reality in the cybersecurity industry — one that many argue is a necessary practice, even if it largely occurs out of sight. Brokering payments and terms with cybercriminals who hold organizations’ data and operations hostage places security professionals in a fraught position that requires them to balance a responsibility to meet their clients’ needs without fueling the spread of financially-motivated crime.

The pitfalls of ransomware negotiation are excessive — pinning the goals of cybercrime against victims and incident response firms that typically face no good options. Negotiators are charged with ensuring their clients don’t break any laws by financially supporting sanctioned criminals, but they also have to consider the lines they won’t cross without betraying their moral compass.

These backchannel negotiations can go awry for various reasons. Many people involved in ransomware negotiation prefer to share very little about what transpires in these discussions, a decision that ensures the terms of ransomware payments remain largely unscrutinized. 

Yet, many security companies and professionals spoke to CyberScoop about the challenges and benefits of ransomware negotiation after two of their own became turncoats. The former incident responders, Ryan Clifford Goldberg and Kevin Tyler Martin, were moonlighting as ransomware operators and pleaded guilty last month to a series of ransomware attacks in 2023.

“There’s no structured community of practice, no peer review, and no recognized body to certify or hold negotiators accountable,” Jon DiMaggio, principal at XFIL Cyber, told CyberScoop. “It’s one of the few areas of cybersecurity with no real standards, an unregulated tradecraft that still operates like the Wild West.”

This uneven approach manifests across the landscape, particularly among the top incident response firms, which have varying levels of comfort with ransomware negotiations. CrowdStrike and Mandiant draw a firm line, refraining from providing ransomware negotiation services to clients. 

If a client is considering paying a ransomware group, Mandiant will explain the options and let the client decide. The Google-owned company will also share what it knows about the group’s reputation for honoring terms and provide a list of third-party vendors that specialize in ransomware negotiation.

Adam Meyers, head of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, is firmly in the don’t-pay-ransoms camp. But he, too, recognizes it’s not always that simple. 

“No good comes from paying them,” but sometimes in extreme cases when the choice is between a business’s downfall or potentially putting the people you serve at risk of significant harm, victims don’t have a choice but to pay the ransom, Meyers said.

Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 takes things to the finish line, but stops before payment. “The boundary for us is we don’t perform ransomware payments. That’s actually an intentional decision on our end to separate those out,” Steve Elovitz, vice president of consulting at Unit 42, told CyberScoop.

“We will perform negotiations when requested by our clients, but we will not perform the payments,” he added. “There’s the complexity side of it, but there’s also just the moral side of it — not wanting to be involved, really, in the transaction itself.”

The red lines in ransomware response — viewing stolen or illegal data on dark web forums, collecting that information, engaging with cybercriminals, negotiating and, ultimately, submitting payment — can push those involved beyond their comfort zones, said Sean Nikkel, lead cyber intelligence analyst at Bitdefender.

Lack of transparency engenders isolation

These self-imposed limits highlight how secretive ransomware negotiations tend to be, which creates a vacuum in which criminals thrive, DiMaggio said. 

“The lack of transparency isolates everyone,” he said. “Victims don’t know what’s normal or fair, law enforcement is often left guessing, and the criminals use that silence to control the narrative and drive up their prices.”

Nikkel asserts some secrecy is necessary, yet ransomware negotiators are “operating without a license and it kind of freaks me out a little bit,” he said.

Professional certifications exist for many lines of intelligence work, but there’s nothing for ransomware negotiation, he added.

DiMaggio, who has infiltrated ransomware groups to investigate their operations, dox their leaders and chronicle stories that would otherwise go untold, said victim organizations constantly make the same mistakes because lessons from these attacks are rarely shared. 

“Until the industry finds a responsible way to collect and analyze anonymized negotiation data, we’ll keep fighting each case in the dark,” he said. “Transparency isn’t about shaming victims — it’s about denying criminals the advantage of secrecy.”

Open sharing of ransomware negotiations is a non-starter for many important reasons, experts said. These communications contain privileged information that could tip attackers off to counterstrategies or empower them with information they can use as leverage to further compromise victims. 

“It would be difficult to do that in a way that doesn’t compromise the practice,” said Kurtis Minder, the co-founder and former CEO of GroupSense who published a book in July about his experiences as a ransomware negotiator.

Cynthia Kaiser, who joined Halcyon’s ransomware research center as senior vice president after 20 years with the FBI, shares that view. 

“You don’t want to do anything that re-victimizes the victim,” she said. “If that information goes out, that should be their choice.”

The “darkness” about negotiations doesn’t merit the same emphasis as the need to better understand “how insidious and gross all these ransomware attacks are, and who they’re attacking,” Kaiser added. 

“That’s the only way we can really grapple with the actual extent of the threat, and that’s not happening right now,” she said. “That information doesn’t get out there enough.”

Key negotiation skills and considerations

Minder got pulled into his first ransomware negotiation in 2019 by accident and against his best intentions. “Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed to do more and then it sort of snowballed on us,” he said. “We didn’t really want to do this.”

Since then, Minder has been involved in hundreds of ransomware negotiations for major companies and small businesses who he volunteered to help in his personal time. 

There is no litmus test for what makes a good negotiator, but soft skills and emotional intelligence are critical, he said. 

“Empathy is one of the most important things,” Minder added. “Not sympathy — empathy — being able to effectively put yourself in the bad guys’ shoes is super powerful.”

As ransomware attacks have grown, so too has the mixed motivations of attackers attempting to extort victims for payment. 

Attacker volatility has increased in the past four years and complicated the considerations negotiators must heed in their response, said Lizzie Cookson, senior director of incident response at Coveware by Veeam. 

Some attackers are “eager to get paid, but they’re also in it for the notoriety, for the bragging rights, for the media attention,” said Cookson, who’s worked as ransomware negotiator for more than a decade. “That’s where we start to encounter more concerning behavior — more hostility, threat actors threatening violence, making threats against people’s family members.”

These cases, which occur much more often now, are more likely to result in broken promises — data leaks after a ransom was paid to avoid such an outcome or follow-on extortion demands, she said.

Indeed, cybercriminals consistently pull new threads to amplify the pressure they place on victims. This includes elements of physical extortion wherein ransomware groups call and threaten executives, claiming they know where the executives’ kids go to school, where they live and how they get to work, said Flashpoint CEO Josh Lefkowitz.

These threats put business leaders in precarious, unexpected positions that challenge their preconceived notions about how they’d respond to a cyberattack, Lefkowitz said. 

Ransomware negotiation requires practitioners to navigate between doing what’s necessary and what’s right, DiMaggio said. “The key is to treat every negotiation as a crisis with human consequences, not just a transaction.”

Negotiators reflect on previous cases

Ransomware negotiators tend to run through common checklists based on patterns they’ve experienced, but each incident is unique and requires some level of improvisation. 

Matt Dowling, senior director of digital forensic and incident response at Surefire Cyber, said ransomware operators, on the whole, are more trustworthy now than when he first got involved in negotiations in 2019. The practice, he said, has also improved because threat intelligence is more useful, making negotiations a data- driven effort.

Dowling separates ransomware operators into two groups: named and unnamed. Named groups are more trustworthy because they have a reputation to uphold, while unnamed groups are more likely to re-extort victims and deviate from the standards of ransomware negotiation, such as not providing proof of their claims.

Still, he said, most payments result in positive outcomes for the victims. The lowest payment Dowling has facilitated came in around $6,000, and the largest was about $8 million, he said. 

Some negotiations end abruptly without further incident. These cases typically involve charities or non-profits, according to Minder.

One case he worked on involved a charity that provided free screenings for breast cancer. In that incident, he simply asked the attackers: “Why are you doing this? These people don’t have any extra money.”

The attackers walked away after the organization agreed to pay a $5,000 ransom to cover what the ransomware group claimed amounted to costs it incurred to conduct the attack — a significant discount from their initial demand of $2 million.

When cases involving data extortion come to a close, negotiators will ask for proof the data was deleted, which is impossible to confirm. Some attackers, who are especially proud of their work will provide detailed reports about how they gained access — information that helps the victim and incident responders understand how and what occurred. 

Experts said the number of people involved in ransomware negotiations can be quite large when lawyers, insurance providers and law enforcement is involved. The duration of these back-and-forth compromises can last for a couple hours or up to three months.

Tactics define process for negotiation

Negotiators also employ generally similar strategies to achieve their client’s objectives at the lowest possible payment.

Threat intelligence on ransomware groups can guide negotiators toward a more gentle or aggressive approach, but in all cases “the threat actor, at the outset, has all the leverage,” Dowling said. 

“The leverage that you have is the threat actor wants to get paid. The only way they’re going to get paid is if you come to an agreement,” he added. 

Every ransomware negotiator CyberScoop spoke with remarked on the importance of delay. “Time is always our friend,” Cookson said. “Every day that passes after the initial incident is an opportunity for us to get more visibility so that they can make those decisions with a lot more confidence and make those decisions based on actual data, not based on fear and emotion.”

Initial outreach from negotiators working on behalf of a victim should be short and simple, allowing attackers to do most of the talking up front, Minder said. Negotiators should also avoid discussion of any financial numbers or positional bargaining as long as possible, he said.

Cursing or adopting combative language is a hard no-no for Minder as well. “There are ways to convey disappointment in the messages that aren’t fighting words,” he said. “They’re humans. They have egos, so you have to keep that in mind.”

Delay tactics are designed to get the attackers to question their own demand before the negotiator ever puts a number in writing, Minder said. 

Moreover, it’s not just about the money — ransomware operators are seeking validation, and a sense that they’re in control and winning, he said.

The worst outcomes involve victims that rush to make a payment, assuming that will make all the pain go away, Cookson said. 

Financial incentives present ethical challenges

Ransomware is a thriving criminal enterprise, amounting to a combined $2.1 billion in payments during the three-year period ending in December 2024 and about 3,000 total attacks in 2023 and 2024, according to the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Businesses, of course, see opportunity in all of that activity and boutique firms have assembled teams to support victim organizations by engaging in ransomware negotiations on their behalf in the wake of attacks. 

This ancillary industry fosters additional ethical challenges, especially when there’s a built-in financial incentive for ransomware negotiations to occur and, in some cases, result in payments.

A general lack of transparency in billing puts the practices of some of these firms under heavier scrutiny. Some firms charge a flat fee or hourly rate, while others use a contingency model based on the percentage of the ransom reduction they’re able to achieve, DiMaggio said. 

“It’s not the norm across the industry, but it happens, and it introduces a clear conflict of interest,” he added. “When a negotiator’s income depends on the ransom outcome, it blurs the line between representing the victim and profiting from the crime.”

While some ransomware negotiation providers do, indeed, charge a small percentage off the ransom payment, victim organizations should avoid hiring any firm that employs that model, Elovitz said. 

“If you’re making a percentage of the payment, then at least there’s some financial incentive to not negotiate it down as far as you might otherwise,” he added. 

DiMaggio would like to see more clarity around how service providers set prices for ransomware negotiation. Absent that, he said, “the industry will keep living in a moral gray zone, one where good intentions can unintentionally sustain the very ecosystem we’re trying to dismantle.”

Rules of engagement don’t apply

Ransomware negotiation remains an ill-defined, largely unrestricted practice, absent any collective industrywide agreement on rules of engagement.

Any effort to define rules upon which the industry can coalesce could potentially pit competitors against one another, leaving room for those more willing to bend the norms an opportunity to win business by providing less scrupulous services.

Negotiators are effectively unfettered once they ensure they’re not breaking any laws by engaging with or sending money to sanctioned criminals.

Still, there’s an unmet need for checks and balances, oversight, transparency and a standardized set of rules for negotiators to follow without crossing any professional or personal lines. 

Part of the challenge with external oversight lies in the act of negotiation, an art that requires intermediaries to build limited trust with attackers spanning conversations that may not play well in the public sphere, Elovitz said. 

“Putting that under a microscope could inhibit the good guys more than the bad,” he said. Payments themselves, however, could benefit from more scrutiny, Elovitz added. 

Clarity in purpose should prevail above all of these factors. 

Protecting victims without empowering criminals is the first principle of ransomware negotiation, but that balance can’t be managed in the dark, DiMaggio said. 

“I’ve seen firsthand how the lack of oversight allows abuse from both sides of the table,” he said.

To prevent manipulation, DiMaggio called for a standardized framework, vetted negotiators, recorded and auditable communications and anonymized after-action reviews.

“Without accountability, the victims end up paying twice,” he said. “Once to the criminals, and again to the people who claim to save them.”

The scars from years spent as a ransomware negotiator brought Minder back to where his intuition was before he ever got involved. “I don’t believe this should be a business. I say that having been paid to do this,” he said. 

“It’s almost like a parasitic industry,” Minder said. “You’re profiting from victims.”

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Cybersecurity authorities and threat analysts unveiled alarming details Thursday about a suspected China state-sponsored espionage and data theft campaign that Google previously warned about in September. The outlook based on their limited visibility into China’s sustained ability to burrow into critical infrastructure and government agency networks undetected, dating back to at least 2022, is grim.

“State-sponsored actors are not just infiltrating networks, they are embedding themselves to enable long-term access, disruptions and potential sabotage,” Nick Andersen, executive assistant director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said during a media briefing.

Brickstorm, a backdoor which Andersen described as a “terribly sophisticated piece of malware,” has allowed the attackers to achieve persistent access with an average duration of 393 days to support immediate data theft and follow-on pivots to other malicious activity, Austin Larsen, principal analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, told CyberScoop.

“We believe dozens of organizations in the United States have been impacted by Brickstorm, not including downstream victims,” Larsen said.

CISA, the National Security Agency and the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security released an analysis report on Brickstorm, which targets VMware vSphere and Windows environments to conceal activity, achieve lateral movement and tunnel into victim networks while also automatically reinstalling or restarting the malware if disrupted. CISA provided indicators of compromise based on eight Brickstorm samples it obtained from victim organizations.

China state-sponsored attackers are primarily implanting Brickstorm into the networks of organizations in government, IT and legal services, and targeting edge devices, software as a service providers and business process outsourcers to gain access to downstream targets, according to officials and researchers.

Andersen declined to say how many government agencies have been impacted or the type of data stolen, but the scope of assumed impact is far greater than what’s been uncovered to date. “I think it’s a logical conclusion to assume that there are additional victims out there that we have not yet had the opportunity to communicate with,” he said.

CrowdStrike, which attributes the attacks to Warp Panda, and GTIG, which attributes the activity to UNC5221, both said the Brickstorm campaign goes back to at least 2022. Yet, the intrusions involving Brickstorm weren’t detected until last summer.

“Their infrastructure expansion, evolution of their tooling, and continued ability to exploit cloud misconfigurations all point to a campaign that remains highly active,” said Adam Meyers, senior vice president of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike.

CrowdStrike said it also observed Warp Panda deploy two previously unobserved implants called Junction and GuestConduit. All of the malware is written in Golang. 

The threat group has stolen configuration data, identity metadata, documents and emails on topics that align with China’s government interest, Meyers said.

“While we haven’t observed destructive follow-on actions, the intelligence value alone is significant. Access to this kind of cloud-resident data gives a state actor the ability to map infrastructure, study dependencies, and position themselves for future operations,” he added. “That’s what makes this campaign so dangerous, it’s espionage with strategic depth.”

CISA provided details about a 2024 attack on an unnamed organization’s internal network as an example of the threat group’s operations, but much remains unknown. Authorities still don’t know key details about how attackers obtained initial access in that incident, when the webshell was implanted or how they obtained credentials for a second account to move laterally to a domain controller using remote desktop protocol.

Attackers involved in that incident copied the organization’s Active Directory database, obtained credentials for a managed service provider account and used those credentials to move from the internal domain controller to the VMware vCenter server. Officials said the attackers also jumped multiple servers to steal cryptographic keys and elevated privileges, which allowed them to deploy Brickstorm malware in the server’s directory. 

The attacks revive and amplify enduring concerns about China’s cyberespionage activity, mirroring other campaigns with similar objectives based on living-off-the-land techniques attributed to other prominent China state-sponsored threat groups.

“Compared to past China-nexus efforts, this campaign represents an evolution of tradecraft,” Meyers said. “It shows a deep understanding of multi-cloud environments and the identity fabrics that tie them together.”

A sustained lack of insight into China’s already achieved goals and what these persistent backdoors might ultimately allow attackers to accomplish down the line is startling.

The Brickstorm campaign effectively blends objectives spanning espionage, intellectual property theft and persistent access that attackers could use for follow-on malicious activity, Larsen said.

The nation-state attackers are also remarkably stealth, exploiting gaps in networks where detection tools can’t be deployed and prioritizing the compromise of perimeter and remote access infrastructure where log retention is often insufficient to determine the initial access vector, he added. 

“Identifying this activity is exceptionally difficult because it targets appliances and edge devices that are often poorly inventoried and unmonitored,” Larsen said. “This level of operational security and the focus on ‘unmanageable’ devices places it among some of the most evasive nation-state activities we track.”

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An independent forensic investigation is underway to determine the extent of the intrusion into customer management software Gainsight’s systems and whether the breach has spread beyond Salesforce to other third-party applications. Despite this ongoing analysis, the company maintains that the impact on customer data stored within connected services is limited and largely contained.

“While Salesforce has identified compromised customer tokens, we presently know of only a handful of customers who had their data affected,” Gainsight CEO Chuck Ganapathi wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “Salesforce has notified the affected customers and we have reached out to each of them to provide support and are working directly with them.”

Details about the attack are scattered, and discrepancies remain about the number of companies impacted and the extent to which they are compromised. Information is fragmented, in part, because Gainsight and Salesforce are sharing updates independent of each other and respective to their own systems.

Gainsight is relying on Salesforce and Mandiant, its incident response firm, to identify victims of the attack and provide detailed indicators of compromise. 

Salesforce identified three impacted customers in the immediate aftermath of the attack, and has since found more confirmed victims, Gainsight said in an update on its community page. Neither company has provided a specific number of known victims.

“There is a distinction between the number of customers who Salesforce identified as having compromised tokens and the handful of customers we presently know had their data affected,” a company spokesperson told CyberScoop Tuesday.

Google Threat Intelligence Group, which is affiliated with Mandiant under Google Cloud’s security apparatus, said it was aware of more than 200 Salesforce instances potentially affected by the Gainsight breach last week. Google hasn’t provided an updated figure since then.

Inconsistencies are common in supply-chain attacks that flow downstream.

Meanwhile, Mandiant is continuing to sift through logs and analyze token behavior and connector activity to provide Gainsight with a more complete view of what occurred and how far attackers were able to use Gainsight customers’ access tokens to breach additional systems.

Gainsight previously said Hubspot, Zendesk and revenue intelligence platform Gong.io also temporarily revoked Gainsight customers’ access tokens “out of an abundance of caution.” The company hasn’t reported any confirmed impact on other systems and Salesforce maintains that the issue did not involve a vulnerability in the Salesforce platform.

The breach and its root cause is strikingly similar to an expansive downstream attack spree that impacted more than 700 customers who integrated Salesloft Drift into Salesforce two months ago. 

While Gainsight and Salesforce are both communicating directly with customers, publicly available threat hunting guidance and information about the attacks exist in multiple places.

Salesforce has shared the most comprehensive IOCs, including dates and observed activities for each malicious IP address. The earliest malicious activity linked to the campaign occurred Oct. 23, according to Salesforce.

The company advised customers to review all available logs for potential compromise and noted that the revocation of Gainsight OAuth tokens does not delete a customers’ logs or hinder their ability to investigate the incident.

Gainsight, however, said its logs are of less use. “Based on the nature of the logs we retain, many of our clients have not found them to be material in assessing any risk to their organization,” Brent Krempges, chief customer officer at Gainsight, said on its community page. 

“We strongly recommend that you focus your investigation on the Salesforce logs that show authentication attempts and API calls originating from the Gainsight Connected App,” he added. “These Salesforce-side logs are the authoritative source of information for identifying any anomalous access patterns.”

Gainsight also recommended that customers configure IP restrictions for API calls to ensure only legitimate requests are allowed. This security control is manual and requires cooperation from every vendor in the supply chain. Okta said IP restrictions kept its Drift integrations secure and successfully blocked an attempted attack on its Salesforce environment during the widespread incidents in August.

Ganapathi, who was named CEO in August, acknowledged that Gainsight is critical to its customers’ daily operations and said the company is personally responsible for ensuring access to its products. The company is helping customers manage their Gainsight Customer Success (CS) instances while its Salesforce connected app is offline, he said. 

“The only way we beat these threats is by working together and sharing information and strategies,” Ganapathi said. “That is why I am committing to sharing what we learn from this experience to help everyone in the SaaS community strengthen their defenses and, we hope, avoid going through something similar themselves.”

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GlobalLogic, a digital engineering and product design company, said it was impacted by a widespread data theft and extortion campaign linked to a zero-day vulnerability in Oracle E-Business Suite.

The company, which was acquired by Hitachi in 2021 and has a current customer base of nearly 600 clients, filed data breach notifications with authorities in California and Maine on Friday. GlobalLogic said the attack exposed human resources data on nearly 10,500 current and former employees. 

GlobalLogic is among many Oracle customers targeted by attackers aligned with the Clop ransomware group, which exploited a zero-day vulnerability affecting the enterprise platform to steal massive amounts of data as far back as July. John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, previously told CyberScoop dozens of organizations were impacted. 

GlobalLogic said it discovered the data breach Oct. 9 and, upon investigation, determined the initial breach occurred July 10. The most recent malicious activity occurred Aug. 20, the company said.

“This incident did not target or impact GlobalLogic’s systems outside our Oracle platform, and, based on industry reports, we are one of many Oracle customers believed to be impacted,” the company said in the notification letter sent to people impacted. GlobalLogic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Data exposed by the attack includes names, addresses, phone numbers, emergency contact information, email addresses, dates of birth, nationality, passport information, internal employee numbers, tax identifiers such as Social Security numbers, salary information, bank account details and routing numbers, according to GlobalData.

Upon discovering it was impacted, GlobalLogic said it immediately activated incident response procedures, notified law enforcement and engaged with third-party firms to assist with an investigation. “We also promptly applied software patches upon their release from Oracle to address the vulnerability,” the company said. 

Oracle disclosed and issued a patch for the zero-day vulnerability —  CVE-2025-61882 affecting Oracle E-Business Suite — in a security advisory Oct. 4, and previously said it was aware some customers had received extortion emails. 

The zero-day wasn’t the only problem confronting Oracle and its customers. Clop exploited multiple vulnerabilities, including the zero-day, in Oracle E-Business Suite to steal large amounts of data from several victims, according to Mandiant Consulting CTO Charles Carmakal. 

The significant lag time between when the attacks occurred and Oracle’s disclosure indicates Clop was breaking into and stealing data from Oracle E-Business Suite customers’ environments for months. Researchers were not aware of the attacks until executives of alleged victim organizations received extortion emails demanding payment. 

Clop’s ransom demands reached up to $50 million, according to Halcyon. “We have seen seven- and eight-figure demands thus far,” Cynthia Kaiser, senior vice president of Halcyon’s ransomware research center, told CyberScoop last month.

Clop’s data-leak site included almost 30 alleged victims as of last week. The notorious ransomware group has threatened to leak alleged victims’ data unless it receives payment. 

One of those named victims, Envoy Air, a subsidiary of American Airlines, confirmed it was impacted by the attack spree. 

“We have conducted a thorough review of the data at issue and have confirmed no sensitive or customer data was affected. A limited amount of business information and commercial contact details may have been compromised,” a spokesperson for Envoy Air said in a statement. 

GlobalLogic said it implemented Oracle’s recommended mitigation steps in the wake of the attack and took additional steps to improve its security.

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SonicWall said a state-sponsored threat actor was behind the brute-force attack that exposed firewall configuration files of every customer that used the company’s cloud backup service. 

The vendor pinned the responsibility for the attack on an undisclosed nation state Tuesday, after Mandiant concluded its investigation into the incident.

SonicWall did not attribute the attack to a specific country or threat group and Mandiant declined to provide additional information. The vendor’s update, which lacked a root-cause analysis, was mostly an effort to put the attack behind it as leadership made pledges to improve SonicWall’s security practices.

“The malicious activity has been contained and was isolated to our firewall cloud backup service, which stores firewall configuration files in a specific cloud bucket,” SonicWall CEO Bob VanKirk said in a pre-recorded video published alongside the update. “There was no impact to any SonicWall product, firmware, source code, production network, or to any customer data or any other SonicWall system.”

Yet, customer data was impacted because backup firewall configuration files were stolen. Ryan Dewhurst, head of proactive threat intelligence at watchTowr, previously told CyberScoop those files contain a “treasure trove of sensitive data, including firewall rules, encrypted credentials, routing configurations and more.”

The vendor’s public disclosures regarding the attack have been convoluted and, in some cases, erroneous. SonicWall played down the scope of compromise in its initial disclosure, framing it as impacting less than 5% of its firewall install base, but walked that assessment back weeks later when Mandiant confirmed the totality of exposure. 

SonicWall said Mandiant determined the state-sponsored attacker gained access to the cloud backup files using an API call, but it did not provide further detail. 

Other critical details remain unknown, including how many customers were impacted and how long the nation-state attacker maintained access to SonicWall’s customer portal. The company said it detected suspicious activity on MySonicWall.com in September. 

The attack on SonicWall’s customer-facing system was disclosed a week after researchers and authorities warned about a fresh burst of about 40 Akira ransomware attacks involving exploits of a year-old vulnerability affecting SonicWall firewalls. The company said those attacks impacting customers are unrelated to the attack on SonicWall’s cloud backup environment.

“There is no evidence that this event is related to recent increases in the Akira ransomware attacks on edge devices,” VanKirk said. 

SonicWall customers have confronted a series of actively exploited vulnerabilities in SonicWall devices, including four flaws exploited in the wild this year.

Fourteen defects affecting the vendor’s products have been added to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s known exploited vulnerabilities catalog since late 2021. Nine of those defects are known to be used in ransomware campaigns, according to CISA. 

VanKirk said the company is committed to continuously improve the security of its products and systems, adding that all of Mandiant’s recommended remediations have been enacted or are actively underway.

The post SonicWall pins attack on customer portal to undisclosed nation-state appeared first on CyberScoop.

The recent mass-theft of authentication tokens from Salesloft, whose AI chatbot is used by a broad swath of corporate America to convert customer interaction into Salesforce leads, has left many companies racing to invalidate the stolen credentials before hackers can exploit them. Now Google warns the breach goes far beyond access to Salesforce data, noting the hackers responsible also stole valid authentication tokens for hundreds of online services that customers can integrate with Salesloft, including Slack, Google Workspace, Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and OpenAI.

Salesloft disclosed on August 20 that, “Today, we detected a security issue in the Drift application,” referring to the technology that powers an AI chatbot used by so many corporate websites. The alert urged customers to re-authenticate the connection between the Drift and Salesforce apps to invalidate their existing authentication tokens, but it said nothing then to indicate those tokens had already been stolen.

On August 26, the Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) warned that unidentified hackers tracked as UNC6395 used the access tokens stolen from Salesloft to siphon large amounts of data from numerous corporate Salesforce instances. Google said the data theft began as early as Aug. 8, 2025 and lasted through at least Aug. 18, 2025, and that the incident did not involve any vulnerability in the Salesforce platform.

Google said the attackers have been sifting through the massive data haul for credential materials such as AWS keys, VPN credentials, and credentials to the cloud storage provider Snowflake.

“If successful, the right credentials could allow them to further compromise victim and client environments, as well as pivot to the victim’s clients or partner environments,” the GTIG report stated.

The GTIG updated its advisory on August 28 to acknowledge the attackers used the stolen tokens to access email from “a very small number of Google Workspace accounts” that were specially configured to integrate with Salesloft. More importantly, it warned organizations to immediately invalidate all tokens stored in or connected to their Salesloft integrations — regardless of the third-party service in question.

“Given GTIG’s observations of data exfiltration associated with the campaign, organizations using Salesloft Drift to integrate with third-party platforms (including but not limited to Salesforce) should consider their data compromised and are urged to take immediate remediation steps,” Google advised.

On August 28, Salesforce blocked Drift from integrating with its platform, and with its productivity platforms Slack and Pardot.

The Salesloft incident comes on the heels of a broad social engineering campaign that used voice phishing to trick targets into connecting a malicious app to their organization’s Salesforce portal. That campaign led to data breaches and extortion attacks affecting a number of companies including Adidas, Allianz Life and Qantas.

On August 5, Google disclosed that one of its corporate Salesforce instances was compromised by the attackers, which the GTIG has dubbed UNC6040 (“UNC” stands for “uncategorized threat group”). Google said the extortionists consistently claimed to be the threat group ShinyHunters, and that the group appeared to be preparing to escalate its extortion attacks by launching a data leak site.

ShinyHunters is an amorphous threat group known for using social engineering to break into cloud platforms and third-party IT providers, and for posting dozens of stolen databases to cybercrime communities like the now-defunct Breachforums.

The ShinyHunters brand dates back to 2020, and the group has been credited with or taken responsibility for dozens of data leaks that exposed hundreds of millions of breached records. The group’s member roster is thought to be somewhat fluid, drawing mainly from active denizens of the Com, a mostly English-language cybercrime community scattered across an ocean of Telegram and Discord servers.

Recorded Future’s Alan Liska told Bleeping Computer that the overlap in the “tools, techniques and procedures” used by ShinyHunters and the Scattered Spider extortion group likely indicate some crossover between the two groups.

To muddy the waters even further, on August 28 a Telegram channel that now has nearly 40,000 subscribers was launched under the intentionally confusing banner “Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters 4.0,” wherein participants have repeatedly claimed responsibility for the Salesloft hack without actually sharing any details to prove their claims.

The Telegram group has been trying to attract media attention by threatening security researchers at Google and other firms. It also is using the channel’s sudden popularity to promote a new cybercrime forum called “Breachstars,” which they claim will soon host data stolen from victim companies who refuse to negotiate a ransom payment.

But Austin Larsen, a principal threat analyst at Google’s threat intelligence group, said there is no compelling evidence to attribute the Salesloft activity to ShinyHunters or to other known groups at this time.

“Their understanding of the incident seems to come from public reporting alone,” Larsen told KrebsOnSecurity, referring to the most active participants in the Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters 4.0 Telegram channel.

Joshua Wright, a senior technical director at Counter Hack, is credited with coining the term “authorization sprawl” to describe one key reason that social engineering attacks from groups like Scattered Spider and ShinyHunters so often succeed: They abuse legitimate user access tokens to move seamlessly between on-premises and cloud systems.

Wright said this type of attack chain often goes undetected because the attacker sticks to the resources and access already allocated to the user.

“Instead of the conventional chain of initial access, privilege escalation and endpoint bypass, these threat actors are using centralized identity platforms that offer single sign-on (SSO) and integrated authentication and authorization schemes,” Wright wrote in a June 2025 column. “Rather than creating custom malware, attackers use the resources already available to them as authorized users.”

It remains unclear exactly how the attackers gained access to all Salesloft Drift authentication tokens. Salesloft announced on August 27 that it hired Mandiant, Google Cloud’s incident response division, to investigate the root cause(s).

“We are working with Salesloft Drift to investigate the root cause of what occurred and then it’ll be up to them to publish that,” Mandiant Consulting CTO Charles Carmakal told Cyberscoop. “There will be a lot more tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day.”