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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other researchers also expect exploitation to pick up rapidly. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Proofpoint researchers have spotted at least four state-aligned threat groups chain a trio of zero-day vulnerabilities to conduct espionage on various targets of interest to China’s government since late August. 

The Chinese espionage group that Proofpoint tracks as TA412, also known as Violet Typhoon and APT31, struck first, exploiting the chain of vulnerabilities Aug. 28. At least three additional espionage threat groups followed suit, exploiting the same vulnerabilities in subsequent waves of attacks days later, researchers said.

The exploit chain Proofpoint calls BlueMoon targets Chrome, Chromium-based browsers and Microsoft Windows. It allows attackers to run code in the browser’s sandbox, escape the sandbox and gain system privileges to access a targeted machine, said Mark Kelly, staff threat researcher at Proofpoint.

“All three vulnerabilities were exploited before patches were available to the public,” he said.

The vulnerabilities include: CVE-2026-85046 and CVE-2026-87491, remote-code execution defects in the JavaScript engine for Chromium-based browsers; and CVE-2026-85880, a privilege-escalation zero-day that Microsoft disclosed Tuesday in Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call. 

“While the V8 vulnerabilities were known and fixed in Chromium source code, they were not yet patched in the latest publicly available browsers at the time of the activity, meaning they effectively functioned as zero-days in those products,” Kelly said.

Proofpoint said the exploit kit developer likely reverse engineered the publicly available Chromium patches to weaponize the browser exploit chain during that gap.

With a limited group of organizations exposed to all three vulnerabilities, attackers moved quickly and likely rushed development to target a narrow pool of potential targets. “In all observed cases, the infrastructure used for exploit delivery was created on the same day as — or in the days immediately preceding — the associated campaigns,” Proofpoint wrote in a threat intelligence report.

APT31, a group that’s committed espionage on behalf of China’s Ministry of State Security, including seven Chinese nationals indicted by the Justice Department in 2024, dropped various lures containing the exploit chain loader in phishing emails targeting non-governmental organizations, mining companies and commodity trading firms in the United States. 

The phishing link installed a malicious browser extension disguised as Google Gemini on targeted machines, enabling attackers to surveil browser activity, steal credentials and execute commands, according to Proofpoint. 

Other distinct threat groups have also used the BlueMoon exploit chain with some slight technical changes and variances in targeting. 

“Proofpoint observed BlueMoon usage as recently as Sept. 8,” Kelly said. “The activity peaked Sept. 2-3 immediately prior to the Chrome patch being released and has continued intermittently since then.”

A China-aligned espionage threat group Proofpoint tracks as UNK_LateNight targeted multiple U.S. aerospace companies Sept. 2. Researchers also that day observed UNK_DoubleCheck, a suspected espionage-motivated threat group targeting Vietnamese manufacturing organizations with emails from a compromised Southeast Asian government account. 

Researchers said UNK_QuietRacket, another espionage group aligned with China, targeted government, consulting and financial sector organizations in Indonesia and Singapore Sept. 3.

Proofpoint has directly observed fewer than 20 organizations targeted globally thus far, but Kelly said the true number of impacted organizations is likely much higher. 

While Proofpoint attributes most of the observed attacks to Chinese espionage groups, attackers of other origins and motivations could strike soon as well. 

“Given its ease of adoption, we expect the exploit kit is likely to proliferate further and be adopted by additional espionage-motivated and financially motivated threat actors as patched versions are fully rolled out across all Chromium-based browsers,” Kelly said.

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Microsoft addressed 974 defects across its product suite, including two actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities, in its monthly Patch Tuesday security program. 

The massive batch of patches, Microsoft’s largest ever, reflects a continuing trend for the vendor as it leans on artificial intelligence to discover more vulnerabilities at a faster rate. Yet, the recent period of record breaking vulnerability disclosures hasn’t resulted in a flood of actively exploited zero-days.

“AI-assisted vulnerability discovery shows no signs of slowing down,” Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “However, we have not seen a correlating spike in active exploits — yet.”

The vulnerabilities actively exploited prior to disclosure — CVE-2026-81963 affecting the Windows Update Stack and CVE-2026-85880 affecting Windows Advanced Local Procedure Call — both have CVSS ratings of 7.8 and allow attackers to escalate privileges. 

More than 1 in 10 defects Microsoft disclosed in this month’s security update are rated critical. The update included 723 vulnerabilities in Windows, 111 in Office, 111 in Office 2016, 62 in SQL and 22 spanning various developer tools.

Researchers encouraged security teams and customers to not get overwhelmed by the total number of defects, but instead focus on their specific areas of risk and exposure. 

“While the number of vulnerabilities being patched is rising, the number of vulnerabilities that can and will affect most organizations remains quite low. AI-assisted vulnerability discovery in 2026 is creating larger haystacks, but it isn’t finding more needles,” Satnam Narang, senior staff research engineer at Tenable, said in an email. 

“It’s critical that organizations understand which vulnerabilities actually apply to them, whether they pose a threat by being reachable and exploitable, and prioritize remediation based on this risk context,” he added. 

Jack Bicer, director of vulnerability research at Action1, drew a similar conclusion from the record-breaking Patch Tuesday. 

“At this scale, the challenge is not simply getting through the patch list but knowing what needs attention first,” he said. “With hundreds of updates landing at once, IT and security teams need to quickly separate the vulnerabilities that demand immediate action from those that can follow the normal deployment cycle.”

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

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SonicWall customers are grappling with yet another pair of actively exploited zero-day vulnerabilities in SonicWall SMA 1000 appliances, a product that’s been besieged with recurring defects and attacks over the past nine months. 

The vendor disclosed and released patches for the defects — CVE-2026-83548 and CVE-2026-83549 — and noted both were already actively exploited in the wild in a security advisory Tuesday. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added the defects to its known exploited vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog Wednesday. 

SonicWall customers have confronted a barrage of actively exploited vulnerabilities in SonicWall devices for years. Attackers have consistently exploited newly discovered zero-days and years-old defects in the vendor’s products to break into victim environments.

Rapid7 researchers said the new zero-days — a max-severity pre-authentication server-side request forgery vulnerability and a high-severity OS command injection vulnerability — can be chained together to achieve unauthenticated remote-code execution. 

SonicWall did not say how many customers have been directly impacted by active exploitation or when the first known instance of exploitation occurred. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

“Please stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Another appliance sitting at the edge of the network, another pair of vulnerabilities chained together, and another unauthenticated path to complete compromise,” Jake Knott, head of threat intelligence at watchTowr, said in an email. 

“SonicWall says these vulnerabilities were internally discovered, while also saying it investigated a case indicating active exploitation. Please pick one, or, at minimum, explain how both are true,” Knott added. “Those statements may be technically accurate, but without that context, the disclosure leaves defenders guessing about when and how the vulnerabilities were actually identified.”

The vendor’s security advisory did not include indicators of compromise. It urged customers to contact tech support for assistance in reviewing IOCs and hunting for potential signs of compromise, and if detected, to reimage or redeploy the appliance, change all user and administrator passwords and reset tokens. 

SonicWall did not attribute the known exploits to a specific threat group or describe the attacker’s motivations.

The freshly disclosed pair of vulnerabilities are the latest in a series of security issues confronting the vendor’s customers, including actively exploited zero-days, previously disclosed defects, and an attack last year that allowed a state-sponsored threat group to steal the firewall configurations of every SonicWall customer. 

In late July, Huntress researchers spotted an attack spree that compromised 30 SonicWall customers in less than two days. Earlier that month, the company acknowledged another pair of zero-days that were exploited for three weeks before the vendor disclosed and patched the defects.

Ransomware groups, including INC ransomware and Akira, have taken a special interest in SonicWall. Ten of the 19 SonicWall defects added to CISA’s KEV catalog since late 2021 are known to be used in ransomware campaigns.

The five defects added to CISA’s KEV most recently, since just mid-December 2025, all impact SonicWall SMA 1000 appliances.

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Researchers said INC ransomware, one of the most active ransomware groups globally, has been the main attacker exploiting a pair of SonicWall zero-days soon after they were disclosed last month.

The prolific ransomware-as-a-service operation wasn’t the first group to exploit the flaws, which were actively exploited for three weeks before the vendor disclosed and patched the defects July 14, but it has been the most assertive and concerning group to target and chain both vulnerabilities together for full access.

“Since public disclosure, INC ransomware has emerged as the most commonly named threat actor actively weaponizing this vulnerability chain,” Brett Deroche, director of incident response at Rapid7, told CyberScoop. “While Inc is the name driving the post-disclosure wave, we can’t attribute the full body of exploitation to INC specifically.”

SonicWall did not respond to a request for comment.

The SonicWall vulnerabilities — CVE-2026-15409 and CVE-2026-15410 — are the latest in a series of security issues confronting the vendor’s customers, including actively exploited zero-days, previously disclosed defects, and an attack last year that allowed a state-sponsored threat group to steal the firewall configurations of every SonicWall customer. 

Just last week, Huntress researchers spotted an attack spree that compromised 30 SonicWall customers in less than two days. 

Ransomware groups have taken a special interest in SonicWall. Ten of the 17 SonicWall defects added to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s known exploited vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog since late 2021 are known to be used in ransomware campaigns.

INC ransomware, which has claimed nearly 900 victims across 71 countries since it was first discovered three years ago, is just the latest financially-motivated group to target SonicWall customers. 

Researchers haven’t determined how many organizations have been impacted by the latest SonicWall zero-days, including attacks linked to INC ransomware. 

“Attribution here isn’t a single clean answer. The earliest exploitation we observed, beginning June 22, traced back to common hosted infrastructure, though those attacks were largely unsuccessful,” Deroche said. 

“INC’s confirmed activity that we’ve observed came after public disclosure, using different infrastructure and moving from initial access to ransomware deployment in short order. That’s a meaningfully different operational tempo and skill level than what we saw pre-disclosure,” he added. 

Deroche said Rapid7 has successfully prevented data theft and encryption in the majority of recent cases, yet noted ransomware was deployed in at least one case the security vendor observed.

Yet, there could be other attacks outside the purview of Rapid7’s telemetry. INC ransomware has listed multiple new alleged victims on its data leak site, including organizations and government agencies in Australia, the United States, the United Arab Emirates, Colombia and Switzerland, Resecurity said in a blog post Saturday.

The company said it has aided several victims with incident response, and learned multiple victims received emails and phone calls from alleged hackers who pressured them to engage in negotiations.

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SonicWall customers are attempting to dodge another security challenge as attackers are exploiting a pair of zero-day vulnerabilities that have been confirmed by the vendor. 

The company publicly disclosed the vulnerabilities — CVE-2026-15409 and CVE-2026-15410 — in a security advisory Tuesday. SonicWall credited an employee with discovering the defects, but it hasn’t said when the discovery occurred or the earliest known instance of exploitation. 

Rapid7 researchers told CyberScoop both vulnerabilities were first exploited June 22. “From the cases that our team has observed, the goal is likely ransomware, though we have prevented the actors from achieving exfiltration and encryption,” said Seth Lazarus, senior manager of detection and response services at Rapid7.

Overlapping tactics, techniques and procedures from the attacks observed by Rapid7 indicate the same threat group or attacker discovered and exploited the zero-days, Lazarus added.

SonicWall did not answer questions about the impacts of these attacks thus far, and the company hasn’t attributed the attacks to a known group or described the attacker’s origins and motivations.

The vendor did, however, confirm to CyberScoop that both vulnerabilities have been chained together for exploitation. The vulnerabilities affecting SonicWall SMA1000 appliances, including a max-severity defect that allows attackers to make authenticated requests and a 7.2-rated vulnerability that allows authenticated command injection.

“When these two are chained, an attacker can go from zero access to a complete system compromise for the affected appliance,” said Landon Rice, senior exploit developer at VulnCheck.

Ben Harris, founder and CEO at watchTowr, said two characteristics of the vulnerabilities fuel a sense of dread. “Both were exploited as zero-days before fixes were available, and together they offer a plausible path to remote-code execution from the internet,” he said.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added both zero-days to its known exploited vulnerabilities catalog Tuesday. 

SonicWall encouraged customers to patch the vulnerabilities by upgrading to the latest software version, which it released upon disclosure, and shared some indicators of compromise to help customers hunt for potential malicious activity on their systems.

“Speed of response was a priority for us,” said Bret Fitzgerald, senior director of global communications at SonicWall. “Within days of becoming aware of the issue, our team had developed a script that we can run on behalf of affected customers to assist with resolution, and mitigation efforts are already underway.”

SonicWall and third-party researchers haven’t said how many SonicWall customers are impacted by the exploited vulnerabilities, but the vendor did say it already investigated multiple cases of active exploitation. 

Fitzgerald said the company monitors about one million sensors globally and “SMA1000 appliances represent a very small subset of that footprint, less than 5,000 units.”

SonicWall said support staff are also helping customers work through instances of suspicious activity, warning that patching alone is not sufficient. 

The vendor and its customers have been hit by a barrage of actively exploited zero-days and previously disclosed defects in SonicWall devices for years. In 2025, an undisclosed state-sponsored threat actor intruded the company’s cloud environment and stole firewall configurations of every SonicWall customer. 

Seventeen defects affecting the vendor’s products have been added to CISA’s known exploited vulnerabilities catalog since late 2021. Ten of those defects are known to be used in ransomware campaigns, according to CISA, including a wave of about 40 Akira ransomware attacks between mid-July and early August.

“As always,” Harris said, “when something is confirmed as already exploited in the wild, patching is the bare minimum, and breach should be assumed.”

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