Over 70 Organizations Across Multiple Sectors Targeted by China
Vulnerabilities mentionedAll →
| CVE | Vulnerability | CVSS | EPSS | Flags | Affected | Exposure | Published |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CVE-2024-8190 | OS Command Injection RCE in Ivanti Cloud Services Appliance 4.6 Ivanti Cloud Services Appliance versions 4.6 Patch 518 and before contain an OS command injection flaw (CWE-78) that allows a remote, authenticated attacker to achieve remote code execution. The attacker must already hold administrator-level privileges on the appliance, and exploitation is triggered by sending crafted input to the appliance over the network. Successful exploitation yields arbitrary command execution on the CSA, and related reporting indicates nation-state actors have been exploiting Ivanti CSA flaws for network infiltration, including attacks on French government and telecom targets. Only organizations still running CSA 4.6.x are affected, and that product line has reached end-of-life and will not receive further security updates. The vulnerability was added to CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2024-09-13 and carries a very high EPSS score (88.5%, 100th percentile), signaling confirmed and likely ongoing exploitation in the wild. Do: Because CSA 4.6.x has reached end-of-life, remove CSA 4.6.x from service or migrate to the supported 5.0.x line, as future 4.6.x flaws are unlikely to receive fixes. Given confirmed nation-state exploitation, hunt for signs of compromise such as unexpected admin sessions, processes, or network tunnels, and restrict internet exposure of any remaining 4.6.x appliances in the interim. | 7.2 | 89% | KEV |
| moderateroughly 1,000–2,000 internet-exposed CSA appliances (public internet scan counts) | |
| CVE-2024-8963 | Unauthenticated Path Traversal in Ivanti Cloud Services Appliance CVE-2024-8963 is a path traversal vulnerability (CWE-22) in the Ivanti Cloud Services Appliance (CSA), a virtual appliance used to remotely manage Ivanti Endpoint Manager environments. A remote, unauthenticated attacker can send crafted requests containing directory traversal sequences to reach restricted functionality without any credentials. Successful exploitation grants access to restricted (including administrative) functions on the appliance, and public reporting indicates it has been chained with other CSA zero-day flaws by nation-state attackers to infiltrate networks. All CSA 4.6.x releases before Patch 519 are affected, and the 4.6.x product line has reached end-of-life, meaning future 4.6.x vulnerabilities will not receive fixes. Exploitation is confirmed in the wild: CISA added it to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2024-09-19, and multiple outlets report Chinese-linked actors exploiting CSA zero-days against French government, telecom and other critical-infrastructure targets. Do: Upgrade CSA 4.6.x to Patch 519 or later, or move to the supported 5.0.x line; because 4.6.x is end-of-life, CISA urges removing CSA 4.6.x from service or migrating to 5.0.x rather than relying on future 4.6.x patches. Until patched, restrict or remove internet exposure of CSA appliances and review logs for unauthenticated access to restricted functionality, since this flaw is being chained with other CSA vulnerabilities in targeted intrusions. | 9.1 | 99% | KEV |
| moderate≈1,000–2,000 internet-exposed CSA appliances (order of magnitude; installed base larger if internal-only deployments are counted) |
Full article647 words · extracted from thehackernews.com · click to collapse
Ravie LakshmananJun 09, 2025Government Security / Cyber Espionage
The reconnaissance activity targeting American cybersecurity company SentinelOne was part of a broader set of partially-related intrusions into several targets between July 2024 and March 2025.
"The victimology includes a South Asian government entity, a European media organization, and more than 70 organizations across a wide range of sectors," SentinelOne security researchers Aleksandar Milenkoski and Tom Hegel said in a report published today.
Some of the targeted sectors include manufacturing, government, finance, telecommunications, and research. Also present among the victims was an IT services and logistics company that was managing hardware logistics for SentinelOne employees at the time of the breach in early 2025.
The malicious activity has been attributed with high confidence to China-nexus threat actors, with some of the attacks tied to a threat cluster dubbed PurpleHaze, which, in turn, overlaps with Chinese cyber espionage groups publicly reported as APT15 and UNC5174.
In late April 2024, SentinelOne first disclosed PurpleHaze-related reconnaissance activity targeting some of its servers that were deliberately accessible over the internet by "virtue of their functionality."
"The threat actor's activities were limited to mapping and evaluating the availability of select internet-facing servers, likely in preparation for potential future actions," the researchers said.
It's currently not known if the attackers' intent was to just target the IT logistics organization or if they planned to expand their focus to downstream organizations as well. Further investigation into the attacks has uncovered six different activity clusters (named to A to F) that date back to June 2024 with the compromise of an unnamed South Asian government entity.
The clusters are listed below -
- Activity A: An intrusion into a South Asian government entity (June 2024)
- Activity B: A set of intrusions targeting organizations globally (Between July 2024 and March 2025)
- Activity C: An intrusion into an IT services and logistics company (at the beginning of 2025)
- Activity D: An intrusion into the same South Asian government entity compromised (October 2024)
- Activity E: Reconnaissance activity targeting SentinelOne servers (October 2024)
- Activity F: An intrusion into a leading European media organization (late September 2024)
The June 2024 attack against the government entity, as previously detailed by SentinelOne, is said to have led to the deployment of ShadowPad that's obfuscated using ScatterBrain. The ShadowPad artifacts and infrastructure overlap with recent ShadowPad campaigns that have delivered a ransomware family codenamed NailaoLocker following the exploitation of Check Point gateway devices.
Subsequently in October 2024, the same organization was targeted to drop a Go-based reverse shell dubbed GoReShell that uses SSH to connect to an infected host. The same backdoor, SentinelOne noted, has been used in connection with a September 2024 attack aimed at a leading European media organization.
Also common to these two activity clusters is the use of tools developed by a team of IT security experts who go by the name The Hacker's Choice (THC). The development marks the first time THC's software programs have been abused by state-sponsored actors.
SentinelOne has attributed Activity F to a China-nexus actor with loose affiliations to an "initial access broker" tracked by Google Mandiant under the name UNC5174 (aka Uteus or Uetus). It's worth noting that the threat group was recently linked to the active exploitation of SAP NetWeaver flaws to deliver GOREVERSE, a variant of GoReShell. The cybersecurity company is collectively tracking Activity D, E, and F as PurpleHaze.
"The threat actor leveraged ORB [operational relay box] network infrastructure, which we assess to be operated from China, and exploited the CVE-2024-8963 vulnerability together with CVE-2024-8190 to establish an initial foothold, a few days before the vulnerabilities were publicly disclosed," the researchers said. "After compromising these systems, UNC5174 is suspected of transferring access to other threat actors."
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