UK Council Attack Linked to Mass Exploitation of SonicWall Flaw
Hunt.io links a UK council attack to mass exploitation of SonicWall SMA1000 flaw CVE-2026-15409 (CVSS 10.0), enabling credential and Active Directory theft.
Hunt.io links, with moderate confidence, the July 17, 2026 attack on the Borough Council of King's Lynn and West Norfolk to mass exploitation of SonicWall SMA1000 appliances via CVE-2026-15409, an unauthenticated SSRF in the WorkPlace portal WebSocket proxy with CVSS 10.0. The operator adapted Rapid7's July 15 PoC into a 50-thread mass scanner within days and stole LDAP credentials for 534 Active Directory accounts across 160 domains, with nine environments losing SAM/LSA secrets and five losing full AD databases via DCSync. CISA added the flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog and noted use in ransomware campaigns; targeting of ~200,000 Shodan-derived SonicWall addresses spanned government, healthcare, finance, universities, and manufacturing worldwide.
Attackers Exploit Two SonicWall SMA 1000 Zero-Days That May Form an Attack Chain
SonicWall patches two actively exploited zero-days (CVE-2026-83548, CVE-2026-83549) in SMA 1000 VPN appliances, likely chained for code execution.
SonicWall fixed CVE-2026-83548 (CVSS 10.0), a pre-authentication SSRF in the Appliance Work Place interface, and CVE-2026-83549 (CVSS 7.8), a post-authentication OS command injection in the Appliance Management Console. The company investigated a case indicating active exploitation, suggesting attackers chained both bugs to execute arbitrary code on susceptible devices. Affected SMA 1000 models 6210, 7210, and 8200v require hotfixes 12.4.3-03526 or 12.5.0-02952; customers are urged to hunt for IoCs and re-image, reset credentials, and rotate TOTP if found.
New Mirai Variant Targeting Network Security Devices
New Mirai botnet variant exploits nine vulnerabilities in SonicWall, D-Link, Netgear, and other devices, with attacks ongoing at publication.
Unit 42 observed attacks exploiting VisualDoor (SonicWall SSL-VPN), CVE-2020-25506 (D-Link DNS-320), CVE-2020-26919 (Netgear ProSAFE Plus), and other flaws, with infrastructure rotating across at least three IP addresses between February 16 and March 13, 2021. Payloads were updated hours after CVE-2021-27561 and CVE-2021-27562 (Yealink Device Management, unauthenticated root RCE) and later added CVE-2021-22502 (Micro Focus Operation Bridge Reporter) and CVE-2019-19356 (Netis WF2419). Successful exploitation invokes wget to fetch shell scripts that download Mirai binaries compiled for multiple architectures and brute-forcers, and attacks were still ongoing when reported.