Four Nation-State Actors Used the Same Chrome Zero-Day Exploit Kit Within 12 Days
Proofpoint reports four nation-state actors, mostly China-nexus, adopted the BlueMoon Chrome and Windows zero-day exploit kit within 12 days, targeting US organizations.
Proofpoint tracked an exploit kit dubbed BlueMoon that chains CVE-2026-85046, a Chrome V8 type-confusion bug, with an unnamed V8 sandbox escape and CVE-2026-85880, a Windows kernel privilege escalation using ALPC and the Windows Notification Facility. The first observed use was by China-nexus TA412 (APT31, Violet Typhoon, JungleBamboo) on August 28, 2026 against US NGOs, mining companies, and commodity trading firms, followed by UNK_LateNight targeting US aerospace and defense companies on September 2. Both V8 bugs were patch-gap zero-days: the fix was committed to Chromium on August 7 but reached stable Chrome on September 3, enabling rapid weaponization from public patches. TA412's post-exploitation payload, GemStone, is a malicious browser extension posing as an AI-powered Google Gemini companion that captures keystrokes, cookies, screenshots, and browsing history via a Cloudflare Worker C2.
Adobe Commerce max-severity bug comes under active attack
Attackers are actively exploiting CVE-2026-75650 (CVSS 10.0), an unauthenticated RCE zero-day in Adobe Commerce/Magento, deploying a Rust backdoor on e-commerce servers.
Sansec identified active exploitation of a CVSS 10.0 zero-day (CVE-2026-75650) in Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source versions 2.4.4 through 2.4.9, dubbed StyleSmuggler. The attack abuses crafted style properties in Magento template processing to execute PHP while rendering a 'Payment Transaction Failed Reminder' email, then launches a Rust backdoor connecting to C2 at 99.84.67.186 disguised as NTP traffic. Exploitation began September 4, 2026; Adobe released emergency hotfix VULN-393411, but Sansec also observed a second attacker deploying a PHP web shell in the product-image cache.