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Suspected China-Nexus Actor Exploits VMware vCenter Flaw, Deploys Babuk
QUIRSO attributes exploitation of VMware vCenter CVE-2026-59310 to a suspected China-nexus actor that hit 361 IPs in 47 countries, deploying backdoors and Babuk.
German incident response firm QUIRSOS assessed with moderate confidence that a suspected China-nexus actor, likely operating in UTC+08:00 hours, exploited VMware vCenter flaw CVE-2026-59310 (CVSS 9.8 directory traversal) beginning five days after Broadcom's July 29 patch. The campaign compromised 361 unique victim IPs across 47 countries, most in Germany, the US, Turkey, Iran, and France. The actor abused cron jobs, a XOR-obfuscated 'linuxFile' WebSocket backdoor with systemd/cron persistence, a JSP web shell, SSH authorized-keys manipulation, and a reverse SSH tool, with one Babuk deployment reported. A separate vCenter 'vcenter_admin' account creation consistent with CVE-2026-59309 exploitation was also observed from August 1.
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Red Heron Hackers Exploit Critical Gitea RCE to Steal Source Code and Deploy Linux Rootkit
PRC-linked Red Heron exploits critical Gitea RCE CVE-2026-60004 to steal source code and deploy JITTERLY implant with SIXZUT LD_PRELOAD rootkit; victims span five countries.
Acronis Threat Research Unit attributes a campaign to Chinese-speaking threat actor Red Heron, which weaponized CVE-2026-60004, a CVSS 9.8 RCE in Gitea versions 1.17 through 1.27.0, patched in 1.27.1 on July 27, 2026. The actor built an automated exploitation framework after a public PoC appeared, scanned 1,386 internet-exposed Gitea instances across seven countries, and separately listed 477 Taiwan-based systems across defense, energy, elections, and AI sectors. Confirmed victims include organizations in Canada, Argentina, Taiwan, the US, and Sri Lanka, with a Canadian renewable-energy firm hit in 22 sessions and a Taiwanese industrial automation firm losing hundreds of repositories including SCADA/HMI tools. Red Heron deploys the JITTERLY Linux implant (30+ commands, AES-128-GCM, Adaptix-like protocol) and the SIXZUT LD_PRELOAD rootkit disguised as libglthread.so.2, and moved laterally into a Synology/Proxmox environment to steal VM backups.
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