ZeroHour

Search: “Broad Institute”

91 stories

FBI Seizes China-Linked Hacking Platforms QScan and QTRouter Used Against Critical Infrastructure

FBI seizes China-linked QScan and QTRouter hacking platforms used by QTFY to obfuscate intrusions against US federal agencies.

The DOJ and FBI seized domains hard-coded into QScan and QTRouter, two platforms operated by China-based Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Company on behalf of state-sponsored group QTFY. QScan automatically infected thousands of IoT devices which were added to QTRouter, an obfuscation network routing malicious traffic through compromised and proxy devices outside China. Targets included NASA, the Federal Reserve, Departments of Energy, Justice, and HHS, NIH, and the US Senate, exploiting flaws in Fortinet SSL-VPN, Citrix ADC, Microsoft Exchange, F5 BIG-IP, Log4j, and others.

Security Affairs · 21d agoThreat actor in the wild

ThreatsDay: Gogs 10.0 RCE, n8n Workflow-to-RCE, $10M Reward, GLM

Hacker News ThreatsDay roundup: Defender BTR.sys driver abuse, DoJ charges 17 Mabna Institute members over IRGC-linked intrusions, Grandoreiro sideloading, OpenAI monitoring.

Check Point researchers showed Microsoft's signed Defender Boot-Time Removal driver (BTR.sys) can be repurposed as a universal kernel operation engine to bypass endpoint security without BYOVD. The DoJ charged 17 members of Iran's Mabna Institute, which on behalf of the IRGC stole over 31 TB of academic data from 144 US universities and compromised roughly 8,000 of 100,000 targeted professor accounts; the State Department offered a $10 million reward for five defendants. Separately, Acronis tracked a Grandoreiro campaign abusing DLL sideloading in the Duplicate Files Finder app across Latin America and Spain, while ErrTraffic ClickFix campaigns deliver Cruciferra (BYOVD) and Remus Stealer. OpenAI also previewed Private Safety Processing, a privacy-centric approach to monitoring model misuse without retaining customer content.

The Hacker News · 27d agoThreat actor1

Gaming the system: how a Chinese-speaking actor turned Brazilian government sites into an SEO weapon

Check Point identifies Chinese-speaking group Gambling Goblin hijacking Brazilian government domains via malicious Apache modules for SEO-manipulated gambling phishing.

Check Point Research tracks a sustained campaign since mid-2025 against Brazilian government and educational organizations by Gambling Goblin, a Chinese-speaking cybercrime cluster linked to Earth Berberoka. Attackers compile and install malicious Apache modules that silently reverse-proxy visitors to phishing pages impersonating Google Play, Microsoft Store, and Amazon, chaining compromised high-reputation domains to inflate search rankings. The group deploys a heavily obfuscated Linux toolkit including DownPro, AlphaAgent, oRAT, a 3snake-based credential stealer, and SSH brute-forcers, with parallel phishing networks localized for Vietnamese, Spanish, and English victims.

Check Point Research · 14d agoThreat actor

DoJ Corrects China Hacking Claim, Says U.S. Agencies Were Targets, Not Victims

DoJ corrected its statement to say US federal agencies were targets, not confirmed victims, of China-linked group QTFY's intrusions.

The US Department of Justice revised its press release to list NASA, the Federal Reserve, Department of Energy, DoJ, HHS, NIH and the US Senate as 'among the targets' of QTFY (aka QT AND QTCYBER), rather than victims. QTFY, active since 2018 and linked to Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Co with payments suggesting MSS sponsorship, operates the QScan vulnerability scanning platform and QTRouter obfuscation network, which underpin the Fast Labyrinth encrypted ORB relay network built from infected IoT devices and leased VPSs. The FBI seized qtproxy[.]xyz, qt-proxy[.]org and qt-team[.]com, disrupting QScan and QTRouter, while Lumen Black Lotus Labs reported the actor industrialized ORB networks for China-linked espionage. A 2019 NASA intrusion attempt exploited CVE-2019-11510, a critical Pulse Secure VPN flaw.

The Hacker News · 17d agoThreat actor in the wildCVE-2019-115101