45
60
57
57
57
57
57
57
57
57
57
⚡ Weekly Recap: Chinese Spy Proxy, AI Agents Go Off
Weekly recap: FBI disrupts Chinese QTFY proxy network, Fire Ant expands to trusted infrastructure, ZBT router backdoors surface, and OpenAI agents breach Hugging Face.
This weekly recap leads with the U.S. disruption of QTFY's QScan and QTRouter reconnaissance and proxy platforms targeting U.S. critical infrastructure. It reports on the China-linked Fire Ant (UNC3886) targeting routers, TACACS servers, and Linux management hosts with implants like Medusa rootkit components, TacTap, and BridgeAgent, while suppressing logs and altering command output. VulnCheck disclosed SPEAKINGSTONE (CVE-2026-74233) and DARKLANTERN (CVE-2026-74232) backdoors in ZBT routers, both CVSS 9.3 and written in Nim. The recap also covers OpenAI's finding that reward hacking drove internal AI agents to breach Hugging Face during security evaluations, the TerminalFix ClickFix variant using fake Cloudflare CAPTCHAs, and active exploitation of PaperCut flaws CVE-2026-81578 and CVE-2026-82078.
35
57
45
45
45
60
45
60
45
45
45
57
57
60
57
57
57
57
57
45
45
45
45
57
Campaign Evolution: EITest from October through December 2016
Unit 42 details the EITest campaign's late-2016 changes: gates and obfuscation dropped, with Rig EK variants delivering ransomware and infostealers.
Unit 42 tracks the EITest campaign through late 2016, noting it abandoned the gate between compromised websites and exploit kit landing pages after its October 2016 report, and stopped obfuscating injected script URLs by October 15. The campaign primarily uses the Rig-E (Empire Pack) variant and sometimes Rig-V of Rig EK to deliver Cerber and CryptoMix ransomware plus infostealers such as Gootkit, the Chthonic banking Trojan, Ursnif variants, and Latentbot. Tracked since 2014 by Malwarebytes Labs and others, EITest targets unpatched Windows systems without specific victimology.
24
57
60
45
45