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Officials disrupt Chinese espionage operation that hit multiple federal agencies

FBI and DOJ seized QTFY infrastructure, disrupting a Chinese state-sponsored group that compromised federal agencies and critical infrastructure since 2018.

Authorities seized three domains powering QScan and QTRouter, the hacking suite of QTFY, a Chinese government-funded group operating through front company Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology. Targets include the Departments of Energy, Justice, and Health and Human Services, the Federal Reserve, NASA, NIH, financial institutions, defense contractors, utilities, telecoms, and hospitals; the group exploited zero-days in Ivanti, Pulse Secure, Fortinet, Citrix, and others, intruding three DOE national labs in September 2024. QScan carried over 200 proof-of-concept exploits and processed more than two million scanning tasks in a single day in 2024.

CyberScoop · 21d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Russian State-Sponsored Hackers Use Claude to Rebuild Malware After Detection

Anthropic disrupted APT29-linked GTG-20006, which used Claude to autonomously rebuild malware, hijack hotel Wi-Fi DNS, and target 20-plus Ukrainian, European, and US-linked organizations.

Anthropic attributed the campaign to GTG-20006, aligned with Midnight Blizzard (APT29/Cozy Bear), which developed an AI-driven process that monitors its implants against security products and autonomously rebuilds and redeploys detected malware. Targets included military intelligence, diplomatic, and defense organizations in Ukraine and Europe, plus Middle East and Asian maritime agencies; the actor compromised at least three hotel Wi-Fi vendors via DNS hijacking and served ClickFix lures delivering Windows, Android, and iOS malware such as PowerChrome, GiftDrop, and DarkSword. Operations also included a North African breach exfiltrating over 300,000 national identity records and 500,000-plus company registry entries, an Embassy Kit device-code phishing campaign stealing Microsoft 365 tokens from at least eight organizations, and WhatsApp account takeover using headless browsers. The campaign overlaps with CaptiveCrunch reporting from ReliaQuest, Microsoft, Google, and Lumen Black Lotus Labs.

The Hacker Newsupdated · 19h agofirst · 5d agoThreat actor in the wild 20 sources2

FBI Disrupts China-Linked QTFY Infrastructure Used to Steal Data From U.S. Organizations

FBI and Lumen disrupted QTFY's QScan and QTRouter botnet platforms used by Chinese state-sponsored hackers to conceal intrusions into U.S. agencies.

The U.S. DoJ announced court-authorized seizure of domains behind QScan and QTRouter, operated by the Chinese state-sponsored group QTFY and employed by Nanjing Xinjiuwei Network Technology Company. QTFY has been active since May 2018 and targeted NASA, the Federal Reserve, the Department of Energy, DoJ, HHS, NIH, the U.S. Senate, and academic institutions. QScan exploits vulnerable IoT devices, feeding them into QTRouter, an OpenWrt-based proxy obfuscation network likened to an operational relay box (ORB) that masks attack origins. The group exploited zero-days such as Ivanti CSA flaws CVE-2024-8190, CVE-2024-8963, and CVE-2024-9380, plus numerous N-days, and maintained persistence with RATs, web shells, and legitimate credentials.

The Hacker News · 15d agoThreat actor in the wildCVE-2018-13379CVE-2019-10068CVE-2019-19781+10 CVEs

FBI takes down China-linked hacking network behind attacks on NASA, DOJ and U.S. Senate

FBI seized domains disabling QScan and QTRouter malware run by China-linked QTFY group behind intrusions at NASA, DOJ, Senate and other agencies.

The Justice Department and FBI seized domains hard-coded into two malware tools, QScan and QTRouter, operated by a Chinese state-sponsored group called QTFY, tied to a Nanjing-based company that sold hacking services to China's Ministry of State Security and the PLA. QScan infected IoT devices worldwide while QTRouter combined them with commercial proxies and rented servers to build an obfuscation network that masked attack origins. Victims include NASA, the Federal Reserve, the Departments of Energy and Justice, HHS, NIH, and the U.S. Senate. The FBI and NSA published a joint advisory with indicators of compromise, the latest in operations against Mustang Panda, Flax Typhoon, and Volt Typhoon infrastructure.

Help Net Security · 21d agoThreat actor in the wild

BlueDelta Targets Defense and Diplomacy with HOOKEDGE

Recorded Future reports Russian state-sponsored group BlueDelta deploying the HOOKEDGE backdoor against European defense and diplomatic organizations.

Recorded Future research reports that BlueDelta, a Russian state-sponsored threat group, is using the HOOKEDGE backdoor in campaigns targeting defense and diplomatic organizations across Europe. The disclosure details the group's use of the backdoor in espionage-focused operations against high-value government and military targets.

Recorded Future · 21d agoThreat actor in the wild

Risky Bulletin: Slovakia finds Russian backdoor in traffic speed cameras

Slovakia's NBU found an SMS-triggered backdoor in Russian-made NERO R-ONE traffic cameras, pausing a 279-unit deployment.

Slovakia's national security service NBU issued an alert against NERO R-ONE high-speed traffic cameras after finding a backdoor that grants shell and network access via SMS from hardcoded Russian phone numbers. The cameras are a rebranded version of the Russian CORDON PRO.M model by St. Petersburg firm Semicon, purchased via a Cyprus shell company under a €30 million EU-funded project. The report also found SecureBoot disabled, vulnerable web management, and unauthenticated live streams; the Interior Ministry paused deployment of 279 cameras pending independent assessment.

Risky Business News · 29d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Threat actors are coming for your AI assets to operationalize their use of AI

Google GTIG reports espionage and crime groups stealing AI models, prompts, and API credentials, plus distillation campaigns and agentic AI attack automation.

Google Threat Intelligence Group's quarterly AI Threat Tracker reports adversaries stealing proprietary models, source code, prompts, and API credentials from government, healthcare, and media targets, including China-based UNC6508 compromising clouds to run unauthorized LLM workloads. Distillation campaigns against Google's models exceeded 100 million prompts launched via thousands of stolen account credentials through proxy networks. Mandiant also observed a financially motivated actor deploy an autonomous multi-agent framework that harvested thousands of third-party credentials in under 6 hours, and a 'Recon' framework on a live C2 server managing over 23,000 stolen credentials including cloud and AI API keys.

CSO Online · 2d agoThreat actor in the wild

The Top 4 Threats We Found by Investigating Every Alert for a Quarter

Prophet Security's quarterly threat report finds identity attacks made up roughly half of confirmed malicious activity, with stolen authenticated sessions bypassing conditional access controls.

Between May 1 and July 31, 2026, Prophet Security investigated every alert in customer environments immediately on arrival; about 7% of completed investigations were confirmed malicious. Direct account/session attacks made up roughly 18% of confirmed activity, with replayed authenticated sessions bypassing conditional access since no re-authentication occurs. Infostealer activity affected about a quarter of investigated organizations, mostly delivered via browsers through compromised websites, malicious ads, sponsored search results and ClickFix fake CAPTCHA gates, with payloads including Lumma Stealer, Vidar, HijackLoader and AsyncRAT. Credential phishing was the largest category at about 28%, with adversary-in-the-middle relays revealed by seconds-long MFA approvals from distant countries and MFA fatigue attacks exploiting automatic unlock policies.

BleepingComputer · 6d agoThreat actor in the wild

GTIG AI Threat Tracker: From Prompting to Autonomy – The Evolution of Adversarial AI

GTIG's Q2 2026 tracker shows adversaries adopting agentic AI workflows, including credential harvesting in under six hours and supply chain attacks by UNC6780.

Google Threat Intelligence Group's Q2 2026 report documents adversaries moving from basic prompting to agentic AI workflows and automation, including a cloud compromise followed by agent-enabled mass credential harvesting executed in under six hours. It tracks financially motivated actor UNC6780 (TeamPCP) conducting large-scale open source supply chain compromises across PyPI, npm, and Docker Hub since March 2026, deploying credential stealers. The report also highlights growing targeting of proprietary AI models, source code, prompts, and API credentials, plus LLMJacking practices where adversaries steal developer credentials or hijack cloud infrastructure to run unauthorized AI workloads.

Google Threat Intelligence · 8d agoThreat actor in the wild1

New Ted Backdoor Hides Inside Victims' Own HAProxy Builds to Intercept Web Traffic

Rapid7 found a new backdoor, ted, compiled into trojanized HAProxy at two South Korean organizations, with medium-confidence attribution to North Korean actors.

Rapid7 documented a previously undocumented Linux toolkit named ted compiled into the HAProxy load balancer binaries of two South Korean organizations in the automotive and media sectors. The implant intercepts web traffic, serves altered pages only to filtered visitors, and hides C2 exchanges from backend logs and HAProxy statistics; a companion RAT, curlRAT, beacons on a default 12-hour schedule. The toolkit also trojanizes crond, sshd, agetty, atd, and polkitd binaries and sanitizes logs and bash history. Rapid7 attributes the activity with medium confidence to North Korean state-sponsored actors, with domain infrastructure overlapping APT37 listings in maltrail and delivery resembling the Operation SyncHole campaign.

The Hacker News · 12d agoThreat actor in the wild

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

Edge infrastructure under siege: what two independent datasets reveal about who's exploiting your perimeter

Joint Tenable-SentinelOne analysis of 93 CVE-actor attribution pairs shows nation-state and criminal groups independently converge on the same edge infrastructure.

Tenable and SentinelOne jointly analyzed 93 CVE-actor attribution pairs covering exploitation of perimeter devices. The data shows state-sponsored and financially motivated actors independently target the same edge products from Ivanti, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks. The findings challenge the narrative that edge exploitation is exclusively a China-nexus nation-state problem, showing a broader shared attack surface.

Tenable Blog · 22d agoThreat actor in the wild