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The Smishing Deluge: China-Based Campaign Flooding Global Text Messages
Unit 42 attributes a global smishing campaign with 194,000+ phishing domains impersonating tolls, banks, and couriers to the Smishing Triad.
Palo Alto Unit 42 attributes ongoing smishing texts about toll violations and package misdelivery to the Smishing Triad, targeting U.S. residents since April 2024. Researchers identified 194,345 FQDNs across 136,933 root domains registered since January 2024, mostly via Hong Kong registrar Dominet (HK) Limited with Chinese nameservers and hosting concentrated on U.S. cloud services. The decentralized campaign impersonates banking, cryptocurrency, e-commerce, healthcare, law enforcement, and social media services, and its scale points to a large phishing-as-a-service operation. Phishing pages harvest national ID numbers such as Social Security numbers, home addresses, payment details, and login credentials.
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Stately Taurus Activity in Southeast Asia Links to Bookworm Malware
Unit 42 links Stately Taurus APT activity in ASEAN region and Myanmar to the decade-old Bookworm malware family via infrastructure overlaps.
Unit 42 connected Stately Taurus (aka Mustang Panda) espionage activity targeting ASEAN-affiliated organizations and Myanmar to the Bookworm malware family, first published in 2015. Earlier attacks delivered the PubLoad stager via DLL sideloading, with a PubLoad variant communicating with C2 at 123.253.32[.]15 while mimicking Windows Update URLs. Three previously unreported loader samples from 2021-2022 used UUID-decoded shellcode loaded via heap allocation and API callbacks, ultimately decrypting and loading Bookworm DLLs. A ToneShell backdoor variant shared debug paths with Bookworm loaders, and the January 2024 CSIRT CTI post corroborated the Myanmar attacks.
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Unit 42 Researchers Discover Multiple Espionage Operations Targeting Southeast Asian Government
Unit 42 attributes three espionage clusters targeting a Southeast Asian government to Stately Taurus, Alloy Taurus, and Gelsemium APTs.
Unit 42 investigated espionage attacks starting in late 2022 against multiple governmental entities in a Southeast Asian country, including critical infrastructure, public healthcare, financial administrators, and ministries. Analysis revealed three distinct clusters: CL-STA-0044 attributed to Stately Taurus (Mustang Panda), CL-STA-0045 to Alloy Taurus (GALLIUM), and CL-STA-0046 to Gelsemium. The first cluster used a ToneShell backdoor variant, ShadowPad, China Chopper web shells, Impacket, and credential dumping tools across roughly Q1 2021 to Q3 2023. All three operated with distinct tools, infrastructure, and long-term surveillance tradecraft consistent with APTs.
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Threat Brief: CVE-2022-41040 and CVE-2022-41082: Microsoft Exchange Server (ProxyNotShell)
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Keys to the Kingdom: Erlang/OTP SSH Vulnerability Analysis and Exploits Observed in the Wild
Attackers actively exploit CVE-2025-32433, a CVSS 10.0 unauthenticated RCE in Erlang/OTP SSH, heavily targeting OT and critical infrastructure networks.
CVE-2025-32433 enables unauthenticated RCE in Erlang/OTP's SSH daemon via SSH connection protocol messages (codes >= 80) processed before authentication, affecting versions before OTP-27.3.3, OTP-26.2.5.11 and OTP-25.3.2.20. Unit 42 recorded a spike in exploitation between May 1-9, 2025, with 70% of detections on firewalls protecting OT networks, disproportionately affecting healthcare, agriculture, media and high technology. Observed payloads bind TCP-connected shells or launch Bash reverse shells to hosts like 146.103.40.203:6667, with randomized DNS lookups under dns.outbound.watchtowr.com indicating OAST-driven blind RCE validation.
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Attackers Expose Ongoing AI Tool Use Targeting Organizations in Latin America
Unit 42 documents two AI-assisted intrusion campaigns against Latin American government, utility, and financial organizations using LLM-orchestrated tooling.
Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 tracks two ongoing intrusion clusters, CL-CRI-1131 (Mexican transportation, federal ministries, municipal water utilities) and CL-CRI-1163 (Brazilian financial sector), both using living-off-the-land techniques, SOCKS5 relays, and custom RATs. The attackers appear to orchestrate operations via commercial LLMs like Claude and GPT-4.1, evidenced by iterative batch scripts and AI-generated tunneling tool naming. The Mexican campaign (also reported as Operation Escaneo by CloudSEK) exfiltrated sensitive data via dynamic-DNS infrastructure with rotated multi-SAN TLS certificates between February and June 2026. This signals broader adoption of AI-enhanced operations by diverse threat groups in the region.
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Bad Likert Judge: A Novel Multi-Turn Technique to Jailbreak LLMs by Misusing Their Evaluation Capability
Unit 42 details the Bad Likert Judge multi-turn jailbreak that abuses LLMs' evaluation capability, raising attack success rates over 60% across six frontier models.
Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 describes the Bad Likert Judge technique, a multi-turn jailbreak that asks a target LLM to act as a Likert-scale judge scoring the harmfulness of example responses. The highest-rated example in each scale can carry harmful content, bypassing the model's internal guardrails. Testing across six state-of-the-art text-generation LLMs showed an average attack success rate increase of more than 60% versus plain attack prompts, with tested models anonymized. The technique targets edge cases rather than typical use, and the article positions the work as guidance for defenders on potential jailbreak risks.
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Persistent Attempts at Cyberespionage Against Southeast Asian Government Target Have Links to Alloy Taurus
Alloy Taurus (GALLIUM) compromised Southeast Asian government networks from 2022 to 2023 using Exchange web shells and undocumented .NET backdoors Reshell and Zapoa.
Unit 42 tracked persistent multiwave intrusions at a Southeast Asian government starting in early 2022 and continuing through 2023, attributing the activity with moderate confidence to Alloy Taurus (aka GALLIUM), a Chinese state-aligned espionage group. Attackers exploited Exchange Server vulnerabilities to deploy web shells including China Chopper, then ran reconnaissance with Fscan and WebScan, created administrative accounts, and installed undocumented .NET backdoors named Reshell and Zapoa. They established resilience by installing SoftEther VPN, brute-forced Active Directory credentials with Kerbrute, and dumped credential stores with GoDumpLsass and LsassUnhooker. The campaign reflects long-term espionage tradecraft to maintain a foothold.
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Threat Brief: Ongoing Russia and Ukraine Cyber Activity
Ukrainian government sites were defaced via OctoberCMS CVE-2021-32648 while Microsoft-attributed actor DEV-0586 deployed destructive WhisperGate malware.
Unit 42 tracks January 2022 attacks against Ukrainian government websites that were defaced or made inaccessible, which Ukraine attributed to Russia. Attackers exploited CVE-2021-32648, an account takeover flaw in OctoberCMS prior to 1.0.472, by submitting a boolean true as the password reset code to bypass validation. Separately, WhisperGate malware, attributed by Microsoft to DEV-0586, disabled Windows Defender and corrupted files across multiple Ukrainian organizations, using a ransomware-appearing first stage and an HTTPS-beaconing second stage with LOLBINs and anti-analysis techniques.
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Threat Brief: 3CXDesktopApp Supply Chain Attack (Updated)
Trojanized 3CXDesktopApp installers for Windows and macOS loaded RC4-encrypted shellcode delivering a backdoor to hundreds of thousands of 3CX users.
Threat actors compromised the 3CXDesktopApp build process, adding malicious libraries (ffmpeg.dll, d3dcompiler_47.dll) to installers downloaded from the developer's website. The Windows MSI loader decrypts embedded shellcode with RC4, sleeps for a random 1-4 weeks, then beacons to C2 hidden in icon files on GitHub. Unit 42 fingerprinted 247,277 IPs across 199 countries using 3CX applications and blocked shellcode execution at 127 Cortex XDR customers between March 9-30, 2023.
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Threat Brief: VMware Vulnerabilities Exploited in the Wild (CVE-2022
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Week in review: Firmware-level Android backdoor found on tablets, Dell zero-day exploited since 2024
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