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"Blank Slate" Campaign Takes Advantage of Hosting Providers to Spread Ransomware

Unit 42 profiles the Blank Slate malspam campaign: blank emails with double-zipped attachments delivering Cerber ransomware while cycling abused hosting provider domains.

The Blank Slate campaign sends empty emails containing double-zipped archives with macro-enabled Word documents or JavaScript files that launch PowerShell to download ransomware, primarily Cerber, and occasionally Sage 2.0 or Locky. Unit 42 observed 555 campaign domains over seven months, with actors repeatedly registering new domains and cycling abuse of legitimate hosting providers after takedowns. In a five-day January-February 2017 window, at least eight domains across seven IP addresses were observed hosting Cerber payloads.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 29d agoThreat actor in the wild1

Automatically Detecting DNS Hijacking in Passive DNS

Unit 42's machine learning pipeline detected 6,729 DNS hijacking events between March and September 2024, hitting political parties, ISPs, and universities.

Unit 42 processes roughly 167 million new DNS records daily and applies a machine learning model using 74 features over 169 TB of passive DNS and geolocation data to flag hijacked domains. From March to September 2024 the pipeline screened over 29 billion records and classified 6,729 as DNS hijacking, averaging 38 detections per day; a new model detects hijacks in customer traffic within about 10 minutes. Notable cases include a Hungarian political party's hijacked domain, defacement of a large utility company and ISP, and university and research center domains repurposed for illicit gambling. DNS hijacking typically relies on stolen registrar or DNS provider credentials or cache poisoning, enabling MitM attacks, phishing, drive-by downloads, and scams.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 29d agoResearch in the wild

Thai Broadband Provider Hacked via Fortinet Vulnerability

Hackers exploited Fortinet CVE-2024-21762 RCE to breach Thai broadband provider 3BB, deploying MeshCentral backdoors and credential-harvesting tools across its network.

Hunt.io uncovered an intrusion staging directory in Thailand containing 298 files of custom tooling built for Triple T Broadband (3BB) and its former owner Jasmine. Initial access came via fingerprinting a FortiGate SSL-VPN appliance and exploiting CVE-2024-21762 for remote code execution, after probing CVE-2018-13379, CVE-2022-42475, and CVE-2023-27997. The actor also probed F5 BIG-IP for CVE-2021-22986, CVE-2022-1388, and CVE-2023-46747, escalated privileges with PwnKit and Dirty COW, used MeshCentral as a C2 backdoor, harvested SSH/database/SNMP/Radius credentials, deployed PHP web shells, and ran cleanup scripts to hide the intrusion.

FrostyGoop’s Zoom-In: A Closer Look into the Malware Artifacts, Behaviors and Network Communications

Unit 42 dissects FrostyGoop OT malware, which sent Modbus TCP commands to disrupt heating for 600+ apartment buildings in Ukraine.

Palo Alto Unit 42 analyzed new FrostyGoop/BUSTLEBERM samples, the ninth known ICS-centric malware, first used against a Ukrainian municipal energy company by sending Modbus TCP commands to ENCO control devices. The attack caused a two-day heating outage affecting over 600 apartment buildings during sub-zero temperatures. The Go-compiled malware accepts Modbus register operations and timing parameters via command-line arguments or a JSON configuration file, uses an obscure open-source Modbus library, and checks the Windows BeingDebugged flag to evade debuggers. Unit 42 telemetry recorded over 1 million Modbus TCP devices exposed to the internet between September and October 2024.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 27d agoMalware in the wild

Off Guard: Breaking LiteLLM from authentication bypass to cloud compromise

Wiz found LiteLLM auth bypass (CVE-2026-59822) and post-auth RCE (CVE-2026-59821) chainable to cloud compromise; the bypass is in CISA KEV with in-the-wild exploitation.

Wiz scanned roughly 3,074 internet-facing LiteLLM deployments and found 9.6% accepted the default master key sk-1234 or required no authentication, making post-auth attacks effectively pre-auth. The MCP endpoint accepts any Bearer token and grants a valid session (CVE-2026-59822), confirmed exploited in the wild via honeypots and added to CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. Custom code guardrails allow post-auth root-level RCE via exec(compile(...)) (CVE-2026-59821), while pass-through endpoints lack URL validation, enabling cloud credential theft in post-auth scenarios. All assigned vulnerabilities have been patched; the research was presented at DEF CON 34.

Wiz Blogupdated · 5d agofirst · 6d agoExploit / PoC in the wild 4 sourcesCVE-2026-59822CVE-2026-598211

China-Based Artificial Intelligence Companies Conducting Industrial-Scale Distillation Campaigns Against U.S. AI Companies

NSA, CISA, and FBI warn DeepSeek, Alibaba, and other Chinese AI firms ran industrial-scale distillation of U.S. frontier models, threatening U.S. AI leadership.

A joint NSA, CISA, and FBI Cybersecurity Advisory (AA26-251A) says China-based firms DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI extracted billions of tokens from U.S. frontier models including Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok, likely with Chinese government knowledge. Campaigns running since at least late 2024 used native APIs, cloud providers, third-party aggregators, gray-market proxy "transfer stations", and shared premium subscriptions to bypass geographic restrictions, evade safeguards, and violate providers' terms of use. The agencies recommend detecting anomalous prompts, accounts, and usage patterns; subtly altering responses to suspected distillers; and cross-organization intelligence sharing. They also call DeepSeek's publicly cited $5.6M training cost misleading because it excludes data acquired through distillation.

CISA Advisories · 7d agoAdvisory in the wild1