Elttam disclosed a pre-authentication remote code execution flaw in the 33-year-old TACACS+ protocol used across nearly all enterprise networks, with patches only partially available.
Sygnia links the China-nexus Fire Ant campaign to UNC3886, showing hackers weaponized compromised Cisco IOS XR routers for espionage and wider intrusions.
China-linked Fire Ant backdoored Cisco IOS XR routers, injected TACACS libraries to steal credentials, and rewrote logs across infrastructure targets.
China-nexus espionage group Fire Ant compromised Cisco IOS XR routers and TACACS servers to harvest credentials, capture traffic and suppress logs.