A sophisticated Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) actor exploited a critical security vulnerability in Sophos’ firewall product that came to light earlier this year to infiltrate an unnamed South Asian target as part of a highly-targeted attack.
“The attacker implement[ed] an interesting web shell backdoor, create[d] a secondary form of persistence, and ultimately launch[ed] attacks against the customer’s staff,” Volexity said in a report. “These attacks aimed to further breach cloud-hosted web servers hosting the organization’s public-facing websites.”