Unit 42 identified a campaign targeting government entities and state-affiliated infrastructure, with observed activity spanning from October 2025–April 2026. We track this activity as CL-UNK-1211.
In the operations we witnessed, the attackers relied on AI-generated payloads. Multiple artifacts deployed throughout the intrusion contained AI-made conversational annotations and developer reasoning comments, suggesting that the code was either generated using large language models (LLMs) or executed by an automated AI agent.
The attackers behind this cluster of activity focused on Linux environments to conduct extensive reconnaissance and maintain persistent network access to support intelligence-gathering. The attackers attempted to dump sensitive databases and exfiltrate government mailboxes to access social media accounts.
Read more…
Source: Palo Alto Unit 42
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Internet
February 2, 2022
For the past two weeks, observers of North Korea’s strange and tightly restricted corner of the internet began to notice that the country seemed to be dealing with some serious connectivity problems. On several different days, practically all of its websites—the notoriously isolated nation only has a few dozen—intermittently dropped offline en masse, from the ...
- UEFI firmware vulnerabilities affect at least 25 computer vendors
February 2, 2022
Researchers from firmware protection company Binarly have discovered critical vulnerabilities in the UEFI firmware from InsydeH2O used by multiple computer vendors such as Fujitsu, Intel, AMD, Lenovo, Dell, ASUS, HP, Siemens, Microsoft, and Acer. UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) software is an interface between a device’s firmware and the operating system, which handles the booting process, ...
- Arid Viper APT targets Palestine with new wave of politically themed phishing attacks, malware
February 2, 2022
Cisco Talos has identified a new wave of what is believed to be an ongoing campaign using the Delphi malware since 2017. Talos believes with high confidence that this is the work of the Arid Viper threat actor. This is a group believed to be based out of Gaza that’s known to target organizations all ...
- FBI: Scammers Exploit Security Weaknesses on Job Recruitment Websites to Impersonate Legitimate Businesses, Threatening Company Reputation and Defrauding Job Seekers
February 1, 2022
The FBI warns that malicious actors or ‘scammers’ continue to exploit security weaknesses on job recruitment websites to post fraudulent job postings in order to trick applicants into providing personal information or money. These scammers lend credibility to their scheme by using legitimate information to imitate businesses, threatening reputational harm for the business and financial ...
- Update now: Samba prior to 4.13.17 hit with remote root code execution bug
February 1, 2022
Samba has fixed a vulnerability in all versions of its software prior to version 4.13.17 that allowed for a remote actor to execute code as root, thanks to an out-of-bounds heap read write vulnerability. “The specific flaw exists within the parsing of EA metadata when opening files in smbd. Access as a user that has write ...
- Powerful new Oski variant ‘Mars Stealer’ grabbing 2FAs and crypto
February 1, 2022
A new and powerful malware named ‘Mars Stealer’ has appeared in the wild, and appears to be a redesign of the Oski malware that shut down development abruptly in the summer of 2020. Mars Stealer is an information-stealing malware that steals data from all popular web browsers, two-factor authentication plugins, and multiple cryptocurrency extensions and wallets. Additionally, ...