Unit 42 researchers uncovered a campaign by an initial access broker (IAB) to exploit leaked Machine Keys — cryptographic keys used on ASP.NET sites — to gain access to targeted organizations.
IABs breach organizations and then sell that access to other threat actors. This report analyzes the tools used in these attacks. Palo Alto track this actor as the temporary group TGR-CRI-0045. The group seems to follow an opportunistic approach but has attacked organizations in Europe and the U.S. in the following industries: financial services, manufacturing, wholesale and retail, high technology, and transportation and logistics. The IAB used these leaked keys to sign malicious payloads that provide unauthorized access to targeted servers, in a technique called ASP.NET View State deserialization.
Read more…
Source: Palo Alto Unit 42
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber secnews and insights delivered right to your inbox.
Related:
- Data breach exposes 400,000 bank customers’ information
December 20, 2025
A major data breach tied to U.S. fintech firm Marquis is rippling through banks, credit unions and their customers. Hackers broke into Marquis systems by exploiting a known but unpatched vulnerability in a SonicWall firewall, gaining access to deeply sensitive consumer data. At least 400,000 people are confirmed to be affected so far across multiple states. ...
- U.S. DOJ: Ukrainian National Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy to Use Ransomware
December 19, 2025
Earlier today, in federal court in Brooklyn, Artem Stryzhak pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud and related activity, including extortion, in connection with computers, for his role in a series of international ransomware attacks. Stryzhak, a Ukrainian citizen, was arrested in Spain in June 2024 and extradited to the United States on April 30, ...
- Cisco email security products actively targeted in zero-day campaign
December 19, 2025
A China-affiliated threat actor has been abusing a zero-day vulnerability in multiple Cisco email appliances to gain access to the underlying system and establish persistence. Cisco confirmed the news in a blog post and a security advisory, urging users to apply provided recommendations and harden their networks. In its announcement, Cisco said it first spotted the ...
- Thailand says Cambodia border fight is also a war on scammers
December 19, 2025
Thailand’s army has recast its deadly clash with Cambodia as a battle against cybercriminals, adding a new motive for bombing runs across the border that it says are aimed at rooting out scammers. Calling the strikes a “war against the scam army,” a military division involved in the border fight said this week it’s on the ...
- Cloud Atlas activity in the first half of 2025: what changed
December 19, 2025
Known since 2014, the Cloud Atlas group targets countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Infections occur via phishing emails containing a malicious document that exploits an old vulnerability in the Microsoft Office Equation Editor process (CVE-2018-0802) to download and execute malicious code. In this report, Kaspersky researchers describe the infection chain and tools that the ...
- CVE-2025-37164: Critical unauthenticated RCE affecting Hewlett Packard Enterprise OneView
December 19, 2025
On December 17, 2025, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) published an advisory for CVE-2025-37164, a CVSS 10.0 vulnerability in HPE OneView. The vulnerability, which was reported to HPE by security researcher Nguyen Quoc Khanh, facilitates unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) on versions of HPE OneView before 11.0. Defenders are advised to prioritize upgrading to version 11.0 ...