A newly discovered cyberattack campaign targeting Ivanti VPN devices is suspected to be linked to a Chinese cyberespionage group. Security researchers believe the attackers exploited a critical vulnerability in Ivanti Connect Secure, which was patched by the Utah-based company in February. The attack is yet another example of how state-backed Chinese threat actors are rapidly taking advantage of newly disclosed vulnerabilities and frequently targeting Ivanti’s infrastructure.
On Thursday, researchers from Mandiant revealed that a group tracked as UNC5221 exploited a stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability to deploy malicious code from the Spawn malware ecosystem—an attack technique often associated with Chinese state-sponsored activity. Mandiant also identified two previously unknown malware families, which they’ve named Trailblaze and Brushfire. As seen in earlier attacks tied to Chinese hackers, this group attempted to manipulate Ivanti’s internal Integrity Checker Tool to avoid detection.
The vulnerability, officially tracked as CVE-2025-22457, was used to compromise multiple Ivanti products, including Connect Secure version 22.7R2.5 and earlier, the legacy Connect Secure 9.x line, Policy Secure (Ivanti’s network access control solution), and Zero Trust Access (ZTA) gateways. Ivanti released a patch for Connect Secure on February 11, emphasizing that Policy Secure should not be exposed to the internet, and that “Neurons for ZTA gateways cannot be exploited when in production.”
This article has been indexed from CySecurity News – Latest Information Security and Hacking Incidents
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