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Backdoor in Notepad++

Hackers associated with the Chinese government used a Trojaned version of Notepad++ to deliver malware to selected users.

Notepad++ said that officials with the unnamed provider hosting the update infrastructure consulted with incident responders and found that it remained compromised until September 2. Even then, the attackers maintained credentials to the internal services until December 2, a capability that allowed them to continue redirecting selected update traffic to malicious servers. The threat actor “specifically targeted Notepad++ domain with the goal of exploiting insufficient update verification controls that existed in older versions of Notepad++.” Event logs indicate that the hackers tried to re-exploit one of the weaknesses after it was fixed but that the attempt failed.

Make sure you’re running at least version 8.9.1.

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How China’s “Walled Garden” is Redefining the Cyber Threat Landscape

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How China’s “Walled Garden” is Redefining the Cyber Threat Landscape

In our latest webinar, Flashpoint unpacks the architecture of the Chinese threat actor cyber ecosystem—a parallel offensive stack fueled by government mandates and commercialized hacker-for-hire industry.

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January 30, 2026

For years, the global cybersecurity community has operated under the assumption that technical information was a matter of public record. Security research has always been openly discussed and shared through a culture of global transparency. Today, that reality has fundamentally shifted. Flashpoint is witnessing a growing opacity—a “Walled Garden”—around Chinese data. As a result, the competence of Chinese threat actors and APTs has reached an industrialized scale.

In Flashpoint’s recent on-demand webinar, “Mapping the Adversary: Inside the Chinese Pentesting Ecosystem,” our analysts explain how China’s state policies surrounding zero-day vulnerability research have effectively shut out the cyber communities that once provided a window into Chinese tradecraft. However, they haven’t disappeared. Rather, they have been absorbed by the state to develop a mature, self-sustaining offensive stack capable of targeting global infrastructure.

Understanding the Walled Garden: The Shift from Disclosure to Nationalization

The “Walled Garden” is a direct result of a Chinese regulatory turning point in 2021: the Regulations on the Management of Security Vulnerabilities (RMSV). While the gradual walling off of China’s data is the cumulative result of years of implementing regulatory and policy strategies, the 2021 RMSV marks a critical turning point that effectively nationalized China’s vulnerability research capabilities. Under the RMSV, any individual or organization in China that discovers a new flaw must report it to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) within 48 hours. Crucially, researchers are prohibited from sharing technical details with third parties—especially foreign entities—or selling them before a patch is issued.

It is important to note that this mandate is not limited to Chinese-based software or hardware; it applies to any vulnerability discovered, as long as the discoverer is a Chinese-based organization or national. This effectively treats software vulnerabilities as a national strategic resource for China. By centralizing this data, the Chinese government ensures it has an early window into zero-day exploits before the global defensive community. 

For defenders, this means that by the time a vulnerability is public, there is a high probability it has already been analyzed and potentially weaponized within China’s state-aligned apparatus.

The Indigenous Kill Chain: Reconnaissance Beyond Shodan

Flashpoint analysts have observed that within this Walled Garden, traditional Western reconnaissance tools are losing their effectiveness. Chinese threat actors are utilizing an indigenous suite of cyberspace search engines that create a dangerous information asymmetry, allowing them to peer at defender infrastructure while shielding their own domestic base from Western scrutiny.

While Shodan remains the go-to resource for security teams, Flashpoint has seen Chinese threat actors favor three IoT search engines that offer them a massive home-field advantage:

  • FOFA: Specializes in deep fingerprinting for middleware and Chinese-specific signatures, often indexing dorks for new vulnerabilities weeks before they appear in the West.
  • Zoomai: Built for high-speed automation, offering APIs that integrate with AI systems to move from discovery to verified target in minutes.
  • 360 Quake: Provides granular, real-time mapping through a CLI with an AI engine for complex asset portraits.

In the full session, we demonstrate exactly how Chinese operators use these tools to fuse reconnaissance and exploitation into a single, automated step—a capability most Western EDRs aren’t yet tuned to detect.

Building a State-Aligned Offensive Stack

Leveraging their knowledge of vulnerabilities and zero-day exploits, the illicit Chinese ecosystem is building tools designed to dismantle the specific technologies that power global corporate data centers and business hubs.

In the webinar, our analysts explain purpose-built cyber weapons designed to hunt VMware vCenter servers that support one-click shell uploads via vulnerabilities like Log4Shell. Beyond the initial exploit, Flashpoint highlights the rising use of Behinder (Ice Scorpion)—a sophisticated web shell management tool. Behinder has become a staple for Chinese operators because it encrypts command-and-control (C2) traffic, allowing attackers to evade conventional inspection and deep packet analytics.

Strengthen Your Defenses Against the Chinese Offensive Stack with Flashpoint

By understanding this “Walled Garden” architecture, defenders can move beyond generic signatures and begin to hunt for the specific TTPs—such as high-entropy C2 traffic and proprietary Chinese scanning patterns—that define the modern Chinese threat actor.

How can Flashpoint help? Flashpoint’s cyber threat intelligence platform cuts through the generic feed overload and delivers unrivaled primary-source data, AI-powered analysis, and expert human context.

Watch the on-demand webinar to learn more, or request a demo today.

Request a demo today.

The post How China’s “Walled Garden” is Redefining the Cyber Threat Landscape appeared first on Flashpoint.

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Burner phones and lead-lined bags: a history of UK security tactics in China

Starmer’s team is wary of spies but such fears are not new – with Theresa May once warned to get dressed under a duvet

When prime ministers travel to China, heightened security arrangements are a given – as is the quiet game of cat and mouse that takes place behind the scenes as each country tests out each other’s tradecraft and capabilities.

Keir Starmer’s team has been issued with burner phones and fresh sim cards, and is using temporary email addresses, to prevent devices being loaded with spyware or UK government servers being hacked into.

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© Photograph: Simon Dawson/Simon Dawson/10 Downing Street

© Photograph: Simon Dawson/Simon Dawson/10 Downing Street

© Photograph: Simon Dawson/Simon Dawson/10 Downing Street

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Telegram Hosting World’s Largest Darknet Market

Wired is reporting on Chinese darknet markets on Telegram.

The ecosystem of marketplaces for Chinese-speaking crypto scammers hosted on the messaging service Telegram have now grown to be bigger than ever before, according to a new analysis from the crypto tracing firm Elliptic. Despite a brief drop after Telegram banned two of the biggest such markets in early 2025, the two current top markets, known as Tudou Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee, are together enabling close to $2 billion a month in money-laundering transactions, sales of scam tools like stolen data, fake investment websites, and AI deepfake tools, as well as other black market services as varied as pregnancy surrogacy and teen prostitution.

The crypto romance and investment scams regrettably known as “pig butchering”—carried out largely from compounds in Southeast Asia staffed with thousands of human trafficking victims—have grown to become the world’s most lucrative form of cybercrime. They pull in around $10 billion annually from US victims alone, according to the FBI. By selling money-laundering services and other scam-related offerings to those operations, markets like Tudou Guarantee and Xinbi Guarantee have grown in parallel to an immense scale.

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Autumn Dragon: China-nexus APT Group Targets South East Asia

In this report, we describe how we tracked for several months a sustained espionage campaign against the government, media, and news sectors in several countries including Laos, Cambodia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia.


Since early 2025, China’s involvement in the Indo-Pacific has been more prolific, from escalating maritime tensions, to being peacebroker in Myanmar’s military junta and more recently, espionage activities on joint exercises the Philippines naval forces have been conducting together with the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

The attacker, which we believe is a China-nexus threat actor, showcases a love of DLL sideloading techniques in order to compromise their targets of interest. Governments and media are high-value targets because they shape policy, public opinion, and international alignment.

The report details the full attack chain of one particular compromise we discovered, and goes further into detail on victimology, other campaigns and finally lists indicators of compromise.

 Link to the report: https://cyberarmor.tech/blog/autumn-dragon-china-nexus-apt-group-targets-south-east-asia 

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UK ‘woefully’ unprepared for Chinese and Russian undersea cable sabotage, says report

CSRI finds China and Russia may be coordinating ‘grey zone’ tactics against vulnerable western infrastructure

China and Russia are stepping up sabotage operations targeting undersea cables and the UK is unprepared to meet the mounting threat, according to new analysis.

A report by the China Strategic Risks Institute (CSRI) analysed 12 incidents in which national authorities had investigated alleged undersea cable sabotage between January 2021 and April 2025. Of the 10 cases in which a suspect vessel was identified, eight were directly linked to China or Russia through flag-state registration or company ownership.

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© Photograph: John Leicester/AP

© Photograph: John Leicester/AP

© Photograph: John Leicester/AP

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‘Source of data’: are electric cars vulnerable to cyber spies and hackers?

British defence firms have reportedly warned staff not to connect their phones to Chinese-made EVs

Mobile phones and desktop computers are longstanding targets for cyber spies – but how vulnerable are electric cars?

On Monday the i newspaper claimed that British defence firms working for the UK government have warned staff against connecting or pairing their phones with Chinese-made electric cars, due to fears that Beijing could extract sensitive data from the devices.

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© Photograph: Ying Tang/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Ying Tang/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Ying Tang/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock

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