The National Security Agency (NSA) has released a cybersecurity advisory on Chinese state-sponsored malicious cyber activity. This advisory provides 25 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) known to be recently leveraged, or scanned-for, by Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors to enable successful hacking operations against a multitude of victim networks.

Oliver Tavakoli, CTO at Vectra, a San Jose, Calif.-based provider of technology which applies AI to detect and hunt for cyberattackers, says, “The breadth of products covered by this list of CVEs would indicate that the NSA has curated this list through the observation of many attacks undertaken by these actors. The exploits themselves also cover a broad range of steps in the cyberattack lifecycle indicating that many of the attacks in which these exploits were observed were already pretty deep into the attack progression – and many were likely found only after-the-fact through deep forensic efforts rather than having been identified while the attacks were active.”

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) encourages critical system administrators to prioritize the immediate patching of the CVEs in NSA’s advisory and to review CISA’s Alert Potential for China Cyber Response to Heightened U.S.–China Tensions, which details potential cyber response to heightened tensions between the United States and China and provides specific tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) and recommended mitigations to the cybersecurity community to assist in the protection of our Nation’s critical infrastructure. 

To read the NSA cybersecurity advisory, please click here.