A just lately disclosed important safety flaw impacting SAP NetWeaver is being exploited by a number of China-nexus nation-state actors to focus on important infrastructure networks.
“Actors leveraged CVE-2025-31324, an unauthenticated file add vulnerability that allows distant code execution (RCE),” EclecticIQ researcher Arda Büyükkaya mentioned in an evaluation revealed at present.
Targets of the marketing campaign embody pure gasoline distribution networks, water and built-in waste administration utilities in the UK, medical machine manufacturing crops oil and gasoline exploration and manufacturing corporations in the USA, and authorities ministries in Saudi Arabia which are accountable for funding technique and monetary regulation.
The findings are based mostly on a publicly uncovered listing uncovered on attacker-controlled infrastructure (“15.204.56[.]106”) that contained occasion logs capturing the actions throughout a number of compromised techniques.
The Dutch cybersecurity firm has attributed the intrusions to Chinese language menace exercise clusters tracked as UNC5221, UNC5174, and CL-STA-0048, the final of which was linked to assaults focusing on high-value targets in South Asia by exploiting recognized vulnerabilities in public-facing IIS, Apache Tomcat, and MS-SQL servers to drop internet shells, reverse shells, and the PlugX backdoor.
It additionally famous that an uncategorized China-nexus menace actor is conducting a widespread web scanning and exploitation marketing campaign towards SAP NetWeaver techniques. The server hosted on the IP tackle “15.204.56[.]106” has been discovered to include a number of information, together with –
- “CVE-2025-31324-results.txt,” which has recorded 581 SAP NetWeaver situations compromised and backdoored with an online shell
- “服务数据_20250427_212229.txt,” which lists 800 domains operating SAP NetWeaver seemingly for future focusing on
“The uncovered open-dir infrastructure reveals confirmed breaches and highlights the group’s deliberate targets, providing clear perception into each previous and future operations,” Büyükkaya famous.
The exploitation of CVE-2025-31324 is adopted by the menace actor deploying two internet shells which are designed to keep up persistent distant entry to the contaminated techniques and execute arbitrary instructions.
As well as, three totally different Chinese language hacking teams have been noticed exploiting the SAP NetWeaver vulnerability as a part of efforts to keep up distant entry, conduct reconnaissance, and drop malicious packages –
- CL-STA-0048, which has tried to determine an interactive reverse shell to “43.247.135[.]53,” an IP tackle beforehand recognized as utilized by the menace actor
- UNC5221, which has leveraged an online shell to deploy KrustyLoader, a Rust-based malware that may used to serve second-stage payloads like Sliver, arrange persistence, and execute shell instructions
- UNC5174, which has leveraged an online shell to obtain SNOWLIGHT, a loader that initiates a reference to a hard-coded server to fetch a Go-based distant entry trojan named VShell and a backdoor often called GOREVERSE
“China-linked APTs are extremely more likely to proceed focusing on internet-exposed enterprise purposes and edge gadgets to determine long-term strategic and persistence entry to important infrastructure networks globally,” Büyükkaya mentioned.
“Their give attention to extensively used platforms like SAP NetWeaver is a strategic transfer, as these techniques are deeply built-in into enterprise environments and infrequently host unpatched vulnerabilities.”
SAP Patches New NetWeaver Flaw in Could 2025 Patch
The disclosure comes days after one other China-linked unnamed menace actor dubbed Chaya_004 has additionally been attributed to the exploitation of CVE-2025-31324 to deploy a Go-based reverse shell referred to as SuperShell.
SAP safety agency Onapsis mentioned it’s “seeing vital exercise from attackers who’re utilizing public data to set off exploitation and abuse internet shells positioned by the unique attackers, who’ve at present gone darkish.”
Additional evaluation of those assaults has led to the invention of one other important defect in NetWeaver’s Visible Composer Metadata Uploader element. Tracked as CVE-2025-42999 (CVSS rating: 9.1), it has been described as a deserialization vulnerability that could possibly be exploited by a privileged person to add untrusted or malicious content material.
In gentle of ongoing lively exploitation, prospects of SAP NetWeaver are really useful to replace their situations to the most recent model as quickly as doable.
