Chinese-speaking threat actors are suspected to have leveraged a compromised SonicWall VPN appliance as an initial access vector to deploy a VMware ESXi exploit that may have been developed as far back as February 2024. Cybersecurity firm Huntress, which observed the activity in December 2025 and stopped it before it could progress to the final stage, said it may have resulted in a ransomware attack.
CVE-2025-53771 is a SharePoint Server spoofing vulnerability allowing attackers to impersonate trusted users or resources, while CVE-2025-53770 permits remote code execution.