AI-Agent-Orchestrated Campaign Breaches Asian Government and Education Systems

A Chinese-speaking operator used the SecFlow framework to orchestrate AI agents associated with Claude, Qwen, and DeepSeek in intrusion activity against government, education, industrial, and telecommunications organizations across Asia. The agents automated reconnaissance, testing of known vulnerabilities, credential collection, and reporting, while conventional tooling—including webshells, stolen credentials, custom implants, GLUTTON tooling, and shared SOCKS infrastructure—carried out the intrusions. Researchers linked activity through reused accounts, niestools.com services, SecFlow artifacts, and the recurring handle “Nie.”

The most severe confirmed breach affected a Fengtai District government Office Automation environment, where the operator obtained Windows command execution, captured LSASS memory and registry hives, extracted OA accounts and records, created a privileged application account, exfiltrated government and health data, and deployed the SecBox implant. A Chinese education AI platform’s control and data plane were also compromised; other targets included Taiwan’s Kuomintang archives, Indonesia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Vietnamese organizations, Chinese public-service systems, and an Afghan telecommunications operator. Workflows tested eight known flaws, including Shellshock, Spring4Shell, Ghostcat, Shiro deserialization, Log4Shell, Grafana and Nexus traversal vulnerabilities, and a Nacos authentication bypass, though not all exploitation attempts succeeded.