China-nexus actors reported to have rooted 25 PAN-OS servers using an AI-built scanning platform, with victims in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea and a US government-affiliated environment

“aiscan” built on DeepSeek and Kimi, and 19,000 fingerprinted firewalls

In Dream's analysis the operation began on 8 October when the attackers built the AI-enabled platform “aiscan”; by 23 October they had fingerprinted about 19,000 firewalls and narrowed the list to 240 targets. After intrusion they installed webshells, tunnelled internally, extracted credentials from LDAP and enumerated Active Directory. Three of the 25 compromised servers sat in a US government-affiliated environment, and Dream's Kfir Fleischer says at least two were US government servers. Attribution is bolstered by indicators such as naming conventions and the presence of authentication tied to a Chinese certificate authority, without confirmation from any public authority.

Chaining PHP2Shell with a kernel flaw

PHP2Shell is a PHP vulnerability with a CVSS severity of 9.2, and Fragnesia is a Linux kernel privilege-escalation flaw added to CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue on 28 October. In a 29 October update Palo Alto Networks confirmed exploitation of internet-exposed PAN-OS management interfaces and shipped hotfixes for each release line, estimating that about 0.02% of the installed base is exposed.

Unit 42 meanwhile retracted its 23 October statement linking PHP2Shell to a European government agency. With potentially vulnerable PHP instances estimated above 22.6 million and only about 2.6% patched by one count, the same chain has ample room to spread to other appliances.

Victims including Japan, and the “AI-assisted” label

The inclusion of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea among the victims overlaps with the AI-enabled attack infrastructure targeting Japan reported in late October by TrendAI and CrowdStrike. Dream distinguishes this operation from autonomous attacks, calling it AI-assisted, with models supporting reconnaissance and target selection. The use of Chinese open-weight models as attack tooling adds a concrete case to debates over export controls and the regulation of open-weight models. For Japanese organisations the immediate tasks are checking exposed management interfaces and confirming that kernel fixes have been applied.