By: [Ravie Lakshmanan](/p/authors.html) A sophisticated Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) actor exploited a critical security vulnerability in Sophos’ firewall product that came to light earlier this year to infiltrate an unnamed South Asian target as part of a highly-targeted attack. “The attacker implement[ed] an interesting web shell backdoor, create[d] a secondary form of persistence, and ultimately launch[ed] attacks against the customer’s staff,” Volexity said in a report. “These attacks aimed to further breach cloud-hosted web servers hosting the organization’s public-facing websites.” The zero-day flaw in question is tracked as CVE-2022-1040 (CVSS score: 9.8), and concerns an authentication bypass vulnerability that...