F5 Labs analyzed exploitation of CVE-2026-24423, a CVSS 9.8 unauthenticated remote code execution flaw in SmarterTools SmarterMail (CWE-306). CISA added it to the KEV catalog on February 2, 2026 and notes it has been used in ransomware campaigns. Despite public write-ups, F5 sensors saw only one IP, 193.24.123.58 (ASN 200593, Russian ISP …
F5 Labs assesses the security risks and rewards of Chinese open-weight LLMs (Qwen, GLM, Kimi, MiMo, MiniMax, DeepSeek). It finds that strong offensive and defensive cyber capability does not translate into consistent resistance to attack. Cited examples include Kimi K3 finding 19 vulnerabilities in Redis and GLM 5.2 being self-hosted by H…
F5 Labs, using Efflux sensor telemetry, found that HTTP requests hitting its sensors rose from 5,125,557 in 2023 to 8,727,820 in 2024 (about 71%, or nearly 95% once normalized for sensor count). Most of the increase came from the BotPoke scanner, which looks for filenames associated with malware distribution sites. It was active mainly in…
F5 Labs honeynet telemetry shows overall hostile activity rising 55.5% month over month in June 2026, a return to the levels of the earlier-year spike. Highlighted is CVE-2024-44000, an unauthenticated account takeover flaw (CVSS 9.8, CWE-522) in the LiteSpeed Cache WordPress plugin, which rose by 1,128 to 2,603 attacks (8). Scanning is i…
F5 Labs, using attack telemetry from Efflux's global sensor network, analyzed the most exploited vulnerabilities in July 2025 and found that nearly all top-scanned CVEs are HTTP-based RCE or command injection flaws in web interfaces. CVE-2017-9841 (PHPUnit) was the most exploited, followed by CVE-2023-1389 (TP-Link Archer AX21), CVE-2022-…
F5 Labs, using Efflux sensor telemetry, reports a campaign that began on 2025-06-08. One actor is exploiting TP-Link AX21 routers (CVE-2023-1389, command injection in the country query parameter) and Raisecom web interfaces (CVE-2024-7120) to deliver a new malware family named NoBooze1. Four source IPs and three stage-one hosts were rotat…
F5 Labs published a "canary exploit" generator for CVE-2025-30065, a CVSS 10.0 flaw in the Apache Parquet Java parquet-avro Maven module. The tool lets defenders test whether their environments are vulnerable and confirm that patches and configuration are effective. F5's analysis finds the flaw far less severe than the CVSS score and earl…
This F5 Labs explainer describes how quantum computing affects cryptography. Shor's algorithm can efficiently break the problems behind RSA, DSA, Diffie-Hellman and ECC, while Grover's algorithm only halves the effective strength of symmetric ciphers such as AES. The article stresses "harvest now, decrypt later" risk: an adversary who rec…
The F5 Labs 2026 State of PQC on the Web report scanned the top 1 million domains with TLS 1.3 handshakes. It found that 54% support post-quantum (hybrid) key exchange, but the figure is driven mainly by CDNs, especially Cloudflare and Fastly, which enable PQC by default. Excluding Cloudflare-hosted domains, adoption falls to 22%. Sectors…
F5 Labs, using Efflux sensor telemetry, analyzed December 2025 exploitation of React2Shell (CVE-2025-55182), a CVSS 10.0 unsafe deserialization RCE in React Server Components. It was disclosed on 3 December 2025 and rose to second place among the most exploited CVEs, behind only CVE-2017-9841. Within days of disclosure, actors moved from …
F5 Labs argues that AI systems embedded in the operations of the 2026 Winter Games (spectator chatbots, scheduling, translation, fraud detection, operational analytics) create a behavioral attack surface that traditional security controls do not cover. The main risk is manipulated model behavior rather than outages or stolen credentials. …
F5 Labs, using Efflux sensor telemetry, reports that CVE-2023-1389, an RCE in TP-Link Archer AX21 routers, was the most scanned-for CVE in December 2024 for the fifth consecutive month, with traffic far above any other tracked CVE. Other heavily scanned flaws include CVE-2022-24847 (GeoServer), CVE-2022-22947 (Spring Cloud Gateway), CVE-2…
F5 Labs' January 2026 AI security roundup covers two attack developments: the Persona Bullying jailbreak and a critical LangChain serialization injection vulnerability (CVE-2025-68664) reachable through prompt injection. Persona Bullying applies human social-engineering tactics such as gaslighting, ridicule and social pressure to LLMs con…
F5 Labs' 2025 Advanced Persistent Bots Report analyzes more than 200 billion web and mobile API transactions from F5 Bot Defense customers between November 2023 and September 2024. It finds that 10.2% (21.22 billion) of requests were bots or automation. Of these, 4.8% were unwanted bots mitigated by F5, 3.5% were flagged automation and 2.…
F5 Labs analyzes CVE-2025-23061 and its predecessor CVE-2024-53900, a CVSS 9.0 flaw in the Mongoose MongoDB client library that allows remote code execution on Node.js API servers. The bug abuses the populate method, which accepts a $where clause containing arbitrary JavaScript. The initial fix for CVE-2024-53900 blocked only top-level $w…
CVE-2026-9082 is a critical (CVSS 9.8) pre-authentication SQL injection in the JSON:API module of Drupal Core. It was published on May 20, 2026 and added to the CISA KEV catalog the same month, with a remediation deadline of May 27. F5 sensors recorded 576 exploitation attempts from 9 source IPs between May 20 and May 31, 2026. The earlie…
F5 Labs published its 2026 cybersecurity predictions and scored its 2025 forecasts at 6.5/8, by its own assessment. The 2025 review cites AI-powered botnets, attacks on AI model APIs, AI side-channel attacks on cryptography, APT use of hacktivist personas, and expanded Roskomnadzor powers to isolate or reroute Russian internet traffic fro…
F5 Labs, using attack telemetry from Efflux sensors, reports that CVE-2017-9841 (PHPUnit eval-stdin.php RCE) remained the most targeted vulnerability in May 2025 with over 54,000 instances. CVE-2020-8958 (Guangzhou ONU command injection RCE) shows near-exponential targeting growth for a third consecutive month. CVE-2024-3721 (TBK DVR OS c…
F5 Labs, with Efflux sensor telemetry, profiled a persistent information-disclosure scanner operating from 78.153.140.203 in a netblock of AS202306 (HOSTGLOBAL.PLUS LTD), a UK ISP. The IP was first seen on 10 January 2025, vanished on 10 April, and returned on 11 July 2025. It scans 130 unique URLs: 80.23% are variations of /.env, 11.45% …
F5 Labs reports a scanning campaign observed on its Honeynet in March 2026. It recorded 1,897 session-grouped attempts (2,821 raw events) tied to CVE-2018-14028, a WordPress 4.9.7 unrestricted file upload flaw, and the CVE entered the monthly top 10 after being absent in February. Instead of exploiting the upload flaw, the operator probes…