Red Heron exploits Gitea n-day flaw in multinational campaign, exposing new Linux rootkit

Acronis Threat Research Unit (TRU) uncovered a multinational campaign in which a Chinese-speaking threat actor, tracked as Red Heron, rapidly weaponized CVE-2026-60004 to compromise internet-facing instances of Gitea, a self-hosted source-code management platform. The activity progressed from source-code theft to persistent access, credential collection, and lateral movement, including root-level access to a three-node Proxmox cluster. TRU traced a Linux implant to Red Heron’s exposed staging server, revealing the actor’s exploitation tools, reconnaissance databases, command history, stolen repositories, and malware. This provided rare visibility into the operation, from target selection and vulnerability weaponization to post-exploitation activity. Red Heron scanned 1,386 Gitea instances across seven countries and maintained a separate dataset of 477 Taiwan-based systems. Targets were classified using Simplified Chinese labels covering defense, elections, energy, aerospace, telecommunications, government, and research. Confirmed compromises affected organizations in Canada, Argentina, Taiwan, the United States, and Sri Lanka. Within days of the vulnerability’s July 2026 disclosure, Red Heron transformed public proof-of-concept code into an automated framework capable of registering accounts, exploiting vulnerable servers, stealing repositories, and removing selected traces. The campaign demonstrates how quickly n-day vulnerabilities in self-hosted development platforms can expose source code, credentials, secrets, and connected infrastructure. The staging server also contained JITTERLY, a C++ Linux implant supporting more than 30 post-exploitation commands, including shell execution, file transfer, network tunneling, interactive terminal access, and internal pivoting. Embedded inside it was SIXZUT, a previously undocumented LD_PRELOAD rootkit capable of hiding files, processes, and network connections, preventing the implant from being terminated, and relaunching it if the process is stopped while the binary remains present. TRU assesses with moderate confidence that Red Heron operates within a PRC-linked context, based on Simplified Chinese operational material, its classification of Taiwan as part of China, and targeting aligned with apparent strategic collection priorities. We have not identified sufficient evidence linking Red Heron to a previously tracked threat group. More details – https://www.acronis.com/en/tru/posts/red-heron-exploits-gitea-n-day-flaw-in-multinational-campaign-exposing-new-linux-rootkit/ submitted by /u/acronis [link] [comments]Technical Information Security Content & DiscussionRead More