The United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre along with cybersecurity agencies from the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, and Sweden has issued a joint advisory highlighting a shift in tactics by China-linked hacking groups. These actors are increasingly moving away from using dedicated, traceable infrastructure and instead relying on large-scale proxy networks built from compromised consumer and small-business devices. These include SOHO routers, internet-connected cameras, DVR systems, and NAS equipment. By routing malicious traffic through chains of these hijacked devices across different regions, attackers are able to obscure their true origin and significantly reduce the chances of detection. The advisory notes that most China-nexus threat actors are now believed to operate through such distributed covert networks, which are continuously expanded and may even be shared across multiple groups. One major example is the “Raptor Train” botnet, which in 2024 infected over 260,000 devices globally. It was linked to activity attributed to the state-aligned Flax Typhoon group and Integrity Technology Group, which was sanctioned in early 2025. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, working with security researchers such as Black Lotus Labs, disrupted this network in 2024 after it was found targeting military, government, telecom, defense, education, and IT sectors, mainly in the US and Taiwan. Another case involved the KV-botnet, associated with Volt Typhoon, which primarily exploited outdated Cisco and Netgear routers lacking security patches. Although the FBI disrupted it in early 2024 by removing malware from infected devices, attempts to rebuild the network were observed later. The advisory stresses that traditional defenses like IP blocking are no longer sufficient against such dynamic infrastructure. Instead, organizations are advised to adopt multi-factor authentication, zero-trust models, certificate-based verification, continuous monitoring of edge devices, and dynamic threat intelligence to better detect and counter these evolving proxy-based attack networks.
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