China-Linked APT GopherWhisper Abuses Legitimate Services in Government Attacks

Multiple high-impact incidents and trends were reported: a China-linked APT dubbed “GopherWhisper” is using Go-based backdoors, custom loaders/injectors and abusing legitimate services to target government organizations; a US federal agency’s Cisco firewall was compromised with a persistent “Firestarter” backdoor that survives patching and enables remote control; researchers linked a pre-Stuxnet sabotage malware named “Fast16” to attacks that tamper with high-precision calculation software and self-propagate. Separately, CrowdStrike and Tenable released patches (including a critical LogScale-f