sichuan silence

The U.S. has sanctioned Sichuan Silence, a Chinese cybersecurity firm involved in ransomware attacks targeting critical infrastructure in 2020. One of its employees, Guan Tianfeng, has also been charged individually. Guan, a security researcher, discovered a zero-day vulnerability in a firewall product developed by U.K.-based security firm Sophos. He exploited the vulnerability, designated CVE 2020-12271, using a SQL injection attack that retrieved and remotely executed a script from a malicious server. Guan and his co-conspirators…