The Next Phase of Attacks and the Blind Spots We Must Address

On October 15, 2025, a major network infrastructure provider disclosed a sophisticated cybersecurity incident in which a nation-state threat actor maintained long-term, unauthorized access to internal systems. During the intrusion, the attackers exfiltrated portions of the company’s flagship network and application delivery system source code and information about undisclosed vulnerabilities. In other words, the attackers didn’t simply exploit a weakness, they stole the knowledge required to create new ones.

This breach reflects a growing pattern in nation-state operations: infiltrating the very environments where security technologies are designed, built, and validated. By compromising product development systems, threat actors can gain deep insight into how defensive mechanisms function and how to circumvent them in the future.

As organizations digest the implications of this event, it’s worth examining what made it possible, why traditional detection methods often fail to see such attacks, and how network-level visibility can expose the subtle patterns that betray even the most persistent intrusions.

Although the specific company may not matter, the tactics used and what they reveal about modern visibility challenges should concern every organization that builds or operates critical digital infrastructure.

Anatomy of the Attack

While the full details are still emerging, official filings and CISA’s subsequent emergency directive outline the core elements of the breach. The threat actor achieved and maintained access to multiple high-value internal systems, including the company’s core platform’s product development environment and engineering knowledge-management platforms. Through this access, the attackers quietly exfiltrated data over an extended period, including code fragments, vulnerability research, and limited configuration data.

The tactics align closely with several MITRE ATT&CK techniques:

• Credential Access (TA0006): Harvesting embedded credentials and API keys within internal systems
• Persistence (TA0003):  Establishing long-term footholds in development or build environments
• Lateral Movement (TA0008): Pivoting across connected engineering systems using compromised credentials
• Exfiltration (TA0010): Slowly transferring small files over encrypted channels to evade detection

What’s striking here is not just the sophistication of the intrusion, but the patience. This was not a smash-and-grab data theft; it was a methodical, intelligence-gathering campaign designed to remain invisible for as long as possible.

Why Traditional Detection Missed It

Modern enterprises rely on a layered mix of security technologies such as SIEMs, EDR agents, flow collectors, and log analytics platforms, each providing partial views of what’s happening in the environment. Yet these tools are often alert-driven, designed to detect known indicators of compromise or behavioral deviations significant enough to trigger a rule or signature.

Persistent attacks such as this one thrive in the space between those alerts. Repeated transfers of small files may appear as normal development activity. Movement between build systems may look like routine administrative access. And when these actions occur over encrypted channels, the visibility gap widens further.

Even advanced detection systems can struggle to differentiate legitimate traffic from malicious behavior when they rely on metadata summaries or sampled flow data. The missing context, such as what was actually transmitted, how frequently, and with what payload characteristics, is exactly where these operations hide.

The Visibility That Changes the Story

This is where packet-level visibility becomes transformative. Unlike flow data or logs, packets provide the ground truth of network activity: the complete, continuous record of every session, transaction, and payload exchanged across the network. For forensic analysts, that fidelity means not only knowing that data moved, but what kind of data, how much, and in what sequence.

With continuous packet capture and decryption, subtle exfiltration patterns that would otherwise blend in become detectable. Examples include:

• Repeated HTTPS POSTs of identical size to unrecognized destinations
• Encrypted sessions initiated from systems that rarely communicate externally
• Lateral traffic showing credential reuse or new service creation within engineering networks

These signals often exist long before a traditional alert fires, but they require both data depth and analytic context to recognize.

How Omnis Cyber Intelligence Fits In

NETSCOUT’s Omnis Cyber Intelligence was built specifically to address these kinds of gaps. It operates on the principle that visibility must exist independent of alerts. By continuously capturing and analyzing packets at the source, across data centers, hybrid cloud, and remote networks, Omnis Cyber Intelligence provides defenders with the contextual visibility needed to reconstruct and understand subtle activity such as that seen in this breach.

From a technical standpoint:

• Continuous, full-fidelity packet capture ensures no event is missed, even when attackers avoid triggering alerts.
• Deep packet inspection (DPI) extracts Layer 2–7 metadata, revealing application behavior even in encrypted or tunneled traffic.
• Analytics at the source reduces mean time to knowledge (MTTK) by detecting anomalies in real time and preserving forensic evidence for later validation.

In the context of an attack such as this, Omnis Cyber Intelligence could identify repeated small-file transfers leaving development networks, detect unauthorized communication paths between build servers, and provide the packet evidence necessary to confirm exfiltration; even months after it occurred.  This isn’t about only detection; it’s about restoring observation where visibility has been lost. When adversaries operate inside trusted systems using legitimate credentials, packets are often the only remaining truth left to analyze.

The Broader Implications: Supply Chain Trust

Perhaps the most concerning aspect of this incident is its potential ripple effect across the software supply chain. Exfiltrated source code and vulnerability information can accelerate the discovery of zero-day exploits targeting the affected vendor’s customers, including critical infrastructure and federal networks. CISA’s Emergency Directive 26-01 underscores this risk by requiring agencies to inventory and update all network infrastructure devices affected by the breach, citing an “imminent threat” to federal systems.

This marks a critical inflection point: Defending the supply chain now requires defending the development environments themselves. Engineering systems must be monitored with the same rigor as production environments. The boundary between “IT” and “R&D” is no longer a safe separation; it’s an opportunity for attackers to move laterally into the software that defines modern infrastructure.

Network-based analytics play a key role here. Packet-level monitoring provides independent verification of what data moves where, invaluable not just for incident response but for regulatory reporting under new SEC 1.05 disclosure rules requiring transparent and timely communication of material cybersecurity incidents.

From Detection to Knowledge

This breach will likely become a defining case study in how visibility, or the lack of it, determines whether an intrusion becomes a disclosure. It demonstrates that prevention alone is not enough. Attackers will find a way in; the question is how quickly defenders can know what happened and prove it.

Full-fidelity packet data offers that knowledge. It bridges the gap between detection and response, providing the clarity and context required to make confident decisions under pressure.

As organizations reassess their defenses, the lesson is clear: The most dangerous breaches are those you can’t see. And in an age where attackers can hide in legitimate traffic, seeing everything including down to the packet, is the foundation of resilience.

Learn how NETSCOUT Omnis Cyber Intelligence can help by providing comprehensive network visibility with scalable deep packet inspection (DPI) to detect, investigate, and respond to threats more efficiently.

Schedule a demo.