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SOCRadar title artwork for its report n0n Ransomware: Inside an AI-Assisted Extortion Operation, showing a grid of gray blocks with one broken open in red.
Image: SOCRadar (fair use).

Detection

SOCRadar Says an Exposed n0n Ransomware Workspace Shows Every Documented Break-In Used Weak or Stolen Credentials, From Credential Stuffing Against 305 FortiGate VPNs to Exposed AWS Keys, With AI-Written Scripts Doing the Legwork

The open directory held 1,719 files from September, including 829 scripts and five encryptor sources, and tied the operator to at least 23 organizations in 14 countries. SOCRadar also published behavioral detections a SOC can run today, from .n0n file renames and a Run key named n0nNote to FortiGate login requests carrying the cookie APBSID=n0n.

Ava Okello, DetectionLondon6 min read

LONDON - A misconfigured file server has given defenders an unusually complete look inside n0n, the extortion crew that has surged onto ransomware leak sites since September, and the picture is less exotic than its AI tooling suggests. Every break-in documented in the operator's files began with a weak or stolen password, according to research the threat intelligence company SOCRadar published Wednesday.

"No vulnerability exploitation was identified: every documented compromise relied on weak or stolen credentials," SOCRadar wrote. Where the group does not encrypt, it destroys data and backups after stealing them.

An open directory, two snapshots

SOCRadar's researchers found a Python HTTP file server on 185.157.161[.]148, port 8877, exposing the operator's working directory in two snapshots on September 25 and 26. The 1,719 files included 829 scripts and five C++ encryptor sources, along with leak site infrastructure and an AI coding agent environment. The material implicates at least 23 organizations in 14 countries, among them a U.S. sports retailer, a cloud provider, a teachers' union, a Venezuelan internet provider and an Argentine ministry.

SOCRadar diagram of the n0n operator's infrastructure, showing relays, an agent box and C2, a leak site backend, a central storage server and a seedbox that distributes leak torrents.
Image: SOCRadar (fair use).The operator's segmented setup, as reconstructed from the exposed files.

The entry points were ordinary: a credential stuffing campaign against 305 FortiGate SSL-VPN appliances run through residential proxies, weak RDP and WinRM passwords, exposed AWS keys and reused sessions on hosting management portals. At one sports e-commerce company, SOCRadar said, an exposed AWS key led to data theft from 40 S3 buckets and the deletion of twelve buckets and a bank-transaction archive. At a Venezuelan internet provider, the operator flipped every firewall rule on the company's Cisco Firepower Management Center to BLOCK and claimed to have severed national network traffic.

AI writes the scripts, a human runs the show

The operator used opencode, an open-source AI coding agent, configured with 154 model entries across seven providers, including models with their safety training removed and a self-hosted model. The agent wrote and debugged hundreds of attack scripts, and spending through the operator's model gateway passed $7,216 by October 22. "The evidence points to a human-directed operation supported by AI; no fully autonomous attack system was observed," SOCRadar wrote.

SOCRadar chart of the n0n execution chain on Windows, Linux and Cisco Firepower Management Center, from delivery and defense disabling through encryption, persistence, ransom note and wiping.
Image: SOCRadar (fair use).How the locker and its wrapper scripts run on each platform.

The encryptor itself is simple: AES-256-CBC with Windows, Linux and PowerShell variants, plus an OpenSSL stage for firewall appliances. Each build uses a single hardcoded key, and SOCRadar said one key is likely shared across two victims, so a decryptor for one could unlock the other. Most of the damage comes from wrapper scripts that stop services, delete shadow copies and wipe free space before the locker runs.

As of October 19, n0n's leak site listed 93 victims with total ransom demands of $283.7 million. On October 12 it added 38 maritime, port and logistics organizations across 18 countries in a single batch. SOCRadar noted, though, that all 55 ransom wallet addresses it checked showed no transactions as of October 16, so whether anyone has paid is unproven.

Detections a SOC can run today

The report's behavioral detections are specific enough to turn into rules:

  • Endpoint: creation of C:\Users\Public\n0n\, files ending in .n0n or .n0n.tmp and n0n_READ_ME notes, especially rapid renames after MSSQL, IIS or MySQL services stop and vssadmin deletes shadow copies.
  • Persistence: SYSTEM scheduled tasks pointing at C:\Users\Public\n0n\, a Run key named n0nNote, and hidden local administrators such as svc_upd and svc_reg with non-expiring passwords.
  • Browser theft: Chrome launched with a remote debugging port on cloned profiles, or a portproxy rule forwarding port 9223 to 127.0.0.1:9222.
  • Firewalls: Firepower Management Center REST tokens issued to non-management addresses, default policies flipped to BLOCK, and FortiGate /remote/logincheck requests carrying the cookie APBSID=n0n.
  • Cloud: CloudTrail runs of ListBuckets, sustained GetObject and DeleteObjects in batches of 1,000, and ssm:SendCommand from new or long-idle keys.
SOCRadar timeline of the n0n campaign from September 17 to October 22, 2026, including negotiation portals, leak waves, the maritime batch and the maritime leak.
Image: SOCRadar (fair use).n0n's tracked operations from September through October 2026.

The preventive advice follows the same theme: phishing-resistant multifactor authentication on VPNs, RDP and admin portals, IP allow-lists and approvals for firewall manager changes, short-lived cloud roles in place of long-lived keys, and backups the operator cannot reach. SOCRadar assessed with medium confidence that the server was a private workspace for one operator or a small team inside a larger multi-operator group, and said the files offer no definitive geographic attribution.

Sources:


Ava Okello covers detection engineering, EDR telemetry, and SOC hunting for SOCtember from London.

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