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Screenshot released by the Australian Signals Directorate of a criminal web panel headed "11,998 credentials saved," listing saved browser logins by browser type, including Chrome, Edge, Opera, Outlook and Tor Browser, with user names masked and a cursor over a menu item labeled Records (11,998).
Screenshot: Australian Signals Directorate, released with its disclosure of the Amadey operation, via ABC News, Oct. 27, 2026 (fair use). Login names were masked before release.

Threat Intel

Australia's Signals Directorate Says It Cut a Criminal's Amadey Controller Off From 180,000 Infected Computers, as Its Annual Report Shows Extensive Compromises Rising From 26 to 40

ASD officials used the release of the agency's seventh annual cyber threat report to describe breaking into an Amadey back end and destroying 5 terabytes of stolen data before it could be sold. The report counts 1,524 incidents, 362 of them identified after ASD warned the victim, with phishing the most prevalent technique at 39%.

Priya Shah, Threat IntelSingapore6 min read

SINGAPORE - Australia's signals intelligence agency says it broke into the back end of a criminal's Amadey malware operation and cut the controller off from about 180,000 infected computers around the world, some of them in Australia.

Officials of the Australian Signals Directorate described the operation in an interview with ABC News published on Oct. 27, the same day the agency released its seventh Annual Cyber Threat Report. The report, compiled by ASD's Australian Cyber Security Centre, counts 1,524 incidents the center responded to in the year to June 30, an increase of more than 20%, and shows the number of extensive compromises rising from 26 to 40.

"The next steps that we took were to disconnect that Amadey controller from all those victims," Tauri Gregory, ASD's acting deputy director-general of intelligence, told ABC News. "And so, effectively, that cyber criminal can no longer access those 180,000 computers and no longer steal data from all those people."

The Amadey operation

Amadey is malware sold to criminals that steals personal data and login details and sends them back to its operators. ASD said one sample it found was hidden in a free, illegitimate copy of Photoshop, and that it found the software offered for sale on the dark web for about $500.

Screenshot released by the Australian Signals Directorate of a dark web forum post by a seller named InCrease, a member since Sept. 18, 2018, with 376 posts, advertising three special licenses at a price of $500, "with discount $100," plus a free rebuild or install on a server valued at $50 and the right to resell.
Screenshot: Australian Signals Directorate, via ABC News, Oct. 27, 2026 (fair use).ASD said it found the malware being sold on the dark web.

ASD did not say when the operation took place, which operator it targeted or whether any arrests followed. Gregory said that without the action, 180,000 businesses or individuals would have had their data stolen and either sold on the dark web, monetized in other ways or used for follow-on crimes such as fraud and identity theft.

In a second case, ASD was tipped off that 5 terabytes of data stolen from a business, which did not know it had been breached, was for sale. The haul included business documents, personal data, logins and passwords. Gregory said the agency broke in and destroyed it before it could be sold, including about 4.8 million files stolen from Australians and hundreds of thousands of files from victims in other countries.

Cutting off a controller stops further theft through that panel. It does not undo theft that already happened, and it does not clean the infected machines.

What the numbers show

The report describes a year in which more intrusions went deep. Of the 1,524 incidents, only one reached Category 2, the second most severe level on ASD's six-step scale, but the count of extensive compromises rose to 40. ASD responded to 139 ransomware incidents, about the same as a year earlier, while extensive ransomware incidents rose from 16 to 24. Data breaches made up 98 incidents, up 66%.

Table from the Australian Signals Directorate's Annual Cyber Threat Report 2025-26, Figure 1, showing cyber security incidents by severity category for FY2025-26, total 1,524, with effect rows from Denial of Essential Systems to Unsuccessful Low-level Malicious Incident and significance columns from members of the public to national security; the Extensive Incident row reads 0, 9, 17, 13, 1 and 0.
Table: Australian Signals Directorate, Annual Cyber Threat Report 2025-26, Figure 1 (fair use).ASD notes it changed how it categorizes incidents this year, so some categories do not align with last year's.

Much of the detection came from the government side. ASD issued more than 4,400 notifications of potentially malicious activity, almost 80% more than the year before, including more than 2,200 individual notifications and collective notices to more than 2,100 entities. More than 51% of individual notifications came from declassified intelligence. ASD says 362 of the incidents it responded to were identified following those proactive notifications. One collective notice to 340 entities in May about cPanel vulnerabilities led to more than 60 confirmed incidents.

Government entities, led by the federal government at 32%, again reported the most incidents. Health care and social assistance became the most frequently reporting non-government sector, and manufacturing entered the top 10 with the largest increase of any sector.

How intruders got in

ASD mapped its incidents to MITRE ATT&CK. Phishing was the most prevalent technique, at 39%, followed by compromise accounts at 21%, user execution at 17%, valid accounts at 15%, and exploit public-facing application at 13%. ASD says it saw a shift away from reconnaissance toward direct access and execution; gathering victim identity information fell from 30% the previous year to 13%.

Bar chart from the Australian Signals Directorate's Annual Cyber Threat Report 2025-26, Figure 8, showing the prevalence of the top 10 MITRE ATT&CK techniques in FY2025-26: Phishing 39%, Compromise Accounts 21%, User Execution 17%, Valid Accounts 15%, Social Engineering 13%, Gather Victim Identity Information 13%, Exploit Public-Facing Application 13%, Network Denial of Service 11%, Phishing for Information 11% and Acquire Infrastructure 10%.
Chart: Australian Signals Directorate, Annual Cyber Threat Report 2025-26, Figure 8 (fair use).

"The easiest way into a network is by using stolen or compromised legitimate credentials," the report says, and it lists compromised accounts and credentials among the most common incident categories across government, industry and critical infrastructure.

Unpatched software remained a steady source of incidents. ASD recorded successful exploitation of a vulnerability identified in 2008. It says most exploitation it has seen happens within two weeks of disclosure, some within 48 hours of a patch or mitigation advice, and that AI tools will compress that window further over the next 12 months. In one case study, reports from several Australian victims in August 2025 let ASD tie a wave of ransomware to a known SonicWall flaw and the Akira group; it then scanned and found almost 1,000 potentially vulnerable devices at around 40 Australian organizations, many of them critical infrastructure, and notified them.

The report also says ASD has tracked attacks on online code repositories since September 2025, including the self-replicating Shai-Hulud worm, and urges organizations to be able to say quickly which packages, and which versions, run across their environments.

What SOC teams can take from it

  • Treat an infostealer infection as a credential incident, not just an endpoint cleanup. Disconnecting one Amadey controller does not revoke what was already taken; rotate passwords and revoke sessions for any user whose machine ran cracked software or a stealer.
  • Hunt for pirated installers. ASD's Photoshop example is a reminder to flag unsanctioned "free" copies of commercial software in software inventory and EDR telemetry.
  • Act on third-party notifications fast. Nearly a quarter of the incidents ASD responded to, 362 of 1,524, were identified after ASD notified the victim; make sure government and vendor notices land with someone who can open a case the same day.
  • Weight detection toward identity. With phishing, compromised accounts and valid accounts at the top of ASD's technique list, sign-in anomalies, MFA changes and new device registrations deserve the same priority as malware alerts.
  • Patch internet-facing systems on the timeline attackers use. ASD's two-week, sometimes 48-hour, window and its 2008 vulnerability example argue for an inventory of old exposed systems as well as fast patching of new flaws.

Sources:


Priya Shah covers threat intelligence, intrusion analysis, and adversary tradecraft for SOCtember from Singapore.

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