Dell users will want to pay attention to the news that a suspected Chinese state-backed hacking group has been quietly exploiting a critical Dell security flaw in zero-day attacks that started in mid-2024.
Martin Jartelius, AI Product Director at Outpost24has provided the following commentary:
“‘Speak friend and enter’ as Tolkien wrote in 1954, where Gandalf is amused by the ancient riddle, reflecting a level of security from a more trusting time. Hardcoded credentials have accounted for roughly 0.4% of all vulnerabilities indexed, following the trend of an increasing number of reported vulnerabilities, and only just above 1% of those make it onto the CISA KEVs list. This vulnerability is not a unicorn, but it is massively hard to detect in logs and monitoring, which contributes to the extremely low reporting frequency, given it is a published set of master keys to any of those systems. Patching must be urgently prioritized.”
If you use Dell gear in your organization, I’d strongly suggest having a look at this and taking action if required. Given how long that it has been around, there’s a possibility that the threat actors behind this have set up shop in a lot of places.
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This entry was posted on February 18, 2026 at 9:54 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Dell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Chinese hackers exploiting Dell zero-day flaw that has been around since mid-2024
Dell users will want to pay attention to the news that a suspected Chinese state-backed hacking group has been quietly exploiting a critical Dell security flaw in zero-day attacks that started in mid-2024.
Martin Jartelius, AI Product Director at Outpost24has provided the following commentary:
“‘Speak friend and enter’ as Tolkien wrote in 1954, where Gandalf is amused by the ancient riddle, reflecting a level of security from a more trusting time. Hardcoded credentials have accounted for roughly 0.4% of all vulnerabilities indexed, following the trend of an increasing number of reported vulnerabilities, and only just above 1% of those make it onto the CISA KEVs list. This vulnerability is not a unicorn, but it is massively hard to detect in logs and monitoring, which contributes to the extremely low reporting frequency, given it is a published set of master keys to any of those systems. Patching must be urgently prioritized.”
If you use Dell gear in your organization, I’d strongly suggest having a look at this and taking action if required. Given how long that it has been around, there’s a possibility that the threat actors behind this have set up shop in a lot of places.
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This entry was posted on February 18, 2026 at 9:54 am and is filed under Commentary with tags Dell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.