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Langflow /api/v1/validate/code missing-auth RCE, initial access for the JADEPUFFER agentic ransomware operation

cve · CVE-2025-3248

Coverage
1
first 2026-07-04 → last 2026-07-04
Latest activity
2026-07-21
Sysdig documents JADEPUFFER, an end-to-end LLM-driven extortion run that entered through an unpatched…
Peak priority
notable
1 notable
Targets
technology
sectors: technology, public-sector, education
Sources cited
4
3 hosts

Action items (4)

Do-now tasks recorded on the entries about CVE-2025-3248, newest first. Check the date before acting on an older one.

  • Patch Langflow to ≥ 1.3.0 and remove the code-validation/execution endpoint from internet exposure; the initial-access CVE has been on CISA KEV since May 2025.
    2026-07-04CVE-2025-3248
  • Rotate MinIO and Nacos default credentials (minioadmin:minioadmin; Nacos default token.secret.key) and stop Nacos authenticating to its backing database as root.
    2026-07-04CVE-2025-3248
  • Egress-filter AI-orchestration and application hosts so a compromised server cannot reach arbitrary external databases or staging infrastructure, and move LLM-provider/cloud credentials into a secrets manager off web-reachable hosts.
    2026-07-04CVE-2025-3248
  • For any Langflow or self-hosted AI-pipeline estate, confirm model checkpoints and training datasets are backed up to storage isolated from the compute host, ENCFORGE encrypts ~180 ML-artifact file types and any training data sitting on the same host, so a co-located backup is inside the blast radius and recovery would otherwise mean re-training from scratch.
    2026-07-04CVE-2025-3248

Defender insights

What each entry about CVE-2025-3248 tells a defender to do, newest first.

2026-07-04NOTABLEexploitedSysdig documents JADEPUFFER, an end-to-end LLM-driven extortion run that entered through an unpatched, internet-exposed Langflow

Latest update

Story timeline

  1. 2026-07-04JADEPUFFER, Sysdig documents an autonomous, LLM-driven ransomware operation entering via Langflow CVE-2025-3248
    active-threatsSysdig documents JADEPUFFER, an end-to-end LLM-driven extortion run that entered through an unpatched, internet-exposed Langflow
ATT&CK techniques (6 across 6 tactics)

6 techniques observed across 1 entry about this entity, derived from entry metadata and body evidence, never asserted without a published entry behind it · pinned to MITRE ATT&CK v19.2 · compare on the matrix · Navigator layer (JSON)

  • Initial AccessValid Accounts · Exploit Public-Facing Application
  • PersistenceValid Accounts
  • Privilege EscalationValid Accounts · Escape to Host
  • StealthValid Accounts
  • Credential AccessUnsecured Credentials
  • ImpactData Destruction · Data Encrypted for Impact

Initial Access TA0001

T1078Valid Accounts×1

Adversaries may obtain and abuse credentials of existing accounts as a means of gaining Initial Access, Persistence, Privilege Escalation, or Defense Evasion. Compromised credentials may be used to bypass access controls placed on various resources on systems within the network and may even be used for persistent access to remote systems and externally available services, such as VPNs, Outlook Web Access, network devices, and remote desktop. Compromised credentials may also grant an adversary increased privilege to specific systems or access to restricted areas of the network. Adversaries may choose not to use malware or tools in conjunction with the legitimate access those credentials provide to make it harder to detect their presence.

Evidence: 2026-07-04/jadepuffer-agentic-llm-ransomware-langflow-rce · ATT&CK page ↗

T1190Exploit Public-Facing Application×1

Adversaries may attempt to exploit a weakness in an Internet-facing host or system to initially access a network. The weakness in the system can be a software bug, a temporary glitch, or a misconfiguration.

Evidence: 2026-07-04/jadepuffer-agentic-llm-ransomware-langflow-rce · ATT&CK page ↗

Persistence TA0003

T1078Valid Accounts×1

Adversaries may obtain and abuse credentials of existing accounts as a means of gaining Initial Access, Persistence, Privilege Escalation, or Defense Evasion. Compromised credentials may be used to bypass access controls placed on various resources on systems within the network and may even be used for persistent access to remote systems and externally available services, such as VPNs, Outlook Web Access, network devices, and remote desktop. Compromised credentials may also grant an adversary increased privilege to specific systems or access to restricted areas of the network. Adversaries may choose not to use malware or tools in conjunction with the legitimate access those credentials provide to make it harder to detect their presence.

Evidence: 2026-07-04/jadepuffer-agentic-llm-ransomware-langflow-rce · ATT&CK page ↗

Privilege Escalation TA0004

T1078Valid Accounts×1

Adversaries may obtain and abuse credentials of existing accounts as a means of gaining Initial Access, Persistence, Privilege Escalation, or Defense Evasion. Compromised credentials may be used to bypass access controls placed on various resources on systems within the network and may even be used for persistent access to remote systems and externally available services, such as VPNs, Outlook Web Access, network devices, and remote desktop. Compromised credentials may also grant an adversary increased privilege to specific systems or access to restricted areas of the network. Adversaries may choose not to use malware or tools in conjunction with the legitimate access those credentials provide to make it harder to detect their presence.

Evidence: 2026-07-04/jadepuffer-agentic-llm-ransomware-langflow-rce · ATT&CK page ↗

T1611Escape to Host×1

Adversaries may break out of a container or virtualized environment to gain access to the underlying host. This can allow an adversary access to other containerized or virtualized resources from the host level or to the host itself. In principle, containerized / virtualized resources should provide a clear separation of application functionality and be isolated from the host environment.

Evidence: 2026-07-04/jadepuffer-agentic-llm-ransomware-langflow-rce · ATT&CK page ↗

Stealth TA0005

T1078Valid Accounts×1

Adversaries may obtain and abuse credentials of existing accounts as a means of gaining Initial Access, Persistence, Privilege Escalation, or Defense Evasion. Compromised credentials may be used to bypass access controls placed on various resources on systems within the network and may even be used for persistent access to remote systems and externally available services, such as VPNs, Outlook Web Access, network devices, and remote desktop. Compromised credentials may also grant an adversary increased privilege to specific systems or access to restricted areas of the network. Adversaries may choose not to use malware or tools in conjunction with the legitimate access those credentials provide to make it harder to detect their presence.

Evidence: 2026-07-04/jadepuffer-agentic-llm-ransomware-langflow-rce · ATT&CK page ↗

Credential Access TA0006

T1552Unsecured Credentials×1

Adversaries may search compromised systems to find and obtain insecurely stored credentials. These credentials can be stored and/or misplaced in many locations on a system, including plaintext files (e.g. Shell History), operating system or application-specific repositories (e.g. Credentials in Registry), or other specialized files/artifacts (e.g. Private Keys).

Evidence: 2026-07-04/jadepuffer-agentic-llm-ransomware-langflow-rce · ATT&CK page ↗

Impact TA0040

T1485Data Destruction×1

Adversaries may destroy data and files on specific systems or in large numbers on a network to interrupt availability to systems, services, and network resources. Data destruction is likely to render stored data irrecoverable by forensic techniques through overwriting files or data on local and remote drives. Common operating system file deletion commands such as <code>del</code> and <code>rm</code> often only remove pointers to files without wiping the contents of the files themselves, making the files recoverable by proper forensic methodology. This behavior is distinct from Disk Content Wipe and Disk Structure Wipe because individual files are destroyed rather than sections of a storage disk or the disk's logical structure.

Evidence: 2026-07-04/jadepuffer-agentic-llm-ransomware-langflow-rce · ATT&CK page ↗

T1486Data Encrypted for Impact×1

Adversaries may encrypt data on target systems or on large numbers of systems in a network to interrupt availability to system and network resources. They can attempt to render stored data inaccessible by encrypting files or data on local and remote drives and withholding access to a decryption key. This may be done in order to extract monetary compensation from a victim in exchange for decryption or a decryption key (ransomware) or to render data permanently inaccessible in cases where the key is not saved or transmitted.

Evidence: 2026-07-04/jadepuffer-agentic-llm-ransomware-langflow-rce · ATT&CK page ↗

Entries about Langflow /api/v1/validate/code missing-auth RCE, initial access for the JADEPUFFER agentic ransomware operation (1)

2026-07-04 · view entry permalink →

NOTABLECVE-2025-3248exploitedupdated

JADEPUFFER, Sysdig documents an autonomous, LLM-driven ransomware operation entering via Langflow CVE-2025-3248

Sysdig's Threat Research Team documented JADEPUFFER, which it assesses to be the first observed ransomware operation driven end-to-end by a large language model rather than a human operator (Sysdig Threat Research Team, 2026-07-01). Initial access exploited CVE-2025-3248, a missing-authentication flaw in Langflow's code-validation endpoint that lets an unauthenticated attacker execute arbitrary Python on the host (T1190 Exploit Public-Facing Application); the flaw was fixed in Langflow 1.3.0 and added to CISA KEV in May 2025, so the exposed instance was an already-known, unpatched target (The Hacker News, 2026-07-02).

Post-exploitation the agent autonomously enumerated the host and swept for secrets, LLM-provider API keys, cloud credentials, and crypto wallets (T1552 Unsecured Credentials), dumped Langflow's Postgres backend, and reached an internal MinIO object store that answered to default minioadmin:minioadmin credentials, exfiltrating a credentials.json from an internal bucket (Sysdig, 2026-07-01). It then pivoted to a separate internet-exposed server running MySQL and Alibaba Nacos, forging a JWT with Nacos's publicly documented default signing key to insert a backdoor admin account (T1078 Valid Accounts), probed for container escape via MySQL file primitives against the Docker socket (T1611 Escape to Host), and finally encrypted 1,342 Nacos configuration items with MySQL's AES_ENCRYPT() and dropped the config tables (T1486 Data Encrypted for Impact / T1485 Data Destruction), leaving a ransom note whose AES key was a random UUID never persisted or transmitted, making the data unrecoverable even on payment. Sysdig cites the agent's fastest evidence of autonomy as diagnosing a failed backdoor-admin login and issuing a working multi-step corrective payload in 31 seconds, a failure-diagnose-correct loop that recurred throughout the run.

Sysdig's framing is that the root cause was neglected, internet-exposed infrastructure (unpatched Langflow, default MinIO/Nacos credentials, root database access, no egress controls) not novel tradecraft, but that agentic tooling collapses the skill floor needed to chain reconnaissance through destruction into a single automated run. Detection concepts the report supports: cron/scheduled-task beaconing off application hosts (the captured persistence was a crontab beaconing every 30 minutes over HTTP on a non-standard port); MySQL audit-log SELECT … INTO OUTFILE / LOAD_FILE against paths outside the data directory (the container-escape pre-check); anomalous INSERT/DELETE churn against a Nacos/IAM backing-database users table in a short window; and MinIO/S3-compatible endpoints reachable from an application host and answering to default credentials.

The Sysdig Threat Research Team (TRT) has captured what we assess to be the first documented case of agentic ransomware: a complete extortion operation driven end-to-end by a large language model (LLM).

CVE-2025-3248 is a missing-authentication flaw in its code validation endpoint that allows an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary Python on the host.

Sysdig Threat Research Team 2026-07-01

The flaw was fixed in Langflow 1.3.0 and added to CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list in May 2025, but plenty of servers were never updated.

The Hacker News 2026-07-02

In a new development, the operator behind JADEPUFFER has doubled down on that bet, using ransomware to destroy the one thing an organization can't simply restore: a trained AI model.

Sysdig Threat Research Team 2026-07-01
Updaterun 2026-07-21T0409Z-intelactionsaffected_productsevidencesectorssourcestagstechniquesbody

The JADEPUFFER operator, the agentic-LLM extortion actor Sysdig first documented exploiting Langflow's missing-authentication code-execution flaw (CVE-2025-3248), returned to the same Langflow instance with a materially upgraded payload. Where the original intrusion improvised Python and MySQL AES_ENCRYPT() to extort a downstream database, the new run deploys ENCFORGE (written to disk as lockd), a compiled, UPX-packed Go ransomware purpose-built for the machine-learning stack (Sysdig, 2026-07-20). Sysdig ties it to the same actor (the extortion contact embedded in ENCFORGE matches the one disclosed in the prior report) assessing "the same operator with a materially upgraded toolkit." Infosecurity Magazine corroborates the campaign (Infosecurity Magazine, 2026-07-20).

ENCFORGE targets roughly 180 file extensions spanning the modern ML pipeline (PyTorch/TensorFlow checkpoints, HuggingFace SafeTensors weights, llama.cpp GGUF quantized models, FAISS vector indices, Apache Parquet/TFRecord training datasets, NumPy arrays and LoRA adapters) encrypting with AES-256-CTR under RSA-2048. Sysdig frames the significance bluntly: the operator is "using ransomware to destroy the one thing an organization can't simply restore: a trained AI model," because rebuilding a production fine-tuned model means re-running weeks-to-months of training, and if the training data sits on the same compromised host it is encrypted too.

threat04 Jul 00:26Zmulti-sourceOpen finding →

Co-occurring entities

Derived: referenced by the same focused operational entries (weekly summaries and report roundups don't count); ×N counts the shared entries.

Where this entity is cited

  • Threats1

Source distribution

  • sysdig.com2 (50%)
  • infosecurity-magazine.com1 (25%)
  • thehackernews.com1 (25%)