Executive Summary
Customer: A leading tertiary public hospital in China
Industry: Healthcare
Challenges: Proactive cyber threat management and compliance for a critical healthcare provider
Sangfor Solution: Sangfor Athena MDR (Managed Detection and Response) Service
Customer Background
A leading public hospital with the highest healthcare classification (Tier 3, Grade A), serving over 2.2 million patients annually, faced various cybersecurity challenges, including unpatched vulnerabilities, weak passwords, and inadequate threat monitoring.
These issues threatened the integrity of critical healthcare systems, such as Electronic Medical Records (EMR), and posed a serious risk to the hospital's operational continuity, which is essential to maintaining uninterrupted patient care. This hospital specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of complex and critical diseases, providing emergency medical response for sudden incidents. Consequently, it maintains extremely high requirements for business continuity.
This case study highlights a critical incident in which a backdoor, dormant within the hospital's network for over a year, was detected and removed within just 15 minutes of being added to Athena MDR’s monitoring scope, preventing a potentially catastrophic data breach waiting to execute at any time.
Incident Overview: A Backdoor Waiting to Strike
| The Discovery | |
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On September 23, 2025, during the hospital's lunch hour, Athena MDR analysts detected anomalous outbound connections from a host that was recently added to the monitoring scope. The host was part of the iFlytek "Cloud Doctor" application, which interfaces directly with the hospital's EMR servers containing vast amounts of sensitive patient data. The chain of events observed was as follows:
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| Rapid Response & Containment | |
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12:48 PM: |
Unusual outbound traffic to a suspicious domain (b1c966fd.ipv6.1433.eu.org) is identified, indicative of a reverse shell connection.
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1:03 PM: |
Athena MDR analysts immediately alerted the hospital's security team via their dedicated instant messaging group chat and proactively blocked the malicious domain URL at the network level.
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 Figure1 - Incident notification sent to the customer via their dedicated instant messaging chat group (Translated from Chinese)
Figure2 - Instant messaging enables proactive follow-up and real-time situation monitoring (Translated from Chinese)
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| Investigation and Root Cause Analysis | |
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Further investigation was completed within the same day and revealed the scope and details of the incident:
• The backdoor had been present in the network since April 2024, lying dormant for over 17 months.
• The entry point was traced to an unpatched Apache NiFi remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2023-34468) with a CVSS score of 8.8 (High) on a non-internet-facing asset that is using an open-source software, which had gone undetected by the hospital's previous security measures.
• By 5:51 PM that same day, Athena MDR analysts fully eradicated the backdoor, completed a full attack path analysis, and provided a comprehensive incident report.
Figure3 - The MDR team provides the customer with updates on the response actions taken and the incident response report
(Translated from Chinese)
CVE-2023-34468 has a history of being abused for data exfiltration, meaning that a potentially devastating data breach—one capable of enabling the mass exfiltration of patient records—was swiftly averted. The hospital's management praised the speed and effectiveness of the Athena MDR response team.
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| Another Attack Stopped in Real Time | |
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In a separate incident, Athena MDR detected reconnaissance activity targeting the Landray Office Automation (OA) system on May 16, 2025, at 3:40 PM. The activity was reported to the customer within six minutes, after deeper analysis confirmed the alert’s legitimacy. By 3:46 PM, the attack was blocked, and an incident report was issued by 4:09 PM, enabling the hospital to notify its vendor and patch the vulnerability.
The incident report, prepared by the Athena MDR team, found that the OA system was unpatched and that the hospital’s security team lacked visibility into real-time attacks. A file-read vulnerability in the Landray OA system exposed critical files, including /etc/passwd.
Figure4 - Alert notification sent to the customer after detection and verification of a true positive security event (Translated from Chinese)
Figure5 - The MDR team sends the incident report to the customer (Translated from Chinese)
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Security Posture Summary: Before & After Athena MDR
After deploying Sangfor's Athena MDR (Managed Detection and Response) service, the hospital significantly strengthened its security posture, resulting in improved resilience and trust in its upgraded security controls.
| Dimension | Category | Before Athena MDR | After Athena MDR |
| Threat Response | Office Automation (OA) System Reconnaissance | Delayed Discovery: Systems were unpatched, and the hospital's security team was unaware of real-time attacks. A file-read vulnerability in the Landray OA system exposed critical files like /etc/passwd. |
6-Minute Takedown: On May 16, 2025, a malicious connection was detected at 3:40 PM. By 3:46 PM, the attack was blocked, and an incident report was provided by 4:09 PM, enabling the hospital to notify their vendor to patch the vulnerability. |
| Apache NiFi Attack | Dormant Threat: Alerts related to the initial compromise in April 2024 were missed by the hospital’s security team. The backdoor remained undetected, posing a continuous risk to critical patient data. | 15-Minute Containment & Full Eradication: The active threat was contained in 15 minutes after the asset was added to the MDR monitoring scope. The backdoor was completely removed, and the root cause was identified and remediated on the same day. | |
| Risk Mitigation and Hardening | Weak Passwords | Incomplete Visibility: Using basic scanners like fscan only uncover host-level (SSH, RDP) weak passwords; leaving application-level credentials as a blind spot. |
Exposing and Fixing Weak Points: Proactive scanning and traffic analysis uncovered 1,521 weak passwords across 26 business systems and 35 hosts, including 9 admin passwords. The weak passwords of all business-critical systems were changed. |
| Security Policies | Security Configuration Gaps: Over 20 misconfigured policies across Athena NGFW, Athena EPP, and Athena NDR security devices. Critical detections, including web shell protection, were disabled. | Continuous Optimization: Athena MDR analysts performed periodic policy checks and tuning, optimizing all defective strategies to ensure optimal protection. |
Key Benefits and Outcomes
1. Proactive Threat Hunting and Hardening
The Athena MDR team initiated a thorough threat hunt, which was crucial as the customer's external network traffic had only recently been integrated into the MDR service monitoring scope. This proactive measure was instrumental in establishing the baseline that later allowed for the rapid detection of the NiFi backdoor.
2. Comprehensive Weak Password Audit
A total of 1,521 weak passwords have been identified and remediated across critical systems—including those that process and store patient data as well as intensive care respiratory systems. This significantly reduced the attack surface and prevented easy privilege escalation paths for attackers.
3. Continuous Security Policy Optimization
Athena MDR analysts continuously monitor and fine-tune the configurations of the customer's security stack (Athena EPP, Athena NDR, Athena NGFW), ensuring that all 20+ previously defective policies are now active and correctly enforced. This closed previous security gaps, maximizes the full capability of the purchased technologies, while identifying any suspicious and malicious attempts to disable security policies for bad intentions.
Conclusion
This case demonstrates that sophisticated threats can persist undetected in complex networks for extended periods. The hospital's previous security approach lacked the 24/7 expert monitoring and proactive threat hunting required to identify such risks that could have led to severe and large data exfiltration.
The Athena MDR service provided not just a rapid reaction force but a strategic partner that:
- Transformed security from reactive to proactive.
- Delivered measurable results through quantifiable risk reduction.
- Ensured the business continuity of a critical healthcare institution.
By partnering with Athena MDR, the hospital now operates with the confidence that its systems hosting sensitive patient data and critical services are constantly protected by a world-class cybersecurity operations team.
