Bangladesh Threat Landscape — August 2026

Executive Summary

In August 2026, automated collection recorded 649 security events associated with Bangladesh infrastructure. While no Bangladeshi organizations were published on ransomware extortion sites during this period, 14 organizations recorded fresh infostealer credential compromises. Notably, 11 of these involved workforce (staff) accounts, impacting significant national entities including the central bank, the national police, and six commercial banks.

National authorities issued three threat advisories this month. The Bangladesh Computer Incident Response Team (CIRT) issued warnings regarding "The Gentlemen," a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) operation, and "DoNot" (APT-C-35), a state-aligned espionage group. Bangladesh Cyber Security Intelligence (BCSI) also issued a notice regarding coordinated cyberattacks. Concurrently, critical infrastructure exposures identified in previous months—including unauthenticated databases and development servers—remained unmitigated. The convergence of freshly harvested workforce credentials and persistent infrastructure exposure provides readily available initial access vectors for RaaS affiliates.

August in Numbers

• Total Nexus Events: 649 (a 7% decrease from 695 in July, based on standardized first-seen date tracking).
• Severity Breakdown: 7 Critical, 323 High, 319 Medium.
• Event Composition: Intelligence Pulse 287 (44%), Network Anomaly 137 (21%), Exposure 114 (18%), Malware URL 79 (12%), Vulnerability 27, Advisory 3, Phishing 2.

1. Workforce Credential Compromise (Critical)

Infostealer credential exposure remains a primary risk vector. In August, 11 organizations recorded new staff credential compromises within the reporting window. Seven of these are financial institutions.

• police.gov.bd: 295 staff accounts (most recent: 26 August)
• sonalibank.com.bd: 110 (most recent: 10 August)
• bb.org.bd (Bangladesh Bank): 107 (most recent: 10 August)
• primebank.com.bd: 89 (most recent: 26 August)
• pathao.com: 62 (most recent: 15 August)
• mutualtrustbank.com: 41 (most recent: 6 August)
• nbr.gov.bd: 40 (most recent: 21 August)
• railway.gov.bd: 17 (most recent: 19 August)
• bracbank.com: 13 (most recent: 18 August)
• nccbank.com.bd: 7 (most recent: 12 August)
• rupalibank.com.bd: 2 (most recent: 11 August)

Additionally, Dhaka Bank, Eastern Bank, and The Premier Bank recorded fresh customer-side credential compromises. Across all 83 tracked domestic domains, cumulative credential counts increased by 11,712 records, bringing the total corpus to 900,470 credentials (of which 3,580 are workforce accounts). Dominant malware families include RedLine, Lumma, and generic stealers, with Raccoon, Vidar, StealC, and CryptBot also present.

2. National Threat Advisories

• The Gentlemen RaaS (August 9): CIRT warned that this group (which previously listed BRAC in July) is scaling its operations against Bangladesh via an affiliate model. This model relies on affiliates purchasing existing network access, closely aligning with the credential exposures detailed in Section 1.
• DoNot / APT-C-35 (August 17): CIRT issued an advisory regarding this South Asian espionage actor targeting Bangladesh military and defense personnel. Due to the targeted nature of espionage, this activity does not typically appear in commodity telemetry feeds.
• Coordinated Attacks (August 26): BCSI issued a generalized notice regarding coordinated cyberattacks against domestic targets.

3. Infrastructure Exposures

Telemetry recorded 114 exposure events (down from 174 in July). A significant portion of this risk is driven by persistent, unmitigated configurations:

• Unauthenticated Databases: An open MySQL database (118[.]179[.]60[.]91) on AmberIT Limited’s network (AS23956) remains accessible without credentials. It has generated 16 detections since June 12, including five in August (most recent: August 13).
• Exposed Development Environments: A Vite development server (202[.]59[.]208[.]112:8081) hosted on the Sustainable Development Networking Programme (AS9825) was observed. The server is vulnerable to CVE-2025-30208, an arbitrary file-read flaw.
• Source Code Leakage: Four exposed .git configurations were detected, including an instance on netspheresolutions[.]net.
• AI Infrastructure: Unauthenticated instances of the Ollama runtime were identified on AmberIT, Wolast Technologies, Total IT Solutions, and Coloasia (7 total detections, down from 18 in July).

4. Reconnaissance Vectors via Monitoring Agents

Unauthenticated network monitoring tools present a substantial reconnaissance risk by exposing internal hostnames, processes, and topologies:

• CheckMk Agents: Exposed on TCP port 6556 across eight distinct domestic providers, including Link3 Technologies, Access Telecom, Agni Systems, Chittagong Online, BRACNet, and HRC Tech.
• Prometheus Endpoints: 16 endpoints were exposed, including four at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (AS136618) and two at the national research and education network (BdREN).
• Directory Indexes: 41 macOS .DS_Store files were identified in public web roots, which can be enumerated to discover sensitive backup or administrative paths.

5. Active Malicious Campaigns

• Cryptomining Loaders: The IP address 2[.]58[.]56[.]13 hosted a PowerShell-staged campaign deploying Monero cryptominers via multiple payload paths (/utl/xmr[.]dat, etc.) across 20 detections. The peak Bangladeshi victim share for this campaign cluster was 66.7%. The presence of a deployed cryptominer indicates established remote code execution, persistence, and outbound command-and-control (C2)—access that is frequently resold to ransomware affiliates.
• Targeted Payloads: Additional campaigns with a 100% domestic victim share were recorded communicating with aware-cr1[.]com/api/beacon and winlogon[.]publicvm[.]com/Vre.
• Threat Profile: Domestic campaigns primarily utilized PowerShell loaders (22), iClickFix (6), Mirai (5), and Neshta (3). Telemetry indicated targeting across business support services (112), telecommunications (105), technology (92), manufacturing (56), and education/research (36). Predominant MITRE ATT&CK techniques included execution-flow hijacking (T1574), process injection (T1055), and sandbox evasion (T1497).

6. Vulnerability Correlations (CISA KEV)

Telemetry identified 27 correlations with CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. Note: These correlations rely on low-confidence service banner version inference and do not represent verified exploitation.

• Notable matches include CVE-2024-38475 (Apache HTTP Server, 10), CVE-2020-0796 (SMBv3, 6), and CVE-2020-11023 (jQuery, 3).
• SMBv3 (CVE-2020-0796), PHP-CGI (CVE-2024-4577), and Apache SSRF (CVE-2021-40438) have documented ransomware associations and require prioritized verification. A legacy PHP-CGI flaw (CVE-2012-1823) was also recorded on bangas[.]com[.]bd.

7. Routing Instability

August recorded 137 routing anomalies (64 BGP hijacks and 73 route leaks), a 69% increase from July. While most appear to be operational errors (e.g., AS139009 accounting for 25 leaks), two recurring hijack patterns require investigation:

• AS137491 hijacked prefixes from AS58682 18 times.
• AS136156 hijacked prefixes from AS134353 9 times. Frequent recurrence of identical origin-victim hijack pairs indicates an uncorrected configuration error or deliberate diversion bypassing RPKI validation and prefix filtering.

8. Public Disclosures and Offline Infrastructure

The absence of ransomware leak site postings in August is a lagging indicator. Ransomware groups typically publish victim data weeks after an intrusion, contingent upon failed extortion negotiations. Given the concurrent high rate of workforce credential compromises, the lack of leak site postings likely reflects attacker publication timing rather than a decrease in successful network intrusions. Conversely, 80 previously tracked malware URLs were re-verified and confirmed offline during the month.

Assessment

ThreatIntel BD assesses with high confidence that the credential-to-ransomware pipeline remained highly active throughout August. The compromise of workforce credentials across 11 major organizations directly supports the initial access requirements of affiliate-model RaaS operations, as highlighted by CIRT's advisory. We assess with moderate confidence that the cataloged infrastructure exposures (e.g., unauthenticated databases, exposed monitoring agents) are more likely to be monetized via initial access brokers than exploited directly by opportunistic scanners. The persistent nature of these configuration-based vulnerabilities indicates that without structural remediation, the current low rate of public security incidents will likely end in subsequent reporting periods.

Recommendations

1. Conduct Endpoint Threat Hunting: Organizations listed with compromised credentials must locate and remediate the infected endpoints. Rotating passwords is insufficient to evict an active infostealer; incident response teams must invalidate active sessions and audit privileged accounts for unauthorized modifications made since August 1.
2. Isolate Exposed Databases: Immediately restrict internet access to the MySQL instance at 118[.]179[.]60[.]91. Assume resident data has been accessed and initiate incident response protocols.
3. Implement Phishing-Resistant MFA: Transition to multi-factor authentication that resists session cookie theft and infostealer extraction (e.g., FIDO2 or number-matching implementations).
4. Audit Monitoring Agents: Restrict access to CheckMk (TCP 6556) and Prometheus (TCP 9090) services. Bind agents strictly to management interfaces, enforce TLS and access lists, and block these ports at network perimeters.
5. Block Malicious Infrastructure: Block outbound connections to 2[.]58[.]56[.]13 at egress points. Conduct retrospective hunting for PowerShell processes executing outbound requests to .dat paths.
6. Secure Web Roots: Update deployment procedures to exclude .DS_Store and .git artifacts from public-facing web servers.
7. Prioritize State Advisories: Defense and military entities should proactively review and act upon the indicators provided in CIRT's DoNot (APT-C-35) advisory.
8. Enforce BGP Hygiene: Network operators should deploy RPKI Route Origin Validation (ROV) and enforce stringent prefix filters to prevent recurring route hijacks.
9. Verify and Patch: Manually verify the presence of KEV-associated vulnerabilities (specifically CVE-2020-0796, CVE-2024-4577, and CVE-2021-40438) and apply patches where applicable.

Methodology and Confidence

This report covers data collected from August 1–31, 2026. The 649 reported events are counted by first-seen date (the date the threat appeared) and possess a direct Bangladesh nexus (e.g., a .bd host, a Bangladesh-routed IP range, or a named domestic organization). Regional data and broader news items (179 items) were excluded from these figures. For trend comparison, July data was restated on this first-seen basis (695 events).

Credential-exposure figures are continuous, rolling per-organization counters. Recency is determined by the compromise dates carried on each counter. Counter totals reflect data as of September 9, 2026; however, all August compromise dates cited occurred within the reporting window.

Sources: Hudson Rock, CTX campaign telemetry, LeakIX, Cloudflare Radar, CISA KEV, ThreatFox, URLhaus, PhishStats, OpenPhish, CIRT, and BCSI. Analytic Confidence: High for exposure, routing findings, and credential compromise observations. Moderate for campaign victim-share distributions (sampled telemetry) and cumulative credential counter growth (reflecting newly surfaced records rather than confirmed new infections). Low for KEV vulnerability correlations (banner version inference only). All indicators are rendered defanged and must be refanged before use in security tooling.