There has been a targeted intrusion attempt against the internal environment of Resecurity in November 2025, which has been revealed in detail by the cyber security company. In order to expose the adversaries behind this attack, the company deliberately turned the attack into a counterintelligence operation by using advanced deception techniques.
In response to a threat actor using a low-privilege employee account in order to gain access to an enterprise network, Resecurity’s incident response team redirected the intrusion into a controlled synthetic data honeypot that resembles a realistic enterprise network within which the intrusion could be detected.
A real-time analysis of the attackers’ infrastructure, as well as their tradecraft, was not only possible with this move, but it also triggered the involvement of law enforcement after a number of evidences linked the activity to an Egyptian-based threat actor and infrastructure associated with the ShinyHunter cybercrime group, which has subsequently been shown to have claimed responsibility for the data breach falsely.
Resecurity demonstrated how modern deception platforms, with the help of synthetic datasets generated by artificial intelligence, combined with carefully curated artifacts gathered from previously leaked dark web material, can transform reconnaissance attempts by financially motivated cybercriminals into actionable intelligence.
The active defense strategies are becoming increasingly important in today's cybersecurity operations as they do not expose customer or proprietary data.
The Resecurity team reported that threat actors operating under the nickname "Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters" publicly claimed on Telegram that they had accessed the company's systems and stolen sensitive information, such as employee information, internal communications, threat intelligence reports, client data, and more. This claim has been strongly denied by the firm.
In addition to the screenshots shared by the group, it was later confirmed that they came from a honeypot environment that had been built specifically for Resecurity instead of Resecurity's production infrastructure.
On the 21st of November 2025, the company's digital forensics and incident response team observed suspicious probes of publicly available services, as well as targeted attempts to access a restricted employee account. This activity was detected by the company's digital forensics and incident response team.
There were initial traces of reconnaissance traffic to Egyptian IP addresses, such as 156.193.212.244 and 102.41.112.148. As a result of the use of commercial VPN services, Resecurity shifted from containment to observation, rather than blocking the intrusion.
Defenders created a carefully staged honeytrap account filled with synthetic data in order to observe the attackers' tactics, techniques, and procedures, rather than blocking the intrusion.
A total of 28,000 fake consumer profiles were created in the decoy environment, along with nearly 190,000 mock payment transactions generated from publicly available patterns that contained fake Stripe records as well as fake email addresses that were derived from credential “combo lists.”
In order to further enhance the authenticity of the data, Resecurity reactivated a retired Mattermost collaboration platform, and seeded it with outdated 2023 logs, thereby convincing the attackers that the system was indeed genuine.
There were approximately 188,000 automated requests routed through residential proxy networks in an attempt by the attackers to harvest the synthetic dataset between December 12 and December 24. This effort ultimately failed when repeated connection failures revealed operational security shortcomings and revealed some of the attackers' real infrastructure in the process of repeated connection failures exposing vulnerabilities in the security of the system.
A recent press release issued by Resecurity denies the breach allegation, stating that the systems cited by the threat actors were never part of its production environment, but were rather deliberately exposed honeypot assets designed to attract and observe malicious activity from a distance.
After receiving external inquiries, the company’s digital forensics and incident response teams first detected reconnaissance activity on November 21, 2025, after a threat actor began probing publicly accessible services on November 20, 2025, in a report published on December 24 and shared with reporters.
Telemetry gathered early in the investigation revealed a number of indications that the network had been compromised, including connections coming from Egyptian IP addresses, as well as traffic being routed through Mullvas VPN infrastructure.
A controlled honeypot account has been deployed by Resecurity inside an isolated environment as a response to the attack instead of a move to containment immediately. As a result, the attacker was able to authenticate to and interact with systems populated completely with false employee, customer, and payment information while their actions were closely monitored by Resecurity.
Specifically, the synthetic datasets were designed to replicate the actual enterprise data structures, including over 190,000 fictitious consumer profiles and over 28,000 dummy payment transactions that were formatted to adhere to Stripe's official API specifications, as defined in the Stripe API documentation.
In the early months of the operation, the attacker used residential proxy networks extensively to generate more than 188,000 requests for data exfiltration, which occurred between December 12 and December 24 as an automated data exfiltration operation.
During this period, Resecurity collected detailed telemetry on the adversary's tactics, techniques, and supporting infrastructure, resulting in several operational security failures that were caused by proxy disruptions that briefly exposed confirmed IP addresses, which led to multiple operational security failures.
As the deception continued, investigators introduced additional synthetic datasets, which led to even more mistakes that narrowed the attribution and helped determine the servers that orchestrated the activity, leading to an increase in errors.
In the aftermath of sharing the intelligence with law enforcement partners, a foreign agency collaborating with Resecurity issued a subpoena request, which resulted in Resecurity receiving a subpoena.
Following this initial breach, the attackers continued to make claims on Telegram, and their data was also shared with third-party breach analysts, but these statements, along with the new claims, were found to lack any verifiable evidence of actual compromise of real client systems. Independent review found that no evidence of the breach existed.
Upon further examination, it was determined that the Telegram channel used to distribute these claims had been suspended, as did follow-on assertions from the ShinyHunters group, which were also determined to be derived from a honeytrap environment.
The actors, unknowingly, gained access to a decoy account and infrastructure, which was enough to confirm their fall into the honeytrap.
Nevertheless, the incident demonstrates both the growing sophistication of modern deception technology as well as the importance of embedding them within a broader, more resilient security framework in order to maximize their effectiveness.
A honeypot and synthetic data environment can be a valuable tool for observing attacker behavior. However, security leaders emphasize that the most effective way to use these tools is to combine them with strong foundational controls, including continuous vulnerability management, zero trust access models, multifactor authentication, employee awareness training, and disciplined network segmentation.
Resecurity represents an evolution in defensive strategy from a reactive and reactionary model to one where organizations are taking a proactive approach in the fight against cyberthreats by gathering intelligence, disrupting the operations of adversaries, and reducing real-world risk in the process.
There is no doubt that the ability to observe, mislead, and anticipate hostile activity, before meaningful damage occurs, is becoming an increasingly important element of enterprise defenses in the age of cyber threats as they continue to evolve at an incredible rate.
Together, the episodes present a rare, transparent view of how modern cyber attacks unfold-and how they can be strategically neutralized in order to avoid escalation of risk to data and real systems.
Ultimately, Resecurity's claims serve more as an illustration of how threat actors are increasingly relying on perception, publicity, and speed to shape narratives before facts are even known to have been uncovered, than they serve as evidence that a successful breach occurred.
Defenders of the case should take this lesson to heart: visibility and control can play a key role in preventing a crisis.
It has become increasingly important for organizations to be able to verify, contextualize, and counter the false claims that are made by their adversaries as they implement technical capabilities combined with psychological tactics in an attempt to breach their systems.
The Resecurity incident exemplifies how disciplined preparation and intelligence-led defense can help turn an attempted compromise into strategic advantage in an environment where trust and reputation are often the first targets. They do this quiet, methodically, and without revealing what really matters when a compromise occurs.
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