GoAnywhere MFT Zero-Day (CVE-2025-10035): Anatomy of a 2025 Enterprise Breach
In September 2025, a maximum severity zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2025-10035) in Fortra’s GoAnywhere Managed File Transfer (MFT) platform was actively exploited in the wild. Attackers remotely injected commands via a deserialization flaw in the License Servlet, requiring only a forged license response signature to achieve pre-authentication remote code execution. The breach timeline reveals attackers gained access at least a week before public disclosure, establishing persistence via a backdoor admin account and deploying secondary payloads like SimpleHelp for ongoing access, with evidence of lateral movement reconnaissance. The incident underscores the increasing sophistication and rapid weaponization of zero-day exploits targeting widely used enterprise file transfer solutions. With high-profile breaches tied to vulnerabilities in GoAnywhere, pressure is mounting for organizations to reassess their exposure and incident response practices amid a sharp uptick in exploit automation and data exfiltration attacks.
Kill Chain