Operation Highland: Velvet Ant's Decade-Long Espionage Campaign

Operation Highland was a sophisticated, decade-long cyberespionage campaign by the Velvet Ant group that exploited a Cisco NX-OS zero-day (CVE-2024-20399) and a modified GS-Netcat reverse shell to gain remote execution, pivot into an air-gapped critical infrastructure network, maintain long-term persistence, and steal administrative credentials; investigations are ongoing.