Not sure what defines highly sophisticated hacker or not but clearly they went for the Jackpot Bingo. Application Delivery Controller or ADC is a single point of exposure of all traffic that goes through F5 that would be a magnet for hackers. It breaks all norms of security by concentrating in the same venue all the secret keys for every service that is on-boarded to the ADC. It is a matter of time until someone gets its hands on it. Otherwise no hacker would bother to go to break F5 if the traffic that goes through it is end to end encrypted. It was unwise and d-mb idea from the begining and only to support security of lax architecture in the back end. Now those all that were calling that is the only secure way to go about it are reaping their fruits. It was not at all driven from security point of view but more about sales, project check mark and also about sniffing transfers in the internal network for data loss prevention or DLP. Well those who pushed it all are not anymore around to be asked about it. Next all the secret vaults and smillar things.
https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2025/10/15/highly_sophisticated_government_hackers_breached/