Starting in mid-January 2025, Volexity identified several social-engineering and spear-phishing campaigns by Russian threat actors aimed at compromising Microsoft 365 (M365) accounts. These attack campaigns were highly targeted and carried out in a variety of ways. The majority of these attacks originated via spear-phishing emails with different themes. In one case, the eventual breach began with highly tailored outreach via Signal.Through its investigations, Volexity discovered that Russian threat actors were impersonating a variety of individuals
Between December 2024 and January 2025, Recorded Future’s Insikt Group identified a campaign exploiting unpatched internet-facing Cisco network devices primarily associated with global telecommunications providers. Victim organizations included a United States-based affiliate of a United Kingdom-based telecommunications provider and a South African telecommunications provider. Insikt Group attributes this activity to the Chinese state-sponsored threat activity group tracked by Insikt Group as RedMike, which aligns with the Microsoft-named group Salt Typhoon. Using Recorded Future® Network Intelligence, Insikt Group observed RedMike target and exploit unpatched Cisco network devices vulnerable to CVE-2023-20198, a privilege escalation vulnerability found in the web user interface (UI) feature in Cisco IOS XE software, for initial access before exploiting an associated privilege escalation vulnerability, CVE-2023-20273, to gain root privileges. RedMike reconfigures the device, adding a generic routing encapsulation (GRE) tunnel for persistent access.
Microsoft today issued security updates to fix at least 56 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software, including two zero-day flaws that are being actively exploited.
Thai police arrested four European hackers in Phuket who allegedly stole $16 million through ransomware attacks affecting over 1,000 victims worldwide. The suspects, wanted by Swiss and US authorities, were caught in coordinated raids across four locations.
Officers from Cyber Crime Investigation Bureau, led by Police Lieutenant General Trairong Phiwphan, conducted “Operation PHOBOS AETOR” in Phuket on February 10, arresting four foreign hackers involved in ransomware attacks. The operation, coordinated with Immigration Police and Region 8 Police, raided four locations across Phuket....
The TL;DR is that this time, we ended up discovering ~150 Amazon S3 buckets that had previously been used across commercial and open source software products, governments, and infrastructure deployment/update pipelines - and then abandoned.
Naturally, we registered them, just to see what would happen - “how many people are really trying to request software updates from S3 buckets that appear to have been abandoned months or even years ago?”, we naively thought to ourselves.
A threat actor has infected the website of Casio UK and 16 other victims with a web skimmer that altered the payment flow to harvest and exfiltrate visitors’ information, web security provider Jscrambler reports.
In September of 2024 while on a customer assigment I encountered the “Network Configuration Operators” group, a so called builtin group of Active Directory (default). As I had never heard of or encountered this group membership before, it sprung to eye immediately. Initially I tried to look up if it had any security implications, like its more known colleagues DNS Admins and Backup Operators, but to no avail. Surpisingly little came up about the group but I couldn’t help myself from probing further. This led me down the rabbithole of Registry Database access control lists and possibilities of weaponization, culminating with the discovery of CVE-2025-21293. Before we move along to the body of work, I have to give out a special thanks to Clément Labro, who initially did the heavy lifting of finding a way to weaponize performancecounters. (This will hopefully make more sense by the end of the article) and my colleagues at ReTest Security ApS, who have provided me with knowledge in the field and the oppertunity to put it to use.
In a first-of-its-kind report, the US government has revealed that it disclosed 39 zero-day software vulnerabilities to vendors or the public in 2023 for the purpose of getting the vulnerabilities patched or mitigated, as opposed to retaining them to use in hacking operations.
It’s the first time the government has revealed specific numbers about its controversial Vulnerabilities Equities Process (VEP) — the process it uses to adjudicate decisions about whether zero-day vulnerabilities it discovers should be kept secret so law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and the military can exploit them in hacking operations or be disclosed to vendors to fix them. Zero-day vulnerabilities are security holes in software that are unknown to the software maker and are therefore unpatched at the time of discovery, making systems that use the software at risk of being hacked by anyone who discovers the flaw.