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 addition to the new backConnect malware developed by Qbot operators, research has emerged tying zloader[4] activity to that of the BlackBasta ransomware operation. It is highly likely this new side loading backConnect malware has been or is going to be utilized to further ransomware attacks.

Chinese nationals Yunhe Wang, Jingping Liu, and Yanni Zheng have been sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department for operating the residential proxy service 911 S5, which was a botnet comprised of over 19 million residential IP addresses that had been used to support various cybercrime groups' COVID-19 relief scams and bomb threats, Ars Technica reports.

Following a recent and highly disruptive cyberattack on telecom carrier Orange España the cybersecurity community needs to rethink its approach to safeguarding the digital identity of staff involved in network engineering and IT infrastructure management. Orange España is the second-largest mobile operator in Spain. In early January, an attacker going by the alias ‘Snow’ hijacked Orange España’s RIPE Network Coordination Centre (NCC) account. RIPE is Europe’s regional Internet registry. After this initial breach, Snow sabotaged the telecommunications firm’s border gateway protocol (BGP) and resource public key infrastructure (RPKI) configurations.