Since early March 2025, Volexity has observed multiple suspected Russian threat actors conducting highly targeted social engineering operations aimed at gaining access to the Microsoft 365 (M365) accounts of targeted individuals. This activity comes on the heels of attacks Volexity reported on back in February 2025, where Russian threat actors were discovered targeting users and organizations through Device Code Authentication phishing...
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
On April 10, 2024, Volexity identified zero-day exploitation of a vulnerability found within the GlobalProtect feature of Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS at one of its network security monitoring (NSM) customers. Volexity received alerts regarding suspect network traffic emanating from the customer’s firewall. A subsequent investigation determined the device had been compromised. The following day, April 11, 2024, Volexity observed further, identical exploitation at another one of its NSM customers by the same threat actor.
Volexity regularly prioritizes memory forensics when responding to incidents. This strategy improves investigative capabilities in many ways across Windows, Linux, and macOS. This blog post highlights some specific ways memory forensics played a key role in determining how two zero-day vulnerabilities were being chained together to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution in Ivanti Connect Secure VPN devices.
On January 15, 2024, Volexity detailed widespread exploitation of Ivanti Connect Secure VPN vulnerabilities CVE-2024-21887 and CVE-2023-46805. In that blog post, Volexity detailed broader scanning and exploitation by threat actors using still non-public exploits to compromise numerous devices. Subsequently, Volexity has observed an increase in attacks from various threat actors against Ivanti Connect Secure VPN appliances beginning the same day.
On January 10, 2024, Volexity publicly shared details of targeted attacks by UTA00178 exploiting two zero-day vulnerabilities (CVE-2024-21887 and CVE-2023-46805) in Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) VPN appliances. On the same day, Ivanti published a mitigation that could be applied to ICS VPN appliances to prevent exploitation of these vulnerabilities. Since publication of these details, Volexity has continued to monitor its existing customers for exploitation. Volexity has also been contacted by multiple organizations that saw signs of compromise by way of mismatched file detections. Volexity has been actively working multiple new cases of organizations with compromised ICS VPN appliances.
Volexity has uncovered active in-the-wild exploitation of two vulnerabilities allowing unauthenticated remote code execution in Ivanti Connect Secure VPN appliances. An official security advisory and knowledge base article have been released by Ivanti that includes mitigation that should be applied immediately. However, a mitigation does not remedy a past or ongoing compromise. Systems should simultaneously be thoroughly analyzed per details in this post to look for signs of a breach.
Over the Memorial Day weekend in the United States, Volexity conducted an incident response investigation involving two Internet-facing web servers belonging to one of its customers that were running Atlassian Confluence Server software. The investigation began after suspicious activity was detected on the hosts, which included JSP webshells being written to disk
