All news with #threat report tag

Threat Source: SharePoint Exploits and Patch Urgency

⚠ Cisco Talos reports a sharp increase in attacks against public-facing applications, with the ToolShell chain exploiting unpatched Microsoft SharePoint servers rising to over 60% of IR cases this quarter. Ransomware-related incidents fell to about 20% but show evolving tactics, including leveraging legitimate tools and compromised internal accounts for persistence and phishing. Organizations are urged to prioritize rapid patching, robust network segmentation, centralized logging, MFA, and user education to reduce exposure.

LockBit Resurges with New Variant and Fresh Victims

🛡️ LockBit has reemerged after a disruption in early 2024 and is actively extorting new victims. Check Point Research identified roughly a dozen organizations hit in September 2025, and about half of those incidents involved the new LockBit 5.0 variant, labeled ChuongDong. The group is deploying attacks across Windows, Linux and ESXi environments in Europe, the Americas and Asia. Check Point Harmony Endpoint and Quantum customers are protected via Threat Emulation, which can block these attacks before encryption occurs.

North Korean Hackers Target European Defense Firms

🛡️ European defense and aerospace firms are being targeted in a renewed Operation Dream Job campaign attributed to North Korean-linked Lazarus actors, ESET reports. Active since March 2025, attackers use social-engineering job lures and trojanized documents to deploy ScoringMathTea and MISTPEN-like downloaders such as BinMergeLoader that abuse Microsoft Graph API. The goal is theft of proprietary UAV manufacturing know‑how and related intellectual property.

YouTube Ghost Network: Disrupting a Massive Malware Campaign

🛡️ Check Point Research uncovered the YouTube Ghost Network, a large-scale operation that used fake and compromised accounts to distribute infostealers like Rhadamanthys and Lumma. More than 3,000 malicious videos — often disguised as cracked software or game hacks — were reported and removed after being linked to password-protected archives that carried the malware. Compromised accounts, coordinated comment manipulation, and false endorsements were used to build trust and drive downloads.

ThreatsDay: Widespread Attacks Exploit Trusted Systems

🔒 This ThreatsDay bulletin highlights a series of recent incidents where attackers favored the easiest paths in: tricking users, abusing trusted services, and exploiting stale or misconfigured components. Notable items include a malicious npm package with a post-install backdoor, a CA$176M FINTRAC penalty for missed crypto reporting, session hijacking via MCP (CVE-2025-6515), and OAuth-based persistent backdoors. Practical defenses emphasized are rapid patching, disabling risky install hooks, auditing OAuth apps and advertisers, and hardening agent and deserialization boundaries.

IR Trends Q3 2025: ToolShell Drives Access & Response

🛡️ Cisco Talos Incident Response observed a surge in attacks exploiting public-facing apps in Q3 2025, driven chiefly by ToolShell chains targeting on-premises Microsoft SharePoint servers. Rapid automated scanning and unauthenticated RCE vulnerabilities led to widespread compromise, highlighting the need for immediate patching and strict network segmentation. Post-compromise phishing from valid accounts and diverse ransomware families, including Warlock and LockBit, continued to impact victims.

Global Smishing Campaign Targets Toll, Delivery, Services

🚨 Unit 42 attributes a widespread smishing campaign to the Smishing Triad that uses urgent SMS messages and realistic phishing pages to impersonate toll, delivery and other critical services. Since April 2024 the operation has registered and churned over 194,000 malicious domains and 136,900 root domains, leveraging a Hong Kong registrar while primarily hosting on U.S. cloud infrastructure. The campaign appears powered by a large phishing-as-a-service ecosystem and seeks PII, credentials and payment data. Advanced URL Filtering and Advanced DNS Security provide protections; contact Unit 42 Incident Response for urgent help.

Vidar 2.0 Emerges as Lumma Stealer Declines, Upgraded

🔒 Trend Micro reports that the Vidar infostealer has been upgraded to Vidar 2.0, featuring a complete rewrite in C, multithreaded exfiltration, custom browser credential extraction and an AppBound bypass targeting Chrome's app-bound encryption. The release, announced by an actor calling themselves "Loadbaks" on October 6, follows a decline in Lumma Stealer activity after law enforcement disruption and doxxing of its developers. Researchers warn security teams to anticipate increased Vidar activity through Q4 2025 and to adapt detection and mitigation strategies accordingly.

CISOs: Earning Business Respect Through Incident Response

🛡️ How a CISO handles a major incident can make or break their career. A Cytactic survey of 480 senior US cybersecurity leaders, including 165 CISOs, found that 65% said leading an incident response elevated their internal reputation while only 5% said it hurt it. Experts say a well-managed response can translate into better budgets and authority, but prevention work is often invisible and a single failure can still cost a CISO their job.

Six IT Risk-Assessment Frameworks for Enterprise Governance

🛡️ This article summarizes six prominent IT risk-assessment frameworks—COBIT, FAIR, ISO/IEC 27001, NIST RMF, OCTAVE and TARA—and explains their core purpose and methods. It contrasts governance-oriented, standards-based, lifecycle and threat-centric approaches and highlights where quantitative analysis or certification focus applies. The overview helps security and IT leaders identify which model or combination of models best fits organizational needs.

Iran-Linked MuddyWater Targets 100+ Organisations Globally

🔒 Group-IB links a broad espionage campaign to Iran-aligned MuddyWater that leveraged a compromised email account accessed via NordVPN to send convincing phishing messages. The actor distributed weaponized Microsoft Word documents that coax recipients to enable macros, which execute VBA droppers that write and decode a FakeUpdate loader. FakeUpdate installs an AES-encrypted payload that launches the Phoenix v4 backdoor. Targets exceeded 100 organisations across the MENA region, predominantly diplomatic and government entities.

PhantomCaptcha Phishing Targets Ukraine Aid Groups

🕵️ SentinelOne describes a coordinated spear-phishing campaign named PhantomCaptcha that used booby-trapped PDFs and a fake Zoom site to deliver a WebSocket-based remote access trojan (RAT). The October 8, 2025 operation targeted members of humanitarian and government organizations connected to Ukraine, including Red Cross, UNICEF Ukraine, and several regional administrations. Victims were lured to a ClickFix-style fake Cloudflare CAPTCHA that prompted a malicious PowerShell command, which fetched an obfuscated downloader and a second-stage payload. The final WebSocket RAT connects to wss://bsnowcommunications[.]com:80 and enables remote command execution, data exfiltration, and further malware deployment.

CISO Imperative: Building Resilience in Accelerating Threats

🔒 The Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2025 warns that cyber threats are accelerating in speed, scale, and sophistication, driven by AI and coordinated, cross-border operations. Attack windows have shrunk—compromises can occur within 48 hours in cloud containers—while AI-powered phishing and credential theft have grown markedly more effective. For CISOs this requires reframing security as a business enabler, prioritizing resilience, automation, and modern identity controls such as phishing-resistant MFA. The Secure Future Initiative provides practitioner-tested patterns to operationalize these priorities.

AI-Powered Mobile Threats Elevate Need to Rethink Security

📱 The 2025 Verizon Mobile Security Index underscores growing danger as mobile devices account for the majority of global internet traffic and increasingly serve as primary attack surfaces. Check Point highlights the rise of AI-powered threats, persistent phishing, and human error that expand exposure. Organizations must rethink security architectures, strengthen endpoint controls, and adopt AI-aware defenses across apps, devices, and identities to reduce risk.

JLR Hack Deemed UK’s Costliest Cyber Incident at £1.9bn

🔒The Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC) concluded that the August 2025 cyber-attack on Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) produced an estimated UK financial impact of £1.9bn ($2.55bn) and affected more than 5,000 organisations. The CMC said the vast majority of the cost derived from halted manufacturing after an IT shutdown that stopped production at major UK plants and disrupted suppliers and dealer systems. Analysts ranked the incident a Category 3 systemic event and warned costs could rise if operational technology or intellectual property were compromised. Industry experts called for stronger governmental oversight and for boards to treat cybersecurity as a strategic risk.

SnakeStealer Infostealer Surges to Top of Detections

🔒 SnakeStealer is an infostealer family that surged in early 2025 to top ESET's infostealer detection charts. First seen in 2019 and originally linked to tools marketed as 404 Keylogger/Crypter, it spread widely by abusing Discord and cloud hosting and through phishing attachments, archived payloads and pirated software. Offered as malware‑as‑a‑service, it harvests credentials, clipboard contents, screenshots and keystrokes while using evasion and persistence tricks. Reduce risk by keeping systems updated, enabling MFA, treating unsolicited attachments with caution, changing passwords from clean devices and running reputable security software.

PassiveNeuron APT Uses Neursite and NeuralExecutor

🧠 Kaspersky researchers have identified a sophisticated cyber-espionage campaign dubbed PassiveNeuron that has targeted government, financial, and industrial organizations across Asia, Africa, and Latin America since late 2024. The operation uses bespoke implants—Neursite (a C++ modular backdoor) and NeuralExecutor (a .NET loader)—alongside Cobalt Strike, leveraging compromised internal servers as intermediate C2s and a plugin architecture to maintain persistence and adapt tooling. Victims include internet-exposed servers; attackers have used SQL-based remote command execution, attempted ASPX web shells, deployed DLL loaders into the System32 directory, and in 2025 adopted a GitHub-based dead-drop resolver to retrieve C2 addresses.

Vidar Stealer 2.0 Rewritten in C with Multi-Threading

🛡️ Vidar Stealer 2.0 was released with a complete rewrite in C, multi-threaded data theft and stronger evasion, prompting warnings from security researchers about likely increased campaigns. The update reduces dependencies and footprint while spawning parallel worker threads to accelerate harvesting of browser, wallet, cloud and app credentials. It introduces extensive anti-analysis checks and a polymorphic builder to frustrate static detection. Notably, the malware injects into running browser processes to extract encryption keys from memory and bypass Chrome's App-Bound protections.

Pro-Russia Information Operations After Drone Incursion

🔎 Google Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) observed coordinated pro-Russia information operations responding to reported Russian drone incursions into Polish airspace on Sept. 9–10, 2025. Actors amplified narratives denying Russian culpability, blaming NATO or Poland, and seeking to erode domestic and international support for Ukraine. GTIG documented activity across multiple networks and languages and noted these operations leveraged both long-standing and recently developed influence infrastructure.

Ransomware Payouts Rise to $3.6M as Tactics Evolve

🔒 The average ransomware payment climbed to $3.6m in 2025, up from $2.5m in 2024, as attackers shift to fewer but more lucrative, targeted campaigns. ExtraHop's Global Threat Landscape Report found 70% of affected organisations paid ransoms, with healthcare and government incidents averaging nearly $7.5m each. The study highlights expanding risks from public cloud, third‑party integrations and generative AI, and urges organisations to map their attack surface, monitor internal traffic for lateral movement and prepare for AI‑enabled tactics.