Microsoft | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

As many as 159 CVE identifiers have been flagged as exploited in the wild in the first quarter of 2025, up from 151 in Q4 2024. "We continue to see vulnerabilities being exploited at a fast pace with 28.3% of vulnerabilities being exploited within 1-day of their CVE disclosure," VulnCheck said in a report shared with The Hacker News. This translates to 45 security flaws that have been weaponized in real-world attacks within a day of disclosure. Fourteen other flaws have been exploited within a month, while another 45 flaws were abused within the span of a year.  The cybersecurity company said a majority of the exploited vulnerabilities have been identified in content management systems (CMSes), followed by network edge devices, operating systems, open-source software, and server software. The breakdown is as follows - Content Management Systems (CMS) (35) Network Edge Devices (29) Operating Systems (24) Open Source Software (14) Server Software (14) The leading...

Microsoft on Monday announced that it has moved the Microsoft Account (MSA) signing service to Azure confidential virtual machines (VMs) and that it's also in the process of migrating the Entra ID signing service as well. The disclosure comes about seven months after the tech giant said it completed updates to Microsoft Entra ID and MS for both public and United States government clouds to generate, store, and automatically rotate access token signing keys using the Azure Managed Hardware Security Module (HSM) service. "Each of these improvements helps mitigate the attack vectors that we suspect the actor used in the 2023 Storm-0558 attack on Microsoft," Charlie Bell, Executive Vice President for Microsoft Security, said in a post shared with The Hacker News ahead of publication. Microsoft also noted that 90% of identity tokens from Microsoft Entra ID for Microsoft apps are validated by a hardened identity Software Development Kit (SDK) and that 92% of employee pr...

The problem is simple: all breaches start with initial access, and initial access comes down to two primary attack vectors – credentials and devices. This is not news; every report you can find on the threat landscape depicts the same picture.  The solution is more complex. For this article, we'll focus on the device threat vector. The risk they pose is significant, which is why device management tools like Mobile Device Management (MDM) and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) are essential components of an organization's security infrastructure. However, relying solely on these tools to manage device risk actually creates a false sense of security. Instead of the blunt tools of device management, organizations are looking for solutions that deliver device trust . Device trust provides a comprehensive, risk-based approach to device security enforcement, closing the large gaps left behind by traditional device management solutions. Here are 5 of those limitations and how to ov...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a new malicious campaign related to the North Korean state-sponsored threat actor known as Kimsuky that exploits a now-patched vulnerability impacting Microsoft Remote Desktop Services to gain initial access. The activity has been named Larva-24005 by the AhnLab Security Intelligence Center (ASEC). "In some systems, initial access was gained through exploiting the RDP vulnerability (BlueKeep, CVE-2019-0708)," the South Korean cybersecurity company said . "While an RDP vulnerability scanner was found in the compromised system, there is no evidence of its actual use." CVE-2019-0708 (CVSS score: 9.8) is a critical wormable bug in Remote Desktop Services that could enable remote code execution, allowing unauthenticated attackers to install arbitrary programs, access data, and even create new accounts with full user rights. However, in order for an adversary to exploit the flaw, they would need to send a specially crafted...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Thursday added a medium-severity security flaw impacting Microsoft Windows to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, following reports of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, assigned the CVE identifier CVE-2025-24054 (CVSS score: 6.5), is a Windows New Technology LAN Manager ( NTLM ) hash disclosure spoofing bug that was patched by Microsoft last month as part of its Patch Tuesday updates. NTLM is a legacy authentication protocol that Microsoft officially deprecated last year in favor of Kerberos. In recent years, threat actors have found various methods to exploit the technology, such as pass-the-hash and relay attacks, to extract NTLM hashes for follow-on attacks. "Microsoft Windows NTLM contains an external control of file name or path vulnerability that allows an unauthorized attacker to perform spoofing over a network," CISA said. In a bulletin published in March, Mi...

Microsoft is calling attention to an ongoing malvertising campaign that makes use of Node.js to deliver malicious payloads capable of information theft and data exfiltration. The activity, first detected in October 2024, uses lures related to cryptocurrency trading to trick users into installing a rogue installer from fraudulent websites that masquerade as legitimate software like Binance or TradingView. The downloaded installer comes embedded with a dynamic-link library ("CustomActions.dll") that's responsible for harvesting basic system information using Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and setting up persistence on the host via a scheduled task. In an attempt to keep up the ruse, the DLL launches a browser window via " msedge_proxy.exe " that displays the legitimate cryptocurrency trading website. It's worth noting that "msedge_proxy.exe" can be used to display any website as a web application. The scheduled task, in the meanwhile...

Threat actors are leveraging an artificial intelligence (AI) powered presentation platform named Gamma in phishing attacks to direct unsuspecting users to spoofed Microsoft login pages. "Attackers weaponize Gamma, a relatively new AI-based presentation tool, to deliver a link to a fraudulent Microsoft SharePoint login portal," Abnormal Security researchers Callie Hinman Baron and Piotr Wojtyla said in a Tuesday analysis. The attack chain commences with a phishing email, in some cases sent from legitimate, compromised email accounts, to entice message recipients into opening an embedded PDF document. In reality, the PDF attachment is nothing but a hyperlink that, when clicked, redirects the victim to a presentation hosted on Gamma that prompts them to click on a button to "Review Secure Documents." Doing so takes the user to an intermediate page that impersonates Microsoft and instructs them to complete a Cloudflare Turnstile verification step before accessing...

Microsoft has revealed that a now-patched security flaw impacting the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) was exploited as a zero-day in ransomware attacks aimed at a small number of targets. "The targets include organizations in the information technology (IT) and real estate sectors of the United States, the financial sector in Venezuela, a Spanish software company, and the retail sector in Saudi Arabia," the tech giant said . The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-29824, a privilege escalation bug in CLFS that could be exploited to achieve SYSTEM privileges. It was fixed by Redmond as part of its Patch Tuesday update for April 2025. Microsoft is tracking the activity and the post-compromise exploitation of CVE-2025-29824 under the moniker Storm-2460, with the threat actors also leveraging a malware named PipeMagic to deliver the exploit as well as ransomware payloads. The exact initial access vector used in the attacks is currently not known. However, the threa...

Microsoft has released security fixes to address a massive set of 125 flaws affecting its software products, including one vulnerability that it said has been actively exploited in the wild. Of the 125 vulnerabilities, 11 are rated Critical, 112 are rated Important, and two are rated Low in severity. Forty-nine of these vulnerabilities are classified as privilege escalation, 34 as remote code execution, 16 as information disclosure, and 14 as denial-of-service (DoS) bugs. The updates are aside from the 22 flaws the company patched in its Chromium-based Edge browser since the release of last month's Patch Tuesday update . The vulnerability that has been flagged as under active attack is an elevation of privilege (EoP) flaw impacting the Windows Common Log File System (CLFS) Driver ( CVE-2025-29824 , CVSS score: 7.8) that stems from a use-after-free scenario, allowing an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally. CVE-2025-29824 is the sixth EoP vulnerability to be di...

A likely lone wolf actor behind the EncryptHub persona was acknowledged by Microsoft for discovering and reporting two security flaws in Windows last month, painting a picture of a "conflicted" individual straddling a legitimate career in cybersecurity and pursuing cybercrime. In a new extensive analysis published by Outpost24 KrakenLabs, the Swedish security company unmasked the up-and-coming cybercriminal, who, about 10 years ago, fled his hometown in Kharkov, Ukraine, to a new place somewhere near the Romanian coast. The vulnerabilities were credited by Microsoft to a party named "SkorikARI with SkorikARI," which has been assessed to be another username used by EncryptHub. The flaws in question, both of which were fixed by Redmond as part of its Patch Tuesday update last month, are below - CVE-2025-24061 (CVSS score: 7.8) - Microsoft Windows Mark-of-the-Web (MotW) Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability CVE-2025-24071 (CVSS score: 6.5) - Microsoft Windo...

Microsoft is warning of several phishing campaigns that are leveraging tax-related themes to deploy malware and steal credentials. "These campaigns notably use redirection methods such as URL shorteners and QR codes contained in malicious attachments and abuse legitimate services like file-hosting services and business profile pages to avoid detection," Microsoft said in a report shared with The Hacker News. A notable aspect of these campaigns is that they lead to phishing pages that are delivered via a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform codenamed RaccoonO365 , an e-crime platform that first came to light in early December 2024. Also delivered are remote access trojans (RATs) like Remcos RAT, as well as other malware and post-exploitation frameworks such as Latrodectus , AHKBot, GuLoader , and BruteRatel C4 (BRc4). One such campaign spotted by the tech giant on February 6, 2025, is estimated to have sent hundreds of emails targeting the United States ahead of the t...

The threat actor known as EncryptHub exploited a recently-patched security vulnerability in Microsoft Windows as a zero-day to deliver a wide range of malware families, including backdoors and information stealers such as Rhadamanthys and StealC. "In this attack, the threat actor manipulates .msc files and the Multilingual User Interface Path (MUIPath) to download and execute malicious payload, maintain persistence and steal sensitive data from infected systems," Trend Micro researcher Aliakbar Zahravi said in an analysis. The vulnerability in question is CVE-2025-26633 (CVSS score: 7.0), described by Microsoft as an improper neutralization vulnerability in Microsoft Management Console ( MMC ) that could allow an attacker to bypass a security feature locally. It was fixed by the company earlier this month as part of its Patch Tuesday update. Trend Micro has given the exploit the moniker MSC EvilTwin, tracking the suspected Russian activity cluster under the name Water...

An unpatched security flaw impacting Microsoft Windows has been exploited by 11 state-sponsored groups from China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia as part of data theft, espionage, and financially motivated campaigns that date back to 2017. The zero-day vulnerability, tracked by Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) as ZDI-CAN-25373 , refers to an issue that allows bad actors to execute hidden malicious commands on a victim's machine by leveraging crafted Windows Shortcut or Shell Link (.LNK) files. "The attacks leverage hidden command line arguments within .LNK files to execute malicious payloads, complicating detection," security researchers Peter Girnus and Aliakbar Zahravi said in an analysis shared with The Hacker News. "The exploitation of ZDI-CAN-25373 exposes organizations to significant risks of data theft and cyber espionage." Specifically, this involves the padding of the arguments with Space (0x20), Horizontal Tab (0x09), Line Feed (0x0A),...

Microsoft is calling attention to a novel remote access trojan (RAT) named StilachiRAT that it said employs advanced techniques to sidestep detection and persist within target environments with an ultimate aim to steal sensitive data. The malware contains capabilities to "steal information from the target system, such as credentials stored in the browser, digital wallet information, data stored in the clipboard, as well as system information," the Microsoft Incident Response team said in an analysis. The tech giant said it discovered StilachiRAT in November 2024, with its RAT features present in a DLL module named "WWStartupCtrl64.dll." The malware has not been attributed to any specific threat actor or country. It's currently not clear how the malware is delivered to targets, but Microsoft noted that such trojans can be installed via various initial access routes, making it crucial for organizations to implement adequate security measures. StilachiRAT i...

Microsoft has shed light on an ongoing phishing campaign that has targeted the hospitality sector by impersonating online travel agency Booking.com using an increasingly popular social engineering technique called ClickFix to deliver credential-stealing malware. The activity, the tech giant's threat intelligence team said, started in December 2024 and operates with the end goal of conducting financial fraud and theft. It's tracking the campaign under the moniker Storm-1865 . "This phishing attack specifically targets individuals in hospitality organizations in North America, Oceania, South and Southeast Asia, and Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western Europe, that are most likely to work with Booking.com, sending fake emails purporting to be coming from the agency," Microsoft said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The ClickFix technique has become widespread in recent months, as it tricks users into executing malware under the guise of fixing a supposed...