Microsoft | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Microsoft has revealed that one of the threat actors behind the active exploitation of SharePoint flaws is deploying Warlock ransomware on targeted systems. The tech giant, in an update shared Wednesday, said the findings are based on an "expanded analysis and threat intelligence from our continued monitoring of exploitation activity by Storm-2603 ." The threat actor attributed to the financially motivated activity is a suspected China-based threat actor that's known to drop Warlock and LockBit ransomware in the past. The attack chains entail the exploitation of CVE-2025-49706, a spoofing vulnerability, and CVE-2025-49704, a remote code execution vulnerability, targeting unpatched on-premises SharePoint servers to deploy the spinstall0.aspx web shell payload. "This initial access is used to conduct command execution using the w3wp.exe process that supports SharePoint," Microsoft said. "Storm-2603 then initiates a series of discovery commands, incl...

The Windows banking trojan known as Coyote has become the first known malware strain to exploit the Windows accessibility framework called UI Automation (UIA) to harvest sensitive information. "The new Coyote variant is targeting Brazilian users, and uses UIA to extract credentials linked to 75 banking institutes' web addresses and cryptocurrency exchanges," Akamai security researcher Tomer Peled said in an analysis. Coyote, first revealed by Kaspersky in 2024, is known for targeting Brazilian users. It comes with capabilities to log keystrokes, capture screenshots, and serve overlays on top of login pages associated with financial enterprises. Part of the Microsoft .NET Framework, UIA is a legitimate feature offered by Microsoft to allow screen readers and other assistive technology products to programmatically access user interface (UI) elements on a desktop.  That UIA can be a potential pathway for abuse, including data theft, was previously demonstrated as a...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), on July 22, 2025, added two Microsoft SharePoint flaws, CVE-2025-49704 and CVE-2025-49706, to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. To that end, Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) agencies are required to remediate identified vulnerabilities by July 23, 2025. "CISA is aware of active exploitation of a spoofing and RCE vulnerability chain involving CVE-2025-49706 and CVE-2025-49704, enabling unauthorized access to on-premise SharePoint servers," the agency said in an updated advisory. The inclusion of the two shortcomings, a spoofing vulnerability and a remote code execution vulnerability collectively tracked as ToolShell, to the KEV catalog comes after Microsoft revealed that Chinese hacking groups like Linen Typhoon and Violet Typhoon leveraged these flaws to breach on-premises SharePoint servers since July 7, 2025. As of writing, the tech...

Microsoft has formally tied the exploitation of security flaws in internet-facing SharePoint Server instances to two Chinese hacking groups called Linen Typhoon and Violet Typhoon as early as July 7, 2025 , corroborating earlier reports. The tech giant said it also observed a third China-based threat actor, which it tracks as Storm-2603, weaponizing the flaws as well to obtain initial access to target organizations. "With the rapid adoption of these exploits, Microsoft assesses with high confidence that threat actors will continue to integrate them into their attacks against unpatched on-premises SharePoint systems," the tech giant said in a report published today. A brief description of the threat activity clusters is below - Linen Typhoon (aka APT27 , Bronze Union, Emissary Panda, Iodine, Lucky Mouse, Red Phoenix, and UNC215), which is active since 2012 and has been previously attributed to malware families like SysUpdate, HyperBro, and PlugX Violet Typhoon (aka ...

The recently disclosed critical Microsoft SharePoint vulnerability has been under exploitation as early as July 7, 2025, according to findings from Check Point Research. The cybersecurity company said it observed first exploitation attempts targeting an unnamed major Western government, with the activity intensifying on July 18 and 19, spanning government, telecommunications, and software sectors in North America and Western Europe. Check Point also said the exploitation efforts originated from three different IP addresses – 104.238.159[.]149, 107.191.58[.]76, and 96.9.125[.]147 – one of which was previously tied to the weaponization of security flaws in Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) appliances ( CVE-2025-4427 and CVE-2025-4428 ). "We're witnessing an urgent and active threat: a critical zero-day in SharePoint on-prem is being exploited in the wild, putting thousands of global organizations at risk," Lotem Finkelstein, Director of Threat Intelligence at Chec...

Microsoft on Sunday released security patches for an actively exploited security flaw in SharePoint and also disclosed details of another vulnerability that it said has been addressed with "more robust protections." The tech giant acknowledged it's "aware of active attacks targeting on-premises SharePoint Server customers by exploiting vulnerabilities partially addressed by the July Security Update." CVE-2025-53770 (CVSS score: 9.8), as the exploited vulnerability is tracked, concerns a case of remote code execution that arises due to the deserialization of untrusted data in on-premise versions of Microsoft SharePoint Server. The newly disclosed shortcoming is a spoofing flaw in SharePoint ( CVE-2025-53771 , CVSS score: 7.1). Viettel Cyber Security and an anonymous researcher has been credited with discovering and reporting the bug. "Improper limitation of a pathname to a restricted directory ('path traversal') in Microsoft Office SharePoint...

A critical security vulnerability in Microsoft SharePoint Server has been weaponized as part of an "active, large-scale" exploitation campaign. The zero-day flaw, tracked as CVE-2025-53770 (CVSS score: 9.8), has been described as a variant of CVE-2025-49704 (CVSS score: 8.8), a code injection and remote code execution bug in Microsoft SharePoint Server that was addressed by the tech giant as part of its July 2025 Patch Tuesday updates. "Deserialization of untrusted data in on-premises Microsoft SharePoint Server allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code over a network," Microsoft said in an advisory released on July 19, 2025. The Windows maker further noted that it's preparing and fully testing a comprehensive update to resolve the issue. It credited Viettel Cyber Security for discovering and reporting the flaw through Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI). In a separate alert issued Saturday, Redmond said it's aware of active attacks ta...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed what they say is a "critical design flaw" in delegated Managed Service Accounts (dMSAs) introduced in Windows Server 2025. "The flaw can result in high-impact attacks, enabling cross-domain lateral movement and persistent access to all managed service accounts and their resources across Active Directory indefinitely," Semperis said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Put differently, successful exploitation could allow adversaries to sidestep authentication guardrails and generate passwords for all Delegated Managed Service Accounts ( dMSAs ) and group Managed Service Accounts ( gMSAs ) and their associated service accounts. The persistence and privilege escalation method has been codenamed Golden dMSA , with the cybersecurity company deeming it as low complexity owing to the fact that the vulnerability simplifies brute-force password generation. However, in order for bad actors to exploit it, they must already be ...

India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has announced that it has taken steps to dismantle what it said was a transnational cybercrime syndicate that carried out "sophisticated" tech support scams targeting citizens of Australia and the United Kingdom. The fraudulent scheme is estimated to have led to losses worth more than £390,000 ($525,000) in the United Kingdom alone. The law enforcement effort, which was carried out on July 7, 2025, as part of Operation Chakra V , involved searches at three locations in Noida, one of which was a fully functional fraudulent call center operating from the Noida Special Economic Zone. Evidence gathered by the CBI revealed that the call center, named FirstIdea, made use of advanced calling infrastructure and malicious scripts to facilitate cross-border anonymity and victim targeting at scale. A total of two arrests have been made, including a key operative partner of FirstIdea. "The operation was meticulously timed with ...

A high-severity security flaw has been disclosed in ServiceNow's platform that, if successfully exploited, could result in data exposure and exfiltration. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-3648 (CVSS score: 8.2), has been described as a case of data inference in Now Platform through conditional access control list (ACL) rules. It has been codenamed Count(er) Strike . "A vulnerability has been identified in the Now Platform that could result in data being inferred without authorization," ServiceNow said in a bulletin. "Under certain conditional access control list (ACL) configurations, this vulnerability could enable unauthenticated and authenticated users to use range query requests to infer instance data that is not intended to be accessible to them." Cybersecurity company Varonis, which discovered and reported the flaw in February 2024, said it could have been exploited by malicious actors to obtain unauthorized access to sensitive information, inclu...

The Initial Access Broker (IAB) known as Gold Melody has been attributed to a campaign that exploits leaked ASP.NET machine keys to obtain unauthorized access to organizations and peddle that access to other threat actors. The activity is being tracked by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 under the moniker TGR-CRI-0045 , where "TGR" stands for "temporary group" and "CRI" refers to "criminal motivation." The hacking group is also known as Prophet Spider and UNC961 , with one of its tools also used by an initial access broker called ToyMaker . "The group seems to follow an opportunistic approach but has attacked organizations in Europe and the U.S. in the following industries: financial services, manufacturing, wholesale and retail, high technology, and transportation and logistics," researchers Tom Marsden and Chema Garcia said . The abuse of ASP.NET machine keys in the wild was first documented by Microsoft in February 2025, with the c...

For the first time in 2025, Microsoft's Patch Tuesday updates did not bundle fixes for exploited security vulnerabilities, but the company acknowledged one of the addressed flaws had been publicly known. The patches resolve a whopping 130 vulnerabilities , along with 10 other non-Microsoft CVEs that affect Visual Studio, AMD, and its Chromium-based Edge browser. Of these, 10 are rated Critical and the remaining are all rated Important in severity. "The 11-month streak of patching at least one zero-day that was exploited in the wild ended this month," Satnam Narang, Senior Staff Research Engineer at Tenable, said. Fifty-three of these shortcomings are classified as privilege escalation bugs followed by 42 as remote code execution, 17 as information disclosure, and 8 as security feature bypasses. These patches are in addition to two other flaws addressed by the company in the Edge browser since the release of last month's Patch Tuesday update . The vulnerability ...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged a supply chain attack targeting a Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension called Ethcode that has been installed a little over 6,000 times. The compromise, per ReversingLabs , occurred via a GitHub pull request that was opened by a user named Airez299 on June 17, 2025. First released by 7finney in 2022, Ethcode is a VS Code extension that's used to deploy and execute solidity smart contracts in Ethereum Virtual Machine ( EVM )-based blockchains. An EVM is a decentralized computation engine that's designed to run smart contracts on the Ethereum network. According to the supply chain security company, the GitHub project received its last non-malicious update on September 6, 2024. That changed last month when Airez299 opened a pull request with the message "Modernize codebase with viem integration and testing framework." The user claimed to have added a new testing framework with Mocha integration and contract testin...

Cybersecurity researchers have shed light on a previously undocumented threat actor called NightEagle (aka APT-Q-95) that has been observed targeting Microsoft Exchange servers as a part of a zero-day exploit chain designed to target government, defense, and technology sectors in China. According to QiAnXin's RedDrip Team, the threat actor has been active since 2023 and has switched network infrastructure at an extremely fast rate. The findings were presented at CYDES 2025 , the third edition of Malaysia's National Cyber Defence & Security Exhibition and Conference held between July 1 and 3, 2025. "It seems to have the speed of an eagle and has been operating at night in China," the cybersecurity vendor said , explaining the rationale behind naming the adversary NightEagle. Attacks mounted by the threat actor have singled out entities operating in the high-tech, chip semiconductors, quantum technology, artificial intelligence, and military verticals with th...

A new study of integrated development environments (IDEs) like Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, IntelliJ IDEA, and Cursor has revealed weaknesses in how they handle the extension verification process, ultimately enabling attackers to execute malicious code on developer machines. "We discovered that flawed verification checks in Visual Studio Code allow publishers to add functionality to extensions while maintaining the verified icon," OX Security researchers Nir Zadok and Moshe Siman Tov Bustan said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This results in the potential for malicious extensions to appear verified and approved, creating a false sense of trust." Specifically, the analysis found that Visual Studio Code sends an HTTP POST request to the domain "marketplace.visualstudio[.]com" to determine if an extension is verified or otherwise. The exploitation method essentially involves creating a malicious extension with the same verifia...

The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) on Monday announced sweeping actions targeting the North Korean information technology (IT) worker scheme, leading to the arrest of one individual and the seizure of 29 financial accounts, 21 fraudulent websites, and nearly 200 computers. The coordinated action saw searches of 21 known or suspected "laptop farms" between June 10 and 17, 2025, across 14 states in the U.S. that were put to use by North Korean IT workers to remotely connect to victim networks via company-provided laptop computers.  "The North Korean actors were assisted by individuals in the United States, China, United Arab Emirates, and Taiwan, and successfully obtained employment with more than 100 U.S. companies," the DoJ said . The North Korean IT worker scheme has become one of the crucial cogs in the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea (DPRK) revenue generation machine in a manner that bypasses international sanctions. The fraudulent operation...

Microsoft has said that it's ending support for passwords in its Authenticator app starting August 1, 2025. Microsoft's move is part of a much larger shift away from traditional password-based logins. The company said the changes are also meant to streamline autofill within its two-factor authentication (2FA) app, making the experience simpler and more secure. Over the past few years, Microsoft has been pushing for a passwordless future using technologies like passkeys , Windows Hello, and FIDO2-based authentication. These methods offer better protection against phishing and password reuse, which are still major attack vectors. While it may feel like a hassle at first, this change is actually aimed at reducing your risk in the long run. "Starting July 2025, the autofill feature in Authenticator will stop working, and from August 2025, passwords will no longer be accessible in Authenticator," Microsoft said in a support document for Authenticator. It's worth noti...

Microsoft on Tuesday announced that it's extending Windows 10 Extended Security Updates ( ESU ) for an extra year by letting users either pay a small fee of $30 or by sync their PC settings to the cloud. The development comes ahead of the tech giant's upcoming October 14, 2025, deadline , when it plans to officially end support and stop providing security updates for devices running Windows 10. The desktop operating system was launched in July 2015. The Windows maker describes ESU as a "last resort option" for customers who need to run legacy Microsoft software that has reached end-of-life (EoL) status. This is meant to be a temporary solution while migrating to a newer supported platform. According to StatCounter data as of May 2025, Windows 10's market share stands at 53.19% globally, making it the most widely used version of Windows. This is followed by Windows 11 at 43%. As part of the new enrollment options announced by Microsoft, individuals can opt-...

Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a Go-based malware called XDigo that has been used in attacks targeting Eastern European governmental entities in March 2025. The attack chains are said to have leveraged a collection of Windows shortcut ( LNK ) files as part of a multi-stage procedure to deploy the malware, French cybersecurity company HarfangLab said . XDSpy is the name assigned to a cyber espionage that's known to target government agencies in Eastern Europe and the Balkans since 2011. It was first documented by the Belarusian CERT in early 2020.  In recent years, companies in Russia and Moldova have been targeted by various campaigns to deliver malware families like UTask, XDDown, and DSDownloader that can download additional payloads and steal sensitive information from compromised hosts. HarfangLab said it observed the threat actor leveraging a remote code execution flaw in Microsoft Windows that's triggered when processing specially crafted LNK files. The v...

Most cyberattacks today don't start with loud alarms or broken firewalls. They start quietly—inside tools and websites your business already trusts. It's called " Living Off Trusted Sites " (LOTS)—and it's the new favorite strategy of modern attackers. Instead of breaking in, they blend in. Hackers are using well-known platforms like Google, Microsoft, Dropbox, and Slack as launchpads. They hide malicious code inside routine traffic, making it incredibly difficult for traditional defenses to detect them. And here's the scary part: many security teams don't even realize it's happening—until it's too late. Why You're Not Seeing These Attacks LOTS tactics don't look suspicious at first glance. There's no malware signature to flag, and no unusual IP address to trace. It's legitimate traffic—until it's not. Attackers are exploiting: Common business tools like Teams, Zoom, and GitHub Shortened or vanity URLs to redirect users Trusted cloud services to host malicious payloads ...