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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...

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...

Phishing works no matter how hard a company tries to protect its customers or employees. Security researchers have been warning of a new phishing attack that cybercriminals and email scammers are using in the wild to bypass the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) mechanism implemented by widely used email services like Microsoft Office 365. Microsoft Office 365 is an all-in-solution for users that offers several different online services, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online and other Office Web Apps, like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. On the top of these services, Microsoft also offers an artificial intelligence and machine learning powered security protection to help defend against potential phishing and other threats by going one level deep to scan the links in the email bodies to look for any blacklisted or suspicious domain. But as I said, phishers always find a way to bypass security protections in order to victimize users. Just ...

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 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 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...

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a now-patched vulnerability impacting the Microsoft SharePoint connector on Power Platform that, if successfully exploited, could allow threat actors to harvest a user's credentials and stage follow-on attacks. This could manifest in the form of post-exploitation actions that allow the attacker to send requests to the SharePoint API on behalf of the impersonated user, enabling unauthorized access to sensitive data, Zenity Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News ahead of publication. "This vulnerability can be exploited across Power Automate, Power Apps, Copilot Studio, and Copilot 365, which significantly broadens the scope of potential damage," senior security researcher Dmitry Lozovoy said . "It increases the likelihood of a successful attack, allowing hackers to target multiple interconnected services within the Power Platform ecosystem." Following responsible disclosure in September 2024, ...

As part of its "October Patch Tuesday," Microsoft has today released a large batch of security updates to patch a total of 62 vulnerabilities in its products, including a severe MS office zero-day flaw that has been exploited in the wild. Security updates also include patches for Microsoft Windows operating systems, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Skype, Microsoft Lync and Microsoft SharePoint Server. Besides the MS Office vulnerability, the company has also addressed two other publicly disclosed (but not yet targeted in the wild) vulnerabilities that affect the SharePoint Server and the Windows Subsystem for Linux. October patch Tuesday also fixes a critical Windows DNS vulnerability that could be exploited by a malicious DNS server to execute arbitrary code on the targeted system. Below you can find a brief technical explanation of all above mentioned critical and important vulnerabilities. Microsoft Office Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2017-11826) T...

As part of this month's Patch Tuesday, Microsoft today released a fresh batch of security updates to fix a total of 129 newly discovered security vulnerabilities affecting various versions of its Windows operating systems and related software. Of the 129 bugs spanning its various products — Microsoft Windows, Edge browser, Internet Explorer, ChakraCore, SQL Server, Exchange Server, Office, ASP.NET, OneDrive, Azure DevOps, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Dynamics — that received new patches, 23 are listed as critical, 105 are important, and one is moderate in severity. Unlike the past few months, none of the security vulnerabilities the tech giant patched in September are listed as being publicly known or under active attack at the time of release or at least not in knowledge of Microsoft. A memory corruption vulnerability ( CVE-2020-16875 ) in Microsoft Exchange software is worth highlighting all the critical flaws. The exploitation of this flaw could allow an attacker to run ...

A high-severity flaw impacting Microsoft SharePoint has been added to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-38094 (CVSS score: 7.2), has been described as a deserialization vulnerability impacting SharePoint that could result in remote code execution. "An authenticated attacker with Site Owner permissions can use the vulnerability to inject arbitrary code and execute this code in the context of SharePoint Server," Microsoft said in an alert for the flaw. Patches for the security defect were released by Redmond as part of its Patch Tuesday updates for July 2024. The exploitation risk is compounded by the fact that proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits for the flaw are available in the public domain. "The PoC script [...] automates authentication to a target SharePoint site using NTLM, creates a spe...

A "dangerous piece of functionality" has been discovered in Microsoft 365 suite that could be potentially abused by a malicious actor to mount attacks on cloud infrastructure and ransom files stored on SharePoint and OneDrive. The cloud ransomware attack makes it possible to launch file-encrypting malware to "encrypt files stored on SharePoint and OneDrive in a way that makes them unrecoverable without dedicated backups or a decryption key from the attacker," Proofpoint  said  in a report published today. The infection sequence can be carried out using a combination of Microsoft APIs, command-line interface (CLI) scripts, and PowerShell scripts, the enterprise security firm added. The attack, at its core, hinges on a Microsoft 365 feature called AutoSave that creates copies of older file versions as and when users make edits to a file stored on OneDrive or SharePoint Online. It commences with gaining unauthorized access to a target user's SharePoint Online...

The China-linked cyber espionage group tracked as APT41 has been attributed to a new campaign targeting government IT services in the African region. "The attackers used hardcoded names of internal services, IP addresses, and proxy servers embedded within their malware," Kaspersky researchers Denis Kulik and Daniil Pogorelov said . "One of the C2s [command-and-control servers] was a captive SharePoint server within the victim's infrastructure." APT41 is the moniker assigned to a prolific Chinese nation-state hacking group that's known for targeting organizations spanning multiple sectors, including telecom and energy providers, educational institutions, healthcare organizations and IT energy companies in more than three dozen countries. What makes the campaign noteworthy is its focus on Africa, which, as the Russian cybersecurity vendor noted, "had experienced the least activity" from this specific threat actor. That said, the findings line u...

Cybersecurity researchers are calling attention to a new phishing campaign that employs the ClickFix technique to deliver an open-source command-and-control (C2) framework called Havoc . "The threat actor hides each malware stage behind a SharePoint site and uses a modified version of Havoc Demon in conjunction with the Microsoft Graph API to obscure C2 communications within trusted, well-known services," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs said in a technical report shared with The Hacker News. The starting point of the attack is a phishing email containing an HTML attachment ("Documents.html") that, when opened, displays an error message, which uses the ClickFix technique to trick users into copying and executing a malicious PowerShell command into their terminal or PowerShell, thereby triggering the next-stage. The ClickFix bait used in the newly discovered campaign informs the user that there is an error connecting to Microsoft OneDrive, and that they need to rectif...

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has  added  a security flaw impacting Microsoft Sharepoint Server to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog based on evidence of active exploitation in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-24955 (CVSS score: 7.2), is a critical remote code execution flaw that allows an authenticated attacker with Site Owner privileges to execute arbitrary code. "In a network-based attack, an authenticated attacker as a Site Owner could execute code remotely on the SharePoint Server," Microsoft  said  in an advisory. The flaw was addressed by Microsoft as part of its  Patch Tuesday updates  for May 2023. The development comes more than two months after CISA  added  CVE-2023-29357, a privilege escalation flaw in SharePoint Server, to its KEV catalog. It's worth pointing out that an exploit chain combining CVE-2023-29357 and CVE-2023-24955 was demonstrated by StarLabs SG a...

An ongoing threat campaign dubbed VEILDrive has been observed taking advantage of legitimate services from Microsoft, including Teams, SharePoint, Quick Assist, and OneDrive, as part of its modus operandi. "Leveraging Microsoft SaaS services — including Teams, SharePoint, Quick Assist, and OneDrive — the attacker exploited the trusted infrastructures of previously compromised organizations to distribute spear-phishing attacks and store malware," Israeli cybersecurity company Hunters said in a new report. "This cloud-centric strategy allowed the threat actor to avoid detection by conventional monitoring systems." Hunters said it discovered the campaign in September 2024 after it responded to a cyber incident targeting a critical infrastructure organization in the United States. It did not disclose the name of the company, instead giving it the designation "Org C." The activity is believed to have commenced a month prior, with the attack culminating i...