The Counter Menace Unit™ (CTU) analysis group analyzes safety threats to assist organizations shield their methods. Primarily based on observations in July and August, CTU™ researchers recognized the next noteworthy points and adjustments within the world risk panorama:
- Ransomware stays a unstable risk regardless of disruptions
- Absent MFA permits exploitation of stolen credentials
- Legacy vulnerabilities keep their worth
Ransomware stays a unstable risk regardless of disruptions
Regulation enforcement actions have made an affect on the ransomware ecosystem however haven’t diminished the variety of assaults.
Ransomware continues to pose a serious risk to organizations. Despite the fact that the variety of victims posted to leak websites has declined since reaching an all-time peak in March 2025, the figures in July and August remained increased than in the identical months of 2024. Regardless of the quantity of media consideration dedicated to high-profile ransomware and knowledge extortion assaults by Scattered Spider and ShinyHunters, the 2 most prolific schemes throughout July and August have been Qilin and Akira. Each schemes have been extremely energetic throughout 2025 (though the variety of victims posted every month is decrease than the month-to-month quantity from earlier prolific operations like LockBit). Even so, general, the excessive variety of ransomware assaults within the second and third quarters of 2025 have principally been extra evenly distributed throughout a number of teams in comparison with earlier years.
Regulation enforcement actions in opposition to main ransomware operators in 2024 and 2025 have precipitated fragmentation and volatility within the ransomware panorama. Sometimes, every legislation enforcement disruption conjures up a short lived spike in new group creations. Thirty-seven new schemes appeared within the first half of 2025. 4 others emerged in July, adopted by one other 4 in August. The sustained excessive quantity could also be linked to the common cadence of legislation enforcement exercise concentrating on LockBit all through 2024. A number of teams that had been thought of dormant returned to exercise throughout July and August 2025 too. In complete, 52 ransomware schemes have been energetic in August, a month-to-month quantity that has solely been surpassed 3 times within the earlier two years.
The brand new schemes are seemingly not fashioned by new cybercriminals. As an alternative, associates who labored with disrupted operations could be part of or launch a brand new scheme, both pooling efforts with different displaced associates or working independently. New schemes may additionally be rebrands of older operations. Associates could alternatively transfer to established operations corresponding to Akira that then improve their assault tempo because of having extra assets. These rebrands and circulation of associates throughout present or new teams could make kill chains laborious to determine and attribution tougher.
Despite the fact that these developments can improve the general issue of monitoring the ransomware ecosystem, they don’t significantly change the important thing defenses in opposition to most ransomware assaults: immediate patching, particularly of internet-facing gadgets; phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA); and complete monitoring of endpoints and networks. As well as, it’s turning into more and more necessary to observe cloud and hybrid environments for malicious exercise as risk actors pivot to the cloud.
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Absent MFA permits exploitation of stolen credentials
Implementing MFA prevents risk actors from cashing in on stolen credentials.
CTU researchers have noticed a number of incidents the place cybercriminals or state-sponsored risk actors obtained preliminary entry to their sufferer’s atmosphere by abusing VPN credentials. For instance, the GOLD LEAPFROG risk group abused VPN credentials in an early 2025 assault that culminated within the deployment of SafePay ransomware.
Unauthorized entry of this nature permits risk actors to bypass conventional safety measures and achieve direct entry into inner methods, even when the equipment is totally patched in opposition to identified vulnerabilities. Different kinds of generally abused entry embody distant desktop logins or administrative accounts. In different phrases, strategies designed to guard approved entry for distant staff also can give attackers entry if the safety is just not sufficiently sturdy.
Menace actors usually buy the credentials on underground marketplaces. Infostealer malware steals credentials and different knowledge from methods that it infects. The stolen knowledge is then packaged into logs and bought on-line to different risk actors. Tens of millions of logs can be found on the market, and the quantity continues to rise sharply annually. Because of this, defending methods from infostealer infections kinds a key a part of defending in opposition to subsequent ransomware or knowledge extortion assaults.
Menace actors who acquire partial credentials may additionally attempt to brute-force entry on VPN accounts. In the event that they achieve gaining entry, it’s nearly all the time as a result of the VPN doesn’t require MFA to authenticate. MFA alone doesn’t stop all unauthorized entry, but it surely does cut back the specter of essentially the most opportunistic cybercrime. Implementing phishing-resistant MFA on all internet-facing providers and home equipment reduces threat ranges even additional. Such a MFA makes use of hardware-backed strategies to stop token theft.
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Legacy vulnerabilities keep their worth
Even when a vulnerability is years outdated, it’s not often too late to patch.
In August, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warned that Russian state-sponsored risk actors linked to the Russian Federal Safety Service’s (FSB) Middle 16 have been conducting cyberespionage assaults in opposition to U.S. and different entities by actively concentrating on Cisco gadgets unpatched in opposition to a vulnerability from 2018. CTU researchers noticed related exercise by Russian state-sponsored risk actors in 2023.
The FBI was additionally one in every of a number of companies within the U.S. and past to concern a warning about Chinese language state-sponsored risk actors compromising networks worldwide for espionage functions. The a part of the doc that lined how the attackers gained preliminary entry states that “they’re having appreciable success exploiting publicly identified widespread vulnerabilities” slightly than beforehand unknown zero-day vulnerabilities. The doc lists the Cisco vulnerability from 2018, in addition to others from 2023 and 2024 that have an effect on edge gadgets.
Organizations could not patch promptly for a lot of causes. Budgetary restrictions and restricted personnel are simply two components that may affect a patching program. Employees could lack consciousness of the vulnerability or not understand that impacted tools is in use. Some patches could require extra analysis or have to be changed with workarounds to keep away from potential affect to different business-critical operations. In some instances, tools is so outdated that distributors now not publish safety updates. Nonetheless, unpatched edge gadgets put organizations in danger. Throughout incident response engagements that CTU researchers noticed in 2024, vulnerabilities in internet-facing gadgets have been the commonest preliminary entry vectors.
The danger posed by unpatched gadgets is just not going to say no. It’s already straightforward to make use of freely accessible scanning methods and publicly accessible exploit code to seek out and exploit susceptible methods, and it’s possible that AI may automate this additional. Immediate patching in keeping with enterprise threat calculations or substitute of end-of-life methods stay extra necessary than ever.
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Conclusion
Regardless of adjustments in risk group composition and will increase in assault numbers, some features of the cyber risk stay the identical. Cybercriminals and state-sponsored risk actors proceed to reap the benefits of quick access to organizations’ environments. Luckily, the fundamentals of excellent cyber protection additionally stay fixed: immediate patching, phishing-resistant MFA, and complete monitoring and response.
