The Counter Menace Unit™ (CTU) analysis staff 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 modifications within the international menace panorama:
- Ransomware stays a risky menace regardless of disruptions
- Absent MFA permits exploitation of stolen credentials
- Legacy vulnerabilities keep their worth
Ransomware stays a risky menace regardless of disruptions
Regulation enforcement actions have made an influence on the ransomware ecosystem however haven’t lowered the variety of assaults.
Ransomware continues to pose a significant menace to organizations. Regardless 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 had been Qilin and Akira. Each schemes have been extremely lively 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, total, the excessive variety of ransomware assaults within the second and third quarters of 2025 have largely been extra evenly distributed throughout a number of teams in comparison with earlier years.
Regulation enforcement actions towards main ransomware operators in 2024 and 2025 have induced fragmentation and volatility within the ransomware panorama. Usually, every regulation 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 regulation enforcement exercise concentrating on LockBit all through 2024. A number of teams that had been thought-about dormant returned to exercise throughout July and August 2025 too. In whole, 52 ransomware schemes had been lively in August, a month-to-month quantity that has solely been surpassed thrice within the earlier two years.
The brand new schemes are seemingly not shaped by new cybercriminals. As a substitute, 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 might also be rebrands of older operations. Associates could alternatively transfer to established operations reminiscent of Akira that then enhance their assault tempo on account of having extra sources. These rebrands and circulation of associates throughout current or new teams could make kill chains arduous to determine and attribution tougher.
Regardless that these developments can enhance the general issue of monitoring the ransomware ecosystem, they don’t drastically change the important thing defenses towards 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 vital to watch cloud and hybrid environments for malicious exercise as menace actors pivot to the cloud.
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Absent MFA permits exploitation of stolen credentials
Implementing MFA prevents menace actors from cashing in on stolen credentials.
CTU researchers have noticed a number of incidents the place cybercriminals or state-sponsored menace actors obtained preliminary entry to their sufferer’s setting by abusing VPN credentials. For instance, the GOLD LEAPFROG menace group abused VPN credentials in an early 2025 assault that culminated within the deployment of SafePay ransomware.
Unauthorized entry of this nature permits menace actors to bypass conventional safety measures and achieve direct entry into inner methods, even when the equipment is totally patched towards identified vulnerabilities. Different forms of generally abused entry embrace distant desktop logins or administrative accounts. In different phrases, strategies designed to guard approved entry for distant workers can even give attackers entry if the safety just isn’t sufficiently robust.
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 menace actors. Hundreds of thousands of logs can be found on the market, and the quantity continues to rise sharply annually. Consequently, defending methods from infostealer infections varieties a key a part of defending towards subsequent ransomware or knowledge extortion assaults.
Menace actors who receive partial credentials might also attempt to brute-force entry on VPN accounts. In the event that they achieve gaining entry, it’s nearly at all times as a result of the VPN doesn’t require MFA to authenticate. MFA alone doesn’t stop all unauthorized entry, nevertheless it does scale back the specter of essentially the most opportunistic cybercrime. Implementing phishing-resistant MFA on all internet-facing companies and home equipment reduces danger ranges even additional. The sort of MFA makes use of hardware-backed strategies to forestall token theft.
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Legacy vulnerabilities keep their worth
Even when a vulnerability is years previous, it’s not often too late to patch.
In August, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warned that Russian state-sponsored menace actors linked to the Russian Federal Safety Service’s (FSB) Heart 16 had been conducting cyberespionage assaults towards U.S. and different entities by actively concentrating on Cisco gadgets unpatched towards a vulnerability from 2018. CTU researchers noticed comparable exercise by Russian state-sponsored menace actors in 2023.
The FBI was additionally considered one of a number of companies within the U.S. and past to difficulty a warning about Chinese language state-sponsored menace 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” relatively 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 elements that may influence a patching program. Workers could lack consciousness of the vulnerability or not notice that impacted gear is in use. Some patches could require further analysis or should be changed with workarounds to keep away from potential influence to different business-critical operations. In some circumstances, gear is so previous that distributors 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 had been the most typical preliminary entry vectors.
The danger posed by unpatched gadgets just isn’t 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 weak methods, and it’s possible that AI may automate this additional. Immediate patching in keeping with enterprise danger calculations or substitute of end-of-life methods stay extra vital than ever.
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Conclusion
Regardless of modifications in menace group composition and will increase in assault numbers, some features of the cyber menace stay the identical. Cybercriminals and state-sponsored menace actors proceed to make the most of easy accessibility to organizations’ environments. Thankfully, the fundamentals of fine cyber protection additionally stay fixed: immediate patching, phishing-resistant MFA, and complete monitoring and response.
