The Counter Risk Unit™ (CTU) analysis group analyzes safety threats to assist organizations defend their techniques. Based mostly on observations in July and August, CTU™ researchers recognized the next noteworthy points and adjustments within the world menace panorama:
- Ransomware stays a unstable menace regardless of disruptions
- Absent MFA permits exploitation of stolen credentials
- Legacy vulnerabilities preserve their worth
Ransomware stays a unstable menace regardless of disruptions
Legislation enforcement actions have made an affect on the ransomware ecosystem however haven’t decreased 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 greater 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 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, 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.
Legislation enforcement actions in opposition to main ransomware operators in 2024 and 2025 have induced fragmentation and volatility within the ransomware panorama. Sometimes, every regulation enforcement disruption evokes a brief 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 focusing 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 whole, 52 ransomware schemes have 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 probably not fashioned by new cybercriminals. As a substitute, associates who labored with disrupted operations could be a 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 enhance their assault tempo because of having extra sources. These rebrands and circulation of associates throughout current or new teams could make kill chains onerous to determine and attribution harder.
Regardless that these developments can enhance the general problem of monitoring the ransomware ecosystem, they don’t tremendously 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 changing 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 taking advantage of 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 inside techniques, even when the equipment is absolutely patched in opposition to recognized vulnerabilities. Different sorts of generally abused entry embody distant desktop logins or administrative accounts. In different phrases, strategies designed to guard licensed entry for distant workers may give attackers entry if the safety will not be sufficiently sturdy.
Risk actors typically buy the credentials on underground marketplaces. Infostealer malware steals credentials and different knowledge from techniques that it infects. The stolen knowledge is then packaged into logs and offered on-line to different menace actors. Tens of millions of logs can be found on the market, and the quantity continues to rise sharply annually. Consequently, defending techniques from infostealer infections types a key a part of defending in opposition to subsequent ransomware or knowledge extortion assaults.
Risk actors who get hold of partial credentials may additionally attempt to brute-force entry on VPN accounts. In the event that they achieve gaining entry, it’s virtually all the time as a result of the VPN doesn’t require MFA to authenticate. MFA alone doesn’t stop all unauthorized entry, however it does scale back the specter of essentially the most opportunistic cybercrime. Implementing phishing-resistant MFA on all internet-facing providers and home equipment reduces danger ranges even additional. One of these MFA makes use of hardware-backed strategies to stop token theft.
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Legacy vulnerabilities preserve their worth
Even when a vulnerability is years previous, it’s hardly ever 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 have been conducting cyberespionage assaults in opposition to U.S. and different entities by actively focusing on Cisco gadgets unpatched in opposition to a vulnerability from 2018. CTU researchers noticed comparable exercise by Russian state-sponsored menace actors in 2023.
The FBI was additionally one in every of a number of companies within the U.S. and past to situation 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 recognized frequent vulnerabilities” reasonably 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. Workers could lack consciousness of the vulnerability or not understand that impacted gear is in use. Some patches could require extra analysis or should be changed with workarounds to keep away from potential affect to different business-critical operations. In some instances, gear is so previous 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 most typical preliminary entry vectors.
The chance posed by unpatched gadgets will not be going to say no. It’s already simple to make use of freely obtainable scanning techniques and publicly obtainable exploit code to seek out and exploit weak techniques, and it’s possible that AI would possibly automate this additional. Immediate patching in keeping with enterprise danger calculations or alternative of end-of-life techniques stay extra vital than ever.
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Conclusion
Regardless of adjustments in menace group composition and will increase in assault numbers, some points of the cyber menace stay the identical. Cybercriminals and state-sponsored menace actors proceed to benefit from easy accessibility to organizations’ environments. Fortuitously, the fundamentals of excellent cyber protection additionally stay fixed: immediate patching, phishing-resistant MFA, and complete monitoring and response.
