The Counter Risk Unit™ (CTU) analysis staff analyzes safety threats to assist organizations shield their methods. Based mostly on observations in July and August, CTU™ researchers recognized the next noteworthy points and modifications 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 influence on the ransomware ecosystem however haven’t decreased the variety of assaults.
Ransomware continues to pose a serious 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 larger than in the identical months of 2024. Regardless of the quantity of media consideration dedicated to high-profile ransomware and information 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 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.
Legislation enforcement actions towards main ransomware operators in 2024 and 2025 have triggered fragmentation and volatility within the ransomware panorama. Usually, every legislation enforcement disruption evokes 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 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 complete, 52 ransomware schemes had 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 doubtless not shaped 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 might also be rebrands of older operations. Associates could alternatively transfer to established operations similar to Akira that then improve their assault tempo on account of having extra sources. These rebrands and circulation of associates throughout current or new teams could make kill chains laborious to establish and attribution tougher.
Regardless that these developments can improve the general problem of monitoring the ransomware ecosystem, they don’t vastly change the important thing defenses towards most ransomware assaults: immediate patching, particularly of internet-facing units; 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 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 surroundings 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 absolutely patched towards 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 isn’t sufficiently sturdy.
Risk actors usually buy the credentials on underground marketplaces. Infostealer malware steals credentials and different information from methods that it infects. The stolen information 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 every year. Consequently, defending methods from infostealer infections varieties a key a part of defending towards subsequent ransomware or information extortion assaults.
Risk actors who acquire partial credentials might also attempt to brute-force entry on VPN accounts. In the event that they reach 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, 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 danger ranges even additional. Such a 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 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 focusing on Cisco units unpatched towards a vulnerability from 2018. CTU researchers noticed related exercise by Russian state-sponsored menace actors in 2023.
The FBI was additionally one among a number of companies within the U.S. and past to concern 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 widespread vulnerabilities” somewhat 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 units.
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 tools is in use. Some patches could require further analysis or must be changed with workarounds to keep away from potential influence to different business-critical operations. In some circumstances, tools is so previous that distributors now not publish safety updates. Nonetheless, unpatched edge units put organizations in danger. Throughout incident response engagements that CTU researchers noticed in 2024, vulnerabilities in internet-facing units had been the most typical preliminary entry vectors.
The danger posed by unpatched units isn’t going to say no. It’s already simple to make use of freely out there scanning methods and publicly out there exploit code to search out and exploit susceptible methods, and it’s possible that AI may automate this additional. Immediate patching in accordance with enterprise danger calculations or alternative of end-of-life methods stay extra necessary than ever.
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Conclusion
Regardless of modifications 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 reap the benefits of easy accessibility to organizations’ environments. Luckily, the fundamentals of fine cyber protection additionally stay fixed: immediate patching, phishing-resistant MFA, and complete monitoring and response.
