Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

The Arctic Wolf Labs team has identified a new campaign by cyber-espionage group Dropping Elephant targeting Turkish defense contractors, specifically a manufacturer of precision-guided missile systems. The campaign employs a five-stage execution chain delivered via malicious LNK files disguised as conference invitations sent to targets interested in learning more about unmanned vehicle systems.

On July 19, 2025, Microsoft disclosed active exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2025-53770) affecting on-premises SharePoint Server instances. Originally, no patch was available for this vulnerability, but fixes were released late on the evening of July 20. CVE-2025-53770 is caused by the deserialization of untrusted data, allowing unauthenticated threat actors to execute code remotely over the network.

In late June 2025, Arctic Wolf issued a security bulletin addressing a critical out-of-bounds read vulnerability in Citrix NetScaler ADC and Gateway that Citrix disclosed, tracked as CVE-2025-5777. This vulnerability affects NetScaler devices configured as a Gateway (VPN virtual server, ICA Proxy, CVPN, RDP Proxy) or AAA virtual server.

A financially-motivated threat actor, active since early 2021, has been targeting Mexican organizations with custom packaged installers that deliver a modified version of AllaKore RAT. Arctic Wolf documented 2022 and 2023 campaign samples from this unidentified threat actor in a previous report. We are now referring to this group as Greedy Sponge, due to its financial focus and prior use of a popular “SpongeBob” meme on its C2.

Despite growing investments and advances in cybersecurity, incidents and data breaches continue to increase year over year. From the continuous uptick of vulnerabilities to the rapidly expanding human attack surface, it’s clear that as new risk points appear, threat actors are right there, ready to take action.

Since at least February 2025, Arctic Wolf has observed Interlock Remote Access Trojan (RAT) being deployed via social engineering techniques. Recently, The DFIR Report published a technical analysis of the Interlock RAT being delivered via a social engineering technique dubbed “FileFix.” The name FileFix is derived from its similarity to the previously documented ClickFix technique using fake CAPTCHA pages.

Arctic Wolf has recently observed a widespread phishing campaign targeting multiple organizations by abusing Microsoft 365’s Direct Send feature—a feature designed for internal email delivery without requiring authentication. Threat actors can identify valid domains and recipients, then send spoofed emails that appear to originate from internal domains—often impersonating the user themself—without needing credentials or access to the tenant.

Organizational perimeters have transformed. From IoT devices and cloud infrastructure to APIs and microservices, today’s perimeters bear little resemblance to those of even the recent past — and one result of these transformations are organizations’ vastly expanded attack surfaces. Additionally, the adoption of hybrid work has imposed new requirements and introduced new challenges that influence perimeter architecture and tooling.

Arctic Wolf Customer, Proof-of-concept exploit code is now available for a high-severity arbitrary file write vulnerability in Git, which poses a risk to developers who regularly work with third-party code. If Git is used in your environment, we recommend reviewing this security bulletin and taking immediate steps to mitigate the risk.

On July 8, 2025, Fortinet released fixes for a critical vulnerability in FortiWeb that could allow an unauthenticated threat actor to execute SQL commands via crafted HTTP or HTTPS requests, tracked as CVE-2025-25257. The flaw lies in the Graphical User Interface (GUI) component and stems from improper neutralization of special elements used in SQL statements. The vulnerability was discovered by a security researcher and responsibly disclosed to Fortinet.