Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

In early December, Arctic Wolf Labs began observing a campaign involving suspicious activity on Fortinet FortiGate firewall devices. By gaining access to management interfaces on affected firewalls, threat actors were able to alter firewall configurations. In compromised environments, threat actors were observed extracting credentials using DCSync.

On January 8, 2025, Ivanti published a security advisory announcing the patching of a critical, actively exploited vulnerability in Ivanti Connect Secure, Policy Secure, and ZTA Gateways. Tracked as CVE-2025-0282, the vulnerability allows remote unauthenticated threat actors to achieve remote code execution (RCE) via a stack-based buffer overflow flaw. Ivanti confirmed that exploitation has only been observed in Connect Secure, and no exploitation has been reported in Policy Secure or ZTA Gateways.

Through a known vulnerability, a threat actor gains access to an organization and begins to alter the network activity, running unusual enumeration commands. Then the threat actor uses stolen credentials to log into various applications within said network. The cybersecurity monitoring solution at work, in this case Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response, subsequently picks up an IP address associated with Finland connecting to the network.

It’s the holiday season, and as we close out the year, I’ve never been more confident in the people and mission that fuel Arctic Wolf. A year ago, we set a goal to be even bolder in our commitment to define the security operations industry, while maintaining the qualities that make us great: our community, our perseverance, and our willingness to go above and beyond to delight our customers.

Since December 16, 2024, Arctic Wolf has observed increased activity in a social engineering campaign associated with Black Basta ransomware. In this campaign, threat actors were observed using Microsoft Quick Assist and Teams to impersonate IT personnel and engage in malicious activities upon contacting victims. This is a continuation of the Black Basta campaign we reported on in a security bulletin sent in June 2024.

On December 15, 2024, reports emerged that threat actors have begun attempting to exploit a recently disclosed critical vulnerability in Apache Struts (CVE-2024-53677) shortly after the publication of a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) exploit. Apache Struts is a widely used open-source web application framework for developing Java-based applications.

Since early December 2024, Arctic Wolf has been monitoring threat activity involving the malicious use of management interfaces on FortiGate firewall devices on the public internet. While our investigation into this activity is ongoing and the scope is yet to be fully determined, organizations running these products should ensure that they are adhering to security best practices for management access of firewall devices.

On December 16, 2024, BeyondTrust published a security advisory outlining a vulnerability impacting their Remote Support (RS) and Privileged Remote Access (PRA) software. The flaw, CVE-2024-12356, is a critical severity command injection vulnerability. If successfully exploited it can allow an unauthenticated remote threat actor to execute underlying operating system commands within the context of the site user.

Arctic Wolf has taken a decisive step forward in our mission to end cyber risk by acquiring Cylance, a pioneer of AI-based endpoint protection. With this acquisition, Arctic Wolf ushers a new era of simplicity and automation to the endpoint security market that will deliver the security outcomes endpoint security customers have been struggling to achieve for years.

With the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), there has been a flurry of new terms to describe an increasing variety of new problems. Some of those problems have been around for decades but are now more difficult to manage due to the versatility of AI-based tools and applications. One of those ongoing challenges is shadow IT with a new class of problems classified as shadow AI.