Cybersecurity Brief – 2025-11-19
Major Incidents or Breaches
- The Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office confirmed a data breach following a ransomware attack by the Inc Ransom group, which claims to have stolen several terabytes of data.
- Princeton University disclosed a data breach affecting alumni, donors, faculty, students, and parents, with hackers accessing a database containing personal information.
- Eurofiber France suffered a breach where a threat actor exploited a vulnerability, exfiltrated data, and attempted extortion.
- French social security agency Pajemploi reported a data breach potentially exposing the personal information of 1.2 million individuals.
- DoorDash disclosed a data breach involving theft of customer names and addresses.
- A simple flaw in WhatsApp’s contact discovery tool exposed up to 3.5 billion phone numbers, along with profile photos and other data, by allowing mass enumeration.
- Cloudflare experienced a global outage affecting multiple major online services, though it was confirmed not to be caused by a cyberattack.
Newly Discovered Vulnerabilities
- Fortinet released patches for a new FortiWeb zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2025-58034, CVSS 6.7) that is being actively exploited in the wild.
- Google released an emergency update to address a new Chrome zero-day vulnerability under active exploitation, marking the seventh Chrome zero-day exploited this year.
- Researchers identified that exposed Ray clusters are being hijacked via an old code execution flaw in a campaign dubbed ShadowRay 2.0, converting them into a cryptomining botnet.
- IoT devices remain susceptible to takeover via gaps in cloud management interfaces for firewalls and routers, even if protected by security software or not directly online.
Notable Threat Actor Activity
- Iranian-linked threat actors, including UNC1549, have been observed targeting aerospace and defense sectors in the US, Israel, UAE, Qatar, Spain, and Saudi Arabia, deploying backdoors such as TWOSTROKE and DEEPROOT.
- The Inc Ransom group claimed responsibility for the ransomware attack and data breach at the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office.
- A new phishing kit is impersonating the Italian IT provider Aruba, targeting Italian entities to steal credentials.
- MI5 warned UK lawmakers that Chinese intelligence operatives are using LinkedIn for large-scale outreach and espionage efforts.
- Seven malicious npm packages were discovered using Adspect cloaking to differentiate between security researchers and real victims, redirecting the latter to cryptocurrency scam pages.
Trends, Tools, or Tactics of Interest
- Phishing-as-a-Service (PhaaS) kit Sneaky 2FA has added Browser-in-the-Browser (BitB) pop-up functionality to better mimic legitimate login processes and bypass 2FA.
- The Tycoon 2FA phishing platform has enabled real-time MFA relays, supporting over 64,000 attacks this year, highlighting the ongoing collapse of legacy MFA when targeted by advanced phishing kits.
- Tuoni C2, a nascent command-and-control and red teaming framework, was used in a recent attempted cyber intrusion targeting a major US real-estate company.
- Microsoft mitigated a record-breaking 15.72 Tbps DDoS attack against an endpoint in Australia, attributed to the AISURU botnet.
- Enterprises are increasingly leveraging dark web search engines for credential leak monitoring, impersonation detection, and supply chain exposure analysis using APIs and IOC hunting.
- Bug bounty programs continue to rise as a key strategic security solution, with Meta alone paying out $4 million in 2025 and launching new tools to support security research on WhatsApp.
- Microsoft announced native integration of Sysmon into Windows 11 and Server 2025, eliminating the need for standalone deployment.
- New Windows 11 features, Cloud Rebuild and Point-in-Time Restore, aim to streamline system recovery and reduce downtime.
- Microsoft Teams will soon allow users to report messages incorrectly flagged as threats, refining threat detection accuracy.
- Thunderbird 145 now supports native connectivity to Microsoft Exchange via EWS protocol.
Regulatory or Policy Developments Affecting the Security Industry
- MI5 issued a formal warning to UK lawmakers regarding ongoing Chinese espionage campaigns leveraging professional networking platforms.