Cybersecurity Brief – 2025-07-15

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Major Incidents or Breaches

Louis Vuitton has notified customers in the UK, South Korea, Turkey, and possibly other countries of a data breach affecting their personal information.
McDonald’s has suffered a data breach resulting in the exposure of customer data.
Two versions of the Gravity Forms WordPress plugin, distributed via the official download page, were compromised in a supply chain attack, with malware injected into the plugin.
A malicious Visual Studio Code extension for the Cursor AI IDE led to the theft of $500,000 in cryptocurrency from a Russian crypto firm, after infecting devices with remote access tools and infostealers.
India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) dismantled a transnational cybercrime syndicate responsible for a £390,000 UK tech support scam, arresting key operatives at a Noida call center.

Multiple Gigabyte motherboard models have UEFI firmware vulnerabilities that allow attackers to bypass Secure Boot and install persistent bootkit malware invisible to the operating system and capable of surviving OS reinstalls.
Vulnerabilities in Gigabyte firmware could allow attackers to disable Secure Boot and execute code during the early boot phase, facilitating backdoor deployment.
A vulnerability in train End-of-Train and Head-of-Train radio systems allows remote attackers to trigger train brakes; this issue has been known in the industry for 20 years.
CISA has added the recently disclosed CitrixBleed 2 vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, designating it as an unacceptable risk.
Google Gemini AI assistant is vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks, allowing attackers to craft invisible, malicious prompts that can be used to display phishing messages, including when summarising emails in Google Workspace.

The Interlock ransomware group is distributing a new PHP-based variant of its remote access trojan (RAT) using a delivery mechanism called FileFix, in campaigns targeting multiple industries. The group is leveraging the KongTuke Traffic Distribution System (TDS) and legitimate websites for web-inject campaigns to gain control of victim devices.
Cybercriminals are impersonating major news outlets (CNN, BBC, CNBC) via sponsored ads and fake news websites to lure victims into investment scams.
Scattered Spider threat actor arrests have been reported, indicating law enforcement action against this group.
Exposed Git repositories continue to be a source of sensitive data leaks across enterprises, representing a persistent but often overlooked risk.

There is a reported increase in honeypot log volumes, indicating a rise in scanning and malicious activity observed on internet-facing systems.
The UserAssist Windows artifact, including previously undocumented binary data structures, has been detailed for forensic and incident response purposes, with a new parsing tool released.
Attackers are increasingly targeting supply chains, as evidenced by the compromise of the Gravity Forms WordPress plugin.
The use of prompt-injection attacks against AI assistants is an emerging tactic for phishing and social engineering.

The UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has launched the Vulnerability Research Initiative (VRI), a new programme to strengthen collaboration with external cybersecurity experts for vulnerability discovery and reporting.

Sat, 12 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A vulnerability in McHire, McDonald’s chatbot job application platform, exposed chat histories and personal data of over 64 million job applicants in the United States due to weak authentication (“123456” password) and insecure API design.
The developer account for the WordPress Gravity Forms plugin was compromised, leading to backdoored plugin installers being distributed via the official website in a supply-chain attack.
A critical vulnerability (CVE-2025-47812) in Wing FTP Server is being actively exploited in the wild, allowing attackers to execute arbitrary commands with root or system privileges.

Fortinet patched a critical SQL injection vulnerability (CVE-2025-25257) in FortiWeb that allows unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary database commands. Proof-of-concept exploits for this vulnerability have been publicly released.
Security researchers disclosed four vulnerabilities in OpenSynergy’s BlueSDK Bluetooth stack (“PerfektBlue”), which could allow remote code execution on millions of vehicles (including Mercedes, Skoda, and Volkswagen) and over a billion industrial, medical, mobile, and consumer devices.
The U.S. CISA confirmed active exploitation of the CitrixBleed 2 vulnerability (CVE-2025-5777) in Citrix NetScaler ADC and Gateway, mandating federal agencies to patch within 24 hours.
A zero-day vulnerability in OpenVSX, a popular extension marketplace, was discovered and patched. The flaw could have enabled attackers to compromise millions of developer machines via a supply chain attack.
Microsoft disclosed new attack techniques targeting AMD CPUs.
NVIDIA issued guidance recommending activation of System Level Error-Correcting Code (ECC) to mitigate Rowhammer attacks on GPUs with GDDR6 memory. Researchers demonstrated Rowhammer-based “GPUHammer” attacks that can degrade machine learning model accuracy.

The Iranian-backed Pay2Key ransomware-as-a-service operation has resurfaced, offering affiliates an increased profit share (80%) for attacks targeting Western organisations, particularly in the US and Israel. This follows recent geopolitical tensions involving Iran, Israel, and the US.
The Indian APT group DoNot is actively targeting government entities.

Researchers at Netcraft highlighted that AI-generated search engine summaries are inadvertently directing users to phishing sites when queried for legitimate login pages, posing a new phishing risk vector.
SentinelOne reported evolution in the ZuRu macOS malware family.
The 2025 Data Risk Report notes heightened data loss risks from AI-powered tools, with calls for unified, AI-driven data security strategies.
Cyber-insurance premiums are declining from previous highs, though comprehensive coverage remains vital for risk management.
There is increased emphasis on integrating cybersecurity into financial sector digital transformation strategies.
Discussion of passwordless authentication mechanisms-specifically passkeys using public key cryptography-to address the inherent risks of shared secrets in traditional password systems.

The European Union unveiled a voluntary AI Code of Practice to help businesses comply with the phased rollout of the EU AI Act.
The Irish Data Privacy Commission opened a new investigation into TikTok regarding the transfer of user data to China under EU privacy regulations.
Google did not release a scheduled July 2025 Android security patch, breaking a ten-year streak of monthly updates.