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.