#zero-day

#zero-day

Microsoft on Tuesday released patches for 63 new security vulnerabilities identified in its software, including one that has come under active exploitation in the wild. Of the 63 flaws, four are rated Critical and 59 are rated Important in severity. Twenty-nine of these vulnerabilities are related to privilege escalation, followed by 16 remote code execution, 11 information disclosure, three denial-of-service (DoS), two security feature bypass, and two spoofing bugs.

In July, Microsoft fixed a flaw in its file sharing service SharePoint that was already being exploited by attackers. Later that month, Microsoft warned that hackers were making use of the zero-day to distribute ransomware, adding even more risk to the serious vulnerability. The SharePoint flaw is just one example of attackers becoming faster at exploiting vulnerabilities before they can be properly addressed by vendors and patched by organizations.

The activity, codenamed Operation Zero Disco by Trend Micro, involves the weaponization of CVE-2025-20352 (CVSS score: 7.7), a stack overflow vulnerability in the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) subsystem that could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code by sending crafted SNMP packets to a susceptible device. The intrusions have not been attributed to any known threat actor or group.

Tracked as CVE-2025-20333 (CVSS score of 9.9) and CVE-2025-20362 (CVSS score of 6.5), the bugs impact the VPN web server of Cisco Secure Firewall Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) and Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) software. The issues, Cisco explains, exist because user-supplied input in HTTP(S) requests is not properly validated, allowing a remote attacker to send crafted requests and execute arbitrary code with root privileges or access a restricted URL without authentication.

Apple has shipped emergency updates to fix an actively exploited zero-day in its ImageIO framework, warning that the flaw has already been abused in targeted attacks. Logged as CVE-2025-43300, the bug is an out-of-bounds write issue in ImageIO, the component apps rely on to read and write standard image formats. Apple warned that the flaw could let miscreants hijack devices with a booby-trapped image - and for some iDevice users, it sounds like the damage has already been done.

CVE-2025-53770 gives a threat actor the ability to remotely execute code, bypassing identity protections (like single sign-on and multi-factor authentication), giving access to content on the SharePoint server including configurations and system files, opening up lateral access across the Windows domain.