Connecting Vulnerability Intelligence to Real-World Exposure With Flashpoint EASM
In this post, we explore how Flashpoint’s External Attack Surface Management (EASM) capability helps organizations continuously discover internet-facing assets, identify exposure to critical vulnerabilities, and prioritize remediation efforts based on real-world risk.
The volume of vulnerability disclosures is higher than ever, yet most security teams are still struggling to act.
From vulnerability scanners to public sources and AI-accelerated discovery, organizations are often drowning in findings, but lack the context to prioritize what affects their perimeter and is actively being exploited.
Compounding this challenge is the growing issue of unknown and forgotten assets. Up to 95% of a company’s assets change each year, creating critical external blind spots and leaving them vulnerable to attacks on unmonitored infrastructure.
As attack surfaces expand due to cloud adoption, shadow IT, acquisitions, and distributed environments, many organizations struggle to maintain control over what assets they own, what software is running on those assets, and therefore, where exposures exist. You can’t patch what you don’t know is there.
These are the challenges Flashpoint External Attack Surface Management (EASM) is designed to address. With the introduction of EASM in Flashpoint Ignite, organizations can continuously discover internet-facing assets, map them to Flashpoint Vulnerability Intelligence, and prioritize remediation efforts based on actual risk rather than vulnerability volume and severity alone.
“The most effective vulnerability management programs are built on more than vulnerability awareness alone,” said Josh Lefkowitz, Co-Founder and CEO of Flashpoint. “Organizations need to understand where exposure exists within their environment and focus remediation efforts where they will have the greatest impact. Flashpoint EASM helps connect vulnerability intelligence directly to exposed assets, giving security teams a clear path from identification to remediation.”
Understanding the Exposure Gap
For many organizations, vulnerability intelligence is no longer the limiting factor.
Security teams have access to more vulnerability data than ever before. They can track newly disclosed vulnerabilities, monitor exploit activity, review KEV catalogs, and identify emerging threats often within hours of disclosure. And Flashpoint customers get the added advantage of learning about vulnerabilities up to 2 weeks faster than NVD, as well as the growing 105K+ vulnerabilities that never make it to public sources.
But understanding whether those vulnerabilities affect assets the organization actually owns remains a challenge. And that challenge exists because asset visibility and vulnerability intelligence often live in separate workflows.
Asset inventories become outdated.
Cloud infrastructure changes constantly.
New internet-facing services appear without centralized oversight.
Acquisitions introduce unfamiliar infrastructure.
Shadow IT creates blind spots that security teams may not discover until after exposure is identified.
As environments become more dynamic, validating exposure often requires analysts to pivot between scanners, spreadsheets, asset inventories, cloud consoles, and vulnerability intelligence sources.
As a result, organizations must face a growing disconnect between understanding which vulnerabilities are out there vs. whether the organization is actually at risk.
Connecting Asset Discovery to Vulnerability Intelligence
Flashpoint EASM begins by discovering internet-facing assets associated with an organization, giving security teams an attacker’s-eye view of their external perimeter. Using seed domains and IP addresses, it initiates ongoing discovery across the external environment, uncovering infrastructure that often evades internal tracking, including:
Shadow IT and untracked cloud resources
Forgotten infrastructure and legacy internet-facing assets
Newly exposed services and subdomains
Once assets are validated, they are surfaced within Ignite and automatically correlated with Flashpoint Vulnerability Intelligence, including pre-NVD findings, KEV intelligence, and proprietary vulnerability coverage beyond public sources. Teams receive alerts when new assets are discovered and when newly identified vulnerabilities affect monitored assets. For a full walkthrough of the workflow, see the Flashpoint EASM product update.
Prioritizing What Actually Requires Action
Not every vulnerability on your attack surface demands the same response. Flashpoint EASM helps teams cut through the noise by combining asset exposure with intelligence on what attackers are actively exploiting, so remediation efforts focus on the vulnerabilities that create meaningful risk.
Rather than focusing on vulnerability severity alone, security teams can now prioritize based on actual exploit activity targeting their attack surface. Flashpoint EASM provides the clarity needed to make that shift.
Building a Continuously Monitored, De-Risked Perimeter
As attack surfaces continue to evolve, organizations need full attack surface visibility, intelligence on what attackers are exploiting, and an efficient path to remediation.
By connecting Flashpoint Vulnerability Intelligence directly to their exposed assets, organizations can move from reactive investigation to having confidence that their external perimeter is continuously monitored and de-risked.
Learn more about Flashpoint External Attack Surface Management and request a demo.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is External Attack Surface Management (EASM)?
External Attack Surface Management (EASM) helps organizations discover, monitor, and assess internet-facing assets that could be exposed to attackers.
This includes domains, subdomains, IP addresses, cloud infrastructure, internet-accessible services, and other externally exposed assets that may introduce security risk.
By continuously monitoring these assets, organizations can better understand their external attack surface and identify exposures that require remediation.
How is Flashpoint EASM different from traditional asset inventories?
Traditional asset inventories, CMDBs, and internal scanners often depend on manual updates and may not reflect the full scope of an organization’s internet-facing environment.
Flashpoint EASM continuously discovers external assets and maps them to Flashpoint Vulnerability Intelligence, helping organizations identify exposures that may otherwise remain difficult to track through static inventories alone.
Why is attack surface visibility important?
As organizations adopt cloud services, acquire new businesses, deploy new applications, and support distributed environments, external attack surfaces change constantly.
Without continuous visibility, security teams may struggle to identify unknown assets, shadow IT, forgotten infrastructure, or newly exposed services that increase organizational risk.
How does Flashpoint EASM help prioritize remediation?
Knowing a vulnerability is severe is only half the picture. Flashpoint EASM correlates discovered assets with our proprietary vulnerability intelligence, including KEV data and pre-NVD findings, so teams can prioritize based on the severity of vulnerabilities present on their actual attack surface.
What vulnerability intelligence is included?
Flashpoint EASM integrates directly with Flashpoint Vulnerability Intelligence, including:
Proprietary vulnerability coverage beyond public sources
Pre-NVD vulnerability findings
Known Exploited Vulnerability (KEV) intelligence
Vulnerability enrichment and contextual risk information
This allows organizations to understand both exposure and vulnerability relevance within a single workflow.
Does Flashpoint EASM support continuous monitoring?
Yes. Once assets are discovered and validated, Flashpoint EASM continuously monitors the external attack surface for newly identified assets, vulnerable software, exposed services, and relevant vulnerability findings.
Teams can receive alerts when new exposure risks are identified.
How does Flashpoint EASM reduce alert fatigue?
Traditional vulnerability programs generate large volumes of findings without clarity on whether those assets are actually owned or exposed. Flashpoint EASM’s triage inbox lets teams accept true assets and reject noise, ensuring alerts are scoped only to infrastructure the organization actually owns.
Who should use Flashpoint EASM?
Flashpoint EASM is designed for security teams responsible for:
Vulnerability management
Attack surface management
Exposure management
Threat intelligence
Security operations
Risk management
It is particularly valuable for organizations seeking to connect vulnerability intelligence to real-world asset exposure and remediation priorities.
How does Flashpoint EASM work with Flashpoint Vulnerability Intelligence?
Flashpoint EASM extends the value of Flashpoint Vulnerability Intelligence by helping organizations understand where vulnerable assets exist within their external environment.
Rather than viewing vulnerability intelligence and attack surface visibility separately, organizations can use both capabilities together to identify exposure, prioritize remediation, and reduce risk more effectively.
The Mini Shai-Hulud Worm and the New Era of CI/CD Exploitation
In this post we break down the technical mechanics of TeamPCP’s recent campaign, the impact on the developer ecosystem, and the urgent steps needed to secure software supply chains.
The developer ecosystem recently faced one of its most significant architectural threats to date, with the threat actor group TeamPCP unleashing Mini Shai-Hulud—a self propagating worm and multi-ecosystem threat. Potentially affecting millions of developers and thousands of companies, Mini Shai-Hulud has fundamentally compromised the trust layer of modern CI/CD pipelines.
The operational tempo of Mini Shai-Hulud has accelerated with every campaign. What began as opportunistic credential theft has now evolved into a high-speed, automated operation that can compromise hundreds of packages in under thirty minutes. From the exfiltration of approximately 3,800 internal GitHub repositories to the poisoning of critical libraries like TanStack and AntV, TeamPCP’s campaign has been incredibly effective in exploiting developer tooling and identity infrastructure.
What is Mini Shai-Hulud?
Mini Shai-Hulud is deployed as a 498 KB obfuscated script executed using the Bun JavaScript runtime. The deliberate choice of Bun, rather than Node.js, is a tactical evasion technique as most endpoint detection and response (EDR) platforms and security information and event management (SIEM) solutions have behavioral rules tuned to Node.js execution patterns.
How Mini Shai-Hulud Works
The worm propagates by stealing npm and GitHub authentication (OIDC) tokens from developer environments, then using those credentials to publish malicious versions of packages the compromised user maintains. To accomplish this, the worm scrapes runner process memory to extract short-lived identity tokens, which it then exchanges for per-package npm trusted-publisher tokens without requiring any long-lived npm secrets.
Credential Exfiltration and Command-and-Control
Mini Shai-Hulud targets credentials across 130 file paths, including npm tokens, GitHub personal access tokens, AWS, GCP, and Azure configuration files, Kubernetes kubeconfig files, Docker credentials, HashiCorp Vault tokens, 1Password and Bitwarden CLI vaults, SSH private keys, and Bitcoin wallet files.
Exfiltration occurs across multiple channels: the Session Protocol network, the GitHub Git Data API using dynamically created Dune-themed repositories on victim accounts, HTTPS to the threat actor-controlled domain, and an api for GitHub Actions workflow exfiltration.
The worm uses a dead-drop command-and-control (C2) architecture via GitHub’s public commit search API. An installed daemon (kitty-monitor, deployed as a systemd service on Linux or a LaunchAgent on macOS) polls GitHub for commits containing the string “firedalazer,” parses RSA-PSS-signed command payloads from matching commits, and executes them. This technique leverages GitHub as a trusted relay, making C2 traffic difficult to block without disrupting legitimate GitHub usage.
The worm then uses a persistence mechanism as a dead-man’s switch: a GitHub personal access token named “IfYouRevokeThisTokenItWillWipeTheComputerOfTheOwner” is created on compromised developer machines. If an operator revokes this token without first disabling the persistence mechanism, the worm destroys all home directory data on the compromised device.
AI Agent Hijacking
Beyond standard persistence mechanisms, Mini Shai-Hulud targets AI coding agents. The SafeDep analysis documents that the worm modifies Claude Code’s settings .json to insert a SessionStart hook, enabling the worm to be reinstated with full LLM API privileges even if the infected npm packages are later removed, or the npm cache is cleared. A similar technique targets Visual Studio Code’s tasks.json file using the “runOn”: “folderOpen” trigger, and Codex configuration files are also targeted.
These AI agent hijacking techniques represent a novel attack surface: by persisting within trusted AI tool configurations, the malware can exfiltrate all code and secrets processed by those tools during future development sessions.
Four Waves of Supply Chain Attacks
Flashpoint has observed at least four documented waves of TeamPCP npm and PyPI supply chain attacks in 2026, leveraging Mini Shai-Hulud to compromise developer tooling ecosystems and steal credentials, cloud keys, and source code across tens of thousands of organizations.
The following timeline tracks the escalation of TeamPCP and the Mini Shai-Hulud waves throughout 2026:
Wave 1: Initial SAP Packages (April 2026)
The first documented wave of Mini Shai-Hulud attacks targeted a small number of SAP-ecosystem npm packages in April 2026. While TeamPCP had already proven their CI/CD attack capabilities in March 2026 by compromising Aqua Security’s Trivy scanner and Checkmarx KICS via GitHub Actions, this initial wave served primarily as a proof-of-concept for the self-propagation mechanism and a reconnaissance phase for TeamPCP’s access broker network. Further, these attacks demonstrated the group’s ability to compromise widely used security tooling—a development that significantly undermines defenders’ ability to trust automated CI/CD pipeline scanning results.
Wave 2: TanStack, Mistral AI, and Guardrails AI (May 2026)
Leveraging a GitHub Actions cache-poisoning technique, TeamPCP published malicious versions of 42 TanStack packages across 84 releases, impacting a project with over 518 million cumulative downloads.
The attack also compromised Mistral AI and Guardrails AI, extending the attack surface to the AI developer tools ecosystem. Forged commit authorship was used to blend the attacker’s commits into AI-assisted development environments where Claude Code is commonly deployed.
TeamPCP simultaneously listed Mistral AI source code for sale on BreachForums, claiming possession of approximately 5 GB of data across 450 internal Mistral repositories.
TeamPCP BreachForums posts advertising Mistral AI internal source code and repositories for sale, May 2026. (Source: Flashpoint)
Wave 3: AntV Ecosystem (May 2026)
Targeting AntV enterprise data visualization ecosystem, TeamPCP compromised the atool npm account, which held publishing rights across a broad catalog of AntV packages. In 22 minutes, 637 malicious versions were published across 323 packages—a scale and speed that overwhelmed standard security monitoring pipelines.
Each infected package contained the Mini Shai-Hulud worm, which, upon execution, created up to 2,500 compromised repositories on victim accounts within hours.
Wave 4: Co-Ownership of BreachForums and GitHub Breach
In the most recent wave, TeamPCP announced its assumption of co-ownership of BreachForums, the largest English-language cybercriminal forum currently active. This development significantly elevates TeamPCP’s standing and operational reach. As co-owners, the group stated it would manage platform operations, handle dispute resolution, staff and vet moderation personnel, and host monetary contests for the community. The announcement positions TeamPCP as both an active threat actor and a platform-level infrastructure operator, with the ability to shape forum policies, curate the availability of criminal tooling, and influence the broader access broker and ransomware ecosystem.
Additionally, by poisoning a GitHub employee’s development environment, TeamPCP exfiltrated approximately 3,800 internal GitHub repositories. Within the stolen data were highly sensitive codebases such as:
copilot-api and copilot-token-service
actions-runtime
billing-platform
enterprise-crypto
authentication
codeql-core
detection-engineering
csirt
azure-config
TeamPCP BreachForums posts advertising GitHub internal source code for sale. (Source: Flashpoint)
Recommended Immediate Actions
Critically, the theft of internal source code from one of the world’s most widely used code hosting platforms creates incredible downstream risk for organizations that depend on GitHub Copilot and GitHub Actions for their own software development pipelines. Organizations running AI coding agents such as Claude Code and VS Code with extensions in their CI/CD pipelines face heightened exposure. Security teams should treat AI agent configuration files as sensitive assets subject to integrity monitoring and change-control policies.
If your organization uses npm, PyPi, or AI-assisted development tools, Flashpoint recommends the following immediate steps:
Audit and remove: Immediately audit CI/CD environments and remove all infected versions of AntV, TanStack, Mistral AI, and Bitwarden CLI packages.
Rotate credentials: Rotate all cloud credentials (AWS, GCP, Azure) and npm tokens.
Disable persistence first: Before revoking suspicious GitHub tokens, ensure the kitty-monitor daemon is disabled to avoid triggering the “dead-man’s switch” wiper.
Lock down IDEs: Restrict the installation of VS Code extensions to an approved allow-list and monitor for unauthorized changes to settings.json or tasks.json.
Block C2 infrastructure: Block all traffic to identified TeamPCP C2 domains.
Track TeamPCP and Defend against Mini Shai-Hulud Using Flashpoint
Flashpoint assesses with high confidence that TeamPCP will continue to scale its supply-chain attacks against npm, PyPI, and developer tooling ecosystems. The group’s shift from direct execution to orchestrating a broader ecosystem via BreachForums signals a maturation into a platform-layer criminal operation. While TeamPCP has hinted that the group may be approaching “retirement” due to law enforcement pressure, this should be treated with caution. Whether a misdirection or a genuine exit plan, the open-sourcing of Shai-Hulud means the tradecraft is available to the wider cybercriminal community.
Organizations should reference the OpenSSF npm Best Practices guidance for a practical baseline in hardening their package consumption posture. Flashpoint customers can gain access to known Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) and MITRE ATT&CK Mapping for Mini Shai-Hulud by logging into Flashpoint Ignite. To learn more about how Flashpoint tracks threat actor groups like TeamPCP and protects the software supply chain, request a demo.
National Vulnerability Database (NVD) Shifts to Selective Enrichment as CVE Volume Surges
In this post, we examine what NVD’s shift to selective enrichment means for vulnerability workflows and how security teams can maintain visibility and prioritization at scale.
The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) is changing how it processes and enriches vulnerability data in response to sustained growth in CVE submissions.
Under a new model announced by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NVD will no longer enrich every CVE. Instead, enrichment efforts will focus on a defined subset, including vulnerabilities in the CISA KEV catalog, software used by the federal government, and software designated as critical.
All other CVEs will remain in the database without additional context unless specifically requested.
Rising disclosure volumes are placing pressure on public vulnerability infrastructure, and it has direct implications for how security teams consume and act on vulnerability data.
What Changed in NVD’s Operating Model
For years, NVD aimed to provide consistent enrichment across all CVEs, including severity scoring, affected product data, and supporting context for prioritization.
That approach has not been sustainable since late 2023.
In 2025, Flashpoint tracked 44,509 disclosed vulnerabilities, 14,593 of which had publicly available exploits (and 1,944 more with proof-of-concepts).
CVE submissions increased by 263% between 2020 and 2025, with 2026 already tracking higher year-over-year. Even with increased throughput, NVD has not been able to keep pace.
Under the updated model:
CVEs meeting prioritization criteria will be enriched on an accelerated timeline
CVEs outside those criteria will be labeled and left without enrichment
Re-analysis of modified CVEs will occur selectively
Separate NVD severity scoring will no longer be applied by default
This introduces a significant structural change in how vulnerability data is published and maintained.
The Impact on Vulnerability Workflows
Many security programs rely on NVD enrichment to operationalize CVE data. That enrichment provides the context needed to evaluate risk and determine remediation priorities.
With enrichment applied selectively, teams will encounter a growing number of CVEs that include:
Limited or no severity scoring
Incomplete product and version data
Minimal context on exploitability or impact
No CPE strings that allow for programmatic consumption of data
At the same time, disclosure volume continues to rise, and exploitation timelines remain compressed. This creates a gap between what is disclosed and what can be acted on efficiently.
Security teams will need to account for:
Larger backlogs of CVEs without actionable context
Increased manual effort to evaluate relevance and risk
Greater variability in data quality across sources
These changes affect vulnerability management, threat intelligence, and security operations workflows simultaneously.
Prioritization Criteria Will Not Capture the Full Risk Landscape
NVD’s updated model focuses enrichment on a defined set of criteria, including known exploited vulnerabilities and software relevant to federal systems.
These categories represent important segments of risk, but they do not encompass the full set of vulnerabilities that organizations encounter in practice.
Modern environments include:
Open-source dependencies
SaaS platforms and APIs
Cloud infrastructure and services
Third-party and partner integrations
Many vulnerabilities affecting these environments fall outside formal prioritization frameworks or lack immediate classification within public datasets. As a result, security teams will continue to face exposure from vulnerabilities that are:
Actively exploited but not yet included in prioritized lists
Missing complete metadata or enrichment
Relevant to their environment but not captured by federal-centric criteria
Vulnerability Intelligence Requires Broader Coverage and Deeper Context
As public enrichment becomes more selective, organizations will rely more heavily on alternative sources to maintain visibility and context.
Continuous tracking of exploitation activity and adversary usage
Context on exploit maturity, and remediation
Consistent enrichment that can be integrated into operational workflows
This level of detail supports faster and more accurate decision-making in environments where both volume and speed are increasing.
Flashpoint’s vulnerability intelligence model is built to address these requirements, with a dataset that includes over 7,000 known exploited vulnerabilities and ongoing analyst-driven enrichment across global sources.
What Security Teams Should Do Next
This shift in NVD operations does not change the need to track CVEs. It changes how that data can be used. Security teams should evaluate how their current workflows depend on:
NVD enrichment for prioritization
CVSS scoring as a primary decision input
Completeness of public vulnerability data
From there, teams can take steps to strengthen resilience:
Incorporate sources of vulnerability intelligence that cover CVE and more
Align prioritization to exploitation activity and environmental relevance
Validate coverage across software, cloud, and third-party dependencies
Ensure that enrichment gaps do not delay remediation decisions
A Structural Shift in Vulnerability Data
For many teams, NVD has been a default source of vulnerability context. This change makes clear that its role is narrowing at a time when disclosure volume and prioritization demands are increasing.
At the same time, the role of vulnerability intelligence is expanding.
Security teams need access to data that supports prioritization, not just identification. They need consistent enrichment, faster turnaround, broader coverage, and context tied to real-world activity. As disclosure volumes continue to grow, those requirements become more central to how organizations manage risk.
Flashpoint’s Vulnerability Intelligence provides this level of coverage and context, with analyst-driven enrichment, global visibility across CVE and non-CVE vulnerabilities, and a dataset that includes over 7,000 known exploited vulnerabilities.
Request a demo to see how Flashpoint helps security teams prioritize and act on vulnerability risk with greater precision and confidence.
Flashpoint Surpasses Cataloging 7,000 Known Exploited Vulnerabilities as Disclosure Volume Accelerates
In this post we explore Flashpoint’s latest milestone of surpassing cataloging 7,000 known exploited vulnerabilities and what this means for security teams.
Flashpoint Vulnerability Intelligence has surpassed cataloging 7,000 known exploited vulnerabilities, surpassing another major milestone as vulnerability disclosures accelerate across the global attack surface.
In 2025, Flashpoint tracked 44,509 disclosed vulnerabilities, a pace that continues to accelerate into 2026. Of those, 14,593 had publicly available exploits (1,944 more with proof-of-concepts), giving threat actors immediate pathways to weaponization.
This pace is shaping how exploitation unfolds, with high-impact vulnerabilities being operationalized within hours or days, particularly when they affect widely deployed technologies or core infrastructure.
Security teams are operating within this compressed environment every day. They are reviewing more findings across open-source software, commercial applications, cloud environments, and third-party dependencies, while working within tighter timelines to assess impact and take action.
Flashpoint’s latest milestone of surpassing 7,000 known exploited vulnerabilities (KEVs) cataloged reflects that reality. It highlights how vulnerability management programs are evolving toward prioritization as a core capability, with a focus on vulnerabilities tied to active exploitation and real-world risk.
What The 7,000+ KEV Milestone Means for You
Security teams are operating in a high-volume environment. Vulnerabilities are disclosed continuously across open-source software, commercial applications, cloud environments, and third-party dependencies. At the same time, advancements in automation and code analysis are increasing the rate at which new findings are surfaced.
Each of these findings enters an already crowded workflow. Teams are expected to determine relevance, urgency, and impact quickly, often with limited context. This is where risk-based decision making becomes essential.
Flashpoint tracks hundreds of thousands of vulnerabilities across thousands of sources. Within that dataset, a much smaller percentage shows confirmed exploitation activity. That concentration of risk informs how effective programs allocate time and resources.
Crossing the 7,000+ KEV milestone goes beyond scale to provide greater precision, deeper context, and stronger confidence in how teams prioritize and act on the most critical vulnerabilities.
Validated threats: Each KEV entry reflects observed exploitation in the wild by threat actors, including APT groups, cybercriminal operations, ransomware presence, and automated botnets.
Exploit-aware prioritization: In reality, only a small percentage of tracked vulnerabilities drive real-world incidents. FP KEV provides visibility into that subset so teams can focus remediation efforts where they have immediate impact.
Human-curated intelligence: Every entry is reviewed, validated, and enriched by analysts, with context on exploit maturity, adversary usage, and remediation pathways when available.
This level of clarity allows teams to move faster without sacrificing accuracy. It supports vulnerability management programs that are built around real-world attacker behavior and aligned to current risk.
How Public Vulnerability Data Fits Into the Picture
Public vulnerability catalogs remain useful reference points for tracking disclosures and confirmed exploitation. The CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, for example, gives security teams a curated view into a limited set of vulnerabilities that have been exploited in the wild that impact U.S. government stakeholders.
For many organizations, though, that level of visibility is not enough.
Public catalogs capture only part of the picture. They tend to reflect a narrower slice of exploitation activity, with less detail on how vulnerabilities are being used, which actors are leveraging them, and what defenders should do next. They also rely heavily on CVE-based tracking, leaving gaps around non-CVE exposures and other vulnerabilities that still carry operational risk.
Flashpoint’s FP KEV and Vulnerability Intelligence provide a broader and more actionable view. The advantage is visible in both scale and depth. Of the 7,000 known exploited vulnerabilities in FP KEV, over 800 are missing from CVE. That expanded coverage is paired with the context security teams need to prioritize effectively, including exploit maturity, adversary mapping, affected product detail, and remediation guidance.
Dimension
Public KEV Catalogs
Flashpoint FP KEV
Scope
Varies by provider, with coverage dependent on available sources and methodology
Global, cross-industry coverage
Coverage
CVE-based tracking
CVE and non-CVE vulnerabilities
Context
Limited enrichment
Exploit maturity, adversary mapping, remediation
Update Model
Periodic updates
Continuously updated with analyst input
This is what separates a reference list from an operational dataset. Teams need vulnerability intelligence that supports triage, remediation, reporting, and broader risk reduction efforts. Wider visibility and deeper context make that possible.
The Critical Role of Human-Curated Intelligence
Vulnerability data originates from a wide range of sources with varying levels of completeness and accuracy.
Flashpoint’s intelligence model includes analyst validation to ensure consistency and depth across the dataset.
This process includes:
Reviewing disclosures across public and private sources
Validating exploit availability and usage
Enriching entries with technical and operational context
Analyst input supports:
Accurate classification of vulnerabilities
Clear understanding of exploitation pathways
Timely updates as activity evolves
Supporting Decision-Making Across Teams
Vulnerability intelligence feeds multiple functions across an organization. Teams use this data to align technical actions with current threat activity.
Common use cases include:
Vulnerability management: Align patching priorities with active exploitation trends.
Threat intelligence: Map vulnerabilities to threat actor campaigns and observed behaviors.
Security operations: Tune detection based on known exploit techniques.
Executive reporting: Communicate risk posture using data tied to real-world activity.
Each of these functions relies on consistent, enriched intelligence to maintain alignment.
Proactively Address Vulnerability Risk
Vulnerability discovery continues to expand across software ecosystems, infrastructure, and identity layers.
Security teams require a clear understanding of which issues are relevant to their environment at any given time.
Flashpoint provides primary source intelligence that supports this need through:
Continuous monitoring of vulnerability disclosures and exploitation
Analyst-driven validation and enrichment
Integration-ready data for operational workflows
This approach enables teams to maintain focus, allocate resources effectively, and respond to risk based on current threat activity. Request a demo and learn more today.
As organizations scale their cloud infrastructure, maintaining proper lifecycle management of Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) is a critical component of their security and risk management goals. AMIs provide the essential information required to launch Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, however; they present security and compliance challenges if not tracked and managed throughout their lifecycle. This blog post explores how organizations can meet their evolving security and compliance requirements by managing potential vulnerabilities across the AMIs deployed throughout their AWS environment.
At the end of 2024, AWS announced lineage supportfor Amazon EC2, providing source details for your AMIs. With this lineage information, you can trace copied or derived AMIs back to their original source. The source AMI information is available for AMIs that were created using specific API commands like CreateImage, CopyImage, and CreateRestoreImageTask. If the AMI was created using a different API command, the ID and AWS Region of the source AMI don’t appear, which can create visibility gaps that potentially impact security and compliance efforts.
To address these gaps and provide comprehensive AMI governance, organizations need to build additional capabilities to analyze the scope of impact of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), ensure deployed resources originate from an approved golden image, and respond to audit inquiries that require a clear chain of custody for AMIs. A well-designed solution should also help track and enforce approved AMI creation patterns across all accounts and AWS Regions. The AMI lineage solution described in this post is designed to help you manage your organization’s AMI hierarchy and lifecycle, including tracking AMI origins and usage throughout its AWS environment. By implementing this solution, your security teams can quickly understand the scope of impact when security vulnerabilities are discovered, help ensure compliance with organizational policies, and maintain better visibility into their AMI estate.
The solution in this blog post uses Amazon Neptune, a high-performance graph database, along with native AWS security services to maintain a comprehensive view of AMI relationships and enable proactive security monitoring. With the solution in place, you can enforce controls on AMI sourcing, including validation of marketplace AMIs through service control policies (SCPs), and maintain compliance with organizational and regulatory requirements throughout the AMI lifecycle.
Solution overview
AMI Lineage provides a comprehensive governance solution that uses AWS security services and Neptune to create and maintain a hierarchical graph representation of their AMI relationships. This solution helps security and compliance teams understand the complete history of their AMIs including where they originated from, enforce organizational policies such as requiring all AMIs to be encrypted, and rapidly assess security impacts across their organization. The solution integrates core AWS services with security and governance capabilities. The core components of the solution in the security tooling account are:
Neptune: A purpose-built, high-performance graph database securely stores and manages the AMI relationship data.
AWS Lambdafunctions serve as the processing engine for the solution. They process AMI lifecycle events (such as CreateImage, CopyImage, DeregisterImage), evaluate them against compliance rules, and update the Neptune graph database. The functions are configured with least-privilege AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) permissions to enhance security.
Amazon API Gateway provides secure REST endpoints for lineage queries and security assessments. Authentication is handled using a combination of API keys and IAM roles to help ensure that only authorized users and systems can access the data.
From a governance perspective, this solution provides comprehensive AMI origin validation to help ensure AMIs come from approved sources, including the validation of AWS Marketplace AMIs against a list of trusted vendors. Lifecycle management capabilities enforce AMI retention policies and deprecation processes. Compliance monitoring tracks adherence to organizational and regulatory requirements, while security event scope assessment capabilities quickly identify affected resources when security vulnerabilities are discovered. A detailed audit trail maintains a complete history of AMI creation, modification, and usage patterns.
Architecture
The AMI Lineage solution follows AWS security best practices with a multi-account deployment architecture designed to maximize security while maintaining operational efficiency. The architecture distributes responsibilities across three primary account types: an organization management account, a centralized security tooling account, and multiple member accounts.
This architectural approach helps ensure that sensitive operations and data remain centralized in the security tooling account while enabling distributed monitoring and policy enforcement across the organization. The clear separation of concerns enhances security while maintaining the scalability needed for large-scale AWS deployments.
Figure 1: AMI Lineage solution architecture and workflow
The workflow and architecture shown in figure one includes the following:
Policy enforcement: Theorganization management account is the central point for control. It uses AWS Organizations to enforce SCPs that prevent non-compliant AMI actions across the member accounts.
Event capture: When an AMI lifecycle event (like CreateImage or CopyImage) occurs in a member account, a local Amazon EventBridge rule captures it.
Centralized processing: The event is securely forwarded from the member account’s EventBridge to the central EventBridge in the security tooling account.
Data ingestion and analysis: A Lambda function is triggered in the security tooling account. This function processes the event, analyzes it for compliance, and updates the Neptune graph database with the new AMI relationship data. AWS Security Hub and Amazon GuardDuty in the security tooling account also receive and analyze findings from member accounts.
Query and visualization: Security teams query the lineage data through a secure API Gateway endpoint. By doing this, they can to visualize AMI hierarchies, investigate security findings from Security Hub, and assess the scope of impact for a given AMI.
The organization management account serves as the central control point for policy enforcement and organizational oversight. This account hosts SCPs that prevent non-approved AMI usage across the organization and manages organization-wide EventBridge rules that capture AMI events from member accounts. Cross-account trust policies configured in this account enable secure communication between the management account and the security tooling account.
Additionally, the management account establishes Security Hub in delegated administrator mode, designating the security tooling account as the centralized security administrator for the organization. From the security tooling account, Security Hub can be then configured to aggregate all Regions down to one core Region for easier evaluation by security personnel.
The security tooling account acts as the central hub for AMI lineage processing and storage. This account hosts the Neptune graph database cluster with encrypted storage, helping to ensure that AMI relationship data is securely maintained. Lambda functions running in this account process events, handle API requests, and evaluate compliance with least-privilege permissions. API Gateway provides secure REST endpoints for lineage queries and security assessments. Security Hub custom insights and findings are centralized here in the security tooling account as the Security Hub delegated administrator account, along with Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topics for notifications and alerts. The Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) infrastructure supporting these services is also deployed in the security tooling account, providing network-level isolation and security.
The solution enables distributed monitoring and enforcement by deploying lightweight components into each member account across the organization. Each member account includes AWS Config rules for continuous compliance monitoring, cross-account IAM roles to enable secure access from the security tooling account, and local EventBridge rules that forward AMI-related events to the central processing system.
Security and compliance integration extends throughout the solution. IAM manages least-privilege access control and permissions across components. AWS CloudTrail records API activity for audit trails and compliance reporting, while Security Hub centralizes security findings and compliance status across your AMI estate. GuardDuty provides threat detection for AMI-related activities. SCPs enforce organization-wide controls on AMI creation and usage patterns, and AWS Config tracks AMI configuration changes and evaluates compliance rules.
How it works
The AMI Lineage solution operates through a continuous monitoring and automated response system that maintains comprehensive visibility into your AMI landscape. When AMI lifecycle events occur in your organization, EventBridge rules capture these activities, including creation, copying, modification, and deregistration events. Lambda functions in the security tooling account are then called upon to process these events with appropriate security controls and update the Neptune graph database in real-time, while CloudTrail logs provide a comprehensive audit trail of AMI-related activities.
The system tracks critical security and compliance metadata that forms the foundation of effective AMI governance. This includes:
Source AMI information and validation status to help ensure lineage integrity
Creation method and timestamp data for comprehensive audit trails
Cross-Region and cross-account relationships to understand the full scope of AMI distribution
Instance launch history with security context to track usage patterns
AMI state changes including deprecation and deregistration for lifecycle management
Compliance status along with policy violations to maintain organizational standards.
Security teams use this comprehensive data through secure API calls to visualize complete AMI hierarchies and relationships, providing clear insight into how AMIs are related across your infrastructure. The compliance of your AMI estate is continuously tracked through a combination of services:
Detection: AWS Config rules deployed in member accounts check for policy violations (for example, incorrect tags and public permissions).
Aggregation: These findings, along with vulnerability data from services like Amazon Inspector, are aggregated in AWS Security Hub.
Correlation: Lambda functions in the security tooling account correlate this information with the lineage data in Neptune. Because of this correlation, you can see not just that an AMI is non-compliant, but also its entire downstream impact. When security events like CVE findings are discovered, teams can quickly assess the scope of impact across their entire AMI estate. The solution monitors AMI usage patterns for security anomalies and enforces governance controls through automated policy checks.
The solution provides robust automated policy enforcement capabilities that operate continuously to maintain security and compliance. The system helps ensure that only approved AMIs with verified lineage history can be used to launch new instances, automatically blocking attempts to use non-compliant images. SCP controls on AMI creation and usage are enforced organization-wide, preventing unauthorized AMI operations before they can impact your environment. When policy violations are detected, the system can trigger automated responses to security events and maintain compliance with organizational standards through real-time enforcement.
Implementation
Before deploying the AMI Lineage solution, you need to establish the proper security and governance foundation across your organization. Your AWS Organizations management account requires administrative permissions, and your organization must be enabled with all features to support the policies used in this solution. You will also need a dedicated security tooling account to host the solution’s core components, with cross-account IAM roles configured to allow secure access. Finally, essential security services must be configured at the organization level, including Security Hub, CloudTrail organization trails for audit logging, and encryption keys using AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) for data protection.
The complete AMI Lineage solution is available as open source code in the AWS Samples repository. You can clone the repository and follow the deployment instructions. The repository includes the necessary AWS CloudFormation templates, Lambda functions, and deployment scripts referenced in the following phases.
Deployment
The deployment process follows a five-phase approach that builds security and compliance capabilities progressively:
Security foundations
Security controls
EventBridge rules
Core infrastructure
Compliance and monitoring
Phase 1 – Establishing security foundations
The first phase establishes the security foundation by configuring AWS Organizations security services. This involves enablingSecurity Hub in the management account and designating the security tooling account as the delegated administrator, enablingnullGuardDuty with the security tooling account configured as thenulldelegated administrator, and enabling an organizational wide CloudTrail trail for audit logging.
# In Organization Management Account:
# Enable Security Hub and set security tooling account as delegated admin
aws securityhub enable-organization-admin-account \
--admin-account-id <security-tooling-account-id>
# Enable GuardDuty organization with security tooling account as admin
aws guardduty enable-organization-admin-account \
--admin-account-id <security-tooling-account-id>
# Create organization trail with encryption aws cloudtrail create-trail \
--name ami-lineage-trail \
--s3-bucket-name <your-secure-bucket> \
--is-organization-trail \
--kms-key-id <your-kms-key-id> \
--enable-log-file-validation
Phase 2 – Security controls
The second phase deploys base security controls through organization-wide SCPs. These policies enforce AMI governance controls by preventing the use of non-approved AMIs and helping to ensure that proper tagging and approval workflows are followed.
The third phase deploys organization-wide EventBridge rules from the management account to capture AMI events across member accounts and forward them to the security tooling account for processing. These rules listen for specific API calls captured by CloudTrail.
An example of the event pattern used to capture CreateImage and CopyImage events looks like this:
{
"source": ["aws.ec2"],
"detail-type": ["AWS API Call via CloudTrail"],
"detail": {
"eventSource": ["ec2.amazonaws.com"],
"eventName": [
"CreateImage",
"CopyImage",
"RegisterImage",
"DeregisterImage"
]
}
}
# In Organization Management Account:
# Deploy organization EventBridge rules
cd deployment-scripts/organization
./deploy-organization-resources.sh
Phase 4 – Core infrastructure
The fourth phase focuses on core infrastructure deployment in the security tooling account. This is where the primary processing and storage components are deployed, following security best practices by centralizing sensitive operations in a dedicated account.
# Switch to Security Tooling Account context
# Deploy Neptune cluster with encryption in security tooling account
cd deployment-scripts/shared
./deploy-shared-resources.sh
This deployment script handles multiple components in the security tooling account. The Neptune cluster deployment includes encryption and VPC configuration to help ensure secure storage and access to AMI lineage data. Lambda functions are deployed with security controls and configured with VPC attachment, which allows for secure Neptune access in the VPC, appropriate IAM roles with least-privilege permissions, and environment variables for secure configuration. API Gateway provides secure REST endpoints for external access to AMI lineage data and security assessments.
Phase 5 – Compliance and monitoring
The fifth phase establishes comprehensive compliance and monitoring capabilities across member accounts. AWS Config rules are deployed to continuously monitor AMI compliance across your organization, while EventBridge rules forward AMI events to the central processing system.
# In each Member Account:
# Deploy AWS Config Rules and monitoring capabilities
cd deployment-scripts/child-account
./deploy-child-account-resources.sh
After deployment, thorough verification helps ensure that security configurations are properly implemented. This includes validating IAM permissions to help ensure least-privilege access, testing security controls to verify SCP enforcement, validating encryption settings acrosscomponents, and confirming that the security tooling account is properly configured as the Security Hub delegated administrator.
Using AMI Lineage
When deployed, AMI Lineage provides security operations and compliance monitoring capabilities through its API hosted in the security tooling account and automated monitoring systems. Security teams can query and receive complete AMI security relationships to understand the full context of AMIs in their environment.
When investigating AMIs, the system provides detailed security context including source validation information that confirms:
Whether AMIs come from marketplace sources or trusted accounts
Compliance status that shows patch levels and policy adherence
Vulnerability status with CVE findings and scan results
Comprehensive lineage data showing the complete chain of AMI relationships and approval history
# Get complete security context for an AMI (API Gateway in Security Tooling Account)
curl -X GET "https://<api-gateway-id>.execute-api.<region>.amazonaws.com/v1/api/v1/ami/ami-1234567890abcdef0/security-context?include_compliance=true" \
-H "x-api-key: <your-api-key>"
For security impact assessments, such as when a new CVE is discovered, the solution provides a powerful scope of impact analysis. By querying the API with a specific finding, security teams can rapidly determine every affected resource across their entire organization that stems from a compromised or vulnerable AMI. Using that information, they can understand the full scope of their exposure and begin remediation. See Security best practices in Amazon API Gateway for helpful considerations while using API Keys.
This analysis returns impact information including:
Affected AMIs in the lineage chain
Running instances requiring immediate remediation
Affected AWS accounts and regions for coordinated response
Associated auto-scaling groups and launch templates that need updates
Compliance impact assessment for regulatory reporting
Detailed remediation steps prioritized by risk level.
Compliance monitoring operates continuously through automated assessment capabilities that evaluate your AMI estate against organizational policies and regulatory requirements. Teams can generate comprehensive compliance reports that show adherence to security standards across their entire infrastructure.
The solution provides security automation and remediation through configurable automated responses to security events. Security Hub, operating in delegated administrator mode from the security tooling account, can be configured to automatically respond to findings by stopping instances using AMIs with critical vulnerabilities, quarantining instances launched from unapproved sources, and sending immediate notifications for high-severity findings.
Security visualization and reporting capabilities, centralized in the security tooling account, provide real-time dashboards showing:
Compliance status across the organization
Scoping visualization for rapid decision-making
AMI approval workflow status for process monitoring
Patch compliance metrics for maintaining security posture
Automated remediation activity logs for audit purposes
Custom security reports tailored to specific organizational needs.
For security investigations and audit purposes, the solution maintains a queryable audit trail that provides a complete history of AMIs, including creation and modification events, security scanning results and findings, approval workflow history, and compliance status changes over time.
# Query comprehensive audit history (Security Tooling Account API)
curl -X GET "https://<api-gateway-id>.execute-api.<region>.amazonaws.com/v1/api/v1/ami/ami-1234567890abcdef0/lineage?direction=both&depth=10" \
-H "x-api-key: <your-api-key>"
Clean up
To decommission the AMI Lineage solution, use the following steps to prevent dependency errors. The process is the reverse of the deployment.
(Optional) Back up your data. Before you begin, export critical data for your audit and compliance records. This includes generating final compliance reports from the API or creating a final snapshot of the Neptune database (you will be prompted to do this when you delete the cluster).
Run cleanup in member accounts. Sign in to each participating member account and run the cleanup script from the deployment files. This removes the local EventBridge rules, AWS Config rules, and cross-account IAM roles.
# In each Member Account
cd deployment-scripts/child-account
./cleanup-child-account-resources.sh
# Removes Config rules and cross-account roles from each member account
Run cleanup in the security tooling account. Sign in to your security tooling account and run the cleanup script. This decommissions the core solution, including the API gateway, Lambda functions, Neptune cluster, and the associated VPC.
# Clean up security tooling account
cd deployment-scripts/shared
./cleanup-shared-resources.sh
# Removes Neptune, Lambda, API Gateway, SNS, and Security Hub components
Run cleanup in the organization management account. Sign in to your organization management account to remove the organization-level resources.
Run the cleanup script to remove the organization-wide EventBridge rules.
# Clean up organization management account
cd deployment-scripts/organization
./cleanup-organization-resources.sh
# Removes SCPs, EventBridge rules, and cross-account trust policies
In the AWS Organizations console, detach and delete the AMI-Governance-Controls SCP.
In the Security Hub and GuardDuty consoles, remove the security tooling account as the delegated administrator.
Delete final data and encryption keys. After the solution’s infrastructure is removed, you can delete the remaining assets.
In the organization management account,schedule the deletion of the KMS keys you created for encrypting the solution’s data.
Conclusion
In this blog post, we showed you how you can use the AMI Lineage solution to build a comprehensive approach to tracking the complete history of your AMIs from creation to decommissioning. By storing this data in an Amazon Neptune graph database, you can build a hierarchical view of the relationships between your EC2 instances and the AMIs they were launched from. You learned how that data can be used to improve security response and remediation and assist in auditing and compliance activities.
The solution uses AWS Organizations to provide preventative controls to help ensure that only approved AMIs are used and integrates AWS security services like Amazon GuardDuty, AWS Security Hub, and AWS Config to add additional layers of security monitoring and management. Finally, you saw how the solution can be used during a security event or when new CVEs are published, so that you can rapidly discover which systems are affected and automate responses based on those findings.
While this solution provides powerful capabilities, it’s important to consider the operational and cost aspects. The core components, particularly Neptune, have associated costs that will scale with the size of your AMI estate. We recommend implementing cost monitoring and alerts as part of your deployment. Furthermore, because the solution is event-driven, you should plan a one-time backfill process to ingest your organization’s existing AMI history into the graph database. For organizations that require this level of granular control and visibility, these operational considerations are offset by the significant gains in security posture and compliance automation.
AMI Lineage transforms AMI governance from a manual, error-prone process into an automated, comprehensive security capability that scales with your organization’s growth. By implementing this solution, your organization can gain the visibility, control, and automated response capabilities needed to maintain a strong security posture while enabling rapid, secure deployment of infrastructure across its AWS environment.
If you have feedback about this post, submit comments in the Comments section below. If you have questions about this post, contact AWS Support.
Navigating 2026’s Converged Threats: Insights from Flashpoint’s Global Threat Intelligence Report
In this post, we preview the critical findings of the 2026 Global Threat Intelligence Report, highlighting how the collapse of traditional security silos and the rise of autonomous, machine-speed attacks are forcing a total reimagining of modern defense.
The cybersecurity landscape has reached a point of total convergence, where the silos that once separated malware, identity, and infrastructure have collapsed into a single, high-velocity threat engine. Simultaneously, the threat landscape is shifting from human-led attacks to machine-speed operations as a result of agentic AI, which acts as a force multiplier for the modern adversary.
Flashpoint’s 2026 Global Threat Intelligence Report
Our report uncovers several staggering metrics that illustrate the industrialization of modern cybercrime:
AI-related illicit activity skyrocketed by 1,500% in a single month at the end of 2025.
3.3 billion compromised credentials and cloud tokens have turned identity into the primary exploit vector.
From January 2025 to December 2025, ransomware incidents rose by 53%, as attackers pivot from technical encryption to “pure-play” identity extortion.
Vulnerability disclosures surged by 12% from January 2025 to December 2025, with the window between discovery and mass exploitation effectively vanishing.
These findings are derived from Flashpoint’s Primary Source Collection (PSC), a specialized operating model that collects intelligence directly from original sources, driven by an organization’s unique Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIR). The 2026 Global Threat Intelligence Report leverages this ground-truth data to provide a strategic framework for the year ahead. Download to gain:
A Clear Understanding of the New Convergence Between Identity and AI Discover how threat actors are preparing to transition from generative tools to sophisticated agentic frameworks. Learn how 3.3 billion compromised credentials are being weaponized via automated orchestration to bypass legacy defenses and exploit the connective tissue of modern corporate APIs.
Intelligence on the “Franchise Model” of Global Extortion Gain deep insight into the professionalized operations of today’s most prolific threat actors. From the industrial efficiency of RaaS groups like RansomHub and Clop to the market dominance of the next generation of infostealer malware, we break down the economics driving today’s cybercrime ecosystem.
A Blueprint for Proactive Defense and Risk Mitigation Leverage the latest trends, in-depth analysis, and data-driven insights driven by Primary Source Collection to bolster your security posture by identifying and proactively defending against rising attack vectors.
“As attackers automate exploitation of identity, vulnerabilities, and ransomware, defenders who rely on fragmented visibility will fall behind. To keep pace, organizations must ground their decisions in primary-source intelligence that is drawn from adversarial environments, so that decision-makers can get ahead of this accelerating threat cycle.”
Josh Lefkowitz, CEO & Co-Founder at Flashpoint
The Top Threats at a Glance
Our latest report identifies four driving themes shaping the 2026 threat landscape:
2026 Is the Era of Agentic-Based Cyberattacks
Flashpoint identified a 1,500% rise in AI-related illicit discussions between November and December 2025, signaling a rapid transition from criminal curiosity to the active development of malicious frameworks. Built on data pulled from criminal environments and shaped by fraud use cases, these systems scrape data, adjust messaging for specific targets, rotate infrastructure, and learn from failed attempts without the need for constant human involvement.
“2026 is the era of agentic-based cyberattacks. We’ve seen a 1,500% increase in AI-related illicit discussions in a single month, signaling increased interest in developing malicious frameworks. The discussions evolve into vibe-coded, AI-supported phishing lures, malware, and cybercrime venues. When iteration becomes cheap through automation, attackers can afford to fail repeatedly until they find a successful foothold.”
Ian Gray, Vice President of Cyber Threat Intelligence Operations at Flashpoint
Identity Is the New Exploit
Flashpoint observed over 11.1 million machines infected with infostealers in 2025, fueling a massive inventory of 3.3 billion stolen credentials and cloud tokens. The fundamental mechanics of cybercrime have shifted from breaking in to logging in, as attackers leverage stolen session cookies to behave like legitimate users.
The Patching Window Is Rapidly Closing
Vulnerability disclosures surged by 12% in 2025, with 1 in 3 (33%) vulnerabilities having publicly available exploit code. The strategic gap between discovery and weaponization is increasingly vanishing, as evidenced by mass exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities in as little as 24 hours after discovery.
Ransomware Is Hacking the Person, Not the Code
As technical defenses against encryption harden, ransomware groups are pivoting to the path of least resistance: human trust. This approach has led to a 53% increase in ransomware, with RaaS groups being responsible for over 87% of all ransomware attacks.
Build Resilience in a Converged Landscape
The findings in the 2026 Global Threat Intelligence Report make one thing clear: incremental improvements to legacy security models are no longer sufficient. As adversaries transition to machine-speed operations, the strategic advantage shifts to organizations that can maintain visibility into the adversarial environments where these attacks are born.
Protecting organizations and communities requires an intelligence-first approach. Download Flashpoint’s 2026 Global Threat Intelligence Report to gain clarity and the data-driven insights needed to safeguard critical assets.
The cybersecurity community is still grappling with a sobering realization: one of the most ubiquitous tools in the developer’s toolkit, Notepad++, was hiding a critical vulnerability for over six months. Being so deeply embedded in daily workflows, many organizations did not realize they were vulnerable until a recent security update pulled back the curtain on a sophisticated Chinese state-sponsored campaign, dubbed “Lotus Blossom.”
Investigations have confirmed that the issue wasn’t just a coding error, it was a compromise at the hosting provider level. This means that for much of 2025, even organizations that followed best practices were still potentially open to backdoors from Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) groups. Here is what you need to know to secure your environment.
Understanding the Notepad++ Vulnerability (CVE-2025-15556)
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-15556 (VulnDB ID: 430205), exploits a critical flaw in the Notepad++ updater component, WinGUP. In versions prior to the February 2026 patch, the updater failed to verify the file integrity signatures of downloaded installers.
By exploiting this lack of verification, threat actors are able to:
Intercept legitimate update requests originating from WinGUp servers
Redirect traffic to malicious servers via Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks or DNS cache poisoning
Deliver trojanized executables (disguised as update.exe) that appeared to be legitimate software patches
Leveraging this vulnerability, attackers have gained a persistent presence in high-value sectors. According to reports from Kaspersky, the impact has spanned government and telecommunications, critical infrastructure, and financial services.
How CVE-2025-15556 Works
The state-sponsored Lotus Blossom campaign was executed in three attack chains, between July and October 2025. Each phase evolved to evade detection by changing file sizes, IP addresses, and delivery methods.
Phase
Timeline (2025)
Execution Method
Payload
Chain #1
July – August
1MB NSIS installer (update.exe)
Multi-stage attack launching a Cobalt Strike beacon via ProShow.exe.
Chain #2
September
140KB NSIS installer (update.exe)
Rotated C2 URLs to maintain stealth while dropping a Cobalt Strike beacon.
Chain #3
October
Backdoor Deployment
Dropped BluetoothService.exe, log.DLL, and shellcode to establish the Chrysalis backdoor.
Mapping CVE-2025-15556 to MITRE ATT&CK
Flashpoint has mapped Lotus Blossom TTPs (tactics, tools, and procedures) to the MITRE ATT&CK framework. Flashpoint analysts have identified the following techniques:
M1057: Data Loss Prevention M1031: Network Intrusion Prevention
Protecting Against CVE-2025-15556
Proactive defense requires not only reactive patching of CVE-2025-15556, but also active threat hunting using the TTPs identified by Flashpoint analysts. Flashpoint recommends the following actions:
Immediate Update: Ensure all instances of Notepad ++ are updated to v8.9.1 or higher immediately. This version enforces the signature verification that was missing in previous releases.
Audit System Paths: Scan for malicious file paths used for persistence.
Network Defense: Monitor and block traffic to malicious domains.
Endpoint Hardening: Implement Behavior Prevention on Endpoints (M1040) and Audit (M1047) to detect unauthorized registry run keys or new system services.
Outpace Threat Actors Using Flashpoint
Software trust is only as strong as the infrastructure behind it. As organizations respond to these recent updates, having best-in-class vulnerability intelligence and direct visibility into threat actor TTPs is the best defense.
N-Day Vulnerability Trends: The Shrinking Window of Exposure and the Rise of “Turn-Key” Exploitation
In this post we explore the data-driven shrinkage of the Time to Exploit (TTE) window from 745 days to just 44, and examine why N-day vulnerabilities have become the “turn-key” weapon of choice for modern threat actors.
The race between defenders and threat actors has entered a new, more volatile phase: the rapidly accelerating exploitation of N-day vulnerabilities. Different from zero-days, N-day vulnerabilities are known security flaws that have been publicly disclosed but remain unpatched or unmitigated on an organization’s systems.
Historically, enterprises operated under the assumption of a “patching grace period,” the designated window of time allowed for a vendor to test and deploy a fix before a system is considered non-compliant or at high risk. However, this window is effectively collapsing, with Flashpoint finding that N-days now represent over 80% of all Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEVs) tracked over the past four years.
The Collapse of the Time to Exploit (TTE) Window
The most sobering trend for security operations (SecOps) and exposure management teams is the dramatic reduction in Time to Exploit (TTE). In 2020, the average TTE, the time between a vulnerability’s disclosure and its first observed exploitation, was 745 days. By 2025, Flashpoint found that this window has now plummeted to an average of just 44 days.
2025
2024
2023
2022
2021
2020
Average TTE
44
115
296
405
518
745
This contraction represents a strategic shift in adversary tempo. Attackers are no longer waiting for complex, bespoke exploits; they are moving at breakneck speeds to weaponize public disclosures.
N-Days Provide a “Turn-Key” Exploit Advantage
Adversaries have gained a significant advantage through the rapid weaponization of researcher-published Proof-of-Concept (PoC) code. When a fully functional exploit is released alongside a vulnerability disclosure, it becomes a “turn-key” solution for attackers. By combining these ready-made exploits with internet-wide scanning tools like Shodan or FOFA, even unsophisticated threat actors can conduct mass exploitation across large segments of the internet in hours.
A prime example of this path of least resistance approach was observed in the leaked internal chat logs of the BlackBasta ransomware group. Analysis revealed that of the 65 CVEs discussed by the group, 54 were already known KEVs. Rather than spending resources on original zero-day research, threat actors are simply leveraging known, yet unpatched and exploitable vulnerabilities for their campaigns.
Defensive Software is a Primary Target for N-Days
The very software designed to protect enterprise firewalls, VPN gateways, and edge networking devices is consistently the most targeted category for both N-day and zero-day exploitation.
Because cybersecurity devices must be internet-facing to function, they provide a constant, unauthenticated attack surface. In 2025 alone, Flashpoint observed 37 N-days and 52 zero-days specifically targeting security and perimeter software. The requirement for these systems to remain open to external traffic means they will continue to be disproportionately targeted by advanced persistent threat (APT) groups and cybercriminals alike.
Attributing N-Day Attacks
While tracking the “how” of an attack is critical, tracking who is responsible remains a fragmented challenge for the industry. Attribution is often hampered by naming fatigue, where different vendors assign their own designated unique monikers to the same actor. For instance, the widely known threat actor group Lazarus has over 40 distinct designations across the industry, including “Diamond Sleet,” “NICKEL ACADEMY,” and “Guardians of Peace”.
Despite these naming complexities, global activity patterns remain clear. China remains the most active nation-state actor in the vulnerability exploitation space, consistently outpacing Russia, Iran, and North Korea in both the volume and scope of their campaigns.
Obstacles for Enterprise Security: Asset Blindness and the CVE Dependency Trap
Why are organizations struggling to keep pace? The primary factor isn’t a lack of effort, but a lack of visibility.
1. The Asset Inventory Gap
The single greatest breakthrough an enterprise can achieve is not a new AI tool, but a complete asset inventory. Most large organizations are lucky to have an accurate inventory of even 25% of their total assets. Without knowing what you own, vulnerability scans can take days or weeks to return results that the adversary is already using to probe your network.
2. The CVE Blindspot
Most traditional security tools are CVE-dependent. However, thousands of vulnerabilities are disclosed every year that never receive an official CVE ID. These “missing” vulnerabilities represent a massive blindspot for standard scanners. Intelligence-led exposure management requires looking beyond the CVE ecosystem into proprietary databases like Flashpoint’s VulnDB, which tracks over 105,000 vulnerabilities that public sources miss.
Move Towards Intelligence-Led Exposure Management Using Flashpoint
To survive in an era where weaponization can happen in under 24 hours, organizations must shift from reactive patching to a threat-informed and proactive security approach. This means:
Prioritizing by Exploitability and Threat Actor Activity: Focus on vulnerabilities that are remotely exploitable and have known public exploits, rather than just high CVSS scores.
Adopting an Asset-Inventory Approach: Moving away from slow, periodic scans in favor of continuous asset mapping that allows for immediate triage.
Operationalizing Intelligence: Embedding real-time threat data directly into SOC and IR workflows to reduce the “mean time to action”.
The goal of exposure management is to look at your organization through the adversary’s lens. By understanding which N-days threat actors are actually discussing and weaponizing in the wild, defenders can finally start to close the window of exposure before a potential compromise can occur.
Flashpoint’s vulnerability threat intelligence can help your organization go from reactive to proactive. Request a demo today and gain access to quality vulnerability intelligence that enables intelligence-led exposure management.
Key Vulnerabilities: Week of December 20 – December 26, 2025
Foundational Prioritization
Of the vulnerabilities Flashpoint published this week, there are 34 that you can take immediate action on. They each have a solution, a public exploit exists, and are remotely exploitable. As such, these vulnerabilities are a great place to begin your prioritization efforts.
Diving Deeper – Urgent Vulnerabilities
Of the vulnerabilities Flashpoint published last week, four are highlighted in this week’s Vulnerability Insights and Prioritization Report because they contain one or more of the following criteria:
Are in widely used products and are potentially enterprise-affecting
Are exploited in the wild or have exploits available
Allow full system compromise
Can be exploited via the network alone or in combination with other vulnerabilities
Have a solution to take action on
In addition, all of these vulnerabilities are easily discoverable and therefore should be investigated and fixed immediately.
To proactively address these vulnerabilities and ensure comprehensive coverage beyond publicly available sources on an ongoing basis, organizations can leverage Flashpoint Vulnerability Intelligence. Flashpoint provides comprehensive coverage encompassing IT, OT, IoT, CoTs, and open-source libraries and dependencies. It catalogs over 100,000 vulnerabilities that are not included in the NVD or lack a CVE ID, ensuring thorough coverage beyond publicly available sources. The vulnerabilities that are not covered by the NVD do not yet have CVE ID assigned and will be noted with a VulnDB ID.
NOTES: The severity of a given vulnerability score can change whenever new information becomes available. Flashpoint maintains its vulnerability database with the most recent and relevant information available. Login to view more vulnerability metadata and for the most up-to-date information.
CVSS scores: Our analysts calculate, and if needed, adjust NVD’s original CVSS scores based on new information being available.
Social Risk Score: Flashpoint estimates how much attention a vulnerability receives on social media. Increased mentions and discussions elevate the Social Risk Score, indicating a higher likelihood of exploitation. The score considers factors like post volume and authors, and decreases as the vulnerability’s relevance diminishes.
Ransomware Likelihood: This score is a rating that estimates the similarity between a vulnerability and those known to be used in ransomware attacks. As we learn more information about a vulnerability (e.g. exploitation method, technology affected) and uncover additional vulnerabilities used in ransomware attacks, this rating can change.
Flashpoint Ignite lays all of these components out. Below is an example of what this vulnerability record for CVE-2025-33223 looks like.
This record provides additional metadata like affected product versions, MITRE ATT&CK mapping, analyst notes, solution description, classifications, vulnerability timeline and exposure metrics, exploit references and more.
Analyst Comments on the Notable Vulnerabilities
Below, Flashpoint analysts describe the five vulnerabilities highlighted above as vulnerabilities that should be of focus for remediation if your organization is exposed.
CVE-2025-33222
NVIDIA Isaac Launchable contains a flaw that is triggered by the use of unspecified hardcoded credentials. This may allow a remote attacker to trivially gain privileged access to the program.
CVE-2025-33223
NVIDIA Isaac Launchable contains an unspecified flaw that is triggered as certain activities are executed with unnecessary privileges. This may allow a remote attacker to potentially execute arbitrary code.
CVE-2025-68613
n8n Package for Node.js contains a flaw in packages/workflow/src/expression-evaluator-proxy.ts that is triggered as workflow expressions are evaluated in an improperly isolated execution context. This may allow an authenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the n8n process.
CVE-2025-14847
MongoDB contains a flaw in the ZlibMessageCompressor::decompressData() function in mongo/transport/message_compressor_zlib.cpp that is triggered when handling mismatched length fields in Zlib compressed protocol headers. This may allow a remote attacker to disclose uninitialized memory contents on the heap.
Digital Supply Chain Risk: Critical Vulnerability Affecting React Allows for Unauthorized Remote Code Execution
CVE-2025-55182 (VulnDB ID: 428930), is a severe, unauthenticated RCE impacting a major component of React and its ecosystem, putting global applications at immediate, high-fidelity risk.
Flashpoint’s vulnerability research team assesses significant enterprise and supply chain risk given React’s ubiquity: the impacted JavaScript library underpins modern UIs, with 168,640 dependents and more than 51 million weekly downloads.
How CVE-2025-55182 Works
CVE-2025-55182 (VulnDB ID: 428930) impacts all React versions since 19.0.0, meaning that this issue has been potentially exploitable since November 14, 2024. This vulnerability stems from how React handles payloads sent to React Server Function endpoints and deserializes them.
Flashpoint’s VulnDB entry for CVE-2025-55182
Depending on the implementation of this library, a remote, unauthenticated threat actor could send a crafted payload that would be deserialized in a way that causes remote code execution. This would lead to a total compromise of the system hosting the application, allowing for malware such as infostealers, ransomware, or cryptojackers (cryptocurrency mining) to be downloaded.
A working exploit for CVE-2025-55182 has already been published that is effective against some installations. In addition, Amazon has reported that two threat actors, attributed to Chinese Advanced Persistent Threat Groups (APTs), have begun to exploit this vulnerability. Those groups are:
Understanding the Impact and Scope of CVE-2025-55182
It is critical that security teams fully understand the potential downstream scope and impact so that they can fully focus on mitigation, rather than time-consuming research. While the vendor has provided a full disclosure, there are several important caveats to understand about CVE-2025-55182:
Applications not implementing any React Server Function endpoints may still be vulnerable as long as it supports React Server Components.
If an application’s React code does not use a server, it is not affected by this vulnerability.
Applications that do not use a framework, bundler, or bundler plugins that support React Server Components are unaffected by this vulnerability.
Additionally, several React frameworks and bundlers have been discovered to leverage vulnerable React packages in various ways. The following frameworks and bundlers are known to be affected:
next
react-router
waku
@parcel/rsc
@vitejs/plugin-rsc
rwsdk
NPMJS.com currently shows that the react-dom package, which is effectively part of React, has 168,640 dependents. This means that an incredible number of enterprise applications are likely to be affected. Nearly every commercial application is built on hundreds, sometimes thousands of components and dependencies. Furthermore, applications coded via Vibe and similar technology are also likely to leverage React: potentially amplifying the downstream risk this vulnerability poses.
How to Mitigate CVE-2025-55182
For mitigation, the React library has released versions 19.0.1, 19.1.2, and 19.2.1 that resolve the issue. Flashpoint advises organizations to upgrade their respective libraries urgently. Security teams leveraging dynamic SBOMs (Software Bill of Materials) can drastically increase risk mapping and triage for deployed React versions.
To avoid confusion, security teams should ignore CVE-2025-66478. It has been rejected for being a duplicate of the preferred CVE-2025-55182.
Mitigate Critical Vulnerabilities Using Flashpoint
Flashpoint strongly recommends security teams treat this vulnerability with utmost urgency. Our vulnerability research team will continue to monitor this vulnerability and its downstream impacts. All updates will be provided via Flashpoint’s VulnDB.
Request a demo today and gain access to quality vulnerability intelligence that helps address critical threats in a timely manner.
Flashpoint’s Top 5 Predictions for the 2026 Threat Landscape
Flashpoint’s forward-looking threat insights for security and executive teams, provides the strategic foresight needed to prepare for the convergence of AI, identity, and physical security threats in 2026.
As the global threat landscape accelerates its transformation, 2026 marks an inflection point requiring defensive strategies to fundamentally shift. The volatility observed in 2025 has paved the way for an era soon to be defined by AI-weaponized autonomy, information-stealing malware, systemic instability of public vulnerability systems, and the complete convergence of digital and physical risk.
Flashpoint offers a unique window into these complexities, providing organizations with the foresight needed to navigate what lies ahead. Drawing from Flashpoint’s leading intelligence and primary source collections, we highlight five key trends shaping the 2026 threat landscape. These insights aim to help organizations not only understand what’s next but also build the resilience needed to withstand and adapt to emerging challenges.
Prediction 1: Agentic AI Threats Will Weaponize Autonomy, Forcing a New Defensive Standard
2026 will see continued evolution of AI threats, with future attacks centering on autonomy and integration. Across the deep and dark web, Flashpoint is observing threat actors move past experimentation and into operational use of illegal AI.
As attackers train custom fraud-tuned LLMs (Large Language Models) and multilingual phishing tools directly on illicit data, these AI models will become more capable. The criminal intent shaping their misuse will also become more sophisticated. Additionally, 2026 will see a greater marketplace for paid jailbreaking communities and synthetic media kits for KYC (Know Your Customer) bypass.
These advancements are enabling criminals to move beyond simple tools and engage in scaled, autonomous fraud operations, leading to two major shifts:
Agentic AI is becoming the true flashpoint: Threat actors will be using agentic systems to automate reconnaissance, generate synthetic identities, and iterate on fraud playbooks in near real-time. In this SaaS ecosystem, AI will help attackers leverage subscription tiers and customer feedback loops at scale.
The attack surface will shift to focus on AI Integrations: Organizations are increasingly plugging LLMs into live data streams, internal tools, identity systems, and autonomous agents. This practice often lacks the same security vetting, access controls, and monitoring applied to other enterprise systems. As such, attackers will heavily target these integrations, such as APIs, plugins, and system connections, rather than the models themselves.
“The ubiquity of automation has dramatically increased attack tempo, leaving many security teams behind the curve. While automation can replace repetitive tasks across the enterprise, organizations must not make the critical mistake of substituting human judgement for AI at the intelligence level.
This is paramount because a critical threat in 2026 is Agentic AI autonomy weaponized against soft targets—API integrations and identity systems. The only winning defense will be human-led and AI-scaled, prioritizing purposeful use to keep organizations ahead of this exponential risk.”
Josh Lefkowitz, CEO at Flashpoint
These evolving AI threats will force a fundamental shift in defensive strategies. Defenders will have to shift to deploying systems around AI rather than trust them on their own.
Prediction 2: Identity Compromise via Infostealers Will Become the Foundation of Every Attack
Infostealers will become the entry point, the data broker, the reconnaissance layer, and the fuel for everything that comes after a cyberattack. This shift is already in motion and is accelerating rapidly: in just the first half of 2025, infostealers were responsible for 1.8 billion stolen credentials, an 800% spike from the start of the year. However, 2026 will redefine the malware’s role, making its most valuable output being access, rather than disruption.
Infostealers will become the upstream event that powers the rest of the attack chain. Identity and session data will be increasingly targeted, since it gives attackers immediate access into victim environments. Ransomware, fraud, data theft, and extortion will simply be downstream ways to monetize.
This upstream approach defines the new reality of the attack chain, which is already operational. Nearly every major stealer strain Flashpoint observes now exfiltrates the following:
An organization’s attack surface is no longer just composed of their own networks. It is the entire digital identity of their employees and partners. This new reality requires security teams to take a new approach. Instead of attempting to block attacks, they must proactively detect compromised credentials before they are weaponized. This will be the difference between reacting to a data breach and preventing one.
“The infostealer economy has fully industrialized the attack chain, making initial compromise a low-cost commodity. Multiple security incidents in 2025 tie back to credentials found in infostealer logs. This reality has underscored the critical importance of digital trust—specifically, verifying who can access what resources. For 2026, identity is the perimeter to watch, and security teams must proactively hunt for compromised credentials before they’re weaponized.”
Ian Gray, Vice President of Intelligence at Flashpoint
Prediction 3: CVE Volatility Will Force Redundancy in Vulnerability Intelligence
The temporary funding crisis at CVE in April 2025 and the subsequent CISA stopgap extension through March 2026 exposed the systemic fragility of a centralized vulnerability intelligence model. With the future of the CVE/NVD system hanging in the balance, 2026 will be defined by the urgent need for redundancy and diversification in vulnerability intelligence.
In today’s vulnerability intelligence ecosystem, nearly every organization’s vulnerability management framework relies on CVE and NVD—including its “alternatives” such as the EUVD (European Union Vulnerability Database). The CVE system has grown into a critical global cybersecurity utility, relied upon by nearly all vulnerability scanners, SIEM platforms, patch management tools, threat intelligence feeds, and compliance reports. A complete shutdown of CVE would result in a widespread loss of institutional infrastructure.
The next generation of security needs to be built on practices that are resilient, diversified, and intelligence-driven. It should be focused on providing insights that can be used to take action such as threat actor behavior, likelihood of exploitation in the wild, relevance to ransomware campaigns, and business context. Security teams will need to leverage a comprehensive source of vulnerability intelligence such as Flashpoint’s VulnDB that provides full coverage for CVE, while also cataloging more than 100,000 vulnerabilities missed by CVE and NVD.
Prediction 4: Executive Protection Will Remain a Critical Challenge as Cyber-Physical Threats Converge
The continued blurring of lines between cyber, physical, and geopolitical threats will elevate the risk to organizational leadership, turning executive protection into a holistic intelligence function in 2026. The rise of information warfare combined with physical world convergence means the threat to key personnel is no longer purely digital.
In the aftermath of the tragic December 2024 assassination of United Healthcare’s CEO, Flashpoint has seen the continued circulation and glorification of “wanted-style posters” of executives in extremist communities. Additionally, Flashpoint has seen nation-state actors participate, using espionage and influence to target high-value individuals. Organizations must adopt an integrated approach that connects insights from threat actor chatter and a wealth of other OSINT sources. This fusion of intelligence is essential for applying frameworks to ensure the safety of leadership and key personnel.
Prediction 5: Extortion Shifts to Identity-Based Supply Chain Risk
2025 was marked by several large-scale extortion campaigns, demonstrating how the threat landscape is rapidly evolving. Ransomware operations have shifted into a straight extortion play. Flashpoint has observed a surge in new entrants to the ransomware market, accompanied by a decline in the quality and decorum of ransomware groups.
Furthermore, vishing campaigns attributed to “Scattered Spider” have highlighted weaknesses in identity, trust, and verification. Campaigns from “Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters” have also exposed vulnerabilities in third-party integrations. These attacks culminated in extortion, showcasing that modern attacks will target trusted users and trusted applications for initial access, and will forgo ransomware in place of data access.
As this shift continues into 2026, threat actors will increasingly focus their efforts on exploiting human behavior and identity systems. Instead of attempting to spend resources on breaking network perimeters, attackers will instead socially engineer employees to gain access to corporate systems at scale. This change in TTPs will undoubtedly greatly increase supply chain risk, especially for third parties.
Charting a Path Through an Evolving Threat Landscape with Flashpoint Intelligence
These five predictions highlight the transformative trends shaping the future of cybersecurity and threat intelligence. Staying ahead of these challenges demands more than just reactive measures—it requires actionable intelligence, strategic foresight, and cross-sector collaboration. By embracing these principles and investing in proactive security strategies, organizations can not only mitigate risks but also seize opportunities to enhance their resilience.
As the threat landscape continues to rapidly evolve, staying informed and prepared are critical components of risk mitigation. With the right tools, insights, and partnerships, security teams can navigate the complexities ahead and safeguard what matters most.
Risk Intelligence Index: Cyber Threat Landscape by the Numbers
Flashpoint’s monthly look at the cyber risk ecosystem affecting organizations around the world, including intelligence, news, data, and analysis about ransomware, vulnerabilities, insider threats, and takedowns of illicit forums and shops.
Flashpoint’s latest ransomware infographic paints a sobering picture of the evolving threat landscape, as cybercriminals employ increasingly sophisticated—and effective—tactics. Last month, our analysts observed a total of 397 ransomware attacks.
Key takeaways for the state of ransomware
Organizations in the United States bore the brunt of ransomware attacks, accounting for a staggering 211 incidents—a 66 percent increase compared to last month.
The top three industries targeted by ransomware were Professional Services, Internet Software & Services, and Construction & Engineering.
Clop ransomware has emerged as one of the most active ransomware groups, securing the second spot in March’s top 10 ranking. Last month, Clop garnered attention by exploiting a remote code execution vulnerability—allegedly enabling them to acquire data from over 100 organizations, although they only disclosed a few victim names on their blog.
Key takeaways for the state of vulnerability intelligence
Approximately34 percent of March’s disclosed vulnerabilities are rated as high-to-critical in severity, which if exploited, could pose a significant risk to an organization’s security posture.
Over 78 percent of March’s vulnerabilities are remotely exploitable, meaning that if threat actors are able to leverage these issues, they can execute malicious code no matter where the device is located.
Nearly 29 percent of March’s vulnerabilities already have a documented public exploit, which drastically lessens the difficulty to exploit.
Vulnerability Management teams can potentially lessen workloads by nearly 88 percent by first focusing on actionable, high severity vulnerabilities—i.e., vulnerabilities that are remotely exploitable, that have a public exploit, and a viable solution; 253 of March’s vulnerabilities meet this criteria.
Insider Threat
The tactic of recruiting insiders has become immensely popular amongst threat actors aiming to breach systems and/or commit ransomware attacks.
In March, our analysts collected 5,586 posts advertising insider services—both from threat actors seeking insiders and malicious employees offering their services. Of those, 1,127 were unique posts from individuals in illicit and underground communities.
Key takeaways for the state of insider threat intelligence
In March, Flashpoint tracked 5,586 posts related to insider threats activity—both from threat actors attempting to solicit insider-facilitated access and from disgruntled employees offering their services. Of the total, 1,127 were unique postings.
At this time, the Telecom industry is the most targeted sector, followed by Financial and Retail.
Looking into the state of insider threats further, Flashpoint found that the majority of insider threat related postings originated from inside the organization with malicious insiders offering their services. Most of this activity came from the Telecom sector.
Takedowns
In March 2023, there were numerous takedowns, voluntary shutdowns, and arrests affecting ransomware, markets, account shops, card shops, and individual cybercriminals. Here are the high-profile takedowns.
Breach Forums
On March 21, 2023, mid-tier hacking forum Breach Forums was shut down following the arrest of its administrator, Conor Brian Fitzpatrick (aka “pompompurin”), six days prior.
On March 3, a US Magistrate Judge issued a seizure warrant for Worldwiredlabs[.]com, a domain used by cybercriminals to sell malware, including remote access trojan (RAT) “NetWire,” which is capable of targeting and infecting major computer operating systems.
On March 7, an international law enforcement effort led to the seizure of Worldwiredlabs. The FBI had begun its investigation in 2020, and uncovered that it was the only known online distributor of NetWire.
The following data is derived from the Flashpoint Intelligence Platform and VulnDB, the most comprehensive and timely source of vulnerability intelligence available. Sign up for a free trial today.
Jordan Drysdale// tl;dr Vulnerability management is a part of doing business and operating on the public internet these days. Include training as part of this Critical Control. Users should be […]
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