If you've spent any time around IT, you must own that dusty box of legacy cables – a tangle of odd connectors, just in case you ever need one again. Before a common standard like USB came along, things were a messy puzzle of dozens of different plugs and ports. USB(-C) changed that by giving us one simple, reversible connector that handles everything – power, data, and video – making it easy for devices to work together. 

One of the greatest challenges in cybersecurity is the constant evolution of threats. While the threat landscape changes frequently, a significant amount of publicly available information is a cumulative summary of threats from the last decade. This makes it difficult for security professionals to prioritize and focus on the attacks that are happening right now, and not the ones from past years. 

Bitdefender analysis confirmed active, widespread exploitation of a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability, CVE-2025-53770, affecting on-premises deployments of Microsoft SharePoint Server. This deserialization flaw, with a CVSSv3.1 score of 9.8, enables unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code across affected networks, leading to full system compromise. Bitdefender's combined MDR (Managed Detection and Response) investigations and Bitdefender Labs' telemetry research have confirmed the active exploitation of this vulnerability in the wild, with detections observed from numerous countries, including the US, Canada, Austria, Jordan, Mexico, Germany, South Africa, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.  

This article shares initial findings from internal Bitdefender Labs research into Living off the Land (LOTL) techniques. Our team at Bitdefender Labs, comprised of hundreds of security researchers with close ties to academia, conducted this analysis as foundational research during the development of our GravityZone Proactive Hardening and Attack Surface Reduction (PHASR) technology. The results reveal adversaries' persistent and widespread use of trusted system tools in most significant security incidents. While this research was primarily for our internal development efforts, we believe these initial insights from Bitdefender Labs are valuable for broader understanding and we are sharing them now, ahead of a more comprehensive report.

Cybersecurity predictions are abundant this time each year, many filled with sensationalism and exaggerated threats. You could easily fill an article with predictions of AI-powered robot armies wreaking havoc or the impending doom of quantum computing. But that's not our style. We believe in predictions rooted in the analysis of data and trends observed in 2024.

Over the last few years, the MITRE ATT&CK® Evaluations has become an industry standard for evaluating detection capabilities of security products and services by simulating real-world attacks.