Hacking 2025: A Pen Tester’s Take on Today’s Cybersecurity Chaos

From Debug to Disaster: Rockwell’s Hidden Entry Point for Hackers It starts where plant networks feel safest inside the rack. A technician checks a status page; a scanner hums along the controls VLAN; shift change is minutes away. Then a request hits an embedded web-based debugger that never should have shipped enabled. Memory spills. Execution nudges. What felt like a closed OT loop is suddenly permeable from the outside. As a penetration tester and independent blogger, I’m flagging a critical vulnerability in Rockwell Automation’s ControlLogix Ethernet modules. A built-in web debugger (WDB) agent-enabled by default-can be accessed remotely from specific IPs, allowing attackers to dump memory, alter execution, and manipulate system behavior. Tracked as CVE-2025-7353 with a CVSS v3.1 score of 9.8 , this flaw affects several 1756-EN modules  , according to Rockwell and CISA. With no authentication required and low complexity , it opens a direct path to core controller communica...

Breaking the Chain of Trust: The Hybrid Exchange Escalation Threat It starts quietly an unnoticed foothold on an Exchange server, stolen admin credentials, and a trust link to the cloud turned into a weapon. From there, it’s a clean pivot into Exchange Online , data harvested, persistence set, and the intruder disappears into normal traffic. As a  part time  penetration tester and independent blogger , I see CVE-2025-53786 as more than a flaw it’s a blueprint for abusing identity and trust. This high-severity vulnerability in hybrid Exchange lets on-prem admins escalate to the cloud with limited log visibility . The August 2025 Security Updates patch it, but with 28,000+ servers still exposed, the window remains open. CISA’s Emergency Directive 25-02 demands immediate action from federal agencies. Everyone else should take the hint attackers certainly will. The Vulnerability in One Paragraph In classic hybrid deployments, on-prem Exchange and Exchange Online could share i...

Altitude Meets Exploit: Inside the WestJet Breach That’s Raising New Security Alarms It started like any other trip. A weekend getaway, a quick app login, a glance at your booking and somewhere in the background, an invisible breach was already in motion. That’s the shadow hanging over WestJet’s June cyber incident , where attackers quietly made off with “certain data.” The airline insists no credit cards or passwords were stolen, yet CTV’s latest report warns that personal details may have been exposed, prompting regulators to move in. As a penetration tester, this isn’t just a story about an airline hack it’s a live lesson in identity-layer compromise and supply-chain infiltration. Because in 2025, “no cards stolen” can still mean your digital life just got a whole lot more dangerous. Why This Matters Beyond One Airline Aviation has faced a wave of coordinated incidents this summer. Reports highlight that multiple airlines including Qantas and Hawaiian- disclosed attacks in close...

Keys to the Kingdom: Inside the Black Hat 2025 Authentication Breach Imagine two locks one securing legacy on-prem systems, another protecting cloud infrastructure. At Black Hat 2025, researchers showed how both can be silently picked, allowing attackers to forge tokens, impersonate users, and bypass MFA entirely. As a part-time penetration tester, that moment hit like a gut punch: even trusted identity foundations aren’t safe. This revelation underscores a crucial truth: in modern networks, defense must assume that every layer can be breached and testing must be ready to detect it. Endpoint to Entra: How Low-Privilege Accounts Can Become Admins Mollema demonstrated a method to convert a low-privilege cloud-only account into a hybrid admin via Entra ID soft matching granting full Tenant access undetected. Attackers exploited weakened syncing logic between AD and Entra ID, breaking the trusted boundary. Seamless SSO & SAML Forgery: Core Identity Trust Abused The techniques extend in...

Passwords Down, Alarms Up: The Cybersecurity Fallout at UWA The University of Western Australia (UWA) went into lockdown this weekend after unauthorized access to staff and student password data. As a penetration tester, I recognize this incident as both a warning and a classroom example when credentials get exposed, trust in backbone systems instantly erodes. UWA’s quick deployment of its critical incident team signaling the severity, but the deeper lesson for defenders and red teams alike is clear: password systems are ground zero.  Why Password Breaches Strip Trust Passwords serve as digital keys to education systems, research archives, and identity records. A breach doesn’t just lock accounts it exposes internal APIs, session persistence, and third-party integrations, making risk magnitudes higher than typical asset theft. Swift Containment Tactics UWA acted quickly: system-wide lockdown, forced password resets, and a three-day extension for students impacted by disrupted acces...

From Lagos to Lockdown: Anatomy of a Tax Fraud Empire Run by Email You Don’t Need Malware to Commit Cybercrime  Just a Cracked Credential and Enough Time. One breached credential. One overlooked system. One patient attacker. That’s all it took for Kingsley Uchelue Utulu , a Nigerian hacker, to orchestrate a $2.5 million U.S. tax fraud scheme without writing a single sophisticated exploit. No ransomware. No zero-days. Just the quiet abuse of trust, identity, and access. As a penetration tester , this case serves as a reminder that human-centric threats are often the most scalable and the most ignored. While technical defenses improve, attackers are doubling down on the soft surface: the people, the processes, and the portals built on top of brittle assumptions  Anatomy of the Attack: Spear Phishing + Fraud-as-a-Service Utulu’s scheme was as elegant as it was dangerous.He and his collaborators launched targeted spear-phishing campaigns aimed at tax firms across New York, Tex...

The Cloud Betrayal: How Microsoft’s Trusted Hybrid Link Became a Hacker’s Playground It started with a quiet connection the trusted bridge between on-prem Exchange and Microsoft’s cloud.Now, that bridge is broken.  Microsoft has issued a high-severity alert for CVE‑2025‑53786 , a newly discovered vulnerability affecting hybrid Exchange Server deployments. The flaw allows attackers to escalate privileges from local environments to Exchange Online , without triggering any of the usual logging or security alerts. This isn’t just a permissions bug it’s an identity takeover at the protocol level. By exploiting this weakness, threat actors can forge tokens , impersonate users, and gain persistent, invisible access to both sides of the hybrid setup . As a penetration tester , this vulnerability represents a full-spectrum blind spot  where an attacker can move laterally across trusted environments and remain undetected. The question isn’t if someone will exploit it. The real que...

When Claude Betrays Code: How AI Became the Attack Surface  Ever wonder what happens when prompt injection jumps from theory to full system access?No malware. No zero-days. Just one well-crafted email… and boom , Claude, the polished AI assistant, quietly flips from helper to hacker’s payload.It happened on a routine red team run. I wasn’t digging into system files or phishing users , I was watching Claude read an innocent-looking Gmail. No alerts. No clicks. Just raw execution. Literally. The AI processed the message, interpreted a command, and triggered code on the desktop.No scripts. No macros. Just a prompt. And Claude obeyed.This wasn’t a clever bypass it was a straight-up betrayal. A textbook AI manipulation that turned language into execution.As a penetration tester, I’ve probed firmware, breached firewalls, and crushed sandbox escapes but this? This is different. This is an AI acting like a backdoor unlocked with words.So… how did a chatbot become an exploit?Let’s dive in. ...

From Gallery to Gateway: When JPEGs Become the New Attack Vector What if the next breach didn’t ride in through a macro, a malicious link, or even an executable but through an image? That’s not sci-fi. That’s now.It started with a harmless-looking phishing invite a ZIP attachment masking a simple JPEG. But hidden in those pixels was an invisible threat. One click, and the JPEG delivered a fully weaponized, memory-resident backdoor zero files dropped, zero alerts triggered. APT37, a North Korea–aligned threat group, just redefined stealth ops. Their latest campaign uses image steganography to embed payloads directly into JPEG files bypassing antivirus, EDR, and sandboxing with surgical precision.As a penetration tester, this is the kind of tactic we simulate to push organizations beyond checkbox security. Because in today’s threat landscape, if your defenses stop at scanning for LNKs and EXEs, you’re already compromised.This isn’t just a technique it’s a paradigm shift. And it’s time we...

The Patented Backdoor: China’s Silk Typhoon Files for Spyware Rights You’re not going to believe this… It was past midnight during a recon session when I stumbled across something that didn’t scream APT no malware, no shady C2s just... patents. Legit, government-filed patents. And not just for software. For spyware . Silk Typhoon China’s state-backed group formerly known as Hafnium has been quietly patenting surveillance implants, remote access frameworks, keyloggers, and voice recorders. Tools likely active in real-world espionage, now hiding in plain sight behind intellectual property laws. They didn’t just build backdoors. They branded them. These aren’t concepts or whitepapers they’re field-ready prototypes designed to hijack sessions, harvest credentials, and spy through endpoints. While defenders patch vulnerabilities, threat actors are filing paperwork . As a penetration tester, this flips the script. To morrow’s threats aren’t just coded in shadows they’re published in daylight...