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CrowdStrike 2025 Threat Hunting Report – Part 9: Vulnerability Hunting

  • Writer: Katarzyna  Celińska
    Katarzyna Celińska
  • 20 minutes ago
  • 2 min read

One of the most pressing findings from this year’s report is how vulnerabilities remain the fastest path to compromise. In 2024, 52% of vulnerabilities observed were related to initial access, with adversaries overwhelmingly exploiting internet-exposed applications to get their first foothold.

 

The Zero-Day Challenge

Attackers are no longer waiting weeks or months to weaponize flaws — they’re doing it within hours or days of disclosure. Groups like GRACEFUL SPIDER exemplify this trend:

✅ They exploited a zeroday vulnerability in Cleo data transfer products in December 2024, bypassing recently released patches.

✅ Within minutes of detection, defenders were alerted; within hours, global hunting patterns were deployed to stop malicious file writes.

✅ By December 11, when the exploit was publicly released, opportunistic attackers were already attempting to replicate it at scale.

 

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This illustrates how patch circumvention is now a standard adversary technique: even when vendors release fixes, determined actors quickly find ways around them.

 

Key Observations

✅ Adversaries chain exploits → Combining multiple flaws to escalate privileges and bypass defenses.

✅ Zero-days are monetized quickly → First by sophisticated groups, then by the broader eCrime ecosystem once proof-of-concepts are published.

✅ Critical infrastructure risk → Exploits are disproportionately aimed at VPNs, web apps, and cloud-facing services.

✅ Defensive hunting matters → Even when no patch exists, proactive hunting for post-exploitation behavior provides a fail-safe against mass exploitation.

 

Vulnerability hunting is no longer about “patch and forget.” It’s about detecting what slips through in the critical window before a fix is available. The report makes it clear: adversaries innovate fast, but defenders can win by combining exposure management, proactive hunting, and intelligence-led defense.

 

My recommendation:

✅ Prioritize patching internet-facing systems — especially VPN gateways, cloud applications, and web servers.

✅ Continuously assess exposure through vulnerability scanning and asset inventory.

✅ Hunt for exploitation artifacts, such as anomalous file writes, suspicious PowerShell/command execution, and abnormal process behavior.

✅ Integrate threat intelligence with detection to identify exploit chaining and evolving zero-day campaigns.


 
 
 

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