The Australian Cyber Security Centre has issued urgent warnings about actively exploited vulnerabilities in Microsoft SharePoint Server (CVE-2025-53770) that enable unauthenticated remote code execution. With Chinese state-aligned actors and ransomware groups already compromising Australian organisations, this threat represents an immediate and severe risk to business-critical data and infrastructure.
Across AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure environments in Australia and globally, 59% of IAM users maintain access keys that have never expired—credentials that have been active for more than one year. These long-lived credentials represent a silent but catastrophic vulnerability in your cloud infrastructure. This blog explores why long-lived credentials have become the primary attack vector for identity-based breaches, how red teams exploit them during penetration tests, and what you must do today to eliminate this ticking time bomb.
Critical authentication bypass vulnerabilities in Fortinet FortiGate and related products (CVE-2025-59718 and CVE-2025-59719) are now under active attack, allowing "ghost" SSO logins that completely sidestep normal controls and logs. For Australian organisations, this is more than a VPN or firewall problem – it is a board-level exposure that directly tests whether your external penetration testing, internal penetration testing, and red team assessment services are capable of simulating SSO abuse, identity takeovers, and lateral movement across hybrid networks.
A new security flaw called React2Shell (CVE-2025-55182) puts Australian businesses at extreme risk. It has a severity score of CVSS 10.0, which is the highest possible rating. This flaw lets hackers take full control of your servers without needing a password. It affects the popular tools React and Next.js.
A critical vulnerability in Adobe Commerce and Magento (CVE-2025-54236), dubbed "SessionReaper," is being ruthlessly exploited by threat actors using AI-driven tools to automate attacks at machine speed. With the Australian holiday trading season in full swing, this unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) flaw poses an immediate existential threat to retail and B2B organizations. This alert outlines the mechanics of the attack, the role of AI in its weaponization, and the urgent defensive actions required to prevent a catastrophic data breach.
In this blog, we’ll be focusing on external network penetration testing, in particular, and who should opt for it.
