Article
Top Tips to Improve Cybersecurity Today
Arete Analysis
By Kevin Baker
When I work with clients, I mention a good many things they can do to improve their security. Sometimes I’ll advise on an area I think they need to understand about their company. Sometimes I’ll suggest implementing specific security controls. Some things I propose are very important; others are “nice to haves.” And while my recommendations may change based on the attributes of the client company and the skill level of those involved in fighting the good fight, there are always six things I tell every client.
1: Clean up accounts
Clean up the accounts in your Windows domain by eliminating every account that doesn’t have a valid business purpose — and that includes both human identity and service (aka machine identity) accounts. Software on your servers uses service accounts to perform a specific function, often with a high level of privilege.
“Stale” accounts create unneeded risk and only up the chances of attackers succeeding in their mission. If you don’t understand why an account exists, either justify its existence or carefully remove it.
2: Ditch unnecessary data
Understand what sensitive data is for your company and locate every instance of what you deem sensitive across both your corporate and cloud environments. Most companies think they know where sensitive data is because they’ve asked the subject matter experts (SMEs). Nothing against SMEs, but the best practice is to examine and verify the file stores and network.
Rarely have I seen assumed inventory be accurate. What we think we have is usually orders of magnitude less than what is ultimately discovered.
As with stale accounts, stale data and unneeded or unknown copies of data create big risk. When a breach happens, the accumulation of stale data across file servers, public drives, and email clients will only make a bad day that much worse. So, if you don’t need it, get rid of it.
3: Use multifactor authentication
Passwords are no longer enough to guarantee protection and should be considered table stakes. Why? Because billions of passwords have been lost in breaches of high-profile companies, and people are prone to re-using passwords. A lost password in one place usually exposes multiple accounts and locations.
What’s more, supercomputing and artificial intelligence (AI) can eventually crack nearly every password. For this reason, multifactor authentication (MFA) is one of the best ways to protect your identity, your data, and your reputation. It’s well worth the time, effort, and expense to use MFA.
4. Make cybersecurity everyone’s responsibility
Step one in building an information security training program: Set expectations. Companies need to be clear with regards to employee responsibility around use of company systems and data. Though words cannot protect us directly, policies, standards, and guidelines are useful in setting a standard of due care that employees can clearly understand.
While there are many good security-awareness programs and resources available that teach social-engineering resistance and good security practices, they may not be worth the time or investment without a clear mandate from the company stating expectations of behavior and technical conditions.
Set a simple, but powerful policy: “Every employee is responsible for protecting the data entrusted to our company.”
5. Write an incident response plan
It’s an oft repeated phrase because it’s true: Breaches are not a matter of if, but when. So, don’t wait until it’s too late. Write an incident response plan now and don’t be caught flat-footed at a most critical moment.
And remember, security is not solely a technology problem, it’s also a business problem. IT plays a big role and may drive most of the actions during a breach, but they cannot effectively handle response alone. Everyone in the company is a stakeholder and every department should have a representative on the incident response (IR) team. Thus, make sure your plan assigns specific people to respond, including IT, management, and business representatives.
Inter-departmental communication is key to a swift response and should be part of what you practice. For example, who will talk to the news crews out front? Be sure to media-train personnel or have a crisis communication firm on speed dial. In fact, be sure to have all key contacts listed in your IR plan, including those for all related services or vendors. And regardless of how many venders you use, be sure to have clarity on the internal team as to who will coordinate the response and look after your company’s best interests.
Once you write your plan, practice it — again and again. You’ll improve every time, building muscle memory for fast detection and fast reaction to events that help ensure your success, not the bad guy’s. At a minimum, a good response will greatly minimize an event’s impact and, even if not wholly prevented, still add up to thousands of dollars saved.
6. Have a solid backup plan
Make sure you have a solid back up plan that includes offline copies.
Ransomware is a modern plague that’s costing the United States trillions of dollars per year. That money is going to fund organized crime, human trafficking, and terrorism. The bad actors will not stop what they are doing, and they will get around to you eventually.
As technology advanced, the use of backup tapes fell off, replaced by backups made to storage systems, the cloud, or both. If those online copies are protected by a Windows domain password, you will probably lose them. The first thing the threat actors will do is crack all the admin passwords and log into wherever you store those backups and encrypt them. Next, they’ll encrypt your endpoints, laptops and servers, and send a ransom note.
Expect to be attacked and prepare for it, not only by backing up your data, but also by having at least one offline copy of every critical system. An offline copy that cannot be accessed from any network will ensure that even if you are faced with a massive cleanup of encrypted systems, you’ll avoid having to pay a ransom.
Ransoms often cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and may even run into the millions, so the cost of a solid disaster recovery plan, including offline copies, is peanuts by comparison.
Don’t make it easy on the bad guy
Like water, cybercriminals often take the path of least resistance. So, move, morph, and make your company a harder target to hit.
Want to see an immediate impact? Implement MFA. Want to harden your security over time? Find out and continue to track where your crown jewels reside.
These six steps are all within reach of every company. Start today, and get it done.
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Article
Phishing-as-a-Service Evolves with Venom
“Whaling” has taken on a new meaning with a highly targeted phishing campaign active from November 2025 through March 2026, aimed exclusively at senior executives from more than 20 industries. The campaign, dubbed VENOM, is a phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) platform that combines advanced evasion capabilities with immediate persistence of targeted executives. The initial phish impersonates an internal SharePoint document notification and uses embedded QR codes to convince victims to shift to unmanaged mobile devices to bypass corporate security controls. VENOM aims to establish persistence immediately by either registering a new MFA device or retaining long-lived refresh tokens, allowing threat actors to maintain access even after password resets or other base-level remediation efforts.
What’s Notable and Unique
This campaign is unique in its targeted nature of the PhaaS platform rather than broad, sweeping attempts. The threat actors behind VENOM create convincing phishing emails that impersonate SharePoint activity using the victim’s own domain, company name, and even fabricated email threads. These convincing social engineering tactics, combined with the specific targeting of executives, make this an effective capability for cybercriminals.
VENOM operates as a closed-access system, with full adversarial support, but has no public visibility on the dark web or from security researchers. The service likely operates on an invite-only basis, unlike most PhaaS platforms, which typically seek to have as many paying customers as possible. This, among other items such as the sophisticated evasion techniques, indicates a higher degree of sophistication than most other PhaaS offerings.
Either through MFA enrollment or Microsoft Device Code abuse, the threat actor forces the victim to aid them in establishing persistence early in the attack lifecycle. These tactics result in either valid tokens or an additional MFA login method controlled by the threat actor, meaning typical password resets alone are not effective against this technique. Administrators would be required to explicitly revoke sessions and token grants to mitigate the threat actors’ persistence.
Analyst Comments
Oftentimes, MFA is viewed as a one-stop shop to cybersecurity, but tactics such as this show how threat actors can bypass MFA, or worse, use it to establish persistence. Ultimately, this campaign highlights how modern attacks increasingly abuse legitimate authentication workflows rather than attempting to defeat them outright. Defenses that rely solely on MFA without other security posturing, such as continuous session monitoring, token revocation, and identity logging, can leave organizations vulnerable. As attackers shift toward token theft and device trust abuse, incident response and identity security strategies must evolve accordingly.
Sources
Meet VENOM: The PhaaS Platform That Neutralizes MFA
Article
Threat Actors Continue to Leverage BYOVD Technique
Multiple ransomware operations have recently been observed leveraging the Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver (BYOVD) technique to disable endpoint security controls prior to ransomware deployment. Notably, the Qilin ransomware group commonly leverages a malicious msimg32.dll file loaded via DLL side-loading, along with vulnerable drivers including rwdrv.sys and hlpdrv.sys, to gain kernel-level access and disable security processes. Similarly, Warlock ransomware has been observed exploiting the vulnerable NSecKrnl.sys driver to bypass security controls. The use of BYOVD has also been observed across ransomware campaigns associated with Akira, INC, Medusa, and other threat actors.
What’s Notable and Unique
The Qilin ransomware group employs a sophisticated multi-stage infection chain, leveraging DLL side-loading (msimg32.dll) to execute malicious payloads directly in memory and evade traditional file-based detection. In DLL side-loading, a threat actor tricks a program into loading a malicious dynamic link library. The malware escalates privileges and uses signed but vulnerable drivers (rwdrv.sys and hlpdrv.sys) to bypass security controls, access system memory, and systematically disable endpoint defenses by terminating security processes and disabling monitoring callbacks at the kernel level.
Akira ransomware operators have also exploited the rwdrv.sys and hlpdrv.sys drivers. Additionally, Arete has observed threat actors leveraging multiple other drivers, including the vulnerable TrueSight.sys, to bypass security controls.
Meanwhile, Warlock ransomware operators disguised malicious activity by renaming rclone.exe to TrendSecurity.exe to appear legitimate. The file functioned as a loader, exploiting the vulnerable NSecKrnl.sys driver to disable security processes, while Group Policy Objects (GPOs) were leveraged to systematically disable security controls across the environment.
Analyst Comments
The BYOVD technique, employed by multiple known ransomware operators, reflects a broader shift toward pre-encryption defense evasion, including suppression of Windows telemetry, removal of monitoring callbacks, and abuse of legitimately signed but vulnerable drivers. This technique enables threat actors to evade detection, maintain persistence for extended periods, and maximize the operational impact of ransomware deployment across compromised environments. Organizations should implement strict driver control policies, such as Microsoft’s Vulnerable Driver Blocklist and application control mechanisms. Additionally, enforcing least privilege access, enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA), maintaining up-to-date patching, and continuously monitoring for anomalous driver and kernel-level activity can further reduce the risk of such attacks.
Sources
Qilin EDR killer infection chain
Web Shells, Tunnels, and Ransomware: Dissecting a Warlock Attack
Article
Ransomware Trends & Data Insights: March 2026
The threat landscape in March had a much more even distribution of threat groups than has been observed since the first half of 2025. Although Akira, Qilin, Play, and INC remained among the most active groups, Arete observed 21 unique ransomware and extortion groups in March, compared to only 15 in February. Akira and Qilin’s activity also declined from the previous month; in February, the two groups were responsible for almost half of all ransomware incidents, but in March they only comprised a little more than a quarter of all activity. Arete also observed activity from several emerging groups in the past month, including BravoX, NightSpire, Payouts King, and Securotrop.
Figure 1. Activity from the top 5 threat groups in March 2026
Analysts at Arete identified several trends behind the threat actors perpetrating cybercrime activities:
In March, threat actors actively exploited FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall appliances as initial access vectors to compromise enterprise networks. The activity involves the exploitation of recently disclosed security vulnerabilities, including CVE-2025-59718, CVE-2025-59719, and CVE-2026-24858, or weak credentials, allowing attackers to gain administrative access, extract configuration files, and obtain service account credentials. Arete also observed Fortinet device exploitation involving various threat groups, with the Qilin ransomware group notably leveraging Fortinet device exploits.
Phishing campaigns leveraging OAuth redirection and a resurgence of Microsoft Teams–based social engineering were also observed in March. In one campaign, attackers sent emails disguised as Microsoft Teams recordings or Microsoft 365 alerts, redirecting victims through legitimate OAuth endpoints to attacker-controlled pages hosting malicious ZIP payloads. A separate campaign has been ongoing since last year, in which attackers flood users’ inboxes with spam and impersonate IT support personnel to trick victims into initiating remote support sessions via tools like Quick Assist.
Arete recently released its 2025 Annual Crimeware Report. Leveraging data and intelligence collected during ransomware and extortion incident response engagements, this report highlights notable trends and shifts in the threat landscape throughout 2025, including Akira’s unusually high activity levels in the second half of 2025, evolving social engineering techniques, and trends in ransom demands and impacted industries.
Sources
Arete Internal
Report
Arete's 2025 Annual Crimeware Report
Harness Arete’s unique data and expertise on extortion and ransomware to inform your response to the evolving threat landscape.