Zero-day exploitation surges, report finds

Infosecurity Magazine reports that attacks leveraging zero-day vulnerabilities during the first half of 2025 increased by 46% year-over-year.

Nearly a third of the exploited zero-days impacted Microsoft products, while offerings from Google, Apple, Ivanti, Qualcomm, and VMware had the next highest volumes of zero-day exploits, according to a report from Forescout's Vedere Labs presented at Black Hat USA. Total security flaws published between January and June were 15% higher than the same period last year, while the number of bugs added to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog rose 80% year-over-year. Additional findings revealed ransomware intrusions to increase by 36% year-over-year, with threat actors increasingly mounting attacks against edge devices and other non-traditional equipment. Moreover, nearly half of all threat actors that launched attacks during the first half were either state-backed or hacktivist operations, with those from Iran observed to have been escalating OT environment targeting.