Community Newsletter - October 2025
Let’s see what October had to offer… 🎃 Trick or Treat on Specter St. Have you completed the final lab of Specter St. and found your lost companion, Bones? If you find him before November 28th – and are a member of the Community – you’ll receive a shiny digital badge on your profile. Need a hint, check out the Labs Live recordings or head over to the Help Forum and ask an expert. 🏆 Customer Awards Soon to be revealed, our Customer Awards celebrate some of our incredible customers, and there’s a special award for Community users! All will be revealed soon… 🛡️ The Incident Room This month we started a series of LinkedIn challenges, where we present a cybersecurity or crisis situation along with three choices of how to respond. Voting takes place either through reactions or comments. We later reveal how our cyber experts would have dealt with the situation. Patch Newsday October 2025 - As per usual, the Container 7 team have reviewed the latest Microsoft patches so that you don't have to. 🙌 Special Shout Outs Please join me in thanking this month's most helpful members in our Help & Support Forum. 1. barney 2. edgarloredo 3. LewisMutton 4. DG 5. Dragonstar16 If you'd like to see your name here one day, head on over to the forum and answer a question. 🔮 Looking Forward We’ve got some exciting plans for a redesign of the Community, focussed around what users look for when they visit, and the ability to showcase the latest and greatest content – can’t wait to share it with you all! As always, we want to hear from you. Please give us your feedback on your community experience and let us know what else you'd like to see. SamImmersive Certifications: From incident responders to SOC analysts, we’ve got you covered!
Our career paths are crafted by Immersive experts and designed to give you hands-on, in-depth technical learning across a range of areas. When you complete a career path, we’ve always been proud to see people share their achievements and showcase their badges online. But you called for something more – and we heard you. Now, when you complete one of our 39 Immersive Certified career paths, you’ll be able to download a certificate to demonstrate your achievement and showcase your skills. Our Immersive Certifications cover a range of areas, whatever your interests and expertise – from SOC analysts to incident responders, penetration testers to threat hunters, and Java developers to malware analysts. And a number of the Immersive Certified career paths range from beginner to advanced levels, so you can keep building your skills. If you’ve already completed one of the Immersive Certified career paths, you’ll be able to download a certificate today. Simply head into the Achievements area of the platform (Upskill > Achievements) and select the relevant career path. If you haven’t completed a career path yet, check out the options in the Upskill > Career Paths area of the platform. You can find further information on Immersive Certifications and all of our Immersive Certified career paths in the FAQs page on the Helpdesk. Immersive Certifications are a new feature. We’re keen to hear your feedback on how they can help develop your skills, share your achievements with others, and demonstrate your learning. Leave a comment below to let us know your thoughts!New CTI Labs: CVE-2017-1000353 Offensive and Defensive (October 2025 CISA KEV Additions)
In October 2025, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added five new vulnerabilities to its known exploited vulnerabilities catalogue, one of which was a critical 2017 vulnerability affecting Jenkins versions 2.56 and earlier and 2.46 LTS and earlier. This vulnerability allowed attackers to gain remote code execution on vulnerable instances. Why is this critical for you and your team? Jenkins is a widely used application. Shodan reports confirm that there are 000s of instances exposed to the internet, with the vulnerable versions. With this vulnerability being a critical remote code execution vulnerability, the impact is significant. Understanding how to investigate logs for this attack and understanding how to successfully achieve exploitation is important for any team. Even though it's a 2017 vulnerability, it's a very recent addition to CISA KEV, which illustrates just how significant it is, and that even today, attackers are using this vulnerability to gain footholds and compromise vulnerable victims. Who is the lab for? SOC Analysts Incident Responders Penetration Testers Red Teamers Threat Hunters Here are the links to the labs: Offensive: https://immersivelabs.online/v2/labs/cve-2017-1000353-jenkins-command-injection-offensive Defensive: https://immersivelabs.online/v2/labs/cve-2017-1000353-jenkins-command-injection-defensiveOctober is here! Prepare for Cybersecurity Awareness Month with Immersive 🎃
In a world where technology and threats are constantly evolving, building a resilient team is more important than ever. At Immersive, we're proud to be your partner in this journey, and we've put together a fantastic lineup of events, challenges, and resources throughout October to help you and your teams stay ahead of the curve. What’s on at Immersive this Cybersecurity Awareness Month 📆 Oct 1st Whitepaper: GenAI’s Impact on Cybersecurity Skills and Training Oct 6th Trick or Treat on Specter Street Challenge Begins: Labs 1-3 Oct 9th Labs Live: Ripper's Riddle Community Webinar Oct 13th Trick or Treat on Specter Street Challenge: Labs 4 - 6 Oct 15th Webinar: How to Build a People-Centric Defense for AI-Driven Attacks Oct 16th Labs Live: Cursed Canvas Community Webinar Oct 20th Trick or Treat on Specter Street Challenge: Labs 7 - 9 Oct 22nd Cyber Resilience Customer Awards Winners Revealed Oct 23rd Labs Live: Macro Polo Community Webinar Oct 27th Trick or Treat on Specter Street Challenge: Labs 10-12 Oct 30th Labs Live: Phantom Pages Webinar Oct 31st Trick or Treat on Specter Street Challenge Finale: Labs 13 Oct 31st Virtual Crisis Sim: The Puppet Master’s Trick or Treat Challenges and Labs Trick or Treat on Specter Street 👻 Welcome to Trick or Treat on Specter Street, a Halloween-themed cybersecurity challenge where you'll use both offensive and defensive skills to solve a mystery unlike anything we’ve encountered before. Each week throughout October, we’ll drop new hands-on labs that slowly begin to uncover the secrets of Specter Street. Can you crack the case? Find out more. AI Foundations 🤖 Ready to navigate the rapidly evolving world of Artificial Intelligence with confidence? Give our new AI Foundations lab collection a go! Designed to equip your teams with critical AI knowledge and practical implementation skills; this initial collection features seven foundational labs that progressively guide your teams from high-level overviews to secure, hands-on AI implementation. Find out more. Events and Webinars Webinar How to Build a People-Centric Defense for AI-Driven Attacks Wednesday October 15th A must-attend event for understanding how threat actors are leveraging AI and other emerging technologies to carry out attacks. Register Now. Virtual Crisis Sim The Puppet Master’s Trick or Treat Friday October 31st Join us on Halloween as the notorious Puppet Master returns for a fiendish game of Trick or Treat 🎃 Play along with our Immersive crisis response experts as we tackle a LIVE coordinated attack from the Puppet Master on a Critical National Infrastructure organization. Dare you play the Puppet Master’s game and survive, or will they finally get their revenge?! Register Now. AI and Emerging Threats Throughout the month, we’re shining a spotlight on the rise of AI in cyber. From our all-new AI Foundational lab series to cutting edge research from the experts at the cutting edge of GenAI in cybersecurity in our latest whitepaper: GenAI’s Impact on Cybersecurity Skills and Training. Explore our latest AI-focused resources and upskill your teams to confidently face the future of cyber resilience. Check out our latest reports, articles, webinars and more on GenAI, here. Celebrating Cyber Resilience Heroes 🏆 We're also celebrating the individuals and organizations at the forefront of cyber resilience with our Cyber Resilience Customer Awards. Keep your eyes peeled on our social channels! We'll be unveiling our latest winners on October 22nd, recognizing those who demonstrate an outstanding commitment to proving and improving their cyber readiness. It's going to be a jam-packed month focused on practical application and deep engagement. Let’s make this the most secure October yet!Community Newsletter - September 2025
BenMcCarthy But before we get into that, let’s take a look at all the great things we achieved together throughout September… 🏆 The Maze Challenge How did you manage with our most difficult lab challenge ever? Thousands of you attempted the challenge, but only 4 people escaped the Broken Maze! Congratulations if you were one of them. Need a hint, check out the Q&A Webinar or head over to the Help Forum and ask an expert. 📰 Community Updates Here are some of my favourite community articles from the last month: StevenBoyd shared his thoughts on CVE-2025-32463, a critical vulnerability in the sudo Linux utility. KitHudson shared his analysis of CVE-2025-53770, a critical, unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability in on-premise Microsoft SharePoint servers. 🛡️ Container 7 Updates Container 7 is the home for our team of cyber security experts to post about their research, insights, and the latest threats and vulnerabilities that you need to know about. Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters: The Cybercrime Group Redefining Threats - @ben and KevMarriott shared their thoughts on three of the most notorious groups this year, Scattered Spider, LAPSUS$, and ShinyHunters, joining forces. Patch Newsday September 2025 - As per usual, the Container 7 team have reviewed the latest Microsoft patches so that you don't have to. 🙌 Special Shout Outs Please join me in thanking this month's most helpful members in our Help & Support Forum. 1. autom8on 2. jcberlan 3. KingMashaba 4. LewisMutton 5. edgarloredo If you'd like to see your name here one day, head on over to the forum and answer a question. 🔮 Looking Forward We are very excited to welcome you to Specter Street, a Halloween-themed cybersecurity challenge where you'll use both offensive and defensive skills to solve a mystery unlike anything we’ve encountered before. Each week throughout October, we’ll drop new hands-on labs that slowly begin to uncover the secrets of Specter Street and the furry friend causing havoc. Look out for tomorrow’s blog post which will have all the details about this, and the rest of our Cybersecurity Awareness Month programming. As always, we want to hear from you! Please give us your feedback on your community experience and let us know what else you'd like to see. See you in the community soon! KieranNew Labs - Malterminal: Malware Analysis
With artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) fast becoming a more popular and talked-about set of technologies in every industry in society, it's no surprise that LLM-enabled malware now exists that can dynamically generate code, query data, and offload malicious functionality to LLMs, lowering the barrier of entry for threat actors deploying malware. This lab introduces one of the first known malware samples to ever facilitate the use of LLMs to perform malicious functionality. Why should our customers care? Most, if not all, companies are looking into using AI to varying degrees, whether to make their workforce more efficient and productive or to build full models that facilitate technical processes. With this in mind, and with the advent of basic malware that can use API keys to query LLMs and AI services, we will likely see this particular malware set evolve over time. By doing this lab, you'll begin to see how these pieces of malware are just the stub and querier for AI and how they can be used maliciously. This will showcase what this threat is like in its current state. We shall be monitoring how this threat evolves, so stay tuned for more labs. Who is the defensive lab for? SOC Analysts Incident Responders Threat Hunting Here is a link to the lab: https://immersivelabs.online/v2/labs/malterminal-analysis
Enter The Maze Challenge: Immersive’s Most Advanced Collection Yet
Today marks the release of the Maze Challenge, Immersive’s most advanced and cunningly designed offensive cybersecurity collection yet. This new series of labs is more than just a test of skills. It's a puzzle, a game, and a creative brain-bender, crafted by two of Immersive’s most brilliant minds: StefanApostol and SabrinaKayaci. Stefan, known to many as the "evil genius" behind the Human Connection Challenge, and Sabrina, who recently inspired our London community meetup attendees with her predictions on AI within the AppSec space, have teamed up to create something truly unique. We sat down with them to get their insights on what makes the Maze Challenge so special, so challenging, and so much fun. What was the main inspiration behind the maze theme, and how did you translate that narrative into a collection of technical labs? The core idea for the Maze Challenge, as Stefan explained, came from a shared love of games. "Both Sabrina and I are geeks. We like games, and we wanted to create a challenge with an overarching goal that was more than about earning a completion token." While our labs have always awarded tokens for completion, Stefan and Sabrina wanted to create a narrative that would engage users on a deeper level. "A maze is the perfect example of that," Stefan said. "We wanted to include a game element in these challenges." This isn't just a series of technical scenarios. It's a cohesive puzzle where each lab is a step toward a larger objective. The maze narrative encourages participants to think creatively, connecting different skills and techniques in a way that feels more like a game than a traditional capture the flag (CTF). I’ve heard that this is the most advanced lab collection yet. So, what makes these labs more challenging than the thousands of others in Immersive's catalogue? This collection is Immersive's most advanced to date, introducing a range of techniques not yet widely covered in the platform. The labs are a combination of real-world examples drawn from the creators' past experiences and internal testing, all woven together with a good deal of imagination. While the challenge covers a broad spectrum of offensive skills, including web, Linux, Windows, and Active Directory, Stefan was quick to name binary exploitation as an obvious concept that will have participants scratching their heads. The team collaborated with BenMcCarthy on this particular lab, and Ben being Ben, he poured all his creativity into it, making even Stefan nervous to attempt this mean challenge! Sabrina added that the real difficulty lies in the type of thinking required. "Some of them will really require outside-the-box thinking," she said. "They're unusual in a way that requires not just the technical skill, but some creativity and more critical thinking." This is a key theme throughout the collection. Participants can't rely on a simple, formulaic approach. Instead, they must be flexible and resourceful. Sabrina noted that some challenges will require "multiple sets of skills," forcing users to chain together their expertise in different areas to find a solution. Without giving away any spoilers, can you describe a moment in one of the labs that you're particularly proud of designing? Sabrina beamed as she recalled the Inner Maze lab. "I really enjoyed creating Inner Maze," she said, before adding a cryptic twist. "When you break out of that maze is when you're really trapped." She was particularly proud of her ability to create and then beat her own challenge, finding the exploit even more difficult than the design itself. Can you give users any hints or tips? The Maze Challenge is designed to be tough, and you should certainly expect it to be just that. However, the creators want everyone to have a fair shot, so they’ve some advice for those who might feel intimidated. Use the platform to your advantage. Stefan noted that around 98% of concepts within this challenge can be learned in the rest of our lab catalogue. “If you get stuck on a specific skill, take a break from the maze, find the relevant labs on the platform, and then come back with your newfound knowledge.” We encourage you to learn along the way, and persistence is always rewarded! Failure can be a sign of progress. Sabrina shared a key insight: "Sometimes it's important to take note of what it is you're doing that's failing... If you're failing at the same spot in a particular approach, that could actually mean that you're doing something right." Go figure that one out! Don't go it alone. Sabrina advises anyone starting their journey to ask others for advice and help. Our community help forum is a great resource for sharing knowledge and getting tips from fellow participants. We want you to have fun, and part of that fun is collaborating with your industry peers along the way. In the end, what do you hope participants will take away from this experience, beyond the technical skills? Stefan and Sabrina both hope it's a "desire for more challenges”! They also dropped a teaser for a community Halloween challenge… That’s all you’re getting for now! 👀 Want a head start? Join Stefan and Sabrina for a Labs Live webinar on August 19th. They’ll be solving the Improbable Maze lab live on the call, in collaboration with you. Attendees are encouraged to play along, offer their suggestions, methods, and frustrations. It’s the perfect opportunity to see the creators’ thought process and gain some momentum for your own journey through the maze. See you there!New Labs: BlackHat 2025 and DefCon 33
Throughout early August 2025, representatives from Immersive's cyber team attended the BlackHat 2025 and DefCon 33 conferences and got great exposure to the latest technologies, topics, and techniques presented by the sharpest minds in our industry. As a result of attending these talks, workshops, and villages, Immersive has created brand new labs going through the various talks that took place, allowing you to get hands-on with the latest technologies and exploits. We present a number of brand new labs covering some of the most interesting and insightful topics from the events, from operational technology (OT) to achieving privilege escalation through firewall software. AI was a hot topic, as you would imagine, especially around Prompt Injection attacks. We already have plenty of content on Prompt Injection, not to mention the new AI Foundations content, so for this series, we created an Appsec Style lab around preventing Prompt Injection attacks. Why should our customers care? BlackHat and DefCon are two conferences that attract the greatest minds in cyber to get together and share their knowledge through workshops, official talks, and villages. Given the high diversity of events and talks that took place, there is something for everyone! Many of the topic areas shared are things that attackers could easily exploit themselves, so taking advantage of the information in these labs equips our customers with the knowledge of the latest vulnerabilities, threats, and exploitation techniques currently being talked about in the industry - improving your resilience and preparation against the latest threats. Who are the labs for? Offensive Security Engineers and Penetration Testers SOC Analysts and Incident Responders Malware Reverse Engineers Operational Technology Engineers Cyber Security Engineers Here is a list of the labs in this release: Binary Facades: Extracting Embedded Scripts CVE-2024-5921 Redux - Bypassing mitigations to PrivEsc with Palo Alto Global Protect Chrome Alone: Transforming a Browser into a C2 Platform No VPN Needed?: Cryptographic Attacks Against the OPC UA Protocol Python: AI Prompt Injection If you'd like to do any of these labs, here is a link to the BlackHat/DefCon collection: https://immersivelabs.online/series/defcon-black-hat/ImmersiveOne: Scattered Spider Release
Scattered Spider has continuously been a threat to many of our customers, and one of the reasons is that they have techniques and tactics that can affect all members of an organization. From their advanced social engineering tactics targeting less security-focused users in an organization to bypassing defences long enough to deploy ransomware and steal data from some of the largest organizations in the world. Therefore, Immersive is releasing an ImmersiveOne approach to protecting our customers. This means customers now have access to the following: Lab – Scattered Spider and Dragonforce: Campaign Analysis Lab – Threat Actors: Scattered Spider Workforce Scenario – Social Engineering Techniques Crisis Sim – Responding to a Scattered Spider Attack The technical and non-technical labs, workforce scenario, and Crisis Sim scenario release will enable everyone inside an organization to prepare and be ready for threats posed by Scattered Spider. For an in-depth blog on Scattered Spider and what to think about in a crisis, follow the link here: https://www.immersivelabs.com/resources/blog/scattered-spider-what-these-breaches-reveal-about-crisis-leadership-under-pressureCommunity Newsletter - August 2025
Hello again from Immersive HQ where we hope you all had a fantastic July. Looking for something to do on these long Summer evenings? Why not join us in Bristol on 14th August for our next meetup? This month we excited to welcome ex-hacker Glenn Wilkinson who will take us inside the hacker’s world to reveal how attackers think, and what the rest of us can learn from it. 🏆 The Human Connection Challenge Congratulations once again to the winners of season 1 of the Season 1 Finale Prize Draw. A number of you have asked for a leaderboard for the whole of the season, so we’ve crunched the numbers and come up with this: 🥇 First to Finish steven was the first to finish 6 of the 7 labs! ⏱️ Fastest to Complete onkelstony was the fastest to complete all 7 labs in just 15 hours 🎯 Most Accurate Xat had an average accuracy of 96.1% across all 7 labs 💪 Most Persistent barney completed all 7 labs in 14 attempts. Congratulations to everyone who took part. New challenges will be available very soon! 📰 Community Updates Here are some of my favourite community articles from the last month: Vibe coding your way to a ZAP MCP server - RobertKlentzeris shared his adventures in "vibe coding" to create a ZAP Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, demonstrating how AI can leverage existing SDKs to build new tools and highlighting the potential and challenges of this new coding paradigm. The secret to hosting an engaging Crisis Sim - TomBoyle shared practical advice on how to keep participants engaged and ensure the effectiveness of virtual crisis simulation sessions. CVE-2025-53770 - Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution via unsafe deserialization in Microsoft SharePoint Server In this blog, AmarKhan detailed his research journey to understand and weaponize the CVE-2025-53770 vulnerability, an unauthenticated remote code execution exploit in Microsoft SharePoint Server leveraging unsafe deserialization, by overcoming challenges in lab setup and payload analysis. We also hosted a community webinar on this topic, you can watch the recording here. 🛡️ Container 7 Updates Container 7 is the new home for our team of cyber security experts to post about their research, insights, and the latest threats and vulnerabilities that you need to know about. Patch Newsday July 2025 - As per usual, the Container 7 team have reviewed the latest Microsoft patches so that you don't have to. Weaponizing LLMs: Bypassing Email Security Products via Indirect Prompt Injection Ben McCarthy explains how Large Language Models can be exploited through hidden instructions in emails to reconstruct and present malicious links, thereby circumventing conventional email security products. Our Container 7 Team will be at Blackhat and DEFCON later this week. Keep an eye on the blog for their daily updates or say “Hi” if you see them there. 🙌 Special Shout Outs Please join me in thanking this month's most helpful members in our Help & Support Forum. 1. netcat 2. jamesstammers 3. Fa11acy 4. steven 5. SIgwe1 If you'd like to see your name here one day, head on over to the forum and answer a question. 🔮 Looking Forward Feeling lost without the Human Connection Challenge? Hit a dead end on your cybersecurity upskilling journey? Fear not, we have some a-maze-ing new challenge labs coming very soon 🌽 As always, we want to hear from you! Please give us your feedback on your community experience and let us know what else you'd like to see. See you in the community soon! Kieran
