Community Newsletter - June 2025
Hello from Immersive HQ where once again we're getting ready for our next in-person community meetup on Thursday, June 12th. Come and join us for another evening of talks from cyber security experts RobertKlentzeris, KevBreen and MisterV. 🎁 Community Challenge Season 1 Congratulations to every single one of you who attempted our community challenge labs. Since we launched the challenge in November 420 of you have collectively logged over 2,600 lab attempts! Don't worry if you struggled. All of the walkthrough guides are available here. We are in the process of contacting the Season winners. 🏆 The Human Connection Challenge Over 100 of you attempted this month's challenge, and 19 completed it before the deadline! 🥇 First to Finish Waqar was the fastest community member to complete the lab - looks like you registered a community account just in time! ⏱️ Fastest to Complete Jamesstammers2 was the fastest to complete in just under 4 hours. 🎯 Most Accurate Markus onkelstony Jamesstammers2 m0ns00n IotS2024 barney gromych Xat CyberSharpe phurtim frakattk and netcat all got 100% - Nicely done everyone! 💪 Most Persistent Congrats to chuz2z who spent over 12 hours on this lab! Congratulations to all of our winners! If you haven't completed it yet you can find the walkthrough here. The Community Challenge is taking a short break while we prepare for Season 2. Please drop a comment below and let us know what you'd like to see in the next season. 📰 Community Updates Here are some of my favourite community articles from the last month: This month GreggOgden posted a 3 part series on Level Up Your Organisation's Resilience Using Cyber Drills: Part 1: Unlocking the Power of Cyber Drills with Immersive Part 2: Planning and Executing Effective Cyber Drills with Immersive Part 3: Analyzing Results and Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement 🛡️ Container 7 Updates Did you notice our new Container 7 blog? 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 May 2025 - As per usual, the Container 7 team have reviewed the latest Microsoft patches so that you don't have to. ZEROLOT Analysis - Inside Sandworm’s Destructive New Wiper Decoding the May Retail Cyber Onslaught - Inside the World of Ransomware Cartels and Social Engineering 🙌 Special Shout Outs Please join me in thanking this month's most helpful members in our Help & Support Forum. 1. netcat 2. steven 3. retornet 4. Xat 5. CyberSharpe If you'd like to see your name here one day, head on over to the forum and answer a question. 🔮 Looking Forward Did I mention that we have a meetup in Bristol on Thursday, June 12th? Not in Bristol? Don't worry, next month we hope to host a meetup in London. Please get in touch if you would like to host us or speak. We also have lots of cyber drills taking place globally, you can find the details on our events page. Did you hear about the Immersive Cyber Resilience Awards 2025? Read on to learn how you can qualify for nine different awards this October. 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! KieranCommunity 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! KieranAnnouncing the Winners of the 2025 Cyber Resilience Customer Awards!
What a year for cyber resilience! As we say goodbye to another Cybersecurity Awareness Month, we are thrilled to celebrate the organizations and individuals who have demonstrated exceptional dedication to proving and improving their cybersecurity posture, defending against emerging threats, and embedding a culture of resilience across their organizations using the Immersive One platform. Collectively, our customers have tackled countless labs and simulations, setting new benchmarks for capability and speed. After crunching the numbers and reviewing the nominations, we're ready to announce just some of the winners who truly excelled in 2025 across the following categories: Emerging Threats Leader Award The Emerging Threats Leader award recognizes organizations and individuals at the forefront of threat detection and threat hunting; proactively identifying risks and strengthening defenses using insights from our Cyber Threat Intelligence labs. 🏆 Emerging Threats Award Organization Winners include: NHS England T-Mobile Arctic Wolf 🏆 Emerging Threats Award Individual Winners include: Steven Glogger, Swisscom Paul Blance, Specsavers Taz Wake, Jones Lang LaSalle Mark Cox, NationalGrid Stephen Wilson, BT Group Cyber Resilience Leader Award This award acknowledges organizations that maximize the full use of the Immersive One platform to fully optimize end-to-end cyber readiness. True cyber resilience goes beyond simply preventing attacks; it encompasses the ability to prove, improve, benchmark and report your cyber resilience. 🏆 Cyber Resilience Leader Award Winners include: Swisscom NHS England Arctic Wolf Darktrace BT Group Secure Development Champions Award This award celebrates organizations and individuals who champion security throughout the software development lifecycle. It recognizes a proactive approach to building secure applications, emphasizing practices like threat modeling, secure coding standards, and rigorous testing using the Immersive One platform to prepare and demonstrate secure coding practices. 🏆 Secure Development Champion Organization Award Winners include: Citigroup GfK Swisscom 🏆 Secure Development Champion Individual Award Winners include: Steffen Wacker, Arctic Wolf Joao Santos, GfK Omkar Joshi, GfK Balaji Kannan, GfK Naresh Sivakumar, GfK Alexander Kolyshkin, EMCD Exercising Excellence Award The Exercising Excellence award recognizes organizations that have excelled in regularly using scenarios on the Immersive One platform to prove their cyber resilience. They have successfully run multiple crisis simulations to regularly exercise their teams and have high levels of participation and engagement. 🏆 Exercising Execellence Award Winners include: Mastercard Citigroup Siemens Energy NHS England Immersive Trailblazer Award This award recognizes individuals who simply love Immersive and have shown exceptional dedication to the platform. They have been amongst our top point scorers since January 1st 2025, completing thousands of labs and truly immersing themselves in the platform. 🏆 Immersive Trailblazer Award Winners include: Mico Marcos, PepsiCo QingKai Ma, Hubbel Community Leader Award Our final award, the Community Leader award, recognizes individual members of the Human Connection Community that have contributed to, and engaged with, both community content and their fellow community members. They have consistently shared tips and advice, engaged with popular threads and participated in community events and meetups, helping to bring the Human Connection community to life. 🏆 Community Leader Award Winners include: netcat steven CyberSharpe autom8on MegMarCyberTrust Nneka_AN Dooley DGNew CTI Labs: CVE-2025-53770 (ToolShell SharePoint RCE): Offensive and Defensive
Recently, a critical zero-day vulnerability affecting on-premise SharePoint servers, identified as CVE-2025-53770, was uncovered. This vulnerability allows for authentication bypass, leading to remote code execution, and has been actively exploited in the wild. Eye Security researchers detected an in-the-wild exploit chain on July 18, 2025, during an incident response engagement. This discovery led to Microsoft assigning two CVEs: CVE-2025-53770 and CVE-2025-53771. The attack notably leveraged a combination of vulnerabilities to achieve its objectives, impacting numerous SharePoint servers globally. There is now a public exploit available for anyone wanting to achieve remote code execution. Why should our customers care? This critical vulnerability has been added to the CISA Kev Catalog. and with no authentication or user interaction, a vulnerable SharePoint server can be fully taken over remotely, letting attackers run arbitrary code as if they were privileged admins. SharePoint is a complex and large system that often holds a lot of sensitive data for organizations and is often a targeted system for attackers. Who is the defensive lab for? System Administrators SOC Analysts Incident Responders Threat Hunters Who is the offensive lab for? Red teamers Penetration Testers Threat Hunters Here are the links to the labs: Offensive: https://immersivelabs.online/v2/labs/cve-2025-53770-toolshell-sharepoint-rce-offensive Defensive: https://immersivelabs.online/v2/labs/cve-2025-53770-toolshell-sharepoint-rce-defensive
Community Newsletter - February 2025
Welcome to February’s edition of the community newsletter! After what feels like a long month for many, February is finally here! Let's take a moment to look back at some of our favourite community highlights from January: 🏆 The Human Connection Challenge First of all, The moment that many of you have been waiting for: The results of Episode 3 of The Human Connection Challenge: Season 1. Here are the top performing community members in each category: 🥇 First to Finish jamesstammers was the first to finish the lab, in what can only be described as rapid speed! ⏱️ Fastest to Complete Xat was the fastest to finish, completing in a very respectable 48 minutes. 🎯 Most Accurate Shout outs to autom8on jamesstammers Xat and ifeanyiukadike, who each completed the lab 100% accuracy. 💪 Most Persistent They say that the most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time… audeyisaacscba & netcat did exactly that, securing the spots for the most persistent participants. Congratulation to winners and all who took part. Share how you got on in the comments below, and keep your eyes peeled for ✨ Lab 4 ✨ later today 👀 If you'd like to see how the lab author BethHolden intended for you to complete the lab, check out the official walkthrough here. 💡 Expert Insights We kicked off this year with a content theme of our highly anticipated new feature, Custom Lab Builder. You can read all you need to know about lab builder here: Feature Focus: Introducing Lab Builder Feature Focus: Introducing Drag and Drop, Free Text Questions, and Instructional Tasks in the Lab Builder A 3-part series from NaomiRoberts starting with From Concept to Content: A Deep Dive into Theorizing and Planning a Lab Collection From Feng Shui to Surveys: How User Feedback Shapes Immersive Labs And the beginning of a 3-part series from helenpayne & LauraBrady on Making the Most of Custom Lab Builder, deep-diving on topics including Accessibility, Inclusivity and Tone of Voice. And as usual, our expert CTI team have worked tirelessly to deliver the latest in CTI news, including new labs & Patch Tuesday January 2025. 🤝 Peer to Peer Support We built the Human Connection to help our members to connect and support each other, so it’s great to see many of you actively engaging to troubleshoot challenges and sharing solutions over in the Help and Support forum. So far, the forum is proving its worth with over 180 solutions to date. This month I wanted to particularly wanted to thank RobN who achieved Bronze III Rank by providing hints and tips to numerous other members. Thank you! In addition to forums, on Friday we introduced the community to the Human Connection Study Group! More news on the very first lab of Study Group coming later today. 📰 Product Updates If you are an Immersive Labs customer, come and read about all of the new features (including Lab Builder) and content in our January Release Notes. 🗓️ Exclusive Events If you missed it, catch KevBreen DaveSpencer & DanPotter in the recording of Be Ready in 2025: Hot Cybersecurity Takes and How to Build Resilience 🔮 Looking Forward We know how popular JP’s virtual Crisis Sims have been in this community, so you’ll be pleased to know that he’s back on valentines day with #LoveHacked Virtual Crisis Sim LIVE To look forward, we need to look back over your experiences of the community, so please do take the time to complete the survey this week. Last week we attended an Immersive off-site in Dublin, where we connected with colleagues across the business to plan lots of great initiatives, content and events to come in 2025, so watch this space! Of course, no trip to Dublin is complete without a visit to the Guiness Storehouse… It had to be done! Stay tuned by following the News & Announcements Tag and turn on your email Notifications 👀 See you in the community soon! TillyNew 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-analysisCommunity Newsletter - May 2025
Hello once again from Immersive HQ where we are preparing to host our next in-person community meetup tomorrow (May 7th). If you'd like to join us for another evening of professional networking and cybersecurity talks please RSVP Here. 🎁 Community Challenge Season 1 Finale ICYMI yesterday we announced an exciting end to Season 1 of the Human Connection Challenge with some great prizes up for grabs including: 🥇 Tickets, Flights & Accommodation to an Immersive Summit in NYC or London 🥈 2 x PlayStation®5 Consoles 🥉 10 x Apple AirPods or JBL Headphones 👕 Much coveted Immersive swag and goodies! You can read all about the competition (including full terms and conditions) here. 🏆 The Human Connection Challenge Over 300 of you attempted this month's challenge, and 22 completed it before the deadline! 🥇 First to Finish Once again steven completed the lab just a few hours after it's release! ⏱️ Fastest to Complete Markus was the fastest to complete in 1 hour 20 minutes. 🎯 Most Accurate Despite the difficulty, the following members all got 100% accuracy in their first attempt: barney autom8on CyberSharpe IotS2024 edgarloredo Markus CBAM964 Xat BigChungus Al13nz steven 💪 Most Persistent The most persistent also goes to steven who spent nearly 9 hours in total in the lab... what were you up to in there? Congratulations to all of our winners! If you haven't completed it yet you can find the walkthrough here. And remember, for every challenge lab that you have completed by 2nd June you get an extra entry in the Season Finale Prize Draw! 📰 Community Updates Here are some of my favourite community articles from the last month: The Softer Side: Non-technical Benefits to Technical Team Exercises It can be easy to focus readiness programs solely on individual upskilling and technical capability, but we rarely use these skills in isolation in real-world situations. In this article JennyLam discusses how technical exercising can be an effective way of taking those skills to the next level, applying them to different scenarios and less-than-ideal circumstances. Decoding Coding: Picking a Language In this article, BarnyStewart provides guidance and tips for anyone interested in coding who isn’t a professional developer. The first step in the coding journey is picking a language, and this article will take you through the options. An Ounce of Prevention Beats a Pound of Postmortem with Supply Chain Security EllaBendrickChartier's latest article dissects the hidden dangers in your supply chain, from compromised tools to vendor vulnerabilities, and shows you how to build a proactive security culture with Immersive Labs and Crisis Simulations. Secure Code Comments: One Easy Way to Steward Your Application Security Culture Application Security Content Engineer RobertKlentzeris explores how incorporating security-focused comments into code can elevate developers' skills, improve team security awareness, and foster a proactive security culture within the software development lifecycle. Check out the Find the Flaw exercise to test your skills. 🙌 Special Shout Outs Please join me in thanking this month's most helpful members in our Help. 1. netcat 2. jagira 3. autom8on 4. steven 5. ray96 If you'd like to see your name here one day, head on over to the forum and answer a question. 🔮 Looking Forward Did you hear about the Immersive Cyber Resilience Awards 2025? Read on to learn how you can qualify for nine different awards this October. We are also looking forward to the next Labs Live event on 15th May. In this webinar, MattParven, Principal Security Engineer & Cloud Security SME will talk you through one of our cloud computing labs as he tackles it live! Finally, 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
