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! KieranNew 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! TillyCommunity 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 & Support Forum. 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! KieranAnnouncing the Immersive Cyber Resilience Awards 2025!
At Immersive, we recognize the exceptional efforts of organizations and individuals leading the charge in building true cyber resilience. That's why we’re thrilled to introduce the all-new Immersive Cyber Resilience Awards for 2025! These awards are designed to celebrate those demonstrating an outstanding commitment to proving and improving their cyber resilience through practical application and deep engagement with the Immersive One platform. For Cyber Awareness Month 2025, we're expanding last year’s successful Customer Awards program to nine honors across three categories – celebrating more top-tier organizations and cyber pros than ever. Let’s look at this year’s categories and what’s up for grabs when Cyber Awareness Month rolls around this October! Cyber Resilience Awards 01. Emerging Threats Leader This award recognizes those leading the charge in threat detection and hunting, proactively identifying risks and strengthening defenses using insights from our Cyber Threat Intelligence labs. To qualify for this award, we’ll be looking at the: Total number of Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) labs completed: Indicating a strong commitment to understanding the latest threat intelligence. Average time to complete and respond to every new CTI lab: Highlighting efficiency and agility in addressing emerging threats. 02. Cyber Resilience Leader This award acknowledges organizations that maximize the full use of the Immersive platform to fully optimize end-to-end cyber resilience. True cyber resilience goes beyond simply preventing attacks; it encompasses the ability to withstand, respond to, and recover from cyber incidents with minimal disruption. This award celebrates organizations that: Zero in on the breadth and depth of coverage across the MITRE ATT&CK framework: Demonstrating a comprehensive understanding and application of real-world attack tactics and techniques. Have taken it upon themselves to build Immersive fully into their cyber resilience program: Showing a deep integration of practical cyber skills development into their overall security strategy. 03. Immersive Trailblazer This award recognizes individuals who simply love Immersive and have shown exceptional dedication to the platform. This category celebrates personal commitment and enthusiasm for continuous learning and skill development in cybersecurity. We’re looking for individuals who: Have been our top point scorers since January 1, 2025: Indicating consistent engagement and mastery of a wide range of cyber skills. Have completed hundreds of labs and truly immersed themselves in the platform: Demonstrating an exceptional commitment to hands-on learning and practical skill development. Cyber Excellence and Innovation Awards 04. Exercising Excellence (Crisis Sim) This award recognizes organizations that have excelled in regularly using Crisis Sim scenarios to prove their cyber resilience. In the face of a major cyber incident, the ability to respond effectively and maintain business continuity is critical. This award celebrates organizations that: Have successfully run multiple simulations: Demonstrating a proactive approach to testing and refining their incident response plans. Have high participation in Immersive's own virtual Crisis Sims: Indicating a commitment to leveraging realistic and challenging scenarios to prepare their teams. 05. Exercising Excellence (Cyber Drilling) This Immersive-nominated prize rewards organizations that have successfully implemented and run cyber drill exercises with Immersive in 2025. Cyber Drills are dynamic, immersive simulations that test every aspect of an organization’s ability to detect, manage, and recover from high-impact cyber threats. This award celebrates organizations that have: Actively run Immersive-led cyber drills as part of their security training program: Showing a commitment to continuously improving technical capabilities. Demonstrated success in integrating Cyber Drill outcomes and learnings into their wider security landscape: Highlighting their ability to translate theoretical knowledge into practical skills. 06. Secure Development Champion (AppSec) This award celebrates organizations and individuals championing security throughout the software development lifecycle. Proactive security measures integrated early in the development process are essential for building secure and resilient applications. This award recognizes those who: Have implemented strong Developer Champion programs into their secure development training environment: Demonstrating a commitment to embedding security expertise within development teams. Have completed the highest number of AppSec lab content on the Immersive One platform: Demonstrating a dedication to hands-on practical learning and ongoing upskilling across the secure development lifecycle. Immersive Growth and Adoption Awards 07. Cybersecurity Maturity Leader This award recognizes organizations that have significantly shifted their security culture as a direct result of integrating the full Immersive One platform into their cybersecurity infrastructure. Building a strong security culture is fundamental to long-term cyber resilience, and this award celebrates those who have successfully fostered a more security-aware and engaged workforce. We’re looking for organizations that have demonstrated: A noticeable positive evolution in employee security behaviors and awareness. Evidence of Immersive One being a key driver in this cultural transformation. A commitment to embedding continuous learning and practical skills development across the organization. 08. Immersive Impact and Growth Leader This award recognizes organizations and individuals whose level of engagement with the Immersive One platform has significantly increased over 2025. This category celebrates those actively expanding their use of the platform to enhance their cyber capabilities. We’ll be taking into account factors such as: Overall growth in platform utilization and engagement. Involvement and engagement with Immersive-hosted challenges and competitions. 09. Community Leader This award recognizes individual members of the Human Connection Community who have significantly contributed to, and engaged with, both community content and their fellow community members. A strong and supportive community is invaluable in cybersecurity, fostering collaboration, knowledge sharing, and mutual growth. This award celebrates individuals who have: Consistently shared tips and advice. Engaged with popular threads and participated in community events and meetups. Actively helped to bring the Human Connection community to life. Now it’s over to you! We’ll be unveiling the winners of each category throughout Cyber Awareness Month in October 2025, with some exciting prizes up for grabs along the way to fuel your journey. All you have to do is stay on top of your game with Immersive. Throughout the year, keep your eyes peeled for fun and engaging challenges, competitions, and events meticulously designed to help you and your teams sharpen your skills, deepen your understanding of the threat landscape, and ultimately, strengthen your cyber resilience. We're excited to celebrate your progress and achievements as you continue to build a more secure digital future.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!
