Microsoft has revealed that a now-patched security flaw impacting the Windows Common Log File System ( CLFS ) was exploited as a zero-day in ransomware attacks aimed at a small number of targets.
” The targets include organizations in the information technology ( IT ) and real estate sectors of the United States, the financial sector in Venezuela, a Spanish software company, and the retail sector in Saudi Arabia”, the tech giant .
The risk in question is CVE-2025-29824, a luxury increase insect in CLFS that could be exploited to reach SYSTEM privileges. It was as part of its Patch Tuesday release for April 2025.
Microsoft is tracking the activity and the post-compromise oppression of CVE-2025-29824 under the title Storm-2460, with the threat actors even leveraging a trojan named PipeMagic to give the exploit as well as ransom loads.
The precise initial entry vector used in the attacks is now no known. However, the risk actors have been observed using the certutil power to get malware from a reputable third-party page that was earlier compromised to level the payloads.
The malware is a malignant that contains an encrypted load, which is then packed to release PipeMagic, a plugin-based trojan that has been detected in the wild since 2022.
It’s worth mentioning here that CVE-2025-29824 is the next Windows zero-day weakness to be delivered via PipeMagic after , a Windows Win32 Kernel Subsystem luxury increase insect, which was flagged by ESET and patched by Microsoft last month.
Previously, PipeMagic was also observed in connection with Nokoyawa ransomware attacks that exploited another CLFS zero-day flaw ( ).
” In some of the other attacks that we attribute to the same actor, we also observed that, prior to exploiting the CLFS elevation-of-privilege vulnerability, the victim’s machines were infected with a custom modular backdoor named’ PipeMagic’ that gets launched via an MSBuild script”, Kaspersky in April 2023.
It’s crucial to note that Windows 11, version 24H2, is not affected by this specific exploitation, as access to certain System Information Classes within is restricted to users with , which typically only can obtain.
” The exploit targets a vulnerability in the CLFS kernel driver”, the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team explained. ” The exploit then utilizes a memory corruption and the RtlSetAllBits API to overwrite the exploit process’s token with the value 0xFFFFFFFF, enabling all privileges for the process, which allows for process injection into SYSTEM processes”.
Successful exploitation is followed by the threat actor extracting user credentials by dumping the memory of LSASS and encrypting files on the system with a random extension.
Microsoft said it was unable to obtain a ransomware sample for analysis, but said that the ransom note dropped after encryption included a TOR domain tied to the .
” Ransomware threat actors value post-compromise elevation of privilege exploits because these could enable them to escalate initial access, including handoffs from commodity malware distributors, into privileged access”, Microsoft said. ” They then use privileged access for widespread deployment and detonation of ransomware within an environment”.