System Update

Feds Gave 48 Hours to Patch SharePoint or Pull the Plug

Think of SharePoint as your office's bustling digital filing cabinet, crammed with contracts, client lists, and secret sauces, accessible by the whole team. Now imagine a sneaky gang of cybercriminals picking the lock with a zero-day, slipping in to plant ransomware or swipe your crown jewels. That's the wild west showdown CISA ignited with their urgent alert on active SharePoint exploitation, echoing the hammer-drop of Emergency Directive 25-02 for Exchange but laser-focused on these on-premises servers.

The drama kicked off in May 2025 at Berlin's Pwn2Own hacking competition, where a Viettel hacker pocketed $100K for demonstrating flaws to remotely run code on unpatched SharePoint servers. By July 7—pre-Patch Tuesday, exploits leaked in the wild (because Microsoft shared them with China, see my post 3 days ago), hitting over 9,000 exposed boxes worldwide. I did deep dive on the SharePoint issues 4 days ago.

In response CISA calls to arms all federal civilian exec branch agencies (FCEB) to slap on Microsoft's July security updates, crank up Antimalware Scan Interface, roll out endpoint detection, and if you can't patch quick, yank those public-facing relics offline till the dust settles—especially EOL dinosaurs like SharePoint 2013.

The impacts are brutal. At least seven US agencies, Homeland Security, Energy, Education, took hits, with backdoors lurking for ransomware drops like Warlock, encrypting files and demanding crypto ransoms. No mega-dumps yet, but persistent access means thieves with copied keys are ready for round two.

According to Bleeping Computer, A Texas hospital ate $150K in downtime after a breach locked patient records, while a midwest university leaked 10K student files to the dark web.

Why now? Microsoft's on-prem pushback; legacy setups like SharePoint 2016/2019 limp to 2026 EOS which leaves them juicy for state-sponsored attacks.

At CyberStreams, we're geared to turn this chaos into your calm, keeping your vaults locked-tight.

I’ve Put Together Three Takeaways and Next Steps:

1. Patch Like a Pro
Install that July patch, yesterday's exploit is tomorrow's breach.

2. Web Application Firewall
This is not a standard firewall, it specifically protects web facing servers.

3. Monitor Security 24/7
Bad guys these days aren’t all about pop ups and disruptions, they’re able stealthy malicious business.

Link to original story: https://cyberstreams.com/blog/b/feds-...