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Warlock is a financially motivated ransomware operation, also tracked as Storm-2603, GOLD SALEM, and Water Manaul. Active since at least June 2025, it has targeted government, financial services, manufacturing, technology, education, and critical-infrastructure organizations across North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. It publicly recruited ransomware affiliates and operates a leak site, employing encryption and stolen-data extortion. Warlock has repeatedly obtained initial access by exploiting internet-facing enterprise applications, notably Microsoft SharePoint in the ToolShell exploitation activity, as well as vulnerable mail, help-desk, file-sharing, and backup-management products. It conducts Active Directory and host reconnaissance, credential dumping, directory replication attacks, and domain privilege escalation. Operators have used administrative SMB shares, PsExec, PowerShell Remoting, RDP, remote-management software, and Group Policy Objects to move laterally and deploy payloads domain-wide. The operation uses layered defense evasion, including multiple endpoint-security killers during individual intrusions and Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver techniques to terminate security processes at kernel level. It has also used DLL sideloading, web shells, remote-access tunnels, reverse proxies, and legitimate administration and forensic tools for command and control and persistence. Warlock has exfiltrated selected files to attacker-controlled cloud storage before encryption. Its ransomware has been assessed as a customized LockBit 3.0-derived implementation in earlier activity; later campaigns used a modular ransomware payload distributed through Active Directory policy. HexKiller was previously assessed as exclusive to Warlock, although its later use in Gentlemen intrusions means it is not a reliable exclusive attribution marker.
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Who, where, and (when attributed) which flag flies behind the operation. Pulled from open-source reporting and Mallory's analyst review.
Sectors the actor has been observed targeting.
Geographies tied to known operations.
Attributed origin per open-source reporting.
50 distinct techniques observed across reporting, grouped by tactic. Hover any cell for the evidence excerpt; click through for MITRE's full description.
8 malware families attributed to this actor across reporting.
3 additional families tracked in Mallory.
6 CVEs this actor has used in observed campaigns. 6 of them exploited in the wild.
Warlock and other groups exploited newly discovered vulnerabilities in internet-exposed, unpatched on-premises Microsoft SharePoint servers. The report identifies the SharePoint ToolShell vulnerability as central to the campaign.
"CVE-2026-23760 is an authentication bypass flaw that could allow any user to reset the SmarterMail system administrator password by sending a specially crafted HTTP request." / "ReliaQuest said it identified activity likely linked to Warlock that involved the abuse of CVE-2026-23760 to bypass authentication and stage the ransomware payload..."
CVE-2026-24423, on the other hand, exploits a weakness in the ConnectToHub API method to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE).
CVE-2014-8361 9.3 Realtek SDK, IoT Devices, Network Equipment Warlock, Sinobi, Beast Link
CVE-2025-26399 (CVSS score: 9.8) - A deserialization of untrusted data vulnerability in the AjaxProxy component of SolarWinds Web Help Desk that could allow an attacker to run commands on the host machine.
1 more CVE tied to this actor tracked in Mallory.
18 indicators attributed to this actor: domains, IPs, hashes, and other artifacts pulled from reporting. View more in app.
20 sources tracked across advisories, community write-ups, and news. New activity surfaces here as Mallory finds it.
Conducting ransomware intrusions by exploiting unpatched SharePoint servers, then using extensive credential theft, domain compromise, lateral movement, redundant command-and-control tunnels, kernel-level security-tool disabling via BYOVD, data exfiltration, and GPO-based mass ransomware deployment.
A rapidly growing ransomware operation conducting global extortion campaigns. It exploited exposed SharePoint servers for initial access, conducted reconnaissance and credential theft, moved laterally, disabled security tooling, exfiltrated data, and encrypted victim files with the .x2anylock extension.
Mentioned only for comparison of exploited technologies with Qilin.
Ransomware operators deploying Zoho Assist Unattended Agent to gain persistent, stealthy remote access without requiring active user sessions; activity was consistent with successful Warlock ransomware attacks observed by Talos.
Match sector + geo + tech-stack targeting against your real footprint.
Every observed MITRE ATT&CK technique, grouped by tactic.
Families this actor is known to deploy, with IOCs and behavior.
CVEs this actor has used in known campaigns.
YARA, Sigma, Snort, and vendor rules, auto-deployed to your SIEM.
Domains, IPs, and hashes tied to this actor, refreshed continuously.