The year 2025 represents a pivotal moment in cybersecurity, showcasing a remarkable evolution in zero-click exploitation techniques that significantly challenges our understanding of digital security.
Unlike traditional attacks that require user interaction, such on clicking a malicious link or downloading an infected file, zero-click exploits operate in the shadows, silently compromising devices without any victim involvement.
This year witnessed at least 14 significant zero-click vulnerabilities affecting billions of devices worldwide, exposing a brutal reality: the attack surface has expanded beyond human error into the automated processes we trust implicitly.
The sophistication and scale of zero-click attacks in 2025 represent a paradigm shift where convenience has become vulnerability, and the invisible features designed for seamless user experiences have transformed into silent gateways for advanced persistent threats.
Google’s Threat Intelligence Group documented 75 zero-day vulnerabilities actively exploited in 2024, with the trend accelerating into 2025 as attackers pivoted toward enterprise infrastructure.
In the first half of 2025 alone, more than 21,500 CVEs were newly disclosed, representing an 18% increase over the previous year.
More alarmingly, the “time to exploit” window collapsed to an average of just five days in 2024, down from 32 days in previous years, rendering traditional monthly patch cycles dangerously obsolete.
This acceleration reflects sophisticated automation pipelines deployed by nation-state actors, commercial surveillance vendors (CSVs), and elite ransomware groups who have industrialized the exploitation process.
Zero-click vulnerabilities, once reserved for the upper echelon of cyber espionage, have become weapons of choice across the threat spectrum.
Mobile Platforms Under Attack
Apple’s ecosystem, long considered a fortress of security, faced relentless attacks throughout 2025. CVE-2025-43300, disclosed in August, revealed a critical out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the ImageIO framework affecting iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.
This flaw enabled zero-click remote code execution through malicious DNG images sent via messaging applications, requiring no user interaction whatsoever.
The vulnerability became particularly dangerous when chained with CVE-2025-55177, a WhatsApp flaw involving incomplete authorization of linked device synchronization messages.
Together, these exploits formed a devastating zero-click attack chain that targeted journalists and civil society actors across Europe and the Middle East.
WhatsApp confirmed that fewer than 200 users were targeted in sophisticated spyware campaigns, with victims including human rights defenders and media professionals.
Paragon Solutions’ Graphite spyware exploited CVE-2025-43200, a logic flaw in iOS that allowed maliciously crafted photos or videos shared via iCloud Links to trigger remote code execution without requiring user interaction.
Citizen Lab’s forensic analysis confirmed with high confidence that European journalists were compromised while running iOS 18.2.1, a fully updated system at the time of infection.
Apple patched the vulnerability in iOS 18.3.1, but the delayed public disclosure until June 2025 highlighted the cat-and-mouse dynamics of modern cyber warfare.
Samsung Galaxy devices weren’t spared. CVE-2025-21042, exploited as a zero-day before Samsung’s April 2025 patch, delivered LANDFALL spyware through malicious DNG image files sent via WhatsApp.
This commercial-grade Android spyware targeted flagship devices, including the Galaxy S22-S24 series, enabling comprehensive surveillance capabilities, including call recording, location tracking, and message exfiltration, all without user awareness.
The NICKNAME vulnerability, discovered by iVerify in June 2025, exposed a use-after-free memory corruption flaw in iOS’s imagent process.
Triggered by rapid-fire nickname updates sent through iMessage, this zero-click exploit appeared in fewer than 0.001% of crash logs but disproportionately affected high-profile individuals, including political figures, journalists, and AI company executives in the United States and European Union.
While Apple patched the flaw in iOS 18.3, forensic evidence suggested active exploitation targeting individuals associated with activities contrary to the Chinese Communist Party’s interests.
While mobile platforms dominated headlines, enterprise infrastructure emerged as attackers’ preferred hunting ground.
CVE-2025-21298, a Windows OLE vulnerability with a CVSS score of 9.8, enabled zero-click remote code execution through specially crafted RTF documents in Microsoft Outlook.
When victims opened or even previewed malicious emails, the flaw triggered automatically, granting attackers full system privileges.
Microsoft’s AI ecosystem wasn’t immune. CVE-2025-32711, dubbed EchoLeak, represented the first zero-click vulnerability against an AI agent.
Discovered in Microsoft 365 Copilot, this critical flaw (CVSS 9.3) allowed attackers to exfiltrate sensitive organizational data by simply sending a crafted email, with no user clicks required.
The vulnerability exploited how Copilot’s retrieval-augmented generation engine mixed untrusted external input with privileged internal data, creating an automatic data leak pathway through embedded image references.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT Deep Research agent fell victim to ShadowLeak, a zero-click server-side vulnerability that enabled silent Gmail data theft.
When connected to Gmail and browsing, a single malicious email containing hidden prompt injection commands could trigger the AI agent to autonomously exfiltrate sensitive inbox information directly from OpenAI’s cloud infrastructure, leaving no network traces for enterprise defenses to detect.
Wormable Network Protocols
Apple’s AirPlay protocol harbored a family of 17 vulnerabilities collectively named AirBorne. The most dangerous combination of CVE-2025-24252 and CVE-2025-24206 enabled zero-click remote code execution on macOS devices connected to the same network.
What made these flaws particularly menacing was their wormable nature: malicious code could spread autonomously from one device to another without any human interaction.
CVE-2025-24132 extended this threat to third-party devices using the AirPlay SDK, including smart speakers and CarPlay systems.
The React2Shell vulnerability (CVE-2025-55182) received a perfect CVSS score of 10.0, indicating a critical, unauthenticated remote code execution flaw in React Server Components and Next.js.
Affecting React versions 19.x and Next.js 15.x/16.x, this insecure deserialization vulnerability allowed attackers to execute arbitrary code through a single malicious HTTP request, compromising hundreds of machines across diverse organizations.
Commercial surveillance vendors acted as proliferation engines throughout 2025, lowering barriers to sophisticated zero-click capabilities.
NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware continued evolving with zero-click methods, though its operators faced legal consequences including a $167 million penalty from WhatsApp.
Paragon’s Graphite platform demonstrated that multiple commercial vendors now possess iPhone zero-click exploitation capabilities, fundamentally altering the threat landscape for high-value targets.
Key Lessons Learned
The year 2025 delivered stark lessons. First, zero-click attacks are no longer theoretical; they represent active, evolving threats targeting specific individuals and organizations with precision.
Second, patching velocity is critical: the five-day exploitation window demands automated, immediate update mechanisms.
Third, defense-in-depth strategies remain essential because perimeter defenses alone cannot stop zero-click infiltration.
Organizations must adopt risk-based patching, prioritize actively exploited vulnerabilities, implement zero-trust architectures that limit lateral movement, deploy behavioral analytics to detect post-compromise activities, and enable platform-specific protections, such as iOS Lockdown Mode, for high-risk users.
As we close 2025, the message is unambiguous: zero-click exploits have transitioned from elite espionage tools to mainstream attack vectors.
The convenience features powering our digital lives, automatic message parsing, seamless protocol handling, and intelligent AI agents have become double-edged swords.
Defending against this new reality requires rethinking security from first principles, where trust is continuously verified, and every automated process is treated as a potential attack vector.
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