Key Findings Despite being over two decades old, the NTLM authentication protocol remains a critical security liability in 2025. Cybercriminals are actively exploiting newly discovered vulnerabilities to launch sophisticated attacks across the globe. One of the most alarming vulnerabilities is CVE-2024-43451, which allows attackers to steal a user's NTLMv2 hash with virtually no interaction. The vulnerability abuses the MSHTML engine to trigger an NTLM authentication attempt
