A China-affiliated threat actor has been abusing a zero-day vulnerability in multiple Cisco email appliances to gain access to the underlying system and establish persistence. Cisco confirmed the news in a blog post and a security advisory, urging users to apply provided recommendations and harden their networks.
In its announcement, Cisco said it first spotted the activity on December 10, and determined that it started at least in late November 2025. In the campaign, the threat actor tracked as UAT-9686 abused a bug in Cisco AsyncOS Software for Cisco Secure Email Gateway, and Cisco Secure Email and Web Manager, to execute system-level commands and deploy a persistent Python-based backdoor called Aquashell.
Read more…
Source: TechRadar News
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- Kali365 Phishing-as-a-Service Kit Hijacks Microsoft 365 Access Tokens
May 21, 2026
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is issuing this Public Service Announcement (PSA) to warn the public about an emerging Phishing1-as-a-Service2 (PhaaS) platform called Kali365, first seen in April 2026. Kali365 has primarily been distributed via Telegram, enabling cyber threat actors to obtain Microsoft 365 access tokens and bypass multi-factor authentication3 (MFA) protocols without intercepting the user’s ...
- Key Microsoft legacy tool is still being abused to launch malware campaigns
May 21, 2026
Cybercriminals are increasingly using a legitimate legacy Windows tool to deploy infostealers and loader malware, researchers are saying. A new Bitdefender report has claimed that since the start of 2026, there’s been an uptick in activity related to a Windows utility called Microsoft HTML Application Host (MSHTA), a legitimate utility that runs special HTML-based application files known as HTAs. Read more… Source: ...
- GitHub says internal repos exfiltrated after poisoned VS Code extension attack
May 20, 2026
GitHub, the world’s biggest code repository and DevOps platform, fell victim to a malicious Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension. The company’s initial assessment is that only internal repositories were exfiltrated. The incident was reported by GitHub on X, with follow-up posts revealing a “poisoned VS Code extension” as the cause. The Microsoft-owned code shack continues to ...
- Microsoft shuts down illegal code-signing operation used by ransomware criminals to mask their malware
May 19, 2026
Microsoft seized websites and took down hundreds of virtual machines running a cybercrime service that allegedly sold code-signing certificates to ransomware gangs, thus making their malware look like legitimate software – and allowing criminals to infect thousands of machines in the US, including at least 12 owned and operated by the Windows giant. Read more… Source: The ...
- WantToCry ransomware remotely encrypts files
May 19, 2026
SophosLabs analysts investigated WantToCry ransomware attacks that involved the threat actors abusing the Server Message Block (SMB) service for initial access and then exfiltrating files to attacker-controlled infrastructure for remote encryption. The detection surface is significantly reduced because WantToCry operates without local malware execution, and there is no post-compromise activity beyond exfiltrating files and rewriting ...
- NGINX Rift attackers waste no time targeting exposed servers
May 18, 2026
Exploit attempts are already hammering a newly disclosed NGINX bug dubbed “NGINX Rift,” proving once again that attackers read patch notes faster than most admins. Researchers at VulnCheck said they are seeing active exploitation tied to CVE-2026-42945, a heap buffer overflow flaw affecting both NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus that was disclosed last week after apparently sitting ...