A previously unknown and “sophisticated” nation-state group compromised Cisco firewalls as early as November 2023 for espionage purposes — and possibly attacked network devices made by other vendors including Microsoft, according to warnings from the networking giant and three Western governments.
A Cisco spokesperson declined to comment on which country the snooping crew – tracked as UAT4356 by Talos and as STORM-1849 by Microsoft – is affiliated with. The disclosures, however, come as both Russian and China-backed hacking groups have been found burrowing into critical infrastructure systems and government agencies, with China specifically targeting Cisco gear.
Read more…
Source: MSN News
Related:
- Evasive Panda APT poisons DNS requests to deliver MgBot
December 23, 2025
The Evasive Panda APT group (also known as Bronze Highland, Daggerfly, and StormBamboo) has been active since 2012, targeting multiple industries with sophisticated, evolving tactics. Our latest research (June 2025) reveals that the attackers conducted highly-targeted campaigns, which started in November 2022 and ran until November 2024. The group mainly performed adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attacks on specific ...
- North Korea-backed hackers launch newly detected cyberattack using HWP object linking and embedding code
December 22, 2025
A North Korea-linked cyber hacking group appears to have launched a new cyberattack campaign, code-named “Artemis,” that embeds malicious code inside computer files, a report showed Monday. The Genians Security Center (GSC), a South Korean cybersecurity institute, said in a report that it detected the operation believed to have been carried out by APT37, a Pyongyang-backed ...
- Cisco email security products actively targeted in zero-day campaign
December 19, 2025
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 ...
- Cloud Atlas activity in the first half of 2025: what changed
December 19, 2025
Known since 2014, the Cloud Atlas group targets countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Infections occur via phishing emails containing a malicious document that exploits an old vulnerability in the Microsoft Office Equation Editor process (CVE-2018-0802) to download and execute malicious code. In this report, Kaspersky researchers describe the infection chain and tools that the ...
- Operation ForumTroll continues: Russian political scientists targeted using plagiarism reports
December 17, 2025
In March 2025, we discovered Operation ForumTroll, a series of sophisticated cyberattacks exploiting the CVE-2025-2783 vulnerability in Google Chrome. Kaspersky researchers previously detailed the malicious implants used in the operation: the LeetAgent backdoor and the complex spyware Dante, developed by Memento Labs (formerly Hacking Team). However, the attackers behind this operation didn’t stop at their ...
- Amazon security boss blames Russia’s GRU for years-long energy-sector hacks
December 15, 2025
Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) is behind a years-long campaign targeting energy, telecommunications, and tech providers, stealing credentials and compromising misconfigured devices hosted on AWS to give the Kremlin’s snoops persistent access to sensitive networks, according to Amazon’s security boss. “The campaign demonstrates sustained focus on Western critical infrastructure, particularly the energy sector, with operations spanning ...