Cisco VPNs, Email Services Hit in Separate Threat Campaigns
The company suffered one sophisticated five-alarm campaign and one messy spray-and-pray attack, mere days apart.
Stay secure with the latest email security updates, best practices, and threat alerts to protect your inbox and sensitive information.
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Background for this topic.
Email is a system for exchanging digital messages, typically using mail servers and clients over a network. In security, it includes both the messages and the accounts, servers, domains, and authentication mechanisms that handle them. Email commonly carries phishing links, malicious attachments, and fraudulent requests for payments or credentials; compromised accounts can also be used to impersonate trusted people and conduct further attacks.
Defenses include filtering and malware scanning, phishing-resistant multifactor authentication, careful handling of links and attachments, and monitoring for unusual login or sending activity. Domain controls such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC help receiving systems detect messages that are forged or sent without authorization, while encryption protects message contents in transit or at rest when correctly implemented. Security teams should preserve relevant headers and mailbox activity so suspicious messages can be investigated, removed, and used to identify affected accounts and other recipients.
The company suffered one sophisticated five-alarm campaign and one messy spray-and-pray attack, mere days apart.
A suspected Russia-aligned group has been attributed to a phishing campaign that employs device code authentication workflows to steal victims' Microsoft 365 credentials and conduct account takeover attacks
Cisco Talos Attributes Campaign to UAT-9686Likely Chinese nation-state hackers are exploiting an unpatched flaw in Cisco email appliances as part of an ongoing campaign to gain persistent access. Hackers have been exploiting since mid-November a zero-day in the Cisco Secure Email Gateway and Cisco Secure Email and Web Manager.
Cisco has alerted users of a maximum-severity zero-day flaw in Cisco AsyncOS software that has been actively exploited by a China-nexus advanced persistent threat (APT) actor codenamed UAT-9686 in attacks targeting Cisco Secure Email Gateway and Cisco Secure Email and Web Manager
No timeline for a patch Suspected Chinese-government-linked threat actors have been battering a maximum-severity Cisco AsyncOS zero-day vulnerability in some Secure Email Gateway (SEG) and Secure Email and Web Manager (SEWM) appliances for nearly a month, and there's no timeline for a fix.…
Cisco warned customers today of an unpatched, maximum-severity Cisco AsyncOS zero-day actively exploited in attacks targeting Secure Email Gateway (SEG) and Secure Email and Web Manager (SEWM) appliances. [...]
Microsoft announced on Monday that it will soon block mobile devices running outdated email software from accessing Exchange Online services until they're updated. [...]
Phishing attacks in 2025 increasingly moved beyond email, with attackers using social platforms, search ads, and browser-based techniques to bypass MFA and steal sessions. Push Security outlines key phishing trends and what security teams must know as identity-based attacks continue to evolve in 2026. [...]
The French Interior Minister confirmed on Friday that the country's Ministry of the Interior was breached in a cyberattack that compromised e-mail servers. [...]
An email scam is abusing abusing PayPal's "Subscriptions" billing feature to send legitimate PayPal emails that contain fake purchase notifications embedded in the Customer service URL field. [...]