{"id":227358,"date":"2025-12-18T01:18:03","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T07:18:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/cisco-warns-of-active-attacks-exploiting-unpatched-0-day-in-asyncos-email-security-appliances"},"modified":"2025-12-18T01:18:03","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T07:18:03","slug":"cisco-warns-of-active-attacks-exploiting-unpatched-0-day-in-asyncos-email-security-appliances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/12\/cisco-warns-of-active-attacks-exploiting-unpatched-0-day-in-asyncos-email-security-appliances","title":{"rendered":"Cisco Warns of Active Attacks Exploiting Unpatched 0-Day in AsyncOS Email Security Appliances"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/cisco-warns-of-active-attacks-exploiting-unpatched-0-day-in-asyncos-email-security-appliances.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Cisco has alerted users to 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.<\/p>\n<p>The networking equipment major said it became aware of the intrusion campaign on December 10, 2025, and that it has singled out a \u201climited subset of appliances\u201d with certain ports open to the internet. It\u2019s currently not known how many customers are affected.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis attack allows the threat actors to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges on the underlying operating system of an affected appliance,\u201d Cisco <a href=\"https:\/\/sec.cloudapps.cisco.com\/security\/center\/content\/CiscoSecurityAdvisory\/cisco-sa-sma-attack-N9bf4\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">said<\/a> in an advisory. \u201cThe ongoing investigation has revealed evidence of a persistence mechanism planted by the threat actors to maintain a degree of control over compromised appliances.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cisco has alerted users to 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. The networking equipment major said it became aware of the intrusion campaign on [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,418,1492],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-227358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-internet","category-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=227358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227358\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=227358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=227358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=227358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}