Cisco says Chinese hackers are exploiting its customers with a new zero-day

In a security advisory, Cisco said it discovered a hacking campaign on December 10 targeting Cisco AsyncOS software, and in particular the physical and virtual appliances Cisco Secure Email Gateway, Cisco Secure Email, and Web Manager. The advisory said affected devices have a feature called “Spam Quarantine” enabled and are reachable from the internet.

Kevin Beaumont, a security researcher who tracks hacking campaigns, told TechCrunch that this appears to be a particularly problematic hacking campaign since a lot of big organizations use the affected products, there are no patches available, and it’s unclear how long the hackers had backdoors in the affected systems.