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Conti ransomware gang member sentenced to 4 years in prison

A Ukrainian national has been sentenced to four years in prison for his role in Conti ransomware attacks between 2021 and 2022. 44-year-old Oleksii Oleksiyovych Lytvynenko was arrested by the Irish national police (An Garda Síochána) in July 2023 at the request of the United States and was extradited last year. Lytvynenko and his Conti accomplices deployed ransomware on victim networks in the United States and abroad, stealing data and encrypting devices to extort Bitcoin ransom payments. "From 2020 until 2022, Conti was used to attack computers and networks in 47 states, 31 foreign countries, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. The FBI estimates that, as of January 2022, there had been victim payouts associated with Conti ransomware exceeding $150,000,000," the Department of…

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Ukrainian lawyer's second career as a Conti coder earns him 4 years behind bars
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theregister.comSep 11, 2026extracted
Ukrainian hacker gets four years in US prison over Conti ransomware attacks
Ukrainian hacker gets four years in US prison over Conti ransomware attacks A Ukrainian national was sentenced to four years in a U.S. prison for his role in the notorious Conti ransomware operation, which targeted more than 1,000 victims worldwide before shutting down in 2022. Oleksii Lytvynenko, 44, worked as both a hacker and developer for Conti, personally targeting at least a dozen companies and helping build malicious tools used by the group, the U.S. Justice Department said Thursday. Lytvynenko, who previously lived in Cork, Ireland, pleaded guilty in June. The police found data stolen from eight U.S. victims and four others overseas in his online accounts. Between 2020 and 2022, Conti hackers attacked organizations across 47 U.S. states and 31 countries, as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The FBI estimated that victims had paid the group more than $150 million in ransoms by January 2022. “For years, the Conti ransomware group executed a sustained and sophisticated campaign that victimized hundreds of organizations across the United States and abroad, including critical infrastructure entities,” said A. Tysen Duva, assistant attorney general for the DOJ criminal division. According to prosecutors, Lytvynenko stored data stolen from victims and worked on a malware “loader,” a tool designed to install or launch other malicious programs on compromised computers. The court documents said forensic evidence recovered during his arrest showed he remained involved in ransomware operations even after Conti itself had shut down. Irish authorities arrested Lytvynenko at his home in Cork in July 2023 at the request of the U.S. He spent several years in an Irish jail while fighting extradition before being transferred. Four other alleged Conti members were charged in a separate indictment unsealed in September 2023. Before its collapse, Conti was one of the world’s most prolific ransomware operations. The group was widely believed to operate from Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe and drew particular attention after its leadership publicly backed Moscow following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Shortly afterward, an apparent insider believed to be Ukrainian leaked a trove of Conti’s internal chats and other data, exposing details about the group’s members and operations. Ukrainian authorities arrested another suspected Conti member in Kyiv in 2024. Daryna Antoniuk is a reporter for Recorded Future News based in Ukraine. She writes about cybersecurity startups, cyberattacks in Eastern Europe and the state of the cyberwar between Ukraine and Russia. She previously was a tech reporter for Forbes Ukraine. Her work has also been published at Sifted, The Kyiv Independent and The Kyiv Post.
therecord.mediaSep 11, 2026extracted
Ukrainian Conti Ransomware Developer Sentenced to 4 Years in US Prison
A United States court sentenced Ukrainian national Oleksii Oleksiyovych Lytvynenko to four years in prison this week for his role in the Conti ransomware operation. Lytvynenko, 44, was arrested in Ireland in 2023 and extradited to the United States in late 2025. He pleaded guilty to wire fraud in June 2026, admitting to helping the Conti group develop malware and possessing stolen victim data. He faced up to 20 years in prison. Authorities initially indicated that the Ukrainian man worked with the Conti group between 2020 and 2022, when the operation was shut down. However, at his guilty plea, Lytvynenko admitted joining the cybercrime gang in September 2021. Lytvynenko helped the group develop a malware loader, but investigators also found victim data in his possession, suggesting that he may have also participated in the actual ransomware attacks. Investigators determined that Lytvynenko remained involved in ransomware attacks even after the Conti operation ended, until his arrest. The Conti ransomware gang is estimated to have received at least $150 million in ransom payments after encrypting victims’ files and threatening to leak stolen information unless they paid up. Authorities said the hackers targeted organizations in more than 30 countries, including most US states. Lytvynenko’s sentencing comes just months after Latvian national Deniss Zolotarjovs was sentenced to 8.5 years in prison in the US for his role as a Karakurt ransomware negotiator. Last month, the US also announced that the Belarusian creator and administrator of the Ransom Cartel ransomware was sentenced to 16 years in prison. Related: Five Venezuelans Plead Guilty in US Court to ATM Jackpotting Related: Australia Arrests 2 Alleged TeamPCP Hackers
securityweek.comSep 11, 2026extracted
Conti ransomware gang member sentenced to 4 years in prison
A Ukrainian national has been sentenced to four years in prison for his role in Conti ransomware attacks between 2021 and 2022. 44-year-old Oleksii Oleksiyovych Lytvynenko was arrested by the Irish national police (An Garda Síochána) in July 2023 at the request of the United States and was extradited last year. Lytvynenko and his Conti accomplices deployed ransomware on victim networks in the United States and abroad, stealing data and encrypting devices to extort Bitcoin ransom payments. "From 2020 until 2022, Conti was used to attack computers and networks in 47 states, 31 foreign countries, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. The FBI estimates that, as of January 2022, there had been victim payouts associated with Conti ransomware exceeding $150,000,000," the Department of Justice said on Thursday. "Lytvynenko joined that conspiracy as both an intruder and a developer — personally harming at least 12 companies, storing stolen data from victims, and helping build the malicious tools Conti used to extort and threaten communities," added Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva. The defendant pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in June 2026 and was facing a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. He admitted to joining the Conti ransomware operation in September 2021, controlling the stolen data of eight U.S. victims and four overseas victims, and sending ransom notes as part of the cybercrime gang's double extortion attacks between 2020 and June 2022. Lytvynenko also admitted to joining a team run by another Conti conspirator, where he coded a "loader," which is a type of malware designed to load the software needed to carry out attacks. Conti ransomware gang The Conti ransomware operation emerged from the Ryuk cybercrime group in 2020 with close ties to the TrickBot malware gang, and became notorious for large-scale attacks against healthcare organizations, governments, and enterprises. Conti evolved into a cybercrime syndicate that controlled multiple malware operations, including BazarBackdoor and TrickBot, and it shut down two years later, in 2022, after increased law enforcement pressure and leaked internal chats. The Conti gang later split into other ransomware groups, including BlackCat, Black Basta, ZEON, Hive, Quantum, BlackByte, Karakurt, and the Silent Ransom Group. Seven TrickBot/Conti members were sanctioned in February 2023, after a massive leak of personal information and internal conversations belonging to Conti and TrickBot members, known as the ContiLeaks and TrickLeaks. In September 2023, the U.S. and the United Kingdom also sanctioned and charged nine Russian nationals associated with Conti and TrickBot for attacks against over 900 victims worldwide, while the Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany (Bundeskriminalamt or BKA) doxed the leader of the TrickBot and Conti cybercrime gangs in May 2025, claiming he is a 36-year-old Russian named Vitaly Nikolaevich Kovalev using the alias "Stern." According to court documents, the Conti cybercrime gang has targeted more than 1,000 victims worldwide and collected over $150 million in ransom payments while active. Join Mikko Hyppönen and security leaders from the NFL, CHANEL, and Atlassian for a two-hour digital summit on what AI-speed attacks change, what defenders should stop doing, and how to validate, decide, fix, and re-validate at machine speed. Save your seat
bleepingcomputer.comSep 11, 2026extracted
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Sep 18, 2026
New CrowdStrike 'FalconFlank' zero-day grants SYSTEM privileges
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Other vulnerabilities of note According to Childs, organizations should also prioritize patching a cluster of 20 bugs that affect most supported Windows versions and could be classified as wormable. “In each of these cases, a remote, unauthenticated attacker could get arbitrary code execution on affected systems with no user interaction,” he pointed out. “We haven’t seen a global worm in years, but with a DNS flaw [CVE-2026-69730] acting as the spiritual successor to SigRed, that reality could change fast.” CVE-2026-69676, an authentication bypass flaw in Kerberos that could lead to remote code execution, is classified as Exploitation More Likely. “An authenticated attacker with low-level access sends a crafted request and executes code on the server, no user interaction,” Childs explained. “‘The server’ here means a domain controller, and any authenticated attacker means any domain user. So the realistic read is: one phished workstation account, one crafted request, code execution on the DC. That’s a domain-compromise primitive, and Microsoft expects to see it exploited.” Finally, among the more likely to be exploited flaws is also CVE-2026-80093, a privilege escalation vulnerability in Windows Cloud Files Mini Filter Driver. Though successful exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker to win a race condition, technical details are already public. The good news is that patches for all of these and the above mentioned actively exploited flaws are all bundled in the cumulative security updates and monthly rollups for the various Windows versions, so applying them fixes them all in one fell swoop. Setting Windows updates aside for a moment, Childs also advises prioritizing updating: Microsoft Exchange Server, to fix a RCE flaw that can be triggered by Exchange Server processing an email with a malicious Visio attachment (CVE-2026-55007) Microsoft SharePoint Server, to fix a variety of bugs Why prioritization matters more than patch counts “One of the most important things to recognize across the recent rise in Patch Tuesday releases is that while the number of vulnerabilities being patched is rising, the number of vulnerabilities that can and will affect most organizations remains quite low,” Narang told Help Net Security. AI-assisted vulnerability discovery in 2026 is creating larger haystacks, but it isn’t finding more needles. 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Sep 9, 2026
Cisco patches actively exploited email gateway zero-day (CVE-2026-76461)
Criminals are exploiting a critical Cisco Secure Email Gateway flaw that can turn a malicious email into root access. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-76461, carries a 9.8 CVSS score and affects physical and virtual Secure Email Gateway appliances regardless of their configuration. Cisco says there are no workarounds, so patching is the only fix. The bug lies in how Cisco's AsyncOS software handles incoming email. An attacker doesn't need to log in: they can send a booby-trapped message through a vulnerable gateway and, if the exploit works, run commands as root. Which is not exactly what you want from the box tasked with keeping nasty emails out. Cisco's Product Security Incident Response Team said it became aware of active exploitation in September, although the networking giant hasn't said who is behind the attacks, how long they have been going on, or how many organizations have been compromised. Cisco uncovered the bug while resolving a Technical Assistance Center support case. Signs suggest at least some Cisco cloud customers were caught up in the attacks. Cisco said it investigated devices belonging to its Secure Email Cloud service and directly contacted customers whose appliances showed indicators of possible compromise. It is now carrying out remediation and recovery work and says all of its Secure Email Cloud devices have been upgraded to AsyncOS 16.5.0-780. Admins running their own appliances have a little more work to do. Cisco recommends checking logs for signs of suspicious activity, but warns that finding nothing doesn't necessarily mean the system is clean. Once attackers have root access, Cisco says they could tamper with the logs and cover their tracks. Admins are also being told to check network and firewall logs for anything unusual, rather than relying on the gateway itself for answers. For virtual appliances suspected of being compromised, Cisco's recovery advice is fairly drastic: preserve the forensic evidence, deploy a fresh VM running fixed software, rebuild the configuration, and rotate credentials and cryptographic material. Cisco has fixed the bug in AsyncOS releases 15.5.5-014, 16.0.4-302 and 16.5.0-780, with customers strongly encouraged to move to the latter. There's still a decent-sized target pool out there. The Shadowserver Foundation was tracking more than 400 Cisco Secure Email Gateway appliances exposed to the internet as of Monday The flaw has also landed in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, with US federal civilian agencies ordered to remediate it by September 17. CVE-2026-76461 comes less than a year after attackers exploited another critical AsyncOS flaw, CVE-2025-20393, to break into Cisco Secure Email Gateway appliances and install persistence mechanisms. That bug eventually scored a perfect 10. For anyone still running an affected gateway, the message is fairly simple: the box designed to inspect hostile email can itself be pwned by one; attackers are already doing it, and there is no workaround to hide behind. ®
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Sep 18, 2026
GitLab urges users to patch max severity path traversal flaw
GitLab urged users on Thursday to patch their servers immediately against a maximum-severity path traversal vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-85706. The security flaw, discovered by a security researcher using the 's3ntago' handle and reported via GitLab's HackerOne bug bounty program, stems from improper path confinement and missing authentication enforcement in the repository commits API. Unauthenticated attackers can exploit CVE-2026-85706 "under certain conditions" to read arbitrary data (e.g., credentials, secrets, and sensitive information) from vulnerable servers. While GitLab has yet to flag this flaw as exploited in the wild, one day later, cybersecurity company watchTowr reported that attackers have already begun searching for Internet-exposed GitLab servers unpatched against CVE-2026-85706. "watchTowr Intel is already observing in-the-wild probes for the latest critical GitLab Path Traversal vulnerability, CVE-2026-85706, which allows attackers to read arbitrary files in a single HTTP request," it warned. "Based on recent GitLab vulnerabilities, we know the time until indiscriminate exploitation is likely not far away. [..] Defenders should also hunt through log files for HTTP POST requests to '/api/v4/projects/{id}/repository/commits/' URIs containing 'file.path' parameters to identify potential exploitation attempts." Yesterday, GitLab patched a second critical vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-87719 that stems from an insecure deserialization weakness in the GraphQL subscription serializer. CVE-2026-87719 affects GitLab EE and allows authenticated users with Duo Chat access to steal sensitive credentials and Advanced Search instance configurations. Admins warned to patch as soon as possible GitLab fixed the two security issues in GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) versions 19.3.2, 19.2.6, and 19.1 on Thursday, and urged users to patch their systems immediately. "These versions contain important bug and security fixes, and we strongly recommend that all self-managed GitLab installations be upgraded to one of these versions immediately," the company warned on Thursday. "GitLab.com is already running the patched version. GitLab Dedicated customers do not need to take action." In May 2023, GitLab addressed another maximum severity path traversal flaw (CVE-2023-2825) that exposes sensitive data, including proprietary software code, user credentials, tokens, and files on unpatched servers. One year later, CISA and the FBI urged software companies to weed out path traversal security vulnerabilities from their products before shipping, saying that such flaws "have been called 'unforgivable' since at least 2007." More recently, in January, GitLab also patched a high-severity two-factor authentication bypass affecting community and enterprise editions that enables attackers who know the target's account ID to circumvent two-factor authentication. Since November 2021, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has flagged four GitLab vulnerabilities as exploited in attacks, including two (CVE-2021-22175 and CVE-2021-39935) in February this year. The GitLab DevSecOps platform has more than 30 million registered users and is used by over 50% of Fortune 100 companies, including Nvidia, Airbus, T-Mobile, Lockheed Martin, Goldman Sachs, and UBS. Update September 11, 09:39 EDT: Added watchTowr's report of CVE-2026-85706 probing. Join Mikko Hyppönen and security leaders from the NFL, CHANEL, and Atlassian for a two-hour digital summit on what AI-speed attacks change, what defenders should stop doing, and how to validate, decide, fix, and re-validate at machine speed. Save your seat
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Sep 15, 2026
NetScaler zero-day exploitation escalates into mass attacks (CVE-2026-88771)
The public still doesn’t know who is abusing a critical Citrix vulnerability exploited as a zero-day weeks before disclosure, but we now know that the unknown digital intruders have used CVE-2026-88772 to break into government agencies, financial services firms, education organizations, and legal and professional services sectors across North America and Europe. And everyone agrees that the vendor took way too long to disclose the security holes. GreyNoise said it spotted an attempt to exploit CVE-2026-88771 against a Citrix NetScaler Gateway on September 24. Google researchers, meanwhile, said the CVE-2026-88772 campaign has been ongoing “since at least early September.” “Why Citrix took so long to disclose these vulnerabilities is a question only Citrix can answer,” Benjamin Harris, founder and CEO of exposure management firm watchTowr, told The Register. Citrix declined to answer The Register's questions about the scope of the attacks, and why it didn't alert the public about the CVEs under active exploitation until Sunday. “The vulnerabilities were discovered during incident response and forensic investigations at organizations already compromised, meaning both the exploitation and Citrix’s awareness of it predated public disclosure,” Harris said. “Citrix has a history of delaying the publication of vulnerabilities, even when they’re being exploited in the wild and affecting customers.” So if you use Citrix NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway appliances, and haven’t already applied the security updates, do that ASAP. But first, check your systems for signs of compromise, warns Mandiant Consulting CTO Charles Carmakal. “Given the active exploitation, NetScaler customers should prioritize examining their systems for compromise *before* upgrading/patching,” Carmakal said on LinkedIn. “If you find evidence of web shells or other malicious files, please preserve evidence and investigate the scope of the compromise. Patching alone may not eradicate the threat actor from your environment.” No attribution - yet Citrix disclosed eight CVEs on Sunday with the worst of the bunch – CVE-2026-88771 and CVE-2026-88772 – earning critical 9.5 CVSS scores. “Exploitation of CVE-2026-88771 and CVE-2026-88772 on unmitigated NetScaler deployments has been observed,” the vendor said. CVE-2026-88771 can allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary commands remotely. CVE-2026-88772 is a memory overflow vulnerability that can lead to remote code execution or denial of service when DTLS is enabled, as it is by default on VPN virtual servers. But by the time Citrix issued security advisories and warned customers about the vulnerabilities, they were already under attack. “No attribution has been made public, and we have yet to identify a clear trend among targets by industry or organization size,” Harris said. “Historically, NetScaler vulnerabilities have been exploited by both state-sponsored groups and ransomware operators.” WatchTowr on Tuesday published a technical writeup about CVE-2026-88772, plus a detection artifact generator for Citrix users to determine if they are vulnerable and to help with remediation. Also on Tuesday, Google’s threat intel businesses provided additional details about the exploitation campaign’s targets and the attacker’s custom malware. “We have observed evidence that organizations in North America and Europe in the government, financial services, education, legal and professional services sectors were likely impacted by this exploitation campaign, which has been ongoing since at least early September,” Google Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant said in an advisory. Custom malware After analyzing the intruder’s post-exploit toolkit, the malware hunters found never-before-seen malware used to establish persistent root access and proxy traffic into internal corporate networks. The custom malware includes WHIPSHOT, a PHP web shell, and SLAPSHOT, a TCP tunneling tool written in Python. WHIPSHOT is disguised as a Debian package and hides Base64-encoded command-and-control payloads in native HTTP headers. It functions as an HTTP transport bridge for SLAPSHOT, which accepts commands from WHIPSHOT and forwards arbitrary TCP streams to internal hosts. Supported commands include: open, which establishes an outbound TCP socket to a target host and port. push, which writes data to an open session. pull, which polls and reads data from an open session socket. exch, which sends and receives command-and-control data to and from an open session socket. close, which terminates a specified network session. ping, which performs a basic health-check verification. “In at least one observed intrusion, the threat actor routed traffic through this proxy to manually conduct internal reconnaissance and credential theft,” the threat intel teams noted. Google did not immediately respond to The Register’s questions about the campaign, including how many exploitation attempts and successful intrusions its threat hunters observed. Its advisory notes that the Citrix campaign “underscores the continued targeting of edge devices to gain initial access to victim networks, a trend that GTIG has tracked across a range of threat actors.” Security and networking vulnerabilities accounted for about half of enterprise-related zero-days in 2025, according to Google’s count. Attackers love edge devices - application delivery controllers, VPN gateways, and firewalls - because they provide direct access from the open internet to corporate networks, allowing attackers to bypass endpoint detection tools and other security layers. NetScaler, in particular, is notoriously buggy. Attackers exploited another critical NetScaler vuln in March. A year earlier, Citrix disclosed multiple zero-days in the same product. ®
8 shared
Oct 5, 2026
Cisco warns of new SD-WAN zero-day exploited in attacks
Attackers are exploiting a new critical zero-day flaw in Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager, the system companies use to manage their Cisco SD-WAN networks, Cisco said in an advisory on September 30. The flaw, CVE-2026-76504, could allow a remote attacker with no login access to use the Manager's API as the admin user. Fixed releases are available, and there is no workaround. It carries a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10. It sits in the part of the Manager's API that handles login sessions. The Manager mishandles URI encoding in an HTTP request. A crafted request can therefore bypass an authentication rule intended to restrict access to a single API endpoint. The attacker needs no credentials, only the ability to send that request to the Manager's API. Managers exposed to the internet are at risk of compromise, according to Cisco. By default, the admin user holds the netadmin role, which is allowed to perform all operations on the device. Cisco said its Product Security Incident Response Team "became aware of active exploitation of this vulnerability" in September 2026. The flaw was found while Cisco's Technical Assistance Center (TAC) was handling a support case. The advisory does not say how many customers were attacked, when the attacks began, who carried them out, or what the attackers did with the access. Who Needs to Upgrade The flaw affects SD-WAN Manager regardless of how the system is configured. No other product is listed as affected. These are the first fixed releases for each release train: CVE-2026-76504 is separate from three Cisco SD-WAN flaws fixed earlier: CVE-2026-20182 in May, and CVE-2026-20245 and CVE-2026-20262 in June. A comparison of the advisories shows that the fixed releases for those flaws are all older than the ones in the table above. So a Manager last upgraded for the May or June fixes still needs this update. The table does not list the 20.10, 20.11, 20.13, 20.14, or 20.16 release trains, which Cisco's May advisory did list. The advisory also does not name Cisco SD-WAN Cloud-Pro or Cisco SD-WAN for Government (FedRAMP), two deployment types named in the May and June advisories. Cisco SD-WAN Cloud (Cisco Managed) is already fixed in release 20.15.605, and customers on it need to take no action. Until an on-prem Manager is upgraded, Cisco advises restricting access to it from unsecured networks such as the internet. Where internet access is required, only known, trusted hosts should be allowed in, and the control components should sit behind a firewall. Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Cloud Hosted environments already have this mitigation in place. The mitigation worked in a test environment, according to Cisco, which advises customers to assess its impact on their own networks before applying it. Cisco's SD-WAN hardening guide says administrative interfaces, such as ports 443, 22 and 830, should not be exposed directly to the internet. HTTPS access to the Manager should come only from a jump host or a management subnet. Checking for Signs of Compromise The signs of compromise Cisco describes involve j_security_check, the request path the Manager uses for session-based logins. In Cisco's example, one character of that path is URI-encoded, giving /%6a_security_check, where %6a stands for the letter j. Two log files are the places to look for j_security_check entries from unknown or unauthorized IP addresses: File: /var/log/nms/containers/service-proxy/serviceproxy-access.log File: /var/log/nms/vmanage-server.log, in particular entries for users whose names start with viptela-reserved- Names starting with viptela-reserved- belong to reserved system service accounts. Any one character in the request can be encoded, so %6a is only an example. The same entries can also appear during normal operation, and each match has to be checked against normal activity to avoid false positives. To help determine whether a Manager has been compromised, customers can open a Severity 3 case with Cisco TAC and include CVE-2026-76504 in the title. Cisco asks them to run request admin-tech on the Manager first, so the output file can be reviewed. The advisory includes no detection rule and does not say whether upgrading removes an attacker who already has access. Cisco's advisories for the May flaw and the first June flaw said an update alone would not resolve a confirmed compromise. They told customers to collect the admin-tech file before upgrading. CVE-2026-76504 follows a series of Cisco SD-WAN flaws flagged as exploited this year. As of September 30, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency's (CISA) Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog listed eight Cisco SD-WAN flaws added in 2026.
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Oct 5, 2026