Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

At this time last year, LevelBlue asked its experts to offer up some thoughts on what the coming year, 2025, would bring. So, with a year of hindsight, let’s keep ourselves honest and take a look to see what we got right and where we were a bit off. December 2025.

Telecom networks are the backbone of the digital economy. They must deliver secure, always-on connectivity at scale, supporting everything from critical national infrastructure to everyday consumer services. But cyber resilience today is no longer defined by uptime alone. It is about the ability to withstand, detect, and respond to highly targeted cyber threats that are designed to exploit the very fabric of telecom environments.

On December 18, 2025, WatchGuard released fixes for CVE-2025-14733, a critical out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the Internet Key Exchange daemon (iked) process used to establish VPN tunnels in Fireware OS, which powers Firebox firewall appliances. Exploitation of this vulnerability allows a remote, unauthenticated threat actor to execute arbitrary code. WatchGuard has confirmed in-the-wild exploitation in their advisory.

An Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) is a strategic compliance tool that protects people, data, and systems while setting clear expectations for technology use. A well-crafted AUP turns subjective norms into measurable rules that everyone in the organization can follow, helping mitigate legal, security, and operational risk. By standardizing acceptable behavior and linking usage rules to broader governance and risk management objectives, companies create shared understanding and accountability across teams.

Eighty-one percent of small businesses suffered a security or data breach over the past year, and 38% of these businesses were forced to raise their prices as a result, a report from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) has found. The report notes that external hackers have overtaken malicious insiders as the most common root cause of these incidents. This trend is partially driven by AI-assisted social engineering attacks, which were cited as a root cause by more than 41% of victims.

Every cloud service provider that seeks an authorization to operate with the federal government using the FedRAMP framework has to undergo and pass an audit. Beyond passing the audit, the CSP needs to keep and maintain proof of not just their external audit, but also internal audits, continuous monitoring results, and more.

Modern businesses need faster, more accurate ways to capture data and move it securely across teams. Paper forms, manual uploads, and scattered files slow work down and introduce unnecessary risk. With GoFormz and Egnyte, organizations can digitize field data capture while ensuring information is securely stored, governed, and ready for collaboration.

On December 17, 2025, Cisco published an advisory detailing a new threat campaign identified on December 10, affecting the Cisco AsyncOS software used on Cisco Secure Email Gateway and Cisco Secure Email and Web Manager. The campaign is exploiting an unpatched zero-day vulnerability, which only affects deployments with the Spam Quarantine feature enabled. It allows threat actors to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges on affected devices. This feature is not enabled by default.

CVE-2025-20393 is a CVSS 10.0 Remote Code Execution (RCE) flaw in Cisco Secure Email Gateways currently being actively exploited by China-nexus groups. A recent advisory from Cisco Talos details how an actor dubbed “UAT-9686” is leveraging this vulnerability to target Cisco Secure Email Gateways (ESA) and Secure Email and Web Managers (SMA). The attack allows threat actors to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges and deploy persistence mechanisms.

The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) introduced its Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program in early 2020 to strengthen cybersecurity across the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) and ensure that contractors handling Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) meet strict cybersecurity standards defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).