In 2025, security benchmarks showed that over half of publicly disclosed vulnerabilities can bypass WAF protections when rule updates lag behind real-world exploits. Legacy WAFs were built for stable applications and predictable traffic. Today, frequent releases, API-driven architectures, and rapidly evolving attacks expose the limits of manual tuning and after-the-fact validation, leaving protection out of sync with reality.

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).

According to the Indusface State of Application Security Report, SMBs now experience more attacks per application than large enterprises. Each SMB site facing an average of 2.24 million attacks per quarter, driven largely by malicious bot traffic and automated DDoS attempts. Despite this, many SMBs still operate with minimal security controls or legacy technology stacks, making them extremely vulnerable.

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.

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.

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.

The digital storefront never sleeps, but in the first half of 2025, it has faced unprecedented hostility. According to the State of Application Security report 2025 Report, the threat landscape has shifted dramatically. E-commerce has become a primary target, with DDoS incidents in the retail and e-commerce sector spiking by 420%. Perhaps even more concerning is the vector of these attacks: attacks on APIs rose by 104%, with vulnerability exploitation increasing 13-fold.