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- Wednesday War Room – 01/07/2026
Wednesday War Room – 01/07/2026
The holidays are over, but the attackers didn’t get the memo.
J.W. Croley
January 07, 2026
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Over the last 48 hours, the theme is painfully consistent: edge devices, developer supply chain, and high-believability social engineering are getting hammered, and if your controls assume “trusted defaults,” you’re about to learn why that’s adorable.
Let’s dive in.
Risk Level: Critical
Business Impact: Exploitation of legacy routers can enable credential theft, traffic interception, botnet enrollment, or pivoting into internal networks… especially where remote admin is exposed.
What You Need to Know: Threat actors are actively exploiting a command-injection vulnerability in legacy D-Link DSL gateway routers (CVE-2026-0625), with exploitation details covered in the BleepingComputer report.
Why This Matters:
Edge devices are often the least monitored part of the environment—and attackers know it.
Router compromise can quietly undermine downstream controls by rewriting DNS/routing behavior.
If the device is end-of-life, “patch it” may not be an option—meaning the risk persists until you remove it.
Executive Actions:
🧯 Identify and remove/replace any end-of-life D-Link DSL devices immediately.
🔒 Disable remote administration and restrict management access to trusted internal ranges only.
🧭 Audit router settings for unexpected DNS changes, new admin users, and suspicious port forwards.
🧱 Tighten egress/DNS monitoring to catch abnormal resolver changes and beaconing patterns.
Risk Level: High
Business Impact: Successful execution results in remote access, credential theft, internal recon, and follow-on ransomware staging.
What You Need to Know: A campaign tracked as PHALT#BLYX is using fake Booking-style lures and a “blue screen” ClickFix workflow to trick victims into running malicious PowerShell and MSBuild execution chains, as detailed by The Hacker News and explained in additional context by Dark Reading.
Why This Matters:
This flips the script: users “install the fix” themselves, bypassing a lot of file-based defenses.
Living-off-the-land tooling (PowerShell/MSBuild) delays obvious malware indicators and response timing.
The technique is portable—hospitality today, your finance team tomorrow.
Executive Actions:
🧠 Push an immediate warning: “Never run ‘fix’ commands from webpages, popups, or CAPTCHA-style prompts.”
🛡️ Harden detections for PowerShell download cradles, encoded commands, and MSBuild project execution abuse.
🧱 Enforce application control where possible to reduce LOLBin misuse (especially MSBuild.exe in user context).
🕵️ Hunt for browser → PowerShell → MSBuild chains and new persistence in Startup folders.
Risk Level: High
Business Impact: Malicious extensions can steal credentials, hijack sessions, tamper with code, and leak source/IP. Turning dev endpoints into an access broker.
What You Need to Know: AI-powered VS Code forks were found recommending extensions that don’t exist in Open VSX, creating a window where attackers can squat those names and publish malicious packages - reported by BleepingComputer and further broken down by The Hacker News.
Why This Matters:
“Recommended” is basically “trusted” in developer brains—bad assumption, big consequences.
Dev machines hold high-value tokens (cloud, CI/CD, source control) and often have broad access.
One poisoned extension can ripple into build pipelines and production deployments.
Executive Actions:
💎 Enforce extension allowlisting and approval workflows for developer endpoints.
🔐 Rotate/scoped-token strategy for dev tools (short-lived tokens, least privilege, separate accounts).
🧾 Monitor extension installs and alert on new/unapproved publishers or sudden extension churn.
🧪 Add CI/CD guardrails: signed commits, branch protections, artifact integrity verification.
Leadership Insight:
Most teams are still spending the bulk of their energy on “detecting malware.” The adversary is spending their energy on making you run it, making you trust it, or logging in legitimately. That means the executive-level win condition is simple: reduce trust-by-default and reduce execution paths.
If you can’t stop every click, at least make sure clicks don’t equal code execution… and logins don’t equal access.
The Future of Shopping? AI + Actual Humans.
AI has changed how consumers shop, but people still drive decisions. Levanta’s research shows affiliate and creator content continues to influence conversions, plus it now shapes the product recommendations AI delivers. Affiliate marketing isn’t being replaced by AI, it’s being amplified.
Risk Level: High
Business Impact: Potential exposure of customer data increases fraud, identity risk, regulatory scrutiny, and reputational damage.
What You Need to Know: Brightspeed is investigating cyberattack claims after “Crimson Collective” alleged exfiltration of customer data, with reporting from SecurityWeek and related coverage by SiliconANGLE.
Why This Matters:
Extortion claims are designed to force speed and mistakes… especially in comms and decisioning.
Telecom/ISP data is premium fuel for social engineering, SIM-swap attempts, and account takeover.
Even “unconfirmed” leaks still demand fraud monitoring and containment readiness.
Executive Actions:
📣 Pre-stage customer/regulator comms workflows (speed and consistency beat scrambling).
🔍 Increase monitoring for credential stuffing, ATO patterns, and unusual account changes.
🔐 Reinforce MFA/step-up auth for sensitive customer actions (billing, contact changes, password resets).
🧾 Review access logs and export paths for customer systems and privileged admin activity.
Risk Level: High
Business Impact: Exposure of sensitive files (contracts, configs, customer data, IP) can trigger legal fallout, operational disruption, and long-tail exploitation.
What You Need to Know: An actor known as Zestix has been offering to sell corporate data allegedly stolen after accessing ShareFile, Nextcloud, and ownCloud environments, with analysis reported by BleepingComputer.
Why This Matters:
This is the “MFA tax” in real life: valid creds + no MFA = quiet access, loud consequences.
File-sharing platforms are often treated as utilities, not crown jewels—until they become the breach path.
Infostealer-driven credential reuse means compromises can come from “old” infections you forgot existed.
Executive Actions:
🔐 Enforce MFA everywhere for cloud file-sharing and disable legacy auth paths.
🧹 Rotate credentials and invalidate sessions tied to file-sharing admin and high-privileged users.
🕵️ Monitor for anomalous logins (new geos, unusual IPs, impossible travel, high-volume downloads).
🧱 Restrict access by IP/device posture and tighten sharing/external link policies.
Risk Level: High
Business Impact: Initial access brokers using stolen credentials accelerate time-to-compromise and increase the odds that “someone else’s malware infection” becomes your breach.
What You Need to Know: SecurityWeek reports that multiple major breaches have been linked to an initial access broker associated with Zestix/Sentap, leveraging credentials harvested by infostealers and targeting access into enterprise services such as ShareFile/ownCloud/Nextcloud. See SecurityWeek’s analysis.
Why This Matters:
Infostealers make compromise scalable—attackers don’t need skill, just inventory.
Old credentials remain useful when orgs don’t rotate, don’t invalidate sessions, and don’t enforce MFA.
This is why “it was just one infected laptop” is never just one infected laptop.
Executive Actions:
🧠 Treat infostealer exposure as an incident class: rotate creds, kill sessions, and review access immediately.
🔐 Expand MFA coverage and require phishing-resistant MFA for privileged access where feasible.
🧭 Improve credential hygiene: monitor for leaked creds, password reuse, and high-risk auth patterns.
🧱 Lock down external-facing services and require device posture checks for sensitive access.
🧯 Remove/replace end-of-life edge devices and eliminate remote admin exposure
🧠 Push org-wide guidance: no “run these commands to fix it” instructions from websites… ever
💎 Enforce extension allowlists and approval workflows for developer tooling
🔐 Expand MFA and session invalidation playbooks (treat infostealer exposure like a real incident)
🕵️ Increase monitoring for high-volume downloads and anomalous access in cloud file-sharing platforms
💡 If your users can paste one command and bypass your entire stack, your “security posture” is just vibes with a budget. 💡
J.W.
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