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- Wednesday War Room – 12/24/2025
Wednesday War Room – 12/24/2025
It’s Christmas Eve... and the threat actors are absolutely not leaving cookies out for anyone.
J.W. Croley
December 24, 2025
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Over the last 72 hours, the pattern is loud and clear: attackers are targeting the things we trust the most, edge firewalls, identity paths, browser extensions, dev-adjacent tooling, and “helpful” download flows. If your defenses assume the perimeter is stable, this week politely disagrees.
Let’s dive in.
Risk Level: Critical
Business Impact: Unauthenticated remote code execution on perimeter firewalls can lead to full network compromise, traffic interception, and rapid lateral movement.
What You Need to Know: WatchGuard issued urgent fixes for a critical Firebox/Fireware OS issue tracked as CVE-2025-14733, with active exploitation signals highlighted by TechRadar’s reporting on the forced Firebox OS patch and further exposure context from BleepingComputer’s coverage of the affected WatchGuard firewall scale.
Why This Matters:
If the firewall is owned, visibility and control can be quietly rewritten — your monitoring may be looking at an attacker-edited reality.
Edge compromise bypasses a lot of endpoint controls because the attacker enters above the endpoints entirely.
This is the kind of access that turns into ransomware staging, traffic interception, and persistence.
Executive Actions:
🧯 Patch Firebox devices immediately and verify the running version matches the fixed build.
🔒 Remove direct internet management access and enforce admin access via hardened paths only.
🧱 Review VPN and remote-access configs for risky exposure until patching is confirmed.
🕵️ Hunt for unexpected config changes, new admin sessions, and abnormal outbound connections.
Risk Level: Critical
Business Impact: Major service disruption during peak season can trigger financial losses, trust damage, and operational chaos.
What You Need to Know: France’s postal and digital banking services experienced widespread disruption described by TechCrunch’s coverage of the suspected DDoS event and corroborated in Associated Press reporting on the service impact.
Why This Matters:
DDoS is “simple,” but the impact is very real… and brutally expensive during peak business windows.
High-visibility outages create cover for fraud and secondary intrusion activity while teams scramble.
Availability is security: outages are business-impact incidents, not “just IT problems.”
Executive Actions:
🌐 Validate DDoS protections (CDN/WAF rate limiting + upstream scrubbing readiness).
🧰 Run an outage tabletop: comms, decision authority, and restoration sequencing.
🔍 Watch for fraud spikes and credential abuse during and immediately after disruptions.
📣 Pre-stage internal and customer comms templates so you’re not improvising under pressure.
Risk Level: High
Business Impact: Typosquatted tooling lures can drop loader malware that enables credential theft, persistence, and follow-on payload delivery.
What You Need to Know: A typosquatted domain impersonating Microsoft Activation Scripts was used to distribute malicious PowerShell that installs Cosmali Loader, as documented in BleepingComputer’s investigation into the fake MAS activation malware campaign.
Why This Matters:
“Helpful tools” remain one of the easiest ways to get users to self-compromise.
PowerShell loaders blend into administrative behavior and can evade casual detection.
One compromised machine can become enterprise-wide impact through token and credential harvesting.
Executive Actions:
🛑 Block typosquat domains and tighten controls around script download/execution paths.
🧪 Detect risky PowerShell patterns (encoded commands, download cradles, remote script execution).
🔐 Reduce blast radius by limiting local admin and enforcing least privilege.
🧹 Hunt for suspicious scheduled tasks, persistence artifacts, and unusual outbound beacons.
Leadership Insight:
Christmas Eve is the perfect reminder that attackers don’t observe holidays — but defenders need resilience.
This week’s threats hit the trust layer: perimeter gateways, browser ecosystems, and installer flows that look legitimate enough to pass as normal. That means the old playbook, patch eventually, rely on perimeter controls, assume the browser is “just a client”, no longer holds.
The organizations that win aren’t the ones who prevent everything. They’re the ones who assume compromise is possible in trusted systems and build the ability to detect, contain, and recover fast.
…because the question isn’t whether your trusted systems will be targeted, but how quickly you can respond when they are.
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Risk Level: Critical
Business Impact: Sensitive memory disclosure can leak credentials/tokens and enable severe compromise scenarios if reachable from untrusted networks.
What You Need to Know: MongoDB published official guidance on CVE-2025-14847 via MongoDB’s Alerts portal, with additional defensive advisories and urgency echoed by Canada’s Cyber Centre alert and engineering details tracked in MongoDB’s issue reference.
Why This Matters:
Memory disclosure can quietly leak tokens, credentials, and sensitive fragments without “data exfil” looking obvious.
Databases that are internet-exposed or poorly segmented are perennial high-payoff targets.
Even internal clusters become reachable during lateral movement if segmentation is weak.
Executive Actions:
🧯 Upgrade MongoDB immediately and validate all clusters (prod + non-prod) are on fixed builds.
🧱 Enforce strict network access: no public exposure; allowlist only required app subnets.
🔍 Review logs for anomalous clients, malformed traffic patterns, and unexpected access bursts.
🔐 Rotate secrets near MongoDB workloads if exposure is suspected (app creds, service tokens).
Risk Level: High
Business Impact: macOS credential theft can lead to SaaS compromise, session hijacking, and executive/admin account takeover.
What You Need to Know: The latest MacSync variant is being delivered via a digitally signed, notarized Swift app to reduce user friction, based on Jamf Threat Labs’ analysis of MacSync evolution and broader coverage from The Hacker News reporting on signed/notarized MacSync delivery.
Why This Matters:
“Notarized” doesn’t mean safe — it just means the delivery looks clean enough to get clicked.
Infostealers increasingly target browser sessions and enterprise credentials, not just personal data.
One compromised executive endpoint can become a high-leverage access broker.
Executive Actions:
🍏 Enforce MDM controls to block unapproved installers and require allowlisting for business endpoints.
🔍 Monitor for suspicious execution chains (installer → downloader → credential harvesting behaviors).
🔐 Shorten session lifetimes and increase re-auth requirements for privileged SaaS access.
🧹 Hunt for suspicious launch agents/login items and unexpected outbound beaconing.
Risk Level: High
Business Impact: Malicious extensions can intercept traffic and harvest credentials at scale, turning browsers into silent access brokers.
What You Need to Know: Researchers identified malicious Chrome extensions abusing proxy-style interception, covered by The Hacker News reporting on credential-stealing Chrome extensions and reinforced by Techzine’s breakdown of proxy-disguised extension behavior.
Why This Matters:
Extensions sit inside the trust boundary and can see (and influence) everything the user does online.
Proxy interception steals real sessions in real time… It’s not “phishing,” it’s live theft.
One compromised admin browser can equal immediate privileged SaaS access for attackers.
Executive Actions:
🧩 Enforce extension allowlisting (admins, finance, devs, execs first).
🔐 Tighten conditional access and force frequent re-auth for sensitive apps.
🕵️ Monitor for unusual proxy behavior, traffic tunneling, and anomalous auth patterns.
🧼 If exposure is suspected: invalidate sessions and rotate credentials immediately.
🧯 Patch the edge first: Firebox updates are not optional — verify they’re actually running
🧩 Lock the browser down: extension allowlisting + stronger re-auth for sensitive roles
🍏 Treat “signed/notarized” as suspicious until proven otherwise: tighten macOS installer
controls + session policy
🗄️ Inventory and patch MongoDB: confirm fixed builds across all clusters + enforce strict network access
🌐 Prep for disruption: validate DDoS readiness and rehearse outage comms + decision authority
💡 Stay vigilant, patch promptly, and remember that in cybersecurity, paranoia isn't a disorder – it's a job requirement. 💡
J.W.
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