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CVE-2026-76461: Critical Cisco Secure Email Gateway Vulnerability Exploited in the Wild

Rapid7's emerging threat response write-up on CVE-2026-76461, a critical (CVSS 9.8) SQL injection vulnerability in Cisco AsyncOS Software for Cisco Secure Email Gateway that allows an unauthenticated remote attacker to achieve root command execution by sending a specially crafted email. Cisco confirmed active zero-day exploitation and the vulnerability was added to CISA's KEV catalog the same day it was disclosed; the post provides mitigation guidance (emergency patching to 16.5.0-780) and a log-grep IOC (searching mail_logs for COPY.*TO PROGRAM) to detect exploitation attempts.