Hello and welcome to the Monday, January 5th, 2026th edition of the Sands

and net Storm Center's Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich, recording today from Jacksonville, Florida.

And this episode is brought you by the Sands.edu credit certificate program in cyber defense operations.

Well, first podcast of the new year, so I want to do a quick recap here.

First of all, React to Shell, still hitting the news ever so often year and there.

Mostly various botnets and such,

adding it to their arsenal.

So nothing really too terribly exciting.

Secondly, Mongo Pleat.

I did a special podcast last week,

just to sort of keep everyone in a loop on this one.

Haven't seen a ton of news about this,

but definitely, you know, number one, if you're running MongoDB, make sure that you're patched.

Secondly, you probably want to make sure that MongoDB is not directly exposed to the internet.

And well, in Diaries, we had one this weekend from Brad who wrote about a recent cryptocurrency scam that Brad observed.

This one is your classic advance fee type scam.

The attacker is sending spam messages, claiming that the recipient has some pending cryptocurrency deposit waiting for them.

The way this is sort of made plausible is that they say that the victim signed up

for some kind of cryptocurrency mining

and while their cryptocurrency that they mined

is now basically ready to be withdrawn.

They're promising quite a substantial amount, sort of in the

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