Firewall Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added two security flaws impacting Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS and SonicWall SonicOS SSLVPN to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. The flaws are listed below - CVE-2025-0108 (CVSS score: 7.8) - An authentication bypass vulnerability in the Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS management web interface that allows an unauthenticated attacker with network access to the management web interface to bypass the authentication normally required and invoke certain PHP scripts CVE-2024-53704 (CVSS score: 8.2) - An improper authentication vulnerability in the SSLVPN authentication mechanism that allows a remote attacker to bypass authentication Palo Alto Networks has since confirmed to The Hacker News that it has observed active exploitation attempts against CVE-2025-0108, with the company noting that it could be chained with other vulnerabilities like CVE-2024-9474...

Threat hunters are calling attention to a new campaign that has targeted Fortinet FortiGate firewall devices with management interfaces exposed on the public internet. "The campaign involved unauthorized administrative logins on management interfaces of firewalls, creation of new accounts, SSL VPN authentication through those accounts, and various other configuration changes," cybersecurity firm Arctic Wolf said in an analysis published last week. The malicious activity is believed to have commenced in mid-November 2024, with unknown threat actors gaining unauthorized access to management interfaces on affected firewalls to alter configurations and extract credentials using DCSync . The exact initial access vector is currently not known, although it has been assessed with "high confidence" that it's likely driven by the exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability given the "compressed timeline across affected organizations as well as firmware versions af...

Palo Alto Networks has disclosed a high-severity vulnerability impacting PAN-OS software that could cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition on susceptible devices. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-3393 (CVSS score: 8.7), impacts PAN-OS versions 10.X and 11.X, as well as Prisma Access running PAN-OS versions 10.2.8 and later or prior to 11.2.3. It has been addressed in PAN-OS 10.1.14-h8, PAN-OS 10.2.10-h12, PAN-OS 11.1.5, PAN-OS 11.2.3, and all later PAN-OS versions. "A denial-of-service vulnerability in the DNS Security feature of Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS software allows an unauthenticated attacker to send a malicious packet through the data plane of the firewall that reboots the firewall," the company said in a Friday advisory. "Repeated attempts to trigger this condition will cause the firewall to enter maintenance mode." Palo Alto Networks said it discovered the flaw in production use, and that it's aware of customers "experiencing this denial-of-...

Sophos has released hotfixes to address three security flaws in Sophos Firewall products that could be exploited to achieve remote code execution and allow privileged system access under certain conditions. Of the three, two are rated Critical in severity. There is currently no evidence that the shortcomings have been exploited in the wild. The list of vulnerabilities is as follows - CVE-2024-12727 (CVSS score: 9.8) - A pre-auth SQL injection vulnerability in the email protection feature that could lead to remote code execution, if a specific configuration of Secure PDF eXchange (SPX) is enabled in combination with the firewall running in High Availability ( HA ) mode. CVE-2024-12728 (CVSS score: 9.8) - A weak credentials vulnerability arising from a suggested and non-random SSH login passphrase for High Availability (HA) cluster initialization that remains active even after the HA establishment process completed, thereby exposing an account with privileged access if SSH is ena...

As many as 2,000 Palo Alto Networks devices are estimated to have been compromised as part of a campaign abusing the newly disclosed security flaws that have come under active exploitation in the wild. According to statistics shared by the Shadowserver Foundation, a majority of the infections have been reported in the U.S. (554) and India (461), followed by Thailand (80), Mexico (48), Indonesia (43), Turkey (41), the U.K. (39), Peru (36), and South Africa (35). Earlier this week, Censys revealed that it had identified 13,324 publicly exposed next-generation firewall (NGFW) management interfaces, with 34% of these exposures located in the U.S. However, it's important to note that not all of these exposed hosts are necessarily vulnerable. The flaws in question , CVE-2024-0012 (CVSS score: 9.3) and CVE-2024-9474 (CVSS score: 6.9), are a combination of authentication bypass and privilege escalation that could allow a bad actor to perform malicious actions, including modifying c...

SonicWall has released security updates to address a critical flaw impacting its firewalls that, if successfully exploited, could grant malicious actors unauthorized access to the devices. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-40766 (CVSS score: 9.3), has been described as an improper access control bug. "An improper access control vulnerability has been identified in the SonicWall SonicOS management access, potentially leading to unauthorized resource access and in specific conditions, causing the firewall to crash," the company said in an advisory released last week. "This issue affects SonicWall Firewall Gen 5 and Gen 6 devices, as well as Gen 7 devices running SonicOS 7.0.1-5035 and older versions." The issue has been addressed in the below versions - SOHO (Gen 5 Firewalls) - 5.9.2.14-13o Gen 6 Firewalls - 6.5.2.8-2n (for SM9800, NSsp 12400, and NSsp 12800) and 6.5.4.15.116n (for other Gen 6 Firewall appliances) SonicWall said the vulnerability is ...

Palo Alto Networks has released security updates to address five security flaws impacting its products, including a critical bug that could lead to an authentication bypass. Cataloged as CVE-2024-5910 (CVSS score: 9.3), the vulnerability has been described as a case of missing authentication in its Expedition migration tool that could lead to an admin account takeover. "Missing authentication for a critical function in Palo Alto Networks Expedition can lead to an Expedition admin account takeover for attackers with network access to Expedition," the company said in an advisory. "Configuration secrets, credentials, and other data imported into Expedition is at risk due to this issue." The flaw impacts all versions of Expedition prior to version 1.2.92, which remediates the problem. Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center's (CyRC) Brian Hysell has been credited with discovering and reporting the issue. While there is no evidence that the vulnerability has be...

Palo Alto Networks has released hotfixes to address a maximum-severity security flaw impacting PAN-OS software that has come under active exploitation in the wild. Tracked as  CVE-2024-3400  (CVSS score: 10.0), the critical vulnerability is a case of command injection in the GlobalProtect feature that an unauthenticated attacker could weaponize to execute arbitrary code with root privileges on the firewall. Fixes for the shortcoming are available in the following versions - PAN-OS 10.2.9-h1 PAN-OS 11.0.4-h1, and PAN-OS 11.1.2-h3 Patches for other commonly deployed maintenance releases are expected to be released over the next few days. "This issue is applicable only to PAN-OS 10.2, PAN-OS 11.0, and PAN-OS 11.1 firewalls configured with GlobalProtect gateway or GlobalProtect portal (or both) and device telemetry enabled," the company  clarified  in its updated advisory. It also said that while Cloud NGFW firewalls are not impacted by CVE-2024-3400, specif...

Multiple security vulnerabilities have been discovered in the open-source Netgate pfSense firewall solution called pfSense that could be chained by an attacker to execute arbitrary commands on susceptible appliances. The issues relate to two reflected cross-site scripting ( XSS ) bugs and one command injection flaw, according to new findings from Sonar. "Security inside a local network is often more lax as network administrators trust their firewalls to protect them from remote attacks," security researcher Oskar Zeino-Mahmalat  said . "Potential attackers could have used the discovered vulnerabilities to spy on traffic or attack services inside the local network." Impacting pfSense CE 2.7.0 and below and pfSense Plus 23.05.1 and below, the shortcomings could be weaponized by tricking an authenticated pfSense user (i.e., an admin user) into clicking on a specially crafted URL, which contains an XSS payload that activates command injection. A brief description...

No less than 330,000 FortiGate firewalls are still unpatched and vulnerable to CVE-2023-27997, a critical security flaw affecting Fortinet devices that has come under active exploitation in the wild. Cybersecurity firm Bishop Fox, in a  report  published last week, said that out of nearly 490,000 Fortinet SSL-VPN interfaces exposed on the internet, about 69 percent remain unpatched. CVE-2023-27997  (CVSS score: 9.8), also called XORtigate, is a critical vulnerability impacting Fortinet FortiOS and FortiProxy SSL-VPN appliances that could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code or commands via specifically crafted requests. Patches were released by Fortinet last month in versions 6.0.17, 6.2.15, 6.4.13, 7.0.12, and 7.2.5, although the company  acknowledged  that the flaw may have been "exploited in a limited number of cases" in attacks targeting government, manufacturing, and critical infrastructure sectors. Bishop Fox's analysis further found th...

A new research has demonstrated a technique that allows an attacker to bypass firewall protection and remotely access any TCP/UDP service on a victim machine. Called  NAT Slipstreaming , the method involves sending the target a link to a malicious site (or a legitimate site loaded with malicious ads) that, when visited, ultimately triggers the gateway to open any TCP/UDP port on the victim, thereby circumventing browser-based port restrictions. The findings were revealed by privacy and security researcher Samy Kamkar over the weekend. "NAT Slipstreaming exploits the user's browser in conjunction with the Application Level Gateway (ALG) connection tracking mechanism built into NATs, routers, and firewalls by chaining internal IP extraction via timing attack or WebRTC, automated remote MTU and IP fragmentation discovery, TCP packet size massaging, TURN authentication misuse, precise packet boundary control, and protocol confusion through browser abuse," Kamkar said in ...

One of the most common network security solutions is the branch firewall. Branch firewall appliances can pack into a single device a wide range of security capabilities including a stateful or next-generation firewall, anti-virus, URL filtering, and IDS/IPS. But the reality is that most of these edge devices lack the processing power to apply the full scope of capabilities on all of the necessary traffic. If the firewall deployed in the branch cannot scale to address critical security needs, an alternative strategy must be used. Wholesale appliance upgrades are easy but expensive. Regional security hubs are complex and also costly. A new approach, called firewall bursting , leverages cloud scalability to offer an easier, more cost-effective alternative to branch office security. (You can find a great table comparing the different Firewall approaches here .) Costly Appliance Upgrades and Secure Hub Architectures The existing methods of evolving branch security force IT int...

Admit it. Who would not want their firewall maintenance grunt work to go away? For more than 20 years, companies either managed their edge firewall appliances or had service providers rack-and-stack appliances in their data centers and did it for them. This was called a managed firewall — an appliance wrapped with a managed service, often from a carrier or managed security service provider (MSSP). The provider assumed the management of the firewall box, its software, and even its policy and management from the over-burdened IT team. But customers ended up paying for the inefficiency of dealing with appliances (i.e. "grunt work") because the problem just shifted to the provider. A new architecture was needed - a transformation from an appliance form factor to a true cloud service. In a 2016 Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Protection report , Gartner analyst Jeremy D'Hoinne initiated the emerging category of Firewall as a Service (FWaaS). He defined FWaaS as " ...a fire...

In Brief Investigators from the Forensic Training Institute of the Bangladesh investigated the $80 Million bank heist and discovered that the hackers managed to gain access to the network because the Bank was using second-hand $10 network switches without a Firewall to run its network. When it was reported last month that an unknown hacking group attempted to steal $1 Billion from Bangladesh's Federal Reserve bank account with the help of a malware and, in fact, successfully stole over $80 Million , the investigators would not say how the hackers managed to bypass the security solutions on its network. But in reality, there was no security solution installed to help protect against increasingly sophisticated attacks. This lack of security practices made it incredibly easier for the hackers to break into the system and steal $81 Million, though a simple typo (spell error) by hackers halted the further transfers of the $850 Million funds. The network computers that we...

The US government's $6 Billion firewall is nothing but a big blunder. Dubbed EINSTEIN , the nationwide firewall run by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is not as smart as its name suggests. An audit conducted by the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) has claimed that the firewall used by US government agencies is failing to fully meet its objectives and leaving the agencies open to zero-day attacks. EINSTEIN, which is officially known as the US' National Cybersecurity Protection System (NCPS) and has cost $5.7 Billion to develop, detects only 6 percent of today's most common security vulnerabilities and failed to detect the rest 94 percent. How bad is EINSTEIN Firewall in reality? In a series of tests conducted last year, Einstein only detected 29 out of 489 vulnerabilities across Flash, Office, Java, IE and Acrobat disclosed via CVE reports published in 2014, according to a report [ PDF ] released by the GAO late las...

Are millions of enterprise users, who rely on the next-generation firewalls for protection, actually protected from hackers? Probably Not. Just less than a month after an unauthorized backdoor found in Juniper Networks firewalls, an anonymous security researcher has discovered highly suspicious code in FortiOS firewalls from enterprise security vendor Fortinet. According to the leaked information, FortiOS operating system, deployed on Fortinet's FortiGate firewall networking equipment, includes an SSH backdoor that can be used to access its firewall equipment. Anyone can Access FortiOS SSH Backdoor Anyone with " Fortimanager_Access " username and a hashed version of the " FGTAbc11*xy+Qqz27 " password string, which is hard coded into the firewall, can login into Fortinet's FortiGate firewall networking equipment. However, according to the company's product details, this SSH user is created for challenge-and-response authenti...