Fortinet | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Former members tied to the Black Basta ransomware operation have been observed sticking to their tried-and-tested approach of email bombing and Microsoft Teams phishing to establish persistent access to target networks. "Recently, attackers have introduced Python script execution alongside these techniques, using cURL requests to fetch and deploy malicious payloads," ReliaQuest said in a report shared with The Hacker News. The development is a sign that the threat actors are continuing to pivot and regroup, despite the Black Basta brand suffering a huge blow and a decline after the public leak of its internal chat logs earlier this February. The cybersecurity company said half of the Teams phishing attacks that were observed between February and May 2025 originated from onmicrosoft[.]com domains, and that breached domains accounted for 42% of the attacks during the same period. The latter is a lot more stealthy and allows threat actors to impersonate legitimate traffi...

Cybersecurity researchers have taken the wraps off an unusual cyber attack that leveraged malware with corrupted DOS and PE headers, according to new findings from Fortinet. The DOS (Disk Operating System) and PE (Portable Executable) headers are essential parts of a Windows PE file , providing information about the executable. While the DOS header makes the executable file backward compatible with MS-DOS and allows it to be recognized as a valid executable by the operating system, the PE header contains the metadata and information necessary for Windows to load and execute the program. "We discovered malware that had been running on a compromised machine for several weeks," researchers Xiaopeng Zhang and John Simmons from the FortiGuard Incident Response Team said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "The threat actor had executed a batch of scripts and PowerShell to run the malware in a Windows process." Fortinet said while it was unable to extract th...

Fortinet has patched a critical security flaw that it said has been exploited as a zero-day in attacks targeting FortiVoice enterprise phone systems. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-32756, carries a CVSS score of 9.6 out of 10.0. "A stack-based overflow vulnerability [CWE-121] in FortiVoice, FortiMail, FortiNDR, FortiRecorder, and FortiCamera may allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code or commands via crafted HTTP requests," the company said in an advisory. The company said it observed the flaw being exploited in the wild on FortiVoice systems, but did not disclose the scale of the attacks and the identity of the threat actors behind them. It further noted that the threat actor performed device network scans, erased system crash logs, and enabled fcgi debugging to log credentials from the system or SSH login attempts. The issue affects the following products and versions - FortiCamera 1.1, 2.0 (Migrate to a fixed release) FortiCamer...

Fortinet has revealed that threat actors have found a way to maintain read-only access to vulnerable FortiGate devices even after the initial access vector used to breach the devices was patched. The attackers are believed to have leveraged known and now-patched security flaws, including, but not limited to, CVE-2022-42475 , CVE-2023-27997 , and CVE-2024-21762 . "A threat actor used a known vulnerability to implement read-only access to vulnerable FortiGate devices," the network security company said in an advisory released Thursday. "This was achieved via creating a symbolic link connecting the user file system and the root file system in a folder used to serve language files for the SSL-VPN." Fortinet said the modifications took place in the user file system and managed to evade detection, causing the symbolic link (aka symlink) to be left behind even after the security holes responsible for the initial access were plugged. This, in turn, enabled the threa...

Fortinet has released security updates to address a critical security flaw impacting FortiSwitch that could permit an attacker to make unauthorized password changes. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-48887 , carries a CVSS score of 9.3 out of a maximum of 10.0. "An unverified password change vulnerability [CWE-620] in FortiSwitch GUI may allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to modify admin passwords via a specially crafted request," Fortinet said in an advisory released today. The shortcoming impacts the following versions - FortiSwitch 7.6.0 (Upgrade to 7.6.1 or above) FortiSwitch 7.4.0 through 7.4.4 (Upgrade to 7.4.5 or above) FortiSwitch 7.2.0 through 7.2.8 (Upgrade to 7.2.9 or above) FortiSwitch 7.0.0 through 7.0.10 (Upgrade to 7.0.11 or above), and FortiSwitch 6.4.0 through 6.4.14 (Upgrade to 6.4.15 or above) The network security company said the security hole was internally discovered and reported by Daniel Rozeboom of the FortiSwitch web UI develo...

Ivanti has released security updates to address multiple security flaws impacting Connect Secure (ICS), Policy Secure (IPS), and Cloud Services Application (CSA) that could be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution. The list of vulnerabilities is below - CVE-2024-38657 (CVSS score: 9.1) - External control of a file name in Ivanti Connect Secure before version 22.7R2.4 and Ivanti Policy Secure before version 22.7R1.3 allows a remote authenticated attacker with admin privileges to write arbitrary files CVE-2025-22467 (CVSS score: 9.9) - A stack-based buffer overflow in Ivanti Connect Secure before version 22.7R2.6 allows a remote authenticated attacker to achieve remote code execution CVE-2024-10644 (CVSS score: 9.1) - Code injection in Ivanti Connect Secure before version 22.7R2.4 and Ivanti Policy Secure before version 22.7R1.3 allows a remote authenticated attacker with admin privileges to achieve remote code execution CVE-2024-47908 (CVSS score: 9.1) - Operating sy...

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...

Cybersecurity researchers have flagged two malicious packages that were uploaded to the Python Package Index (PyPI) repository and came fitted with capabilities to exfiltrate sensitive information from compromised hosts, according to new findings from Fortinet FortiGuard Labs. The packages, named zebo and cometlogger , attracted 118 and 164 downloads each, prior to them being taken down. According to ClickPy statistics, a majority of these downloads came from the United States, China, Russia, and India.  Zebo is a "typical example of malware, with functions designed for surveillance, data exfiltration, and unauthorized control," security researcher Jenna Wang said, adding cometlogger "also shows signs of malicious behavior, including dynamic file manipulation, webhook injection, stealing information, and anti-[virtual machine] checks." The first of the two packages, zebo, uses obfuscation techniques, such as hex-encoded strings, to conceal the URL of the co...

A now-patched critical security flaw impacting Fortinet FortiClient EMS is being exploited by malicious actors as part of a cyber campaign that installed remote desktop software such as AnyDesk and ScreenConnect.  The vulnerability in question is CVE-2023-48788 (CVSS score: 9.3), an SQL injection bug that allows attackers to execute unauthorized code or commands by sending specially crafted data packets. Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky said the October 2024 attack targeted an unnamed company's Windows server that was exposed to the internet and had two open ports associated with FortiClient EMS. "The targeted company employs this technology to allow employees to download specific policies to their corporate devices, granting them secure access to the Fortinet VPN," it said in a Thursday analysis. Further analysis of the incident found that the threat actors took advantage of CVE-2023-48788 as an initial access vector, subsequently dropping a ScreenConnect exe...

Fortinet has issued an advisory for a now-patched critical security flaw impacting Wireless LAN Manager (FortiWLM) that could lead to disclosure of sensitive information. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-34990, carries a CVSS score of 9.6 out of a maximum of 10.0. It was originally fixed by Fortinet back on August 18, 2023, but without a CVE designation. The list of supported FortiOS versions was updated in early September. "A relative path traversal [CWE-23] in FortiWLM may allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to read sensitive files," the company said in an alert released Wednesday. However, according to a description of the security flaw in the NIST's National Vulnerability Database (NVD), the path traversal vulnerability could also be exploited by an attacker to "execute unauthorized code or commands via specially crafted web requests." The flaw impacts the following versions of the product - FortiWLM versions 8.6.0 through 8.6.5 (Fixed i...

Taiwanese entities in manufacturing, healthcare, and information technology sectors have become the target of a new campaign distributing the SmokeLoader malware. "SmokeLoader is well-known for its versatility and advanced evasion techniques, and its modular design allows it to perform a wide range of attacks," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "While SmokeLoader primarily serves as a downloader to deliver other malware, in this case, it carries out the attack itself by downloading plugins from its [command-and-control] server." SmokeLoader , a malware downloader first advertised in cybercrime forums in 2011, is chiefly designed to execute secondary payloads. Additionally, it possesses the capability to download more modules that augment its own functionality to steal data, launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, and mine cryptocurrency. "SmokeLoader detects analysis environments, generates fake network t...

A threat actor known as BrazenBamboo has exploited an unresolved security flaw in Fortinet's FortiClient for Windows to extract VPN credentials as part of a modular framework called DEEPDATA . Volexity, which disclosed the findings Friday, said it identified the zero-day exploitation of the credential disclosure vulnerability in July 2024, describing BrazenBamboo as the developer behind DEEPDATA, DEEPPOST, and LightSpy . "DEEPDATA is a modular post-exploitation tool for the Windows operating system that is used to gather a wide range of information from target devices," security researchers Callum Roxan, Charlie Gardner, and Paul Rascagneres said in a technical report. The malware first came to light earlier this week, when BlackBerry detailed the Windows-based surveillance framework as used by the China-linked APT41 threat actor to harvest data from WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, WeChat, LINE, QQ, Skype, Microsoft Outlook, DingDing, Feishu, KeePass, as well as applic...

Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new phishing campaign that spreads a new fileless variant of known commercial malware called Remcos RAT . Remcos RAT "provides purchases with a wide range of advanced features to remotely control computers belonging to the buyer," Fortinet FortiGuard Labs researcher Xiaopeng Zhang said in an analysis published last week. "However, threat actors have abused Remcos to collect sensitive information from victims and remotely control their computers to perform further malicious acts." The starting point of the attack is a phishing email that uses purchase order-themed lures to convince recipients to open a Microsoft Excel attachment. The malicious Excel document is designed to exploit a known remote code execution flaw in Office ( CVE-2017-0199 , CVSS score: 7.8) to download an HTML Application (HTA) file ("cookienetbookinetcahce.hta") from a remote server ("192.3.220[.]22") and launch it using mshta.e...

Fortinet has confirmed details of a critical security flaw impacting FortiManager that has come under active exploitation in the wild. Tracked as CVE-2024-47575 (CVSS score: 9.8), the vulnerability is also known as FortiJump and is rooted in the FortiGate to FortiManager ( FGFM ) protocol. "A missing authentication for critical function vulnerability [CWE-306] in FortiManager fgfmd daemon may allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code or commands via specially crafted requests," the company said in a Wednesday advisory. The shortcoming impacts FortiManager versions 7.x, 6.x, FortiManager Cloud 7.x, and 6.x. It also affects old FortiAnalyzer models 1000E, 1000F, 2000E, 3000E, 3000F, 3000G, 3500E, 3500F, 3500G, 3700F, 3700G, and 3900E that have at least one interface with fgfm service enabled and the below configuration on - config system global set fmg-status enable end Fortinet has also provided three workarounds for the flaw depending on the...

State-sponsored threat actors backed by China gained access to 20,000 Fortinet FortiGate systems worldwide by exploiting a known critical security flaw between 2022 and 2023, indicating that the operation had a broader impact than previously known. "The state actor behind this campaign was already aware of this vulnerability in FortiGate systems at least two months before Fortinet disclosed the vulnerability," the Dutch National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said in a new bulletin. "During this so-called zero-day period, the actor alone infected 14,000 devices." The campaign targeted dozens of Western governments, international organizations, and a large number of companies within the defense industry. The names of the entities were not disclosed. The findings build on an earlier advisory from February 2024, which found that the attackers had breached a computer network used by the Dutch armed forces by exploiting CVE-2022-42475 (CVSS score: 9.8), which allows...