VPN Security | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Unpatched Fortinet VPN devices are being targeted in a series of attacks against industrial enterprises in Europe to deploy a new strain of ransomware called "Cring" inside corporate networks. At least one of the hacking incidents led to the temporary shutdown of a production site, said cybersecurity firm Kaspersky in a report published on Wednesday, without publicly naming the victim. The attacks happened in the first quarter of 2021, between January and March. "Various details of the attack indicate that the attackers had carefully analyzed the infrastructure of the targeted organization and prepared their own infrastructure and toolset based on the information collected at the reconnaissance stage,"  said  Vyacheslav Kopeytsev, a security researcher at Kaspersky ICS CERT. The disclosure comes days after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)  warned  of advanced persistent threat (APT) actor...

As the pandemic continues to accelerate the shift towards working from home, a  slew of digital threats  have capitalized on the health concern to exploit weaknesses in the remote work infrastructure and carry out malicious attacks. Now according to network security platform provider SAM Seamless Network , over 200,000 businesses that have deployed the Fortigate VPN solution—with default configuration—to enable employees to connect remotely are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks, allowing attackers to present a valid SSL certificate and fraudulently take over a connection. "We quickly found that under default configuration the SSL VPN is not as protected as it should be, and is vulnerable to MITM attacks quite easily," SAM IoT Security Lab's Niv Hertz and Lior Tashimov said. "The Fortigate SSL-VPN client only verifies that the CA was issued by Fortigate (or another trusted CA), therefore an attacker can easily present a certificate issued to a differ...