hardware firewall | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

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...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

Juniper Networks has announced that it has discovered " unauthorized code " in ScreenOS , the operating system for its NetScreen firewalls, that could allow an attacker to decrypt traffic sent through Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). It's not clear what caused the code to get there or how long it has been there, but the release notes posted by Juniper suggest the earliest buggy versions of the software date back to at least 2012 and possibly earlier. The backdoor impacts NetScreen firewalls using ScreenOS 6.2.0r15 through 6.2.0r18 and 6.3.0r12 through 6.3.0r20, states the advisory published by the company. However, there's no evidence right now that whether the backdoor was present in other Juniper OSes or devices. The issue was uncovered during an internal code review of the software, according to Juniper chief information officer Bob Worrall , and requires immediate patching by upgrading to a new version of the software just released today. ...