When news breaks about a massive global cybersecurity event, it is easy for local companies to assume they are too small to be targeted. But this week, as reports surfaced in Ars Technica about a severe breach involving Fortinet firewalls, many operations managers were left wondering if their own networks were silently exposed.
The reality is that hackers do not care where your business is located. They use automated tools to scan the entire internet for open doors. In this recent attack, cybercriminals successfully stole VPN credentials from thousands of sensitive corporate networks worldwide simply because the hardware was not configured correctly.
The Industrial Scale of Modern Cybercrime
To understand how advanced these threats have become, we only need to look at how this breach was executed. As detailed by The Register, the attackers did not rely on manual guessing. Instead, they utilized massive computing power to brute-force their way in.
As one security researcher noted on LinkedIn: "They intercept SSL VPN authentication, crack hashes on a 45-GPU cluster managed via Hashtopolis, and pivot into internal Active Directory environments. The operation processed 1.16 billion credential attempts against 320,777 FortiGate targets and 2.1 billion attempts against 163,650 MSSQL servers."
The Danger of Unconfigured Hardware
This industrial scale means that buying a high-end enterprise firewall is no longer enough to keep you safe. A firewall is just a tool. This massive breach occurred because businesses left specific administrative access points open to the public internet and failed to enforce Multi-Factor Authentication on their remote connections. Buying the lock does not work if no one remembers to turn the key.
How We Protect Our Clients
For the businesses we manage, this global threat was neutralized before it ever hit the headlines. Our approach relies on a strict, proactive framework rather than just installing a piece of hardware and walking away.
- Vector Closure: During onboarding, we explicitly disable the specific administrative interfaces that these hackers actively exploit.
- Strict Access Control: We drastically reduce your network's visibility to the open internet so your firewalls cannot even be found by these automated scanning techniques. Furthermore, we enforce multi-factor authentication on all remote access points. Even if a hacker managed to crack a staff password using a GPU cluster, they cannot bypass the secondary approval prompt.
- Proactive Patching: Our automated systems apply the required security patches released by the vendor long before a vulnerability reaches the mainstream news.
Is Your Network Actually Secured?
If you are unsure whether your current IT setup relies on just buying hardware or actually managing it actively, you can take a quick diagnostic. Use our free What IT Support Is Best for Us? tool to see exactly where your network stands today.
At Decision1, we help organisations secure their critical network borders and enforce strict access policies. If you'd like a review of your firewall and remote access setup, we can help. Contact us today.