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Dark Reading0 Hot0 comments5 min read
FortiBleed Attackers Turn Firewalls Into Credentials Stealers
SOCRadar has published a detailed whitepaper exposing the full attack chain behind the 'FortiBleed' campaign, a large-scale credential harvesting operation targeting over 430,000 FortiGate firewalls globally. Threat actors, likely Russian-speaking, deployed a Golang-based tool called FortigateSniffer that abuses FortiOS's built-in diagnostic commands to passively capture authentication traffic across 24 protocols without installing traditional malware. The campaign has already stolen over 110 million credentials including RADIUS, NTLM, and Kerberos material, created 659 credential-harvesting pipelines, and breached targets including a NATO-aligned defense contractor. The attack chain involves five steps: reconnaissance, credential stuffing/brute-force, passive sniffing post-compromise, hash cracking via GPU infrastructure, and lateral movement culminating in data theft or ransomware. CISA has urged organizations to harden Fortinet environments. Recommended mitigations include rotating all credentials, enforcing MFA, removing FortiGate management interfaces from internet exposure, and reviewing authentication logs.
Source: https://www.darkreading.com/cyberattacks-data-breaches/fortibleed-attackers-firewalls-credentials-stealers. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.
