SECURITY researchers have detected a sharp rise in brute-force attempts aimed at hijacking Edge devices such as SonicWall and Fortinet VPNs and firewalls, with the vast majority (88%) appearing to originate from the Middle East. Barracuda said most of these attempts were unsuccessful as they were either blocked outright by security tools or directed at invalid usernames. Although these attacks may simply have been routed through regional servers, the timing coincides with US and Israeli hostilities against Iran.
Barracuda senior cybersecurity analyst, Laila Mubashar, warned that attackers are aggressively scanning and testing perimeter devices for weak or exposed credentials, and that persistent probing raises the risk of compromise even when attacks fail. The report also highlights a rise in ClickFix attacks, a category of social engineering in which users are duped into executing a malicious script to fix a non-existent issue.
Organisations should enforce strong, unique passwords, enable MFA on VPNs and firewalls, monitor repeated failed logins, and restrict management interfaces to trusted IP ranges where possible.