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Beyond the patch: Protecting your NetScaler gateway against future vulnerabilities

The recent disclosure of a major vulnerability in Citrix NetScaler pointed to a widespread weak point: a login page is an attack surface that can be used to compromise and access an application server. Indeed, the disclosures included an actively exploited flaw that allowed attackers to execute commands on affected gateways without signing in. As with any emergency patch, admins had to weigh cutting off or disrupting their users’ access with the risk of delaying a critical security update.

If you’re a NetScaler customer and you haven’t patched your instance, stop reading and go do that. This was a bad one. Once you’ve finished the patch, we’ll explore how to avoid a future fire drill by laying additional security controls.

This issue extends beyond NetScaler and can be applied to any internal application available on the Internet. Remote desktop portals, administrative consoles, and other publicly accessible authentication pages all deserve the same scrutiny: Does the intended audience require unrestricted Internet reachability? And can an attacker bypass this authentication check to reach the application's server?

Citrix released software updates to address the flaw, and Cloudflare followed with an emergency web application firewall (WAF) rule on October 1. But having a patch available does not guarantee safety: every instance has to be identified, updated, and tested. Applying updates across a production deployment is painful — it can result in downtime or cause disruptions to employees who still need their desktops throughout that process. Customers, patients, and others dependent on users of a remote desktop definitely don’t care about your security patch.

Using a web application firewall (WAF) can buy some additional time before a patch can be fully rolled out, but it’s reactive and does not account for the next exploit that’s discovered. Cloudflare and other security vendors do their best to cover variations and similar attacks. But AI is hastening how rapidly attackers can discover new and novel variants. That’s why it is crucial to build defense in depth, to ensure that no specific software failure or exploit will lead to a critical security issue.

Cloudflare combines access policies, web application security, and restricted origin connections to protect the authentication service before a new vulnerability is disclosed. Access controls limit who can reach the application server; WAF inspection evaluates web requests for attacks; origin restrictions prevent direct connections from bypassing those defenses. These reduce exposure without waiting for a new exploit signature or replacing the existing desktop platform.

The NetScaler exploit

Citrix's September 27, 2026 bulletin reported observed exploitation of CVE-2026-88771 and CVE-2026-88772. The first allows unauthenticated command execution on affected appliances, including in their default configuration. The second affects configurations using Datagram Transport Layer Security, or DTLS. Further advisories on October 3 and October 8 addressed additional vulnerabilities in SAML configurations. These exploits allowed attackers to execute arbitrary scripts on target machines and also execute denial of service attacks.

CISA's alert and Mandiant's technical investigation cover the vulnerabilities, observed exploitation, and response guidance in more detail. For details of the available web application protection, see Cloudflare's emergency WAF release for CVE-2026-88771.

In a typical Citrix deployment, the user authenticates through NetScaler Gateway, which then uses a secure ticket authority to pass through to the StoreFront, which presents the applications and desktops available to that user. The native-installed Citrix app then uses that information to establish a separate connection using Citrix's Independent Computing Architecture (ICA) protocol. The gateway validates the ticket before proxying the desktop connection. Citrix documents these as distinct stages of the connection workflow. The entire exploit stems from the fact that the Gateway has to be publicly accessible on the Internet, otherwise users would not be able to initiate their desktop connection.

Put the access decision in front of the authentication server

The best thing that you can do, after patching all your instances, is move any publicly accessible login pages or applications behind single sign-on before the request ever hits the target server. Cloudflare Access can enforce an independent access policy before the request reaches the existing gateway server. The Citrix environment continues to determine which desktop the user may launch and to validate the resulting session ticket. The additional boundary ensures that an attacker could never get to the Gateway server to try running specific exploits. They would only see the Cloudflare Access login page.

That decision no longer depends on recognizing an exploit signature and blocking that way, but rather on a set of Zero Trust policies that determine if someone should even be there to begin with. More attacks like this are coming, and adopting Zero Trust controls throughout your network is the single most important thing you should do next.

This follows the principle described in Cloudflare's own architecture as customer zero: reduce exposure and use independent defenses so that one flaw does not become a compromise. Here, the practical starting point is the service that users reach before they enter their applications.

Protecting the web authentication path adds a boundary in front of the existing Citrix controls. It does not automatically extend that boundary to other gateway services, including DTLS-enabled listeners. Those interfaces still need their own exposure review and applicable security updates, even when the desktop sessions they support already require authentication.

The origin connection must enforce the same boundary

Changing a DNS record and enforcing Access policies are not enough. If an attacker can connect to the original address or an alternate hostname, they can avoid the controls placed in front of it. Access enforces a specific hostname: if the authentication server can be reached via an IP address or alternative hostname, then the Access policy enforcement is worthless. It’s important to take steps to ensure that all traffic comes from a request that was validated by Access. There are a few different approaches to accomplish this, based on your internal architecture.

Cloudflare Tunnel is the most commonly used approach. It establishes an outbound only tunnel from your application server and allows you to close all inbound IP traffic. This means that you won’t have a public IP for the server that can be reached by anyone.

When a public origin IP Address must remain or connector software cannot be run, network restrictions and origin authentication need to constrain the connections it accepts. For example, Dedicated CDN Egress IPs give an account dedicated source addresses for traffic from Cloudflare to its origins. The application server’s firewall can allow those addresses and reject other sources. This makes the network restriction specific to the account's traffic, rather than broadly allowing traffic from Cloudflare's shared address ranges.

Authenticated Origin Pulls can add further depth with mutual TLS to verify the Cloudflare-to-origin connection.

An origin that supports it can also validate the Access JSON Web Token, including its signature, issuer, expiry, and intended application audience. This is the best way to guarantee that a request was authenticated by Access.

If you're unsure where to start, speak with a Cloudflare expert to review your architecture and identify which controls fit your environment.

Protect the web-facing authentication service

Cloudflare Access determines who may reach the web application; Cloudflare's web application firewall (WAF) inspects HTTP requests to that same protected service. The WAF runs before any Access authentication checks, which gives you the ability to completely block known malicious IPs, specific countries, ASNs, or other attributes you know definitely shouldn’t be accessing your applications. The firewall runs continuously on all requests and will also identify users who managed to authenticate attempting to run exploits with known CVE signatures.

Alongside managed CVE signatures, WAF Attack Score uses machine learning to identify potentially malicious requests that do not exactly match a known rule. Administrators can use the score in rules that block or challenge requests. The WAF attack score is powered by network observations from Cloudflare's global network traffic and Cloudforce One investigations feed Cloudflare's shared threat-intelligence platform.

Customers with a Cloudforce One threat intelligence subscription can also use live threat indicators in WAF policies. That adds context about known malicious sources alongside inspection of the request itself.

Reducing exposure does not remove an attacker who already has a foothold. Seriously: go patch your system if you haven’t, and follow Citrix's suspected-compromise guidance. They lay out how to preserve evidence, revoke credentials and certificates, investigate connected systems, and rebuild or restore from a known-good state.

Extend Zero Trust to desktop access, or remove the desktop dependency

Protecting web authentication can be an initial step without making it the final architecture. Cloudflare's Zero Trust architecture for virtual desktops also supports controlling access to the desktop infrastructure itself. With the Cloudflare One Client and private-network connectivity, teams can restrict who and which devices may reach the endpoints carrying desktop traffic, including an existing Independent Computing Architecture (ICA) path. This requires its own routing and policy design; it is not a capability supplied by the browser authentication proxy alone.

Some workflows can remove the ICA dependency instead. For supported Windows workloads,  Cloudflare's browser-based remote desktop access connects users to a Windows host through Cloudflare Tunnel, without a local remote desktop client. If users only need a desktop to open web applications, Access and Browser Isolation can replace that web-access use case without a full virtual desktop.

Start by protecting the authentication service and existing desktop connections. Then replace virtual desktops used only for web access, and move supported Windows workflows to browser-based remote desktops. Reducing exposure does not have to wait for a full desktop migration.

Decide which authentication services need to be public

The same assessment applies beyond virtual desktops. An employee portal or management console may need to be reachable by approved users from anywhere, without needing to accept application requests from everyone.

Not every authentication page can require a prior employee identity. Consumer login pages and the identity-provider endpoints required to establish an initial session may need to remain publicly reachable. Protect those intentionally, and avoid introducing circular authentication dependencies. The point is to make reachability a design decision rather than an inherited default.

Start with one restricted service. Map the web and non-web paths into it, then put the access decision ahead of its authentication surface. Before expanding the rollout, validate the boundary in your own environment:

  1. Request the protected hostname without signing in. Confirm the request stops at Cloudflare rather than reaching the origin.
  2. Sign in with a test account outside the permitted group. Confirm it still cannot reach the protected application.
  3. Test direct-origin addresses and alternate hostnames. Confirm none bypasses the access policy.
  4. Sign in as an approved user. Confirm authentication, desktop launch, and session reconnection still work.

Check the relevant policy, firewall, and origin logs rather than relying only on what the browser displays. Repeat these checks when routing, identity, or failover settings change, so the next configuration update does not quietly reopen the path you closed.

Bring the controls together

The full architecture brings the access decision, web inspection, and availability controls in front of NetScaler, with restrictions on the connection to the origin. The public origin and Tunnel paths are alternatives. The native desktop connection remains separate, with an optional Zero Trust network access layer around that traffic.

Get started

Speak with a Cloudflare expert to plan the right controls for your environment. Download the solution brief and sign up for the upcoming webinar.

Andrei Migia, Nathan Sackett, and Doug Shepherd contributed to this post.

8.8 Million People Affected in Major Denmark Data Breach

Denmark data breach

The Denmark data breach has exposed the names, addresses and CPR numbers of approximately 8.8 million people after unauthorized users exploited a Danish company's legitimate access to the country's Central Person Register (CPR), according to the Danish government. The CPR administration became aware of irregular behavior in the system on October 2, after identifying activity that had occurred during September. An investigation found that unauthorized individuals had used a private Danish company's legal access to search the CPR system and obtain information on millions of registered people. The CPR currently contains information on approximately 11 million registered people, including those who are living in Denmark, people who have moved abroad and deceased individuals.

Denmark Data Breach Involved Legitimate CPR Access

The Denmark data breach did not result from unauthorized access being granted directly to the attackers. Instead, unauthorized users abused a private company's legitimate access to the CPR system. Under Section 38 of Denmark's Civil Registration Act, private companies with a legitimate interest can receive information from the CPR about specific groups of people they have individually identified in advance. Companies must also be entitled to receive the information under the General Data Protection Regulation and Denmark's Data Protection Act. The investigation found that unauthorized individuals used this legitimate access to retrieve information from the register. The exposed information includes names, addresses and CPR numbers, which serve as personal identification numbers in Denmark. The CPR administration said the unauthorized access did not include the names and addresses of people who had registered for name and address protection.

Investigation Into CPR Data Breach Continues

The CPR administration has stopped the company's access to the system and is working with specialists and relevant authorities to establish how the incident occurred. The case has been reported to the Danish Data Protection Authority, while police are investigating in cooperation with other relevant authorities. Authorities said the investigation remains in its early stages, and it is not yet possible to identify who was responsible for the unauthorized access. The CPR administration also warned that further investigation could lead to changes or clarification of the information currently available about the incident. Denmark's Minister of Research, Education and Digitalisation Christina Egelund described the incident as serious and said a thorough security review of the CPR system would be conducted. Additional measures have also been launched to prevent similar incidents.

What the Denmark Data Breach Means for Citizens

Authorities have reminded citizens not to provide passwords or other confidential information during phone calls or email exchanges, even when the person making contact appears to know their name, address or CPR number. Guidance is available through Denmark's Sikker Digital service, while the Cyberhotline for digital security has extended its opening hours from 8 a.m. to midnight in the coming days. The incident also highlights the risks associated with legitimate access to sensitive databases. In this case, the access used to obtain the information was originally available to a private company under Denmark's existing rules for accessing CPR data.

Cybersecurity Awareness Month Puts Data Protection in Focus

The Denmark data breach comes during October's Cybersecurity Awareness Month, a period focused on improving awareness of digital security risks. The incident highlights why protecting access to sensitive personal information remains an important part of cybersecurity. For organizations handling large volumes of personal data, the case also shows the importance of monitoring legitimate access and identifying unusual activity. However, Danish authorities have stressed that the investigation is still underway and that the full circumstances of the incident have yet to be established.

Gemini 4 Argon Restricted Over Cybersecurity Misuse Risks

Gemini 4 Argon

Google is limiting access to Gemini 4 Argon, its new artificial intelligence model capable of autonomously finding, validating and patching critical software vulnerabilities, to a vetted group of cybersecurity experts. The restricted rollout is intended to give defenders access to the model's capabilities while Google strengthens safeguards against potential misuse by malicious actors. Koray Kavukcuoglu, SVP of Google DeepMind and Chief AI Architect at Google, announced the model on September 30, 2026. Google is initially distributing it through its Fairwind Program and plans to expand access after gathering feedback from trusted testers and refining its security measures. The decision puts the focus on a central cybersecurity challenge: AI that can help security teams identify and fix weaknesses could also provide capabilities that attackers might misuse to discover and exploit vulnerabilities.

Gemini 4 Argon Discovers Critical Software Vulnerabilities

Google says Gemini 4 Argon can identify, validate and patch vulnerabilities across complex software environments. Its reported capabilities include examining codebases, identifying potential exposures and producing evidence to validate security weaknesses. In an early deployment, cybersecurity company Wiz used Argon through its Scan for Good initiative, which focuses on identifying and remediating high-risk exposures affecting critical public infrastructure. According to Google, the model discovered a critical vulnerability that exposed sensitive personal information in healthcare software used by hospitals worldwide. The company said previous frontier AI models had missed the issue but did not publicly identify the affected software or provide technical details about the flaw. On CWE-bench v1, a benchmark designed to evaluate vulnerability remediation, Argon tied for first place with a score of 68%. Google also reported improvements over its earlier 3.8 Flash Cyber model in internal testing. On Wiz's internal black-box penetration testing benchmark, Argon performed better at identifying attack surfaces, discovering vulnerabilities and generating proof-of-concept evidence to validate its findings. These results are based on Google's and its partners' reported evaluations. They do not establish how reliably the model will identify vulnerabilities across every real-world environment.

Why Google Is Limiting Access to Gemini 4 Argon

Google is taking a phased approach because the model's advanced capabilities require additional safeguards before wider deployment. For defenders, automated vulnerability discovery could help identify weaknesses earlier and reduce the time needed to investigate and remediate them. However, similar capabilities could also be misused to locate weaknesses in systems that attackers want to compromise. Google said trusted cyber defenders and its own internal teams will receive access to Argon without cyber-specific guardrails so they can use its full defensive capabilities. The company is also participating in the US government's voluntary process for pre-release AI model access. Google has not announced a specific date for general availability. It said it will continue evaluating feedback from early testers while strengthening protections against misuse.

Prompt Injection Attacks Among Key Security Concerns

Google has identified several areas where it is strengthening safeguards before expanding access to Gemini 4 Argon. One is prompt injection attacks, in which malicious instructions hidden in external content attempt to manipulate an AI model's behavior. Google said Argon demonstrated improved resilience against indirect prompt injection on Gray Swan's Indirect Prompt Injection benchmark. The company is also testing protections against requests that could facilitate cyberattacks or the development of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats. Google said internal and external red teams assessed these safeguards using manual and automated attack methods. Additional measures monitor the model's reasoning and actions for potential misalignment, with mechanisms designed to stop execution when necessary. Google is also hardening isolated testing environments used for high-risk training and evaluations. These measures are intended to reduce risks, but the announcement does not establish that every possible misuse scenario or security failure has been eliminated.

Gemini 4 Argon Availability and Pricing

Google plans to expand access to Gemini 4 Argon after gathering feedback and continuing its safeguards work. Paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers are expected to be among the first groups to receive broader access. The announced introductory API pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens. Cached input tokens receive a 95% discount on the standard input price. For cybersecurity teams, the key issue is whether the model's reported vulnerability discovery capabilities translate into reliable results across production systems. Its wider rollout will also test whether safeguards can keep pace with AI systems capable of supporting both vulnerability remediation and offensive security techniques.

Protected Quick Tunnels: simple accountless authentication for your next dev project

We launched Quick Tunnels in 2021 to give developers an easy way to share their latest service, application, or project running in their local development environment. A lot has changed since then, but the core use case remains the same.

Your coding agent has just finished the feature. The dev server is up on localhost:5173, and before you ask, the agent offers to let you try it on your phone. It runs one command and hands you a link:

cloudflared tunnel --url http://localhost:5173

That command starts a Quick Tunnel. cloudflared, Cloudflare's lightweight connector, publishes your local service at a random trycloudflare.com URL. No account, no domain, no cost. Agents now use Quick Tunnels for the same reason people do: they are the shortest path from a local port to a URL.

The catch has always been the same. Anyone with the link can open it.

Starting with cloudflared 2026.9.3, you can add --allowed-mail to the command, and your Quick Tunnel only lets in the email addresses and domains you choose. Visitors prove they own one of those addresses with a one-time PIN from Cloudflare Access. Nobody, on either side, needs a Cloudflare account.

Agents made Quick Tunnels more popular than ever

Agents that write code need somewhere to show you the result. Agents that live on a Mac mini at home need to be reachable from your phone. Model Context Protocol servers on a laptop need a public endpoint before a hosted assistant can call them. Each of these needs a URL, and a Quick Tunnel produces one from a single command an agent can run by itself. There is no signup form for it to get stuck on. Add --output json and every log line becomes a JSON object, so the agent can pick out the URL without scraping text.

Since agents took off, Cloudflare Tunnel and Quick Tunnels adoption has grown exponentially. On September 18, 2026, a link to the Quick Tunnels page climbed to the top of Hacker News and gathered more than 800 points and 300 comments. The thread reads like a catalog of agent workflows. One person's AI had found Quick Tunnels on its own to publish a site it had just built. Another called them "insanely helpful when doing agentic work on the go."

And one commenter asked this post answers: "how long until someone's agent sets up a tunnel for the world to see one's most sensitive, private and embarrassing information or insecure work-in-progress app?"

Control who can access your service

Pass an email address to --allowed-mail:

cloudflared tunnel --url http://localhost:8080 \
  --allowed-mail alice@example.com

Alice opens the URL, enters her email address, types in the code sent to her inbox, and reaches your app. Anyone else is stopped before a single request reaches your machine. You still don't create a DNS record, write a configuration file, or open a dashboard.

To let in more people, repeat the flag or allow an entire domain:

cloudflared tunnel --url http://localhost:8080 \
  --allowed-mail alice@example.com \
  --allowed-mail bob@example.com \
  --allowed-mail '*@example.com'

If you leave out --allowed-mail, nothing changes. Public Quick Tunnels behave exactly as they always have.

To change who can get in, stop cloudflared and start a new tunnel. Access ends for everyone the moment the process exits.

For a stable hostname or richer rules, such as identity provider groups, use Cloudflare Tunnel with Cloudflare Access. To reach an agent at home from your own devices without any public URL and establish bidirectional connectivity, use Cloudflare Mesh.

Make it your agent's default

Because protection is a single flag, agents can use it as easily as people can. Add one line to the instructions file your coding agent reads, such as AGENTS.md:

When you start a Quick Tunnel, always add --allowed-mail me@example.com.

From then on, the previews your agent shares should open only for you. Agents don't always follow instructions, so check what it ran: cloudflared prints whether a tunnel uses email authentication and how many rules it holds, without printing the addresses.

Start a protected tunnel from Wrangler

If you build on Workers, you can start the same kind of tunnel from the latest version of wrangler:

npx wrangler tunnel quick-start http://localhost:8080 \
  --allowed-mail alice@example.com

Wrangler supports repeated flags, comma-separated values, and wildcard domains, and it removes --allowed-mail values from its debug logs.

Cloudflare verifies the email. Your machine decides who gets in.

When someone opens a protected URL, they land on the Cloudflare Access sign-in page. They enter their email address, then the one-time PIN sent to that mailbox. Email sign-in is built for people using a browser.

That step answers one question only: does this person control this email address? It doesn't decide whether they're welcome. cloudflared makes that decision on your machine by comparing the verified address with the rules you typed.

Where does a policy live when there is no account?

Separating those two questions is the core of the design. Authentication proves who a visitor is. Authorization decides whether that visitor gets in. Every Cloudflare product that enforces access rules keeps the authorization half in the same place: your Cloudflare account. A Quick Tunnel doesn't have one. So the hard part was never sending someone a code. It was deciding where the guest list should live.

We started with four requirements. The design had to:

  • Keep Quick Tunnels accountless, because a signup step would defeat the point of a one-command tunnel.
  • Leave the request path for public Quick Tunnels untouched.
  • Avoid a central policy lookup on every request after a visitor signs in.
  • Protect the privacy of the email addresses developers type into their terminals.

Our first idea was to put a Cloudflare Access application in front of every Quick Tunnel hostname. Access already checks visitors before traffic reaches cloudflared, so reusing it looked like the shortest path. But hundreds of thousands of Quick Tunnels can be running at once, many for only a few minutes, and each would need its own application and policy. With no account to own them, we would have had to invent a new namespace and route applications dynamically, just to store a list that lives for an afternoon.

Our second idea was to build the whole flow. cloudflared would hold the rules, and a Tunnel service would send and check the codes. The authorization half of this idea was good: each connector checks its own list, which scales naturally and keeps the rules on the developer's machine. The authentication half was not. Sending a code is the easy part of email login. The hard parts are getting email delivered, stopping abuse, building secure challenges, managing sessions, and serving a sign-in page that is accessible and translated, then operating all of it safely for years. Cloudflare Access has already solved those problems.

So we kept the best half of each idea. Access verifies that the visitor controls the email address. A small authentication broker running on Cloudflare Workers turns that verified identity into a short-lived, signed handoff. The broker is stateless by design. It stores no tunnel policies, no visitor sessions, and no identity records, and it never sees a tunnel's guest list. cloudflared checks the handoff and makes the authorization decision itself, in memory, against the rules you typed.

The result is the property we cared about most: your guest list never leaves your machine. Cloudflare learns that a tunnel requires email authentication. It doesn't learn who you invited.

Following a request through a protected Quick Tunnel

A protected tunnel is created the same accountless way as a public one. The only extra thing cloudflared sends is the authentication mode, never your rules. If the service doesn't confirm that mode, cloudflared refuses to start rather than hand you a public URL by mistake.

The first time a visitor opens the URL:

  1. cloudflared sees a request with no session. It redirects the browser to login.trycloudflare.com with a random, single-use state tied to that browser and valid for 10 minutes.
  2. Cloudflare Access sends a one-time PIN to the visitor's email address and verifies it.
  3. The broker checks the Access identity and returns a short-lived, signed assertion bound to the tunnel hostname and to that state. The browser delivers it in a form POST, so it never lands in a URL, browser history, or logs.
  4. cloudflared verifies the assertion, uses up the state, and checks the email against your rules. On a match, it creates a local session and sends the visitor to the page they asked for. Otherwise, the visitor gets a generic response that reveals nothing about the list.
  5. Later requests use that session for up to four hours (less if the visitor's Access sign-in expires sooner), or until you stop cloudflared. There is no central lookup and no policy service.

The session cookie holds a random value and an expiry time, and nothing about who the visitor is. cloudflared strips authentication credentials before forwarding requests, so your app never sees them and never has to implement a login flow. If any check fails, the request never reaches your local service. A protected tunnel never falls back to public mode.

Built by interns

Protected Quick Tunnels were shipped by two interns: Hugo Vicente on product and Alessandro Frigerio on engineering. They took it from the product requirements to the authentication broker to the cloudflared release. That's how internships work at Cloudflare: interns own real problems and deliver solutions to production.

Try it on your next demo

Email protection for Quick Tunnels is free, like Quick Tunnels themselves. Install or update cloudflared, start your local server, and add the --allowed-mail flag:

cloudflared tunnel --url http://localhost:8080 --allowed-mail you@example.com

Setup details, matching rules, and limits are in the Quick Tunnels documentation.

The next time you or your agent shares what you're building, the link will only open for the people you chose.

SonicWall Warns of Two Actively Exploited SMA1000 Zero-Days, One Rated Maximum Severity

Graphic showing SonicWall SMA1000 devices, CVE-2026-83548, the maximum-severity SonicWall SMA1000 pre-authentication vulnerability

SonicWall disclosed this week that attackers are chaining two previously unknown vulnerabilities in its SMA1000 secure access appliances to run commands on unpatched devices, and urged customers to install an emergency hotfix.

The more severe flaw, CVE-2026-83548, is a pre-authentication server-side request forgery weakness in the appliance's Appliance Work Place interface, rated 10.0 on the CVSS scale. It lets a remote attacker with no credentials reach sensitive internal functionality. The second, CVE-2026-83549, is an operating-system command injection bug in the Appliance Management Console rated 7.8; on its own it requires administrative authentication, but paired with the SSRF flaw it yields remote code execution.

The vendor said it found both issues internally and then observed them being used together in live attacks. SonicWall has not published indicators of compromise or described the attackers.

Affected products are the SMA1000 series 6210, 7210 and 8200v, in both hardware and virtual form. Fixed builds are 12.4.3-03526 and later, and 12.5.0-02952 and later. SonicWall firewalls running SSL-VPN and the separate SMA 100 line are not affected.

Remediation guidance goes beyond patching. SonicWall told customers to contact its support organization to review appliances for signs of intrusion and, where compromise is suspected, to re-image or redeploy the device, rotate all credentials and reset TOTP tokens — an acknowledgment that one-time-password seeds stored on a breached appliance survive a software update. The company said customers should move to the hotfix release as quickly as possible.

Shadowserver Foundation scanning has tracked more than 400 internet-exposed SMA1000 appliances, though an unknown share of those are already patched. The small install base belies the risk profile. These are remote-access gateways that sit at the network edge and hold credentials for the environments behind them.

The disclosure extends a difficult run for the product line. Attackers exploited a separate pair of SMA1000 zero-days in July 2026, tracked as CVE-2026-15409 and CVE-2026-15410, to deploy custom malware; CISA later confirmed ransomware operators were abusing that access.

Read: CISA Adds SonicWall SMA1000 Vulnerabilities to KEV Catalog Following Active Exploitation

Another zero-day surfaced in December 2025. Seventeen SonicWall vulnerabilities across the company's product families currently sit in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. Edge appliances from SonicWall, Ivanti, Citrix and Fortinet have collectively become the preferred initial-access route for ransomware affiliates and espionage crews, because they are internet-facing by design and rarely instrumented with endpoint detection.

Azure CLI Password Spray Attack Exposes Microsoft 365 MFA Gap

A password spray campaign targeting Azure CLI sign-ins exposed how narrow Conditional Access policies can leave Microsoft 365 accounts vulnerable even when MFA is enabled.

The post Azure CLI Password Spray Attack Exposes Microsoft 365 MFA Gap appeared first on TechRepublic.

Time to Rethink Privileged Access for Machines and AI Agents

For years, Identity and Access Management (IAM) and Privileged Access Management (PAM) have been treated as foundational and a solved security challenge. Organizations deployed vaults, enforced policies, and checked the compliance box for their privileged users.  Fast forward to today, and that model no longer holds up.    What’s emerging now is not an incremental shift, but a structural one. Identity is no longer centered on […]

The post Time to Rethink Privileged Access for Machines and AI Agents appeared first on 12Port.

The post Time to Rethink Privileged Access for Machines and AI Agents appeared first on Security Boulevard.

U.S. Consumers Lost $2.1 Billion in Social Media Scams in 2025, FTC Says

An FTC report says that Americans last year lost $2.1 billion in social media scams, such as shopping and investment schemes. Social media site have become the place where most of these scams start, and more than half of that money was stolen in scams began on Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram.

The post U.S. Consumers Lost $2.1 Billion in Social Media Scams in 2025, FTC Says appeared first on Security Boulevard.

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