Hackers Leak VPN Account Passwords From 87,000 Fortinet FortiGate Devices
Vulnerabilities mentionedAll →
| CVE | Vulnerability | CVSS | EPSS | Flags | Affected | Exposure | Published |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CVE-2018-13379 | Unauthenticated Path Traversal in Fortinet FortiOS SSL VPN CVE-2018-13379 is a path traversal flaw (CWE-22) in the Fortinet FortiOS SSL VPN web portal that allows an unauthenticated attacker to download FortiOS system files via specially crafted HTTP resource requests. By traversing directories through crafted requests to the exposed web portal, the attacker can retrieve sensitive files, a technique publicly documented as yielding the SSL VPN session file containing usernames and passwords in plaintext. Any organization running the SSL VPN web portal on a FortiGate appliance is affected, and risk is highest where the portal is directly reachable from the internet. The flaw is confirmed in the wild: it was added to the CISA KEV catalog on 2021-11-03 with known ransomware use, and EPSS assigns it a 100% probability of exploitation within 30 days. No public PoC is listed in the provided data, but credential theft tied to this bug has been widely reused by threat actors. Do: Apply the patched FortiOS release per Fortinet's vendor advisory immediately, as this is a CISA KEV required action; if the fixed version is not known from this data, follow Fortinet's FG-IR-18-384 advisory for the correct upgrade path. Rotate SSL VPN credentials and review VPN access logs for path-traversal requests, since successful exploitation exposes plaintext session credentials, and restrict SSL VPN portal exposure to trusted sources where possible. | 9.8 | 100% | KEV ransomware |
| mass≈500,000 internet-exposed FortiOS SSL VPN portals (Fortinet cited ~480,000 affected devices) |
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Ravie LakshmananSep 09, 2021
Network security solutions provider Fortinet confirmed that a malicious actor had unauthorizedly disclosed VPN login names and passwords associated with 87,000 FortiGate SSL-VPN devices.
"These credentials were obtained from systems that remained unpatched against CVE-2018-13379 at the time of the actor's scan. While they may have since been patched, if the passwords were not reset, they remain vulnerable," the company said in a statement on Wednesday.
The disclosure comes after the threat actor leaked a list of Fortinet credentials for free on a new Russian-speaking forum called RAMP that launched in July 2021 as well as on Groove ransomware's data leak site, with Advanced Intel noting that the "breach list contains raw access to the top companies" spanning across 74 countries, including India, Taiwan, Italy, France, and Israel. "2,959 out of 22,500 victims are U.S. entities," the researchers said.
CVE-2018-13379 relates to a path traversal vulnerability in the FortiOS SSL VPN web portal, which allows unauthenticated attackers to read arbitrary system files, including the session file, which contains usernames and passwords stored in plaintext.
Although the bug was rectified in May 2019, the security weakness has been repeatedly exploited by multiple adversaries to deploy an array of malicious payloads on unpatched devices, prompting Fortinet to issue a series of advisories in August 2019, July 2020, April 2021, and again in June 2021, urging customers to upgrade affected appliances.
CVE-2018-13379 also emerged as one of the top most exploited flaws in 2020, according to a list compiled by intelligence agencies in Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. earlier this year.
In light of the leak, Fortinet is recommending companies to immediately disable all VPNs, upgrade the devices to FortiOS 5.4.13, 5.6.14, 6.0.11, or 6.2.8 and above followed by initiating an organization-wide password reset, warning that "you may remain vulnerable post-upgrade if your users' credentials were previously compromised."
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