In an escalating marketing campaign focusing on distant entry infrastructure, menace actors have initiated energetic exploitation makes an attempt in opposition to Palo Alto Networks’ GlobalProtect VPN portals.
GrayNoise monitoring exercise report scans and exploitation efforts originating from greater than 7,000 distinctive IP addresses worldwide, elevating alarms for organizations counting on the favored VPN resolution for safe distant work.
Ip’s Noticed focusing on (Supply: GreyNoise)
The assaults, first detected in late November 2025, deal with vulnerabilities in GlobalProtect gateways, significantly these uncovered on the web through UDP port 4501.
In line with knowledge from Shadowserver and different menace intelligence feeds, the IP sources span residential proxies, bulletproof internet hosting suppliers, and compromised VPS situations throughout Asia, Europe, and North America.
“This isn’t opportunistic scanning; actors are probing for weak configurations and chaining them with identified exploits,” famous a researcher from a serious cybersecurity agency, who spoke on situation of anonymity.
Palo Alto Networks’ GlobalProtect has lengthy been a main goal as a result of its ubiquity in enterprise environments. Historic flaws, corresponding to CVE-2024-3400 (a vital command injection vulnerability patched in April 2024 with CVSS rating 9.8), proceed to hang-out unpatched techniques.
Current waves exploit misconfigurations permitting pre-authentication entry, together with default credentials or uncovered admin portals. Attackers deploy instruments like customized scripts mimicking Metasploit modules to enumerate portals, brute-force logins, and drop malware for persistence.
Mandiant’s newest menace report attributes related techniques to Chinese language state-affiliated teams like UNC4841, although no single actor has been definitively linked to this surge.
Indicators of compromise embrace anomalous UDP site visitors spikes to port 4501, adopted by HTTP requests to /global-protect/login.urd endpoints. In confirmed breaches, intruders have exfiltrated session tokens, enabling lateral motion into company networks.
Palo Alto Networks issued an pressing advisory on December 5, urging clients to implement multi-factor authentication (MFA), limit portal publicity through firewalls, and apply the newest patches.
“GlobalProtect stays safe when correctly configured, however internet-facing portals are high-value targets,” the corporate said. CISA has added associated IOCs to its Identified Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, advising federal businesses to patch inside 72 hours.
Specialists suggest air-gapping vital portals, implementing zero-trust segmentation, and monitoring for beaconing to C2 servers like these hosted on AWS or Azure. As hybrid work persists, this marketing campaign underscores the fragility of legacy VPNs in opposition to industrialized assaults.
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