A VPN creates an encrypted tunnel between devices and a remote network, making its configuration and flaws important to privacy and access control.
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Background for this topic.
VPN (virtual private network) creates an encrypted tunnel between a device and a VPN gateway, or between networks, across an untrusted network such as the internet. It is commonly used for remote access and site-to-site connectivity. Encryption protects traffic in transit between the tunnel endpoints, but it does not secure a compromised device, protect data after it reaches the destination, or automatically make the VPN provider trustworthy; logging and traffic visibility depend on its configuration and operator.
VPN gateways are high-value entry points: vulnerabilities in internet-facing appliances, weak protocols or configurations, and stolen credentials can enable unauthorized access to internal systems. Organizations should patch and securely configure gateways, require phishing-resistant or otherwise strong multi-factor authentication where practical, restrict access and segment remote sessions, and monitor authentication and connection logs. During an incident, VPN account and gateway records can help identify access, while compromised gateways may require credential resets and network-wide review.
Weekly headline count for the current query.
The U.S. Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has designated two individuals and a VPN service provider for enabling ransomware actors' and other cybercriminals' malicious activities, including ransomware attacks against Americans
Researchers ran 281 of the most popular free VPN apps on the Google Play Store through a new testing system and found that many fail at the basics people install a VPN for, i.e., keeping their traffic private and secure
Stuff broke again. Not in a movie way. An old tool was left exposed. An abandoned package was abused. A deprecated feature was still running in prod
Palo Alto Networks has revealed that it has observed "active exploitation" of a recently disclosed PAN-OS vulnerability by an unknown threat actor to obtain unauthorized access to GlobalProtect portals
Check Point has warned of active exploitation of a critical vulnerability impacting Remote Access VPN and Mobile Access deployments that are configured to use the deprecated IKEv1 key exchange protocol
Palo Alto Networks has warned that a recently disclosed medium-severity security flaw impacting PAN-OS and Prisma Access has come under active exploitation in the wild
Authorities in Europe and North America have announced the dismantling of a criminal virtual private network (VPN) service used by criminal actors to obscure the origins of ransomware attacks, data theft, scanning, and denial-of-service attacks
Chinese-speaking users are the target of an active campaign that uses typosquatted domains impersonating trusted software brands to deliver a previously undocumented remote access trojan named AtlasCross RAT
Microsoft has disclosed details of a credential theft campaign that employs fake virtual private network (VPN) clients distributed through search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning techniques
Chinese-speaking threat actors are suspected to have leveraged a compromised SonicWall VPN appliance as an initial access vector to deploy a VMware ESXi exploit that may have been developed as far back as February 2024
Fortinet on Wednesday said it observed "recent abuse" of a five-year-old security flaw in FortiOS SSL VPN in the wild under certain configurations
WatchGuard has released fixes to address a critical security flaw in Fireware OS that it said has been exploited in real-world attacks
A Google Chrome extension with a "Featured" badge and six million users has been observed silently gathering every prompt entered by users into artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots like OpenAI ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Google Gemini, xAI Grok, Meta AI, and Perplexity
This week showed just how fast things can go wrong when no one’s watching. Some attacks were silent and sneaky. Others used tools we trust every day — like AI, VPNs, or app stores — to cause damage without setting off alarms
The North Korea-linked threat actor known as Kimsuky has distributed a previously undocumented backdoor codenamed HttpTroy as part of a likely spear-phishing attack targeting a single victim in South Korea
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a recently patched critical security flaw in WatchGuard Fireware that could allow unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of a new Rust-based backdoor called ChaosBot that can allow operators to conduct reconnaissance and execute arbitrary commands on compromised hosts
Cybersecurity company Huntress on Friday warned of "widespread compromise" of SonicWall SSL VPN devices to access multiple customer environments
Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an active malware campaign called Stealit that has leveraged Node.js' Single Executable Application (SEA) feature as a way to distribute its payloads
Cisco is urging customers to patch two security flaws impacting the VPN web server of Cisco Secure Firewall Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) Software, which it said have been exploited in the wild