All news with #fortinet tag

Fortinet Recognized by Crime Stoppers for Cyber Leadership

🏆 Fortinet received two 2025 Crime Stoppers International awards—the Cybersecurity Leadership Award and the Corporate Leadership in Crime Prevention Award—for its global efforts to disrupt cybercrime through intelligence sharing, partnership, and workforce development. FortiGuard Labs and the Fortinet Training Institute are cited for delivering actionable threat intelligence and scalable education. The honors validate more than a decade of sustained public‑private collaboration and data‑driven prevention.

AI Literacy Is Critical for Cybersecurity Readiness

🔒 Artificial intelligence is reshaping cybersecurity, creating both enhanced defensive capabilities and new risks that require broad AI literacy. The White House's America’s AI Action Plan and Fortinet’s 2025 Cybersecurity Global Skills Gap Report show strong adoption—97% of organizations use or plan AI in security—yet 48% cite lack of staff expertise as a major barrier. Fortinet recommends targeted training, policies for generative AI use, and its Security Awareness modules to help close the gap and reduce threat exposure.

Fortinet Expands Unified SASE with Global POPs and AI

🚀 Fortinet announced enhancements to Fortinet Unified SASE, expanding its global footprint to over 170 points of presence and embedding AI-powered operations. FortiAI-Assist automates diagnostics and remediation to accelerate mean time to resolution, while an agentless Secure Browser and SaaS Security Posture Management extend DLP and compliance controls across 80+ SaaS apps. These updates aim to boost performance, simplify operations, and strengthen data protection for distributed workforces.

Fortinet Publishes First EPD for FortiGate-40F NGFW

🌱 Fortinet has published the industry’s first Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) for the FortiGate-40F Next-Generation Firewall, verified under the new PCR 2024:06. The EPD is based on an independent Life Cycle Assessment and discloses lifecycle impacts—carbon, energy, water, materials, and waste—providing procurement teams with standardized, third-party-validated data. Fortinet views this as an initial step and plans to extend EPD coverage across additional models to support compliance, decarbonization, and sustainable procurement.

Legacy Flaws in Network Edge Devices Threaten Orgs Today

🔒 Enterprises' network edge devices — firewalls, VPNs, routers, and email gateways — are increasingly being exploited due to longstanding 1990s‑era flaws such as buffer overflows, command and SQL injections. Researchers tracked dozens of zero‑day exploits in 2024 and continuing into 2025 that affected vendors including Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, Ivanti, and others. These appliances are attractive targets because they are remotely accessible, often lack endpoint protections and centralized logging, and hold privileged credentials, making them common initial access vectors for state‑affiliated actors and ransomware groups.

Tracking HoldingHands Malware Expansion Across Asia

🔍 FortiGuard Labs observed a January 2025 campaign that began with Winos 4.0 infections in Taiwan and evolved into a cross‑regional HoldingHands operation affecting China, Taiwan, Japan, and Malaysia. The actor uses phishing PDFs, cloud-hosted and bespoke domains, and multi-stage loaders that leverage Windows Task Scheduler to evade detection. Shared infrastructure, reused code (including digital signatures and debug paths), and repeated JavaScript download scripts link disparate samples, and Fortinet provides detections, IOCs, and mitigation guidance.

Fortinet Advances Global Cyber Resilience at AMC25

🔒 Fortinet participated in the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting on Cybersecurity (AMC25) in Dubai, engaging government, industry, and civil leaders to advance global cyber resilience. Fortinet executives Dr. Carl Windsor and Derek Manky led sessions on public‑private collaboration, frameworks for scaling disruption, and the role of the Cybercrime Atlas in enabling coordinated action. They highlighted recent coordinated operations and impact reported in the 2025 Cybercrime Atlas: Impact Report, emphasizing that aligning policy, governance, and technical intelligence is essential to protect supply chains, AI systems, and critical infrastructure.

Fortinet Named Challenger in 2025 Gartner SIEM Magic Quadrant

🛡️ Fortinet announced that FortiSIEM was named a Challenger in the 2025 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SIEM, marking the vendor's eighth consecutive inclusion. FortiSIEM centralizes IT/OT event collection and combines advanced detection analytics, a CMDB, built-in SOAR automation and FortiAI-Assist GenAI to accelerate detection, investigation and response. Fortinet also notes that FortiSIEM 7.4, released in May 2025 after Gartner’s evaluation, adds federated search, expanded dashboards and enhanced analyst guidance to further improve SOC efficiency.

Fortinet Strengthens Global Cybercrime Collaboration

🔒 Fortinet underscores its leadership within the World Economic Forum’s Cybercrime Atlas, promoting cross-sector intelligence sharing and coordinated disruption to combat cybercriminal networks. The 2025 Impact Report, released ahead of the WEF Annual Meeting on Cybersecurity 2025, details operational support for INTERPOL-led Operations Serengeti and Serengeti 2.0 and quantifies arrests, takedowns, and recovered illicit funds. Fortinet stresses the need for accountability at scale and continued expansion of collaborative capacity-building.

Fortinet Named Gartner Customers’ Choice for WAAP 2025

🔒 Fortinet has been named a Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Cloud WAAP in 2025, reflecting verified customer satisfaction with a 4.8/5 rating and a 99% recommendation rate across 79 reviews. The accolade highlights FortiAppSec Cloud, a unified WAAP platform that integrates WAF, API protection, bot management, DDoS mitigation, CDN acceleration, and AI-driven automation. Customers emphasize rapid onboarding, reliable performance, and strong vendor support.

Chaos Ransomware Evolves: Faster, Smarter, More Destructive

⚠️ Chaos-C++ is a resurfaced C++ ransomware strain identified in 2025 that combines fast AES encryption, deliberate deletion of very large files, and a clipboard-hijacking capability to steal cryptocurrency payments. It employs a stealthy downloader that masquerades as a system optimizer, uses Windows CryptoAPI where available and a weaker XOR fallback otherwise, and appends a .chaos extension to affected files. Victims also see destructive post-infection commands that remove shadow copies and hinder recovery, and ForsGuard detections are available for protection.

AI-Powered Cloud Alert Investigation with FortiCNAPP

🔎 FortiCNAPP consolidates related cloud signals into composite alerts, reducing noise and prioritizing high-confidence incidents so SOC teams can focus on what matters. Its Observation Timeline sequences logins, API calls, commands, and network traffic into a single, evidence-backed storyline. An AI Alert Assistant supports natural-language queries and returns structured answers, visual relationships, and prioritized remediation steps to accelerate containment and help junior analysts act confidently.

AI and Cybersecurity: Fortinet and NTT DATA Webinar

🔒 In a joint webinar, Fortinet and NTT DATA outlined practical approaches to deploying and securing AI across enterprise environments. Fortinet described its three AI pillars—FortiAI‑Protect, FortiAI‑Assist, and FortiAI‑SecureAI—focused on detection, operational assistance, and protecting AI assets. NTT DATA emphasized governance, runtime protections, and an "agentic factory" to scale pilots into production. The presenters stressed the need for visibility into shadow AI and controls such as DLP and zero‑trust access to prevent data leakage.

Phishing and Patching: Cyber Basics Still Critical

🔐 Fortinet’s 2025 Global Threat Landscape Report underscores that two fundamentals — protecting against phishing and keeping software up to date — remain the most effective defenses. Attackers are scaling campaigns with automation and generative AI to produce more convincing messages, and they combine email, SMS, and voice techniques to raise success rates. Organizations should strengthen employee training, deploy MFA, and adopt centralized or automated patch management to reduce exposure and limit lateral movement.

Accelerating Customers' Journey from SD-WAN to SASE

🔒 Fortinet explains how partners can guide customers from secure SD-WAN to a full Unified SASE platform to address hybrid work, multi-cloud adoption, and rising cyberthreats. The article emphasizes that Secure SD-WAN is an on-ramp to SASE because it is natively integrated into Fortinet's SASE architecture, enabling expansion without replacing existing deployments. It outlines operational benefits, market growth projections, and partner opportunities around differentiated services, consolidated policy management, and simplified licensing.

Researchers Expose SVG and PureRAT Phishing Threats

📧 Fortinet FortiGuard Labs and other researchers detailed phishing campaigns that weaponize malicious SVG attachments to initiate downloads of password-protected ZIP archives and Compiled HTML Help (CHM) files. Those CHM files activate loader chains that deliver CountLoader as a distribution stage for Amatera Stealer and the stealthy .NET miner PureMiner, both run filelessly via .NET AOT and memory-loading techniques. Separately, Huntress attributes a Vietnamese-speaking operator using copyright-themed lures that escalate from PXA Stealer to the modular backdoor PureRAT.

Chinese State-Linked RedNovember Targets Global Org

🛰️ Recorded Future has attributed a widespread cyber-espionage cluster to a Chinese state-sponsored actor it has named RedNovember, which overlaps with Microsoft's Storm-2077. From June 2024 to July 2025 the group targeted internet-facing perimeter appliances and used a mix of open-source and commercial tooling — notably Pantegana, Spark RAT and Cobalt Strike — to gain persistent access across government and private-sector networks worldwide. Attacks exploited known CVEs in VPNs, firewalls and other security appliances and leveraged a Go-based loader derived from LESLIELOADER, while administration infrastructure relied on VPN services such as ExpressVPN and Warp.

Fortinet Veterans Program Enables Cybersecurity Careers

🔐 Fortinet’s Veterans Program, in partnership with VetSec, provides veterans and spouses free access to training, hands-on labs, and certification vouchers to accelerate entry into cybersecurity. Participants progress from foundational courses through associate-level credentials, including structured offerings such as the Networking Fundamentals Bootcamp. Graduates like Jeramiah Poff and Derek Zobler reported direct job placements—roles ranging from security architect to cyberthreat hunter—demonstrating measurable workforce impact.

Fortinet Highlights Unified SASE at 4th Annual Summit

🔒 Fortinet’s 4th Annual SASE Summit reinforced that unifying networking and security is now a strategic requirement for cloud and hybrid work environments. Analysts from Gartner, Fortinet executives, and customers shared lessons on consolidation, AI-driven operations, and sovereign SASE. Demos highlighted FortiAI-Assist for automated remediation and DEM for end-to-end experience monitoring. Attendees saw real-world results from customers who replaced fragile VPNs with a single-platform Unified SASE approach.

Data Loss Rises Despite Increased Security Spending

🔒 The 2025 Data Security Report from Fortinet and Cybersecurity Insiders finds that data loss is increasing even as organizations shift to programmatic approaches and boost budgets for insider risk and data protection. Legacy DLP tools, designed for perimeter-era environments, lack visibility into employee interactions across SaaS, cloud, and generative AI, and they fail to provide the context needed to separate accidents from real threats. The report urges adoption of behavior-aware, unified platforms—such as FortiDLP integrated with identity and activity telemetry—to turn alerts into actionable risk narratives and reduce costly insider incidents.