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For years, security training has focused almost entirely on the human being at the keyboard: don't click the link, don't open the attachment, don't fall for the fake invoice. That's still good advice. But the single biggest shift in how ransomware gangs break into businesses this year has nothing to do with employees at all; it's the VPN and firewall appliance sitting at the edge of your network, quietly facing the internet.
According to the 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report, edge devices and VPNs jumped from just 3% to 22% of exploitation-driven breaches in a single year, a sevenfold increase. For the first time in the report's 19-year history, exploiting a vulnerability overtook stolen credentials as the number one way attackers get in. Ransomware showed up in 48% of confirmed breaches overall.
Phishing an employee takes effort, timing, and a little luck. Exploiting a VPN appliance takes none of that. These devices sit exposed to the entire internet by design; that's their job, which makes them a single, high-value target rather than hundreds of individual employees to trick one at a time. Get past the VPN, and you often land with elevated network access right out of the gate, skipping the step of working your way up from one compromised employee laptop.
This year, ransomware group Qilin, among the most active, ran a coordinated exploitation wave against VPN and firewall products from several of the industry's biggest names: Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Check Point, and Citrix. The specific flaws varied: an authentication bypass through forged session cookies here, a credential-harvesting campaign that hit tens of thousands of internet-exposed devices there, a memory-leak flaw in a SAML login flow elsewhere, but the pattern was the same every time: attackers got in without needing a valid password, and in some cases without tripping multi-factor authentication at all.
What makes this especially dangerous isn't just the vulnerabilities themselves; it's the timeline. In more than one of this year's cases, active exploitation began within 24 hours of the flaw becoming public, sometimes even before the vendor's official disclosure caught up. Most businesses patch on a weekly-to-quarterly cycle. Attackers are now working in a window measured in hours to days. A patch sitting untouched for even a couple of weeks can be the entire gap an attacker needs.
And once ransomware operators are past the VPN, they don't waste time. Investigators have documented attackers moving straight into credential harvesting, internal network reconnaissance, and full ransomware deployment often within the same day they gained access.
• Patch edge devices immediately, not on the normal cycle. VPNs, firewalls, and anything internet-facing deserve an accelerated patch policy; these are no longer “get to it this quarter” updates.
• Get management interfaces off the public internet. VPN and firewall admin panels should never be directly reachable from anywhere in the world; restrict access to trusted IP ranges or an internal management network.
inter• Require phishing-resistant MFA on every remote-access account and don't assume MFA alone makes you safe. Several of this year's exploits bypassed authentication entirely, which is exactly why patching still matters even with MFA in place.
• Know what you're running and rotate credentials after any vendor advisory. If you don't know your current firmware version across every edge device, that's the first gap to close.
• Have someone watching for this continuously. Vendor advisories, exploitation reports, and patch releases move fast, and checking in once a quarter isn't fast enough anymore.
This is precisely the kind of risk that slips through the cracks when nobody owns it full-time. Cynergy Information Technology monitors vendor advisories and emerging exploitation campaigns as part of our managed services, so your VPN, firewall, and other edge devices get patched on the timeline attackers are actually working on, not whenever there's a spare afternoon. Reach out to Cynergy IT to find out what's currently exposed on your network edge.
If we don’t meet our promise, you don’t pay—simple as that. We help small businesses across Texas get fast, reliable IT support with a 99.4% client retention rate. Want to see if we’re a fit?