Article
Cybersecurity in the Age of Ransomware. It’s More Than Simply Having Insurance.
Cyber Threats
Combating Ransomware
In many ways, cybersecurity insurance is not so different from car or home insurance. In short, it’s a way to transfer risk. If a cyber incident occurs, insurance can help organizations gain a level of mitigating control and recoup costs, whether they come from direct damages, lawsuits, fines, or breach notification expenses.
Although cybersecurity insurance has been around a while, the industry has had to evolve with the threat landscape — and the advent of ransomware changed everything.
In the early 2000s, cyber insurance policies required little more than a simple questionnaire for underwriting and typically only offered coverage in the event of a breach of customer or other sensitive data. If a company lost someone’s personal data and was required to notify them, the policy would cover related expenses. While notifications have been known to get pricey, sometimes costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, the expense is nothing when compared to that of today’s ransomware threat.
Cybercriminals take the path of least resistance
Today, cybercriminals don’t want credit card numbers. They don’t even really want companies’ data. In fact, one day, they began to think, “What if I don’t move data? What if I leave it right where it is, but encrypt it and demand a ransom?”
It’s simpler. Cybercriminals know that companies need their data to survive — however, data theft is a complex process that requires sophisticated skills. Not only do the bad guys have to know how to break in and find the right data, but they also need to know how to remove it. It’s far easier to hold sensitive data for ransom than to try to exfiltrate and monetize it. And now with ransomware as a service (RaaS), anyone can buy ransomware on the web — no sophisticated skills required.
Easy prey. What’s also made ransomware so disruptive is its impact on smaller companies. Often, they are easier to breach, can’t restore their systems, and thus, have no choice but to pay ransoms.
Reduced risk. With the dawn of digital currency, the bad guys no longer had to meet at a graveyard with a hostage in a car trunk in the hopes of pulling off a successful “exchange.” By removing physical boundaries, enabling anonymity, simplifying the payment process, cryptocurrency has helped ransomware become the US$6 trillion business it is today. Now, all the bad guys have to say is, “Pay up or else.” Or else, they’ll continue to deny you access to your data. Or else they’ll publish it on the Dark Web.
Is cyber insurance making companies more secure?
Gone are the days of answering five questions on a cybersecurity insurance application. In fact, there are major carriers that won’t even provide a quote unless a business can verify it uses multifactor authentication (MFA) for all remote access, has offline backups, and has a cybersecurity program. These are now must-haves.
This greater scrutiny surrounding the application process is forcing companies of all sizes to build formalized security programs that can identify and address risks. For instance, what’s the likelihood of an employee clicking on an email or link that enables malware to run across the environment and encrypt everything, including backups?
While there’s no way to eliminate all risks, there are ways to make it harder for the bad guys to succeed. In addition to using MFA for all remote access and administrative tasks and having offline copies of backups that are disconnected from the domain, it’s important to:
Have — and practice — both incident response and business continuity plans in place.
Implement a behavior-based endpoint detection and response (EDR) solution for serious security monitoring that can stop ransomware.
Educate employees. This means having more than a quarterly newsletter on security and rather, getting into the guts of the company culture and tapping into the quality-conscious mindset to ensure that security becomes another aspect of product quality. Everyone needs to understand that if a product isn’t secure, it isn’t a quality product.
In other words, the more you can do to prove you’re a good driver, the more likely an insurance company will be to grant you a policy.
What is the future of cyber insurance?
Ransomware was the first systemic risk that was cross border and cross sector. It shook up the cyber insurance market because companies couldn’t hedge their bet in one area of risk around the world in one sector because everybody was getting hit. Today, insurance companies have been able to level set and now play a critical role not only in helping to transfer some of the risks that companies have, but also in helping to identify best practices that, when implemented by the companies, will ultimately reduce risk.
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Article
FortiGate Exploits Enable Network Breaches and Credential Theft
A recent security report indicates that threat actors are actively exploiting FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) appliances as initial access vectors to compromise enterprise networks. The activity leverages recently disclosed vulnerabilities or weak credentials to gain unauthorized access and extract configuration files, which often contain sensitive information, including service account credentials and detailed network topology data.
Analysis of these incidents shows significant variation in attacker dwell time, ranging from immediate lateral movement to delays of up to two months post-compromise. Since these appliances often integrate with authentication systems such as Active Directory and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), their compromise can grant attackers extensive access, substantially increasing the risk of widespread network intrusion and data exposure.
What’s Notable and Unique
The activity involves the exploitation of recently disclosed security vulnerabilities, including CVE-2025-59718, CVE-2025-59719, and CVE-2026-24858, or weak credentials, allowing attackers to gain administrative access, extract configuration files, and obtain service account credentials and network topology information.
In one observed incident, attackers created a FortiGate admin account with unrestricted firewall rules and maintained access over time, consistent with initial access broker activity. After a couple of months, threat actors extracted and decrypted LDAP credentials to compromise Active Directory.
In another case, attackers moved from FortiGate access to deploying remote access tools, including Pulseway and MeshAgent, while also utilizing cloud infrastructure such as Google Cloud Storage and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Analyst Comments
Arete has identified multiple instances of Fortinet device exploitation for initial access, involving various threat actors, with the Qilin ransomware group notably leveraging Fortinet device exploits. Given their integration with systems like Active Directory, NGFW appliances remain high-value targets for both state-aligned and financially motivated actors. In parallel, Arete has observed recent dark web activity involving leaked FortiGate VPN access, further highlighting the expanding risk landscape. This aligns with the recent reporting from Amazon Threat Intelligence, which identified large-scale compromises of FortiGate devices driven by exposed management ports and weak authentication, rather than vulnerability exploitation. Overall, these developments underscore the increasing focus on network edge devices as entry points, reinforcing the need for organizations to strengthen authentication, restrict external exposure, and address fundamental security gaps to mitigate the risk of widespread compromise.
Sources
FortiGate Edge Intrusions | Stolen Service Accounts Lead to Rogue Workstations and Deep AD Compromise
Article
Vulnerability Discovered in Anthropic’s Claude Code
Security researchers discovered two critical vulnerabilities in Anthropic's agentic AI coding tool, Claude Code. The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2025-59536 and CVE-2026-21852, allowed attackers to achieve remote code execution and to compromise a victim's API credentials. The vulnerabilities exploit maliciously crafted repository configurations to circumvent control mechanisms. It should be noted that Anthropic worked closely with the security researchers throughout the process, and the bugs were patched before the research was published.
What’s Notable and Unique
The configuration files .claude/settings.json and .mcp.json were repurposed to execute malicious commands. Because the configurations could be applied immediately upon starting Claude Code, the commands ran before the user could deny permissions via a dialogue prompt, or they bypassed the authentication prompt altogether.
.claude/settings.json also defines the endpoint for all Claude Code API communications. By replacing the default localhost URL with a URL they own, an attacker could redirect traffic to infrastructure they control. Critically, the authentication traffic generated upon starting Claude Code included the user's full Anthropic API key in plain text and was sent before the user could interact with the trust dialogue.
Restrictive permissions on sensitive files could be bypassed by simply prompting Claude Code to create a copy of the file's contents, which did not inherit the original file's permissions. A threat actor using a stolen API key could gain complete read and write access to all files within a workspace.
Analyst Comments
The vulnerabilities and attack paths detailed in the research illustrate the double-edged nature of AI tools. The speed, scale, and convenience characteristics that make AI tools attractive to developer teams also benefit threat actors who use them for nefarious purposes. Defenders should expect adversaries to continue seeking ways to exploit configurations and orchestration logic to increase the impact of their attacks. Organizations planning to implement AI development tools should prioritize AI supply-chain hygiene and CI/CD hardening practices.
Sources
Caught in the Hook: RCE and API Token Exfiltration Through Claude Code Project Files | CVE-2025-59536 | CVE-2026-21852
Article
Ransomware Trends & Data Insights: February 2026
After a slight lull in January, Akira and Qilin returned to dominating ransomware activity in February, collectively accounting for almost half of all engagements that month. The rest of the threat landscape remained relatively diverse, with a mix of persistent threats like INC and PLAY, older groups like Cl0p and LockBit, and newer groups like BravoX and Payouts King. Given current trends, the first quarter of 2026 will likely remain relatively predictable, with the top groups from the second half of 2025 continuing to operate at fairly consistent levels month to month.
Figure 1. Activity from the top 5 threat groups in February 2026
Throughout the month of February, analysts at Arete identified several trends behind the threat actors perpetrating cybercrime activities:
In February, Arete observed Qilin actively targeting WatchGuard Firebox devices, especially those vulnerable to CVE-2025-14733, to gain initial access to victim environments. CVE-2025-14733 is a critical vulnerability in WatchGuard Fireware OS that allows a remote, unauthenticated threat actor to execute arbitrary code. In addition to upgrading WatchGuard devices to the latest Firebox OS version, which patches the bug, administrators are urged to rotate all shared secrets on affected devices that may have been compromised and may be used in future campaigns.
Reports from February suggest that threat actors are increasingly exploring AI-enabled tools and services to scale malicious activities, demonstrating how generative AI is being integrated into both espionage and financially motivated threat operations. The Google Threat Intelligence Group indicated that state-backed threat actors are leveraging Google’s Gemini AI as a force multiplier to support all stages of the cyberattack lifecycle, from reconnaissance to post-compromise operations. Separate reporting from Amazon Threat Intelligence identified a threat actor leveraging commercially available generative AI services to conduct a large-scale campaign against FortiGate firewalls, gaining access through weak or reused credentials protected only by single-factor authentication.
The Interlock ransomware group recently introduced a custom process-termination utility called “Hotta Killer,” designed to disable endpoint detection and response solutions during active intrusions. This tool exploits a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2025-61155) in a gaming anti-cheat driver, marking a significant adaptation in the group’s operations against security tools like FortiEDR. Arete is actively monitoring this activity, which highlights the growing trend of Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver (BYOVD) attacks, in which threat actors exploit legitimate, signed drivers to bypass and disable endpoint security controls.
Sources
Arete Internal