Article
The Hidden Costs of Cybercrime
Arete Analysis
By Kevin Baker, Director of Cyber Strategy and Defense
This year, the global cost of cybercrime is expected to hit $6 trillion.[i] Up from $3 trillion in 2015, it’s nothing short of a big, flourishing business whose operators are relentless innovators.
Since COVID, the FBI recorded a 300% increase in cybercrime[ii], with pandemic-related scams baiting people to click on malicious links or attachments. Even ransomware attacks have recently soared — in fact, one is said to be occurring every 11 seconds.[iii] And why not? It’s a lucrative business model!
In the past, kidnappers were always caught at the money-transfer point. But digital currency changed all that, facilitating anonymous handoffs. With Bitcoin, for example, organizations can no longer trace ransoms back to individuals and threat actors can sit in Russia, Eastern Europe, China, Brazil, the United States, often where they may be protected from extradition.
The Evolution of Ransomeware
Ransomware began as a game of keep away. The bad guys didn’t have to steal anything; they simply denied companies or individuals access to their data. This tactic worked well until companies caught on and started to move their backups offline, so they could restore their critical systems without having to pay the ransom.
Like legitimate businesses, cybercriminals looked to pivot, innovate, and find new revenue streams. When encryption alone began to fail, they concocted the double extortion scheme, whereby they opted to encrypt and exfiltrate data. First, they demanded payment for decrypting the stolen data. Next, they asked for a second payment to prevent its public release.
Depending on the sensitivity of the data stolen, companies had to weigh the potential reputational damage related to its exposure along with the broken client trust of not protecting it in the first place.
A Case Study in Costs
In a 2019 Radware survey[i], 43% of participants said they’d experienced negative customer trust and reputational loss because of a successful cyberattack.
Let’s examine the SolarWinds attack. Dubbed the Pearl Harbor of American IT, the SolarWinds hack impacted 18,000 government and private networks. That’s a lot of customers to have mad at you.
SolarWinds had been a reputable, long-time provider of IT monitoring services. But immediately after the hack, its stock price tanked, presumably due to the potential for reputational damage, material loss of customers, a slowdown in business performance, and high remediation and legal costs.
It’s easy to think that only big companies are targets — Microsoft was also recently hacked — but cybercriminals are often emboldened by such successful hacks. While advanced persistent threat actors may not hit smaller targets themselves, they have no qualms about selling their proven exploit methods to other players in the threat actor marketplace. Often, the smaller, less sophisticated players are willing to take smaller pay days.
Thus, no matter an organization’s size and scope of activities, it will be targeted, baited, and attacked.
So, Let's Count the Costs
The direct cost of exploitation includes remediation, repair, restoration of data and IT infrastructure, ransom payment, and legal counsel to help navigate through these complex problems. And if a breach notification to customers is required, those costs can quickly skyrocket, especially depending on how much personally identifiable information (PII) may have been lost.
Not to be forgotten is the cost of business downtime. While production ceases, organizations must continue to pay salaries, rent, the electric bill, the telephone bill, all the normal operating expenses. None of these go away while organizations are trying to restore operations.
Next, there are the indirect costs of reputation damage and lost customer trust, which impacts the ability to gain future customers. There’s also the potential for litigation defense costs should customers decide to sue for what they believe was a failure to protect information that a company had pledged to protect. On top of all that, multiple state attorneys general, the Federal Trade Commission, the Security Exchange Commission, and other regulators may fine the “hacked” company.
And lastly, insurance rates go up. It’s a bit different than with car insurance. For cyber carriers, there’s less actuarial science available and thus, increases go up faster than they would in any other form of insurance right now.
In a worst-case scenario, if the sum proves too high, a company could confront the greatest cost of all: going out of business.
[i] Radware Report Shows That Respondents Claim Average Cost of Cyberattack Now Exceeds $1 Million
[i] Cybercrime to Cost the World $10.5 Trillion Annually By 2025 (cybersecurityventures.com)
[ii] COVID-19 News: FBI Reports 300% Increase in Reported Cybercrimes – IMC Grupo
[iii] Ransomware Attacks Predicted to Occur Every 11 Seconds in 2021 with a Cost of $20 Billion | Robinson+Cole Data Privacy + Security Insider – JDSupra
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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