Article
Endpoint Detection and Response: The Closest Thing to a Silver Bullet to Stop Ransomware
Security Recommendations
In its recent report “Combating Ransomware,” the Ransomware Task Force says there’s no silver bullet to solving the ransomware challenge. Instead, the group touts a multi-pronged approach and provides an extensive list of recommendations to help companies better defend against this growing threat.
While I don’t disagree, for example, that coordinated global action and greater awareness to the severity of this threat are necessary, I couldn’t help but notice a glaring omission from their list: behavioral endpoint detection and response (EDR).
Why aren’t more companies using EDR solutions to combat ransomware?
For our clients, our number one recommendation to prevent or recover from a ransomware attack is to deploy endpoint protection. It’s the closest thing to a ransomware silver bullet you’re going to find — and should be a best practice.
EDR solutions are not based on malicious signatures that ransomers can easily evade. Rather, behavior-based EDR tools search for suspicious patterns of behavior that could indicate malware. And unlike antivirus, they are capable of spotting yet unknown malware, including more sophisticated threats like zero-day attacks; and they combine real-time continuous monitoring with automated analysis and response.
Cost effectiveness of EDR
EDR is not costly, especially considering the potential expense of a ransomware attack. Beyond the ransom payment itself come all the associated attack costs. As Kevin Baker detailed in his “Hidden Costs of Cybercrime” blog, companies must understand that, in the event of an attack, they will be paying for: remediation, repair, restoration of data and IT infrastructure, legal counsel, litigation defense, breach notification, business downtime, reputation damage and lost customer trust, regulatory fines, and increased insurance rates.
Many companies choose to stick with traditional antivirus solutions because they are a slightly less expensive option than EDR. But while EDR may cost more upfront, it’s much more cost-effective in the long run. And too many companies are realizing this after it’s too late, once they’ve been hacked and painfully understand they should have and need to invest more in security.
Ease of deployment and effectiveness
EDR is as quick and easy to deploy as a traditional antivirus solution. Like antivirus, EDR is agent-based, and organizations can automatically install it via a group policy or on an individual basis and, within a day, begin to reap the solution’s benefits.
When Arete’s incident response teams are called on to help victims recover from ransomware attacks — on average, 50 cases per month — this speed and ease of deployment are critical. They immediately deploy EDR technology to contain the attack and provide clients with a clean, safe environment to restore their data and operations.
On top of EDR solutions being intuitive and not requiring a high-level of security expertise, they are incredibly effective, offering functionality far beyond the basic scanning, detection, and “known” malware removal of a traditional antivirus tool. They are designed to protect all endpoints, automatically identify suspicious activity, and mitigate threats in real time. In the case of ransomware, this can mean stopping ransomware encryption, lateral movement, and data exfiltration.
At Arete, we’ve only seen threat actors successfully attack behavior-based EDR systems four times in the past five years. In two of those cases, the client had not fully deployed the EDR solution to all endpoints on the network; in the other two, the client had not protected the EDR management console with two-factor access control, which allowed the attackers to turn off the EDR system.
By comparison, antivirus solutions continue to fall a bit short on effectiveness. Because they are based on pre-populated signatures, attackers can easily evade them with simple changes to their code and sadly, almost all the ransomware victims Arete has worked with have had an antivirus solution in place that failed to detect or block the attack.
If the government can’t solve the ransomware problem, what can I do?
It’s good that the U.S. and international governments are calling for actions to end the ransomware scourge — a threat the director of the FBI has likened to the 9/11 terror attacks. Unfortunately, time is not on anyone’s side.
The daily costs of ongoing ransomware attacks to companies and their clients are too high to wait for possible government action — especially when a cost-effective, near-silver-bullet solution is at hand. If organizations, of any size, want to put ransomware attackers out of business, they should look to deploy behavior-based EDR systems today.
Back to Blog Posts
Report
Arete's 2025 Annual Crimeware Report
Harness Arete’s unique data and expertise on extortion and ransomware to inform your response to the evolving threat landscape.
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