- Firewalls are a common target for hackers, report says
- Barracuda report finds 90% of all ransomware incidents in 2025 exploited firewalls
- Some vulnerabilities are over ten years old, so fix them now
If you can only secure one device on your network today, make sure it’s the firewall, because a new report from Barracuda claims that almost all ransomware incidents start with a compromised firewall instance.
The Barracuda Managed XDR Global Threat Report is based on the 2025 Barracuda Managed
Researchers found that 90% of all ransomware incidents in 2025 exploited firewalls via a vulnerability or compromised account. One in ten vulnerabilities detected already had a known exploit, they added, meaning that in many cases they were targeting “low-hanging fruit.”
The flaws of the old school
One of the report’s most painful findings is that the most widely detected vulnerability was 13 years old. CVE-2013-2566, a flaw discovered in 2013, resides in an outdated encryption algorithm and is often found in existing systems (old servers, embedded devices, applications).
Barracuda is not the only company sounding the alarm about broken firewalls, as recent research from Sophos has also shown that incidents involving network devices such as routers, VPNs and firewalls are becoming a growing point of intrusion, accounting for almost 30% of initial compromises observed in Sophos’ annual threat report.
At the same time, new findings from the Searchlight Ransomware H2 2025 report indicate that the number of active ransomware groups has reached never-before-seen levels, with the growth rate of victims doubling since 204.
In late 2025, SonicWall firewalls with multi-generation SSL-VPN enabled were reported to be vulnerable and targeted by the Akira ransomware group.
Confirmed victims are not widely publicized as company names, but reports and security advisories have indicated that dozens of organizations have been affected, including cases where more than 100 SSL-VPN accounts across approximately 16 customer environments were compromised and used for tracking activities.
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