therecord.media - Multiple cybersecurity incident response firms are warning about the possibility that a zero-day vulnerability in some SonicWall devices is allowing ransomware attacks.
Ransomware gangs may be exploiting an unknown vulnerability in SonicWall devices to launch attacks on dozens of organizations.
Multiple incident response companies released warnings over the weekend about threat actors using the Akira ransomware to target SonicWall firewall devices for initial access. Experts at Arctic Wolf first revealed the incidents on Friday.
SonicWall has not responded to repeated requests for comment about the breaches but published a blog post on Monday afternoon confirming that it is aware of the campaign.
The company said Arctic Wolf, Google and Huntress have warned over the last 72 hours that there has been an increase in cyber incidents involving Gen 7 SonicWall firewalls that use the secure sockets layer (SSL) protocol.
“We are actively investigating these incidents to determine whether they are connected to a previously disclosed vulnerability or if a new vulnerability may be responsible,” the company said.
SonicWall said it is working with researchers, updating customers and will release updated firmware if a new vulnerability is found.
The company echoed the advice of several security firms, telling customers to disable SonicWall VPN services that use the SSL protocol.
At least 20 incidents
Arctic Wolf said on Friday that it has seen multiple intrusions within a short period of time and all of them involved access through SonicWall SSL VPNs.
“While credential access through brute force, dictionary attacks, and credential stuffing have not yet been definitively ruled out in all cases, available evidence points to the existence of a zero-day vulnerability,” the company said. None of the incident response companies have specified what that bug might be.
“In some instances, fully patched SonicWall devices were affected following credential rotation,” Arctic Wolf said, referring to the process of regularly resetting logins or other access.
The researchers added that the ransomware activity involving SonicWall VPNs began around July 15.
When pressed on whether any recent known SonicWall vulnerabilities are to blame for the attacks, an Arctic Wolf spokesperson said the researchers have “seen fully patched devices affected in this campaign, leading us to believe that this is tied to a net new zero day vulnerability.”
Arctic Wolf said in its advisory that given the high likelihood of such a bug, organizations “should consider disabling the SonicWall SSL VPN service until a patch is made available and deployed.”
Over the weekend, Arctic Wolf’s assessment was backed up by incident responders at Huntress, who confirmed several incidents involving the SonicWall SSL VPN.
A Huntress official said they have seen around 20 attacks since July 25 and many of the incidents include the abuse of privileged accounts, lateral movement, credential theft and ransomware deployment.
“This is happening at a pace that suggests exploitation, possibly a zero day exploit in Sonicwall. Threat actors have gained control of accounts that even have MFA deployed,” the official said.
He confirmed that the incidents Huntress examined also involved Akira ransomware.
'This isn't isolated'
Huntress released a lengthy threat advisory on Monday warning of a “likely zero-day vulnerability in SonicWall VPNs” that was being used to facilitate ransomware attacks. Like Arctic Wolf, they urged customers to disable the VPN service immediately.
“Over the last few days, the Huntress Security Operations Center (SOC) has been responding to a wave of high-severity incidents originating from SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) and firewall appliances,” Huntress explained.
“This isn't isolated; we're seeing this alongside our peers at Arctic Wolf, Sophos, and other security firms. The speed and success of these attacks, even against environments with MFA enabled, strongly suggest a zero-day vulnerability is being exploited in the wild.”
SonicWall devices are frequent targets for hackers because the types of appliances the company produces serve as gateways for secure remote access.
Just two weeks ago, Google warned of a campaign targeting end-of-life SonicWall SMA 100 series appliances through a bug tracked as CVE-2024-38475.
In April of 2025, Rapid7 discovered and disclosed three new vulnerabilities affecting SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (“SMA”) 100 series appliances (SMA 200, 210, 400, 410, 500v). These vulnerabilities are tracked as CVE-2025-32819, CVE-2025-32820, and CVE-2025-32821. An attacker with access to an SMA SSLVPN user account can chain these vulnerabilities to make a sensitive system directory writable, elevate their privileges to SMA administrator, and write an executable file to a system directory. This chain results in root-level remote code execution. These vulnerabilities have been fixed in version 10.2.1.15-81sv.
Rapid7 would like to thank the SonicWall security team for quickly responding to our disclosure and going above and beyond over a holiday weekend to get a patch out.
Another day, another edge device being targeted - it’s a typical Thursday!
In today’s blog post, we’re excited to share our previously private analysis of the now exploited in-the-wild N-day vulnerabilities affecting SonicWall’s SMA100 appliance. Over the last few months, our client base has fed us rumours of in-the-wild exploitation of SonicWall systems, and thus, this topic has had our attention for a while.
Specifically, today, we’re going to be analyzing and reproducing:
CVE-2024-38475 - Apache HTTP Pre-Authentication Arbitrary File Read
Discovered by Orange Tsai
Although this is a CVE attached to the Apache HTTP Server, it is important to note that due to how CVEs are now assigned, a seperate CVE will not be assigned for SonicWall's usage of the vulnerable version.
This makes the situation confusing for those responding to CISA's KEV listing - CISA is referring to the two vulnerabilities in combination being used to attack SonicWall devices.
You can see this evidenced in SonicWall's updated PSIRT advisory: https://psirt.global.sonicwall.com/vuln-detail/SNWLID-2024-0018
CVE-2023-44221 - Post-Authentication Command Injection
Discovered by "Wenjie Zhong (H4lo) Webin lab of DBappSecurity Co., Ltd”
As of the day this research was published, CISA had added these vulnerabilities to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities list.
Do you know the fun things about these posts? We can copy text from previous posts about edge devices:
Pre-authentication deserialization of untrusted data vulnerability has been identified in the SMA1000 Appliance Management Console (AMC) and Central Management Console (CMC), which in specific conditions could potentially enable a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary OS commands.
IMPORTANT: SonicWall PSIRT has been notified of possible active exploitation of the referenced vulnerability by threat actors. We strongly advises users of the SMA1000 product to upgrade to the hotfix release version to address the vulnerability.
Please note that SonicWall Firewall and SMA 100 series products are not affected by this vulnerability.
SonicWall is emailing customers urging them to upgrade their firewall's SonicOS firmware to patch an authentication bypass vulnerability in SSL VPN and SSH management that is
Discover Bishop Fox's survey on the current state of SonicWall appliances on the public internet.
Fog and Akira ransomware operators have increased their exploitation efforts of CVE-2024-40766, a critical access control flaw that allows unauthorized access to resources on the SSL VPN feature of SonicWall SonicOS firewalls.
In recent threat activity observed by Arctic Wolf, Akira ransomware affiliates carried out ransomware attacks with an initial access vector involving the compromise of SSLVPN user accounts on SonicWall devices.
Ransomware affiliates exploit a critical security vulnerability in SonicWall SonicOS firewall devices to breach victims' networks.
An improper access control vulnerability has been identified in the SonicWall SonicOS management access, potentially leading to unauthorized resource access and in specific conditions, causing the firewall to crash.
This issue affects SonicWall Firewall Gen 5 and Gen 6 devices, as well as Gen 7 devices running SonicOS 7.0.1-5035 and older versions.
SonicWall discovered the Apache OFBiz flaw, identifying it as a critical issue enabling unauthenticated remote code execution
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Majority of public-facing devices still unpatched against critical vulns from as far back as 2022
Multiple Unauthenticated SQL Injection Issues & Security Filter Bypass – CVE-2023-34133 Title: Multiple Unauthenticated SQL Injection Issues & Security Filter Bypass Risk: 9.8 (Critic…
Improper Neutralization of Special Elements used in an OS Command ('OS Command Injection') vulnerability in SonicWall GMS, SonicWall Analytics enables an authe…
