With corporate networks facing a relentless barrage of automated threats, we sat down with Dominic Jainy, a veteran IT professional with deep expertise in the technologies shaping today’s digital landscape. We explored the anatomy of recent large-scale credential-based attacks, the operational tactics of modern threat actors, and the defensive strategies organizations must adopt to protect their most critical entry points. The discussion centered on a recent surge in credential probing against major network infrastructure, revealing how attackers pivot with alarming speed and what this means for the future of network security.
The recent report on the campaign against Palo Alto Networks was staggering, mentioning 1.7 million sessions from 10,000 IPs in just one day. Could you paint a picture for us of what an attack of this magnitude looks and feels like from a defender’s perspective, and how they can distinguish this from normal network noise?
Imagine a torrential downpour suddenly hitting a tin roof after weeks of quiet. That’s the feeling. This isn’t a subtle, sneaky attack; it’s a brute-force symphony of chaos. The attackers are using automated scripts, essentially a digital army, to hammer GlobalProtect portals with login attempts. For a defender, the first indicator is the sheer velocity and volume. You’re not seeing a few failed logins; you’re seeing millions of sessions light up your dashboards over a 16-hour period. The key differentiator is the origin. When you see that more than 10,000 unique IPs are involved, all trying to log in, it’s a clear signal of a coordinated, scripted campaign, not just users forgetting their passwords.
Interestingly, the traffic was traced back almost entirely to a single hosting provider, 3xK GmbH, targeting portals across the U.S., Pakistan, and Mexico. What does centralizing their attack infrastructure this way tell us about the threat actors’ methods and mindset?
Centralizing their infrastructure is a fascinating choice that speaks volumes about their operational model. On one hand, it’s a huge risk—a single point of failure that, if blocked, could neutralize their entire campaign. On the other hand, it offers incredible speed, scalability, and control. They can spin up thousands of attacking IPs from a cloud provider in minutes, launch their assault, and tear it all down just as quickly. This isn’t the work of amateurs using a scattered botnet of infected home computers; it suggests a more professional, resource-rich group that values efficiency. They are playing a numbers game, casting an incredibly wide net across different countries to find the weakest link, rather than focusing on a single, high-value target.
The day after the Palo Alto attack, the campaign immediately pivoted to Cisco SSL VPNs, with the number of attacking IPs jumping from a baseline of 200 to over 1,200. How does this rapid re-targeting reflect the attackers’ broader strategy, and can you share an example of how they can retool so quickly?
This rapid pivot is the hallmark of an opportunistic and agile adversary. They have a core set of tools and infrastructure built for one purpose: credential stuffing. These tools are often vendor-agnostic. When the Palo Alto campaign either exhausted its value or was sufficiently mitigated, they didn’t pack up and go home. They simply changed the target variable in their scripts from “PaloAlto.GlobalProtect” to “Cisco.SSLVPN” and hit ‘run’. The explosive growth from 200 to over 1,200 attacking IPs overnight shows how quickly they can scale and redeploy their cloud-hosted resources. It’s like a modular weapons system; they just swap out the targeting module for the next most common enterprise solution on their list, aiming to strike before defenders have time to share intelligence and adapt.
Palo Alto Networks confirmed these were “scripted attempts to identify weak credentials,” and GreyNoise had issued warnings about this activity for months. What concrete defensive measures and monitoring metrics should an organization already have in place to get ahead of these brute-force campaigns?
Fundamentally, this is a preventable threat. The warnings were out there. The first and most critical defense is multi-factor authentication everywhere, no exceptions. That alone would stop the vast majority of these attacks. Beyond that, organizations need aggressive rate-limiting on their VPN portals to automatically block IPs that generate too many failed logins in a short period. From a monitoring perspective, security teams must track metrics like failed login attempts per user and per IP address, and set up automated alerts for significant deviations from the baseline. Seeing daily attacking IPs jump from 200 to 1,273 should trigger immediate alarms. It’s about building a defense that makes the attacker’s automated, high-volume model too noisy and too expensive to succeed.
What is your forecast for the evolution of these large-scale, automated credential-based attacks against corporate VPNs and other network gateways?
I foresee these attacks becoming faster, smarter, and even more widespread. Attackers will continue to leverage cloud infrastructure for its scalability and disposability. We will likely see them incorporate rudimentary AI to make their login attempts appear more human, varying the timing and cadence to bypass simple behavioral analytics. The targets will remain the same: internet-facing gateways like VPNs, which are the front doors to corporate networks. As long as weak and reused passwords exist, these automated, credential-based campaigns will offer attackers the best return on investment. The future battlefield won’t be about finding a zero-day vulnerability but about overwhelming defenses with sheer volume, making robust authentication and anomaly detection more critical than ever.