Fortinet VPN Client Exposes VPN Creds, Palo Alto Firewalls Allow Remote Attacks
Found on Bleeping Computer on Thursday, 14 December 2017
According to researchers, the FortiClient software stores VPN credentials in a local file on each computer, which is encrypted with a key to preventing easy access to the data. SEC Consult says this key is the same for all users and it's stored by default in the FortiClient binary itself. The key can easily be extracted and used to decrypt and access the VPN credentials.
Security researcher Philip Pettersson discovered that by combining three vulnerabilities together, he could run code on a Palo Alto firewall from a remote location with root privileges.
It happens way too often that so-called security products make the situation actually worse for the user. Especially antivirus software is often the source for a wide range of problems and it cannot protect from yet unknown malware which gets pushed out daily by the authors.