Description

As per to a Bishop Fox security solution study, thousands of FortiGate firewalls were vulnerable to attack and accessible via the public internet a month after Fortinet released an upgrade to address a significant security vulnerability identified as CVE-2023-27997, which has a severity of 9.8 and is caused by a heap-based buffer overflow in FortiOS, an operating system that connects all Fortinet networking components in order to integrate them into the vendor's Security Fabric platform. In their analysis, the researchers used the Shodan search engine to find devices that reacted in a way that indicated an exposed SSL VPN interface. This was accomplished by looking for appliances that returned a specific HTTP response header and filtering the results that redirected to '/remote/login,' indicating an exposed SSL VPN interface. The above query produced 489,337 devices, only 153,414 of which were patched and updated to a safe FortiOS version, implying that 335,900 FortiGate firewall appliances are still vulnerable to CVE-2023-27997 or the Xortigate bug. Furthermore, researchers discovered that a number of the vulnerable FortiGate devices have not been upgraded in the last eight years, including numerous appliances that were still running FortiOS 6, which reached end of service on September 29, 2022.