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  • Gunra’s 10 p.m.–6 a.m. Pattern Shows Why Edge Appliance Logs Belong Off the Box

    Gunra’s 10 p.m.–6 a.m. Pattern Shows Why Edge Appliance Logs Belong Off the Box

    TL;DR · 30-second read

    The Short Version

    Government agencies in the United States and South Korea have jointly warned about a criminal hacking group called Gunra. It breaks into organizations, copies their private files, locks everything up, then demands payment, threatening to publish or sell the stolen files if victims refuse.

    Its main way in is the security equipment that lets employees log in to work networks from home. Once inside, it erases its tracks and works overnight, between 10 at night and 6 in the morning.

    Hospitals, banks, utilities and universities are among its targets. One bright spot: a flaw in one version lets some victims unlock files without paying.

    Industrial Cyber reported that the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center (DC3), the National Security Agency (NSA), the US Secret Service and South Korea’s National Police Agency (KNPA) released a joint advisory Monday on Gunra, a ransomware operation derived from leaked Conti source code. Gunra steals data, encrypts systems and threatens to publish or sell the stolen data on its leak site, with victims listed across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region.

    The advisory says Gunra gets in mainly by exploiting known flaws in internet-facing firewall and VPN appliances, including two authentication-bypass vulnerabilities in specific FortiOS and FortiProxy versions (CVE-2024-55591 and CVE-2025-24472), deletes logs to hide, and works primarily between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.

    Executive Summary

    Six US and South Korean agencies have published a detailed account of how Gunra ransomware operates, from initial access to extortion. Gunra emerged in April 2025, added a Linux variant by mid-2025, and by early 2026 had become a ransomware-as-a-service operation that recruits affiliates on dark web forums. Its leak site lists victims in more than ten sectors, including healthcare, finance, utilities, transportation and government.

    For infrastructure operators, the advisory’s significance is where the attack begins and how it hides. Entry runs through the edge: firewall and VPN appliances with known vulnerabilities, default credentials or weak access controls. Once inside, the actors delete system and network access logs, clear command history, work overnight and run an encryptor that produces no observable network indicators. That combination leaves appliance logs held somewhere the attacker cannot reach, and watched after hours, among the most useful signals a defender has.

    The advisory also contains a rare point in defenders’ favor: as of March 2026, Gunra’s Linux variants use weak, time-seeded randomness that lets encryption keys be reconstructed and files recovered without payment, though that does nothing about data already stolen.

    The Front Door Is the Security Appliance Itself

    The most consequential detail for infrastructure operators is how Gunra gets in. The FBI observed the group obtaining initial access primarily by exploiting known vulnerabilities in internet-facing devices, including firewall and VPN appliances, and named two authentication-bypass flaws in specific FortiOS and FortiProxy versions: CVE-2024-55591 and CVE-2025-24472. An authentication bypass lets an attacker reach functions that should require a login without valid credentials. South Korea’s National Police Agency separately observed Gunra exploiting credential exposure and Secure Shell (SSH) access-control weaknesses on internet-facing VPN gateways.

    The intrusion the agencies describe shows how modest the first step can be: default credentials on an SSL-VPN appliance, the encrypted gateway remote staff use to reach internal systems, with no account lockout to stop repeated guessing. After compromising an administrator workstation, the actors reached the appliance’s administrative console, found an unused account with access to both external and internal networks, and modified it to skip a mandatory password change, creating a persistent backdoor that looks like an ordinary account.

    For data center, colocation and network operators, firewalls and VPN concentrators sit at the boundary of nearly everything they run, including remote administration paths into their own environments. Because both named CVEs are known vulnerabilities, the defense here is patch cadence and asset inventory rather than anything exotic. The practical test is whether an operator can list every internet-facing appliance it owns, its firmware version and every account configured on it, including dormant ones.

    Why Edge Appliance Logs Belong Off the Box

    Gunra is built to leave few traces where defenders usually look. According to the advisory, the actors delete system and network access logs and clear command history while active, conduct reconnaissance and encryption primarily between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., and run the encryptor as a self-contained binary that produces no observable network indicators. Data is exfiltrated before encryption, so by the time files lock, the extortion leverage has already left the network.

    Taken together, those facts narrow the useful evidence to a short list, and the advisory’s own incident-response guidance points at it: review network appliance logs for anomalous privileged activity and audit file creation to detect exfiltration. Logs that exist only on the compromised appliance or host are exactly what the actors delete. Logs forwarded in near real time to a separate, access-controlled collector survive that deletion, and they only help if someone, or an automated rule, is watching during the overnight window the group favors.

    This falls hardest on organizations that run round-the-clock infrastructure with thin overnight staffing, and on managed service providers that administer appliances for many customers. An after-hours login to a VPN administrative console, a dormant account suddenly modified, or a change to appliance traffic controls are low-volume events that are straightforward to alert on, provided the record sits where the attacker cannot erase it. None of this is new practice, but Gunra’s combination of edge entry, log wiping and night-time activity turns off-device logging from a best-practice line item into the difference between catching the intrusion before encryption and discovering it from a ransom note.

    MFA and Credentials Fail at the Seams

    The advisory is a reminder that multi-factor authentication (MFA) protects a login step, not the systems behind it. Against one victim, Gunra modified files on the virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) authentication portal, the gateway to remotely hosted desktops, so it would accept a designated one-time password. The actors also manipulated SSL-VPN traffic controls to harvest credentials and session cookies, hijacked sessions to impersonate legitimate users, and entered the internal VDI environment with stolen session tokens.

    Inside, the playbook targets the identity core. Using Impacket libraries over SMB, the Windows file-sharing protocol, the actors moved laterally to the VDI authentication server, the Active Directory server that governs who can access what, and IT staff desktops. They ran secretsdump.py against the NTDS database where domain controllers store password hashes, enabling pass-the-hash and pass-the-ticket attacks that reuse stolen credentials without cracking them. At one victim they reached a Hiware system access control server over SSH and stole the symmetric key needed to decrypt enterprise server credentials stored in its database.

    The operational lesson is that authentication portals, privileged-access systems and key stores are high-value targets in their own right and warrant the same integrity monitoring and segmentation as production systems. The agencies’ recommendations map onto each step: least-privilege administrative rights, audits for unrecognized accounts, MFA on all services with emphasis on VPNs and webmail, network segmentation to restrict lateral movement, and disabling command-line and scripting activity where possible.

    A Flaw in the Linux Encryptor, With Limits

    One finding cuts in defenders’ favor. As of March 2026, the advisory says, Gunra’s Linux ELF variants use a weak pseudorandom number generator seeded with predictable system time, allowing defenders to mathematically reconstruct keys from file timestamps and recover files without paying. That is relevant to infrastructure operators because Linux underpins much of the server estate, and Gunra introduced its Linux variant in mid-2025 as it moved toward cross-platform targeting.

    The limits matter. The weakness is described for the Linux variants as of a specific date, and ransomware-as-a-service operations, which rent their tooling to affiliates, can ship revised builds. Key recovery also does nothing about stolen data: the threat to publish or sell it stands regardless. Offline, immutable backups kept in a physically separate, segmented location, and tested, remain the control that makes recovery independent of both the attacker’s cooperation and the attacker’s mistakes.

    Background

    Gunra traces its code to Conti, a prolific ransomware operation whose source code leaked in 2022 and has since been reused by several groups. Gunra appeared in April 2025 focused on Windows systems, introduced a Linux variant by mid-2025, and by early 2026 had adopted a ransomware-as-a-service model, in which core developers supply the malware and infrastructure while recruited affiliates carry out intrusions in exchange for a share of ransoms.

    Joint advisories from US agencies and foreign partners are a standard way of publishing attacker techniques, indicators and mitigations for a specific ransomware family. They typically align recommendations with CISA and NIST’s cross-sector cybersecurity performance goals, a baseline of practices such as patching internet-facing systems, maintaining offline backups, enforcing multi-factor authentication and segmenting networks.

    Sources

    Source: Gunra ransomware expands globally as US, South Korean agencies warn of data theft, encryption and extortion tactics — Industrial Cyber’s report on the joint FBI, CISA, DC3, NSA, Secret Service and Korean National Police Agency advisory on Gunra ransomware.

  • 100+ Water System Hacks Show AI Cooling Risk Sits Outside the Data Center

    100+ Water System Hacks Show AI Cooling Risk Sits Outside the Data Center

    TL;DR · 30-second read

    The Short Version

    In July, hackers broke into the control systems of a drinking-water provider in Oregon. Officials have not said which one. It was part of a wave that reached at least 100 American water systems in seven states.

    The attackers reached small computers that run pumps and valves over the internet and locked operators out. Some towns saw water pressure drop, flooding, or a precautionary boil-water notice.

    This matters beyond your tap. Many of the huge computer buildings behind artificial intelligence use local tap water to stay cool, so a hacked water utility is their problem too.

    Oregon Public Broadcasting reported on August 7, 2026, that Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek’s office confirmed hackers gained access to an Oregon water district’s core operating technology in July. Oregon Enterprise Information Services, which provides cybersecurity support to state agencies, confirmed a July incident involving unauthorized access to operational technology used by an Oregon drinking-water provider. State officials would not name the district, would not say whether the incident is linked to a wider campaign, and said the impact is still being assessed.

    The Oregon disclosure follows a July 30 New York Times report that at least 100 US water systems had detected malicious attacks, which the paper said were initiated by hackers in Iran. An FBI release the same day acknowledged attacks in seven states and said some of the activity degraded water operations. At least 30 systems were targeted in Minnesota, where one treatment plant temporarily went offline; in Georgia, one system lost water pressure and briefly issued a boil-water precaution.

    Executive Summary

    An unnamed Oregon drinking-water provider is the latest confirmed victim of a July campaign against municipal water and sewage systems. According to the FBI, attackers connected over the internet to programmable logic controllers, the small industrial computers that run pumps and valves, then changed their IP addresses and passwords, cutting operators off from monitoring and control. Reported effects included loss of pressure and flooding.

    For the data center industry, the episode matters because water is an operating input, not only a sustainability metric. Facilities that reject heat through evaporative cooling draw continuously on local utilities. The campaign shows that at least 100 of those utilities could be reached directly from the internet within days. A data center’s resilience therefore depends partly on the security of infrastructure it neither owns nor audits.

    The same class of controller also runs chilled-water plants, pumps and valves inside data centers. The FBI’s guidance to water utilities, to limit remote access and keep manual fallback procedures, reads as a checklist for cooling plant operators as well.

    What the FBI Says Happened

    The FBI’s description of the attack is short and specific. Between July 27 and July 30, attackers connected to programmable logic controllers (PLCs), rugged single-purpose computers that open valves, start pumps and read sensors, directly over the internet. They then changed the devices’ IP addresses and passwords, which the agency said resulted in a loss of monitoring and control. Operators could no longer see or steer parts of their own systems.

    The consequences were physical. The FBI said operational effects included loss of pressure and flooding, and warned that pressure loss could potentially allow untreated groundwater to seep into pipes. In Minnesota, where at least 30 systems were targeted, one treatment plant temporarily went offline. In Georgia, a pressure drop prompted a precautionary boil-water notice.

    Attribution remains partly open. The New York Times reported the campaign was initiated by hackers in Iran. Oregon officials declined to say whether their incident belongs to that campaign and referred questions to federal investigators. That caution is reasonable while the investigation continues, and the operational lessons do not depend on who was behind the attacks.

    Why AI Cooling Risk Sits Outside the Fence

    Many data centers remove heat with evaporative cooling towers, which lose water continuously to evaporation and replace it, as so-called makeup water, from the local municipal supply. AI clusters pack far more heat into each rack than conventional servers. Even when the chips are cooled directly by liquid, that heat still has to leave the building, and in many designs it leaves through those same towers. For a significant share of facilities, water pressure at the meter is as much a dependency as power at the substation.

    The failure modes the FBI listed match that dependency closely. A pressure loss or an offline treatment plant is exactly the event a cooling plant’s onsite water storage exists to ride through. What the July campaign changes is the likelihood and breadth of that event. At least 100 systems in at least seven states were affected in a matter of days. The technique did not require first breaching a corporate network, because the controllers were reachable from the internet. A risk that site selection teams once modelled as drought or main breaks now has a cyber path, and it can hit many utilities simultaneously.

    The people exposed are the ones who build, lease and finance capacity: operators sizing onsite storage, tenants whose service agreements assume cooling continuity, and lenders underwriting sites in water-dependent markets. Oregon hosts major data center clusters around Hillsboro, The Dalles and Prineville. Nothing disclosed so far indicates the affected district serves any of them. The point is structural, not local.

    The Same Controllers Run the Chiller Plant

    PLCs are not unique to water utilities. The same kind of device, often from the same vendors, sequences chillers, modulates pumps and controls valves in data center mechanical plants. Remote access is common there for the same reason Tualatin Valley Water District spokesperson Justin Dyke gave for utilities: it lets operators respond quickly when demand shifts. The convenience cuts both ways when a controller’s management interface is reachable from the open internet.

    The FBI’s recommendations to water systems translate almost directly. Limit remote access to controllers. Enforce authentication and other security protocols. Maintain manual procedures for when automation is lost. Dyke described that last practice at his district: if online systems go down, operators make changes by hand. Data center operators can apply the same test to their cooling plants and ask whether staff can run the chilled-water system safely with the controls network unavailable.

    A Defense Spread Across 2,500 Districts

    Oregon has more than 2,500 water districts, and all of its drinking-water systems are locally managed. Oregon Enterprise Information Services consults with districts on cybersecurity and threat assessments but does not run them. That structure is typical of US water and puts security decisions in the hands of many small operators with limited budgets and staff.

    It also limits disclosure. The Portland Water Bureau said it routinely examines vulnerabilities with the city’s security team, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI, but declined to say whether it was targeted in July. Tualatin Valley reported an increase in attempts, none successful. Klamath Falls and Corvallis reported no increase, and Redmond and Bend reported no breach. For a large water customer, that patchwork means a utility’s security posture is mostly invisible unless the customer asks directly.

    Background

    Water utilities have spent years connecting their treatment plants, pumping stations and reservoirs to remote monitoring. This lets small operating teams adjust flow and reservoir levels quickly as demand changes. The same connectivity, when controllers are reachable from the internet, exposes physical equipment to remote tampering. Federal agencies, including the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, work with utilities on these risks, but in states like Oregon, day-to-day operation and security remain local responsibilities.

    Oregon is also one of the country’s established data center markets, with large campuses around Hillsboro, The Dalles and Prineville. Water supply has featured in local debate about their growth. As AI workloads raise heat density per rack, cooling design, and for many facilities the municipal water behind it, has become a primary constraint on where and how capacity gets built.

    Sources

    Source: Oregon drinking water system accessed in recent cyber attacks (Oregon Public Broadcasting): Oregon officials confirm a July intrusion into a water provider’s operating technology amid a national campaign against water utilities.

  • FBI Warns of IT Help Desk Impersonation Attacks Targeting Law Firms

    FBI Warns of IT Help Desk Impersonation Attacks Targeting Law Firms

    The FBI has warned that cybercriminals are impersonating IT support staff to gain access to law firm networks, according to an alert relayed by The Florida Bar on May 29, 2026. The technique — posing as a trusted internal help desk to talk employees into handing over credentials or remote access — is a form of social engineering, meaning the attacker exploits human trust rather than a software vulnerability.

    Executive Summary

    According to the notice, the FBI is cautioning law firms that attackers are masquerading as IT personnel — the people employees are conditioned to obey when a call or message says something is wrong with their account or device. Once an employee complies, the attacker typically ends up with the same access a legitimate technician would have, inside a network that firewalls and endpoint software were never asked to defend against, because the “user” logged in with valid credentials.

    The warning matters beyond the legal sector. Help-desk impersonation has become one of the most reliable intrusion methods across industries precisely because it sidesteps the technical stack entirely. Law firms are a telling case study: they concentrate privileged client data — deal terms, litigation strategy, personal records — behind organizations that are, on average, smaller and less security-staffed than the corporations they serve. An FBI alert aimed at bar members is a signal that the pattern is active and hitting this sector specifically.

    Why the Help Desk Is the New Front Door

    Decades of security investment have hardened the technical perimeter: firewalls, endpoint detection, patched software, multi-factor authentication (MFA — requiring a second proof of identity beyond a password). Attackers have responded rationally by targeting the one component that cannot be patched: the employee’s willingness to trust a voice that sounds official. An IT impersonation call inverts the usual phishing dynamic. Instead of the victim being asked to click something suspicious, the attacker initiates contact as the authority figure, and “helping IT fix your account” feels like compliance, not risk.

    The same playbook also runs in reverse — attackers calling a company’s real help desk while impersonating an employee to request a password or MFA reset. Either direction, the weak point is identity verification over the phone, a process most organizations have never formalized the way they have formalized network access.

    Law Firms Are High-Value, Low-Friction Targets

    Law firms aggregate exactly the data criminals can monetize: non-public deal information, litigation strategy, intellectual property, and personal client records. Confidentiality obligations also make firms sensitive to extortion — the threat of leaking client files carries professional and reputational consequences beyond the direct breach cost. That combination of valuable data and acute leverage is why the sector keeps appearing in law-enforcement advisories.

    Structurally, many firms are also easier to breach than their clients. Mid-size and small practices often run lean IT operations, sometimes outsourced, which ironically makes an unfamiliar voice claiming to be “from IT” more plausible, not less — employees at such firms may genuinely not know their support staff by name.

    Technical Controls Meet Human Trust

    The uncomfortable lesson in this warning is that a well-executed impersonation defeats controls that look strong on paper. MFA stops a stolen password, but not an employee who reads a one-time code to a “technician” or approves a push notification they were told to expect. Remote-management tools are legitimate software, so their installation at an attacker’s direction rarely trips alarms.

    The defenses that hold up are procedural: callback verification through independently known numbers before any credential or access change, help-desk identity checks that cannot be satisfied with publicly available information, hard rules that IT will never ask for passwords or MFA codes, and monitoring that flags unusual remote-access tool installs or off-hours credential resets. None of this is expensive relative to breach response — but it requires treating phone-channel identity as seriously as network identity, which most organizations historically have not.

    Background

    The FBI regularly issues sector-specific cyber warnings through its field offices, industry partnerships, and the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), and bar associations such as The Florida Bar relay those alerts to their members. The legal sector has drawn recurring attention from both criminals and law enforcement because firms hold privileged, market-moving, and personal data on behalf of many clients at once — a single breach can expose dozens of organizations.

    Help-desk impersonation itself is part of a broader shift in attacker tradecraft over recent years: as technical defenses like MFA became standard, intrusion groups moved toward voice-based social engineering (“vishing”) and identity-desk manipulation, which target the human processes around authentication rather than the authentication technology itself.

    Source: FBI warns of cybercriminals impersonating IT staff to breach law firms — alert relayed to members by The Florida Bar, May 29, 2026.