Fortinet Screws the Pooch Again: Critical Auth Bypass Fiasco

Oh, bloody fantastic — Fortinet’s done it again. Because why the hell would we go a month without another goddamn cybersecurity dumpster fire? This time it’s a critical authentication bypass flaw in FortiOS, FortiProxy, and all the other lovely toys that make sysadmins everywhere grind their teeth into powder.

The geniuses at Fortinet just dropped a warning about multiple vulnerabilities (CVE-2024-21792 and friends — because apparently, CVE bingo cards are trending this season). The short version? Some malicious little bastard can waltz right past your FortiCloud SSO login without even buying you dinner first. No creds, no effort, just straight-in “I-own-your-network-now” levels of fuckery.

Scope? Oh, it’s “critical” all right — 9.6/10 on the “you’re screwed” scale. It affects versions of FortiOS <7.2.8 and FortiProxy <7.2.4. So if your version number is smaller than a beer count on a Friday night, congratulations, you’re target practice. Fortinet says upgrade ASAP. Because, no shit — waiting around while cyber-criminals poke holes in your firewall is obviously not top-tier risk management strategy.

As usual, they’ve already patched it for newer builds, but that’s assuming you can untangle the mess of update dependencies without sacrificing your weekend — which, let’s face it, you can’t. So you’ll be stuck watching your boss freak out about “zero trust security” while you try not to throw your laptop out the window.

Moral of the story? If your Fortinet box is still running unpatched, you might as well print out your local admin creds and tape them to the front door. It’ll save the hackers some time.

Full story here, if you can stomach it: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/fortinet-warns-of-critical-forticloud-sso-login-auth-bypass-flaws/

Reminds me of the time a junior tech asked me what “CVE” stood for. I told him it’s short for “Career-Ending Vulnerability Exposure.” He laughed. Until he forgot to patch. Now he’s in marketing.

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