VPN Attacks Surged in First Quarter But volume of malware, botnet, and other exploit activity declined because of the Emotet botnet takedown. Attacks against virtual private network (VPN) products from Fortinet and Pulse Secure surged dramatically in the first quarter of 2021 as threats actors tried to take advantage of previously disclosed vulnerabilities that organizations had not patched. Log data collected by Nuspire from thousands of devices at customer locations show attacks against Fortinet's SSL-VPN increased 1,916% from the beginning of the quarter as threat actors tried to exploit a path traversal vulnerability in the technology (CVE-2018-13379) that could allow unauthenticated attackers to download files. Attacks targeting Pulse Connect Secure VPNs, meanwhile, jumped 1,527% during the same period as adversaries went after an arbitrary file disclosure vulnerability in the product (CVE-2019-11510) with a maximum possibility severity rating of 10.