Fortinet says frontier AI models found critical flaws in its own products, and that about 40% of what they reported was real
Help Net Security reports that Fortinet has released security hardening updates for FortiOS, FortiManager, FortiAnalyzer, FortiMail and FortiAuthenticator, withholding details of the fixed vulnerabilities until November 10, and that chief information security officer Carl Windsor said the flaws were found with AI models and validated by humans, rated critical and high severity, which the account says means at least some may be remotely exploitable without prior authentication. Fortinet used frontier AI models, which the account does not name, alongside its own on-premises models for several months: pointed at products as an attacker would see them, without source code, they found few exploitable flaws but proved good at comparing firmware versions and building proof-of-concept exploits for already-fixed bugs; pointed at Fortinet's own source code, across more than 100 tests of 30 product families, about 40% of findings were real vulnerabilities, 30% were false positives and 30% were non-exploitable security improvements. Windsor said "The window between disclosure and exploitation continues to shrink, and we expect it to keep shrinking" and that "Once updates are public, the fixes themselves reveal where changes were made", and Fortinet's advisory says AI can "link seemingly unrelated lower severity vulnerabilities together to achieve a more severe, exploitable vulnerability". The account gives no CVE numbers and no severity scores, and reports no exploitation in the wild.
The FBI and the Secret Service say the FortiBleed credential campaign is still running, and that attackers are locking administrators out of their own firewalls
A joint FBI and US Secret Service advisory released on Tuesday October 6, carried here through Help Net Security, says the FortiBleed campaign against internet-facing Fortinet FortiGate firewalls and SSL VPN gateways is ongoing. Attackers scan for exposed SSL VPN portals, then use credential stuffing, password spraying and GPU hash cracking with Hashcat and Hashtopolis; they create new accounts on compromised devices for persistence and in some cases delete existing ones, which can lock an organisation out of its own firewall and leave recovery needing “remediation steps beyond standard patching and password resets.” Access is sold on to affiliates of the INC/Lynx and Payload ransomware operations. The scale figure the advisory carries — more than 86,644 compromised devices across 194 countries — is attributed in it to the security firm SOCRadar rather than counted by the agencies, and the advisory PDF at ic3.gov could not be opened here, so neither that attribution nor the AI-tooling claim a second outlet drew from the same document is asserted on this card.
A critical FortiMail flaw is being exploited while the fixed releases are still described as upcoming
Fortinet says CVE-2026-104286, rated critical with a CVSS score of 9.8, is “an Improper Limitation of a Pathname to a Restricted Directory ('Path Traversal') [CWE-22] and Improper Neutralization of NULL Byte or NULL Character [CWE-158] vulnerability” in FortiMail that “may allow an unauthenticated attacker to write arbitrary files on the underlying system via crafted HTTP or HTTPS requests,” and that it is being actively exploited. Versions 7.2.0 to 7.2.9, 7.4.0 to 7.4.8, 7.6.0 to 7.6.6 and 8.0.0 to 8.0.1 are affected, and “security updates are not yet available, with Fortinet listing FortiMail 7.4.9, 7.6.7, and 8.0.2 as upcoming versions containing the fix” — workarounds in the interim. Gwendal Guégniaud of Fortinet's Product Security team discovered it internally. CISA has added the flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog and “requires federal agencies to perform forensic triage and mitigate the flaw by October 4th.” Fortinet says it is “communicating with relevant government organizations, including CISA, on the content of this advisory,” and names no threat actor, campaign or exposure count.
The National Cyber Director's office and Texas launch a six-month cyber pilot for water utilities
Project Watershed 250 is a six-month pilot run by the Office of the National Cyber Director with Texas Cyber Command, offering water and wastewater utilities red-team testing of current defenses, system hardening with private-sector tools, and AI tooling for utility cyber defenders. Twelve companies are named: Parsons, Microsoft, Fortinet, Google Cloud, Palo Alto Networks, Amazon Web Services, Reflection AI, Cloudflare, Zscaler, Forescout, Abnormal AI and Dragos. No number of participating utilities and no dollar figure is stated.
Fortinet buys an agentic-AI security vendor and does not disclose the price
Fortinet acquired Virtue AI, whose products cover agentic-system red-teaming across more than 50 sandboxed environments simulating prompt-injection and MCP attacks, discovery and governance of deployed agents, continuous validation across more than 1,000 risk categories, and runtime guardrails. Fortinet said “financial terms of the transaction are not disclosed, and the amount paid by Fortinet as consideration is immaterial to Fortinet's business.” Chairman and CEO Ken Xie: “AI is fundamentally changing enterprise computing, and security must evolve just as quickly.”