A large-scale brute force password attack using almost 2.8 million IP addresses is underway, attempting to guess the credentials for a wide range of networking devices, including those from Palo Alto Networks, Ivanti, and SonicWall. A brute force attack is when threat actors attempt to repeatedly log into an account or device using many usernames and passwords until the correct combination is found. Once they have access to the correct credentials, the threat actors can then use them to hijack a device or gain access to a network. According to the threat monitoring platform The Shadowserver Foundation, a brute force attack has been ongoing since last month, employing almost 2.8 million source IP addresses daily to perform these attacks. Most of these (1.1 million) are from Brazil, followed by Turkey, Russia, Argentina, Morocco, and Mexico, but there's generally a very large number of countries of origin participating in the activity. These are edge security devices like firewalls, VPNs, gateways, and other security appliances, often exposed to the internet to facilitate remote access. The devices conducting these attacks are mostly MikroTik, Huawei, Cisco, Boa, and ZTE routers and IoTs, which are commonly compromised by large malware botnets. ...