A recent survey conducted in Ireland highlights a concerning trend: fear of blame is preventing employees from reporting cybersecurity incidents. The study, carried out by Censuswide for IT.ie and SonicWall, collected responses from 1,000 office workers, revealing the negative impact of a blame culture on organizational cybersecurity practices.
According to the findings, nearly 75% of respondents believe their employers hold staff personally responsible for cybersecurity failures. Of these, 35% reported that blame is “always” assigned to employees, while another 35% said this happens “sometimes.” This perception has created a hesitation among workers to address cyber incidents openly.
Alarmingly, almost one-third of respondents admitted to being aware of co-workers losing their jobs due to unintentional cybersecurity errors. To avoid repercussions and embarrassment, the same proportion of employees stopped reporting security breaches over the past year. The survey also highlighted discomfort in raising cybersecurity concerns with senior management, with 20% of respondents reporting unease.
This situation has had a detrimental impact on the mental health of employees:
These findings underscore the urgent need for organizations to provide better support to employees. A significant 79% of respondents believe companies should offer mental health support for workers affected by cyberattacks. Furthermore, 60% agreed that employees should not be held personally liable for unintentional breaches, advocating for a collaborative approach to securing systems.
Industry leaders are emphasizing the importance of fostering a blame-free culture to improve cybersecurity practices. Stuart Taylor, Northern Europe's regional director for SonicWall, stated: "This basically just casts blame on individuals, rather than on system weaknesses. Instead, it's about building an environment in which employees feel secure enough to raise issues without fear." He further added, "It is very important to build a constructive culture that motivates employees to act responsibly without fear of retribution."
This issue isn't confined to Ireland. An international survey by CyberArk revealed similar challenges, with 65% of workers bypassing cybersecurity policies. Often, this is driven by the hybrid work model, which prioritizes convenience. These findings highlight the need to balance accountability with support, rather than instilling fear among employees.
The research calls on businesses to:
By adopting these measures, organizations can strengthen both workplace trust and cybersecurity resilience, ensuring a safer and more productive future.
Thousands of SonicWall network security devices are currently exposed to severe vulnerabilities, with over 20,000 running outdated firmware that no longer receives vendor support. This puts countless organizations at risk of unauthorized access and potential data breaches.
The study highlighted that many of these devices remain susceptible to exploits, including authentication bypasses and heap overflow bugs disclosed earlier this year. Attackers could use these flaws to gain unauthorized access to networks, particularly when both SSL VPN and administration interfaces are exposed online.
Bishop Fox employed advanced fingerprinting techniques to reverse-engineer the encryption securing the SonicOSX firmware, allowing researchers to pinpoint the vulnerabilities specific to each device version.
Organizations using SonicWall devices must take immediate steps to mitigate these risks:
The findings underscore the urgent need for companies to prioritize cybersecurity measures. Neglecting to update firmware and secure network devices can have severe consequences, leaving systems and sensitive data vulnerable to exploitation.
With threats growing increasingly sophisticated, staying proactive about network security is no longer optional—it’s essential.
In the latest ransomware attack, operators have started using a critical bug in SonicWall SonicOS firewall devices as an entry point for compromising business networks. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2024-40766, is from the management access interface of the firewall and thus impacts all current devices spanning across Generation 5, Generation 6, and Generation 7. A patch was issued by SonicWall on August 22 to address the issue and asked its users to update their appliances. It later turned out that the same weakness also affects the SSLVPN feature of the devices, which has recently been exploited in the wild.
Arctic Wolf security researchers reported that operators of the Akira ransomware strain have been leveraging the bug for initial access to business networks. These appeared to be the types of attacks that involved compromised accounts, local to the affected devices and independent of centralised authentication systems such as Microsoft Active Directory. What's more, the affected accounts were noted to have MFA disabled, further compromising them. The affected breached devices were running firmware versions in the range vulnerable to CVE-2024-40766.
Apart from Arctic Wolf's discovery, the incidents of ransomware groups making their ways into SonicWall SSLVPN accounts were also reported by the security firm Rapid7. While the incidents being connected to the vulnerability CVE-2024-40766 are purely speculative, the company has underlined the need to take precautions.
Immediate Security Recommendations
The cybersecurity researchers at SonicWall, Arctic Wolf, and Rapid7 have strongly recommended that the administrators take to the immediate implementation of the latest SonicOS firmware updates. Specifically, SonicWall has advised customers to allow access to the Firewall management and SSLVPN features only from trusted sources and block it from the internet, if possible. It has also underlined the implementation of MFA for all SSLVPN users by leveraging the use of TOTP or email-based authentication.
Given the threat, this vulnerability has been added to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalogue by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA. Federal agencies were directed to patch their vulnerable SonicWall devices before September 30, according to Binding Operational Directive, or BOD 22-01. That is the gravity of this vulnerability and how urgently the organisations need to act.
SonicWall Devices Targeted in Previous Attacks
SonicWall devices have been routine targets in the past, due to which the hackers exploit security flaws and gain entry to the corporate networks. For instance, suspected Chinese hackers installed malware on SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) devices, which persists on firmware upgrades. The Ransomware groups-HelloKitty, FiveHands, and now Akira-keeps exploiting similar vulnerabilities in the SonicWall systems for attacks.
Given that SonicWall serves over 500,000 customers, including government agencies and major corporations worldwide, the pervasive nature of these vulnerabilities calls for timely patching and stout security practices. "The company has urged that all users of the affected products must apply the latest updates in order to protect their systems against future attacks.
SonicWall revealed on Friday night that, highly sophisticated threat actors assaulted its internal systems by abusing a probable zero-day flaw on the organization's secure remote access products.