Edge devices sit at the boundary between your internal network and the internet. VPNs, firewalls, MDM solutions, Citrix gateways, Fortinet appliances, remote desktop services…these are the tools that let employees work from anywhere. They’re also the tools that let attackers walk straight into your network.
According to the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security: “Cyber threat actors have increasingly exploited vulnerabilities in edge devices to compromise organizations worldwide. Targeting edge devices has now become a tactic of choice for many cyber threat actors, including state-sponsored actors.”
We are seeing banks across the globe asking about it. Government agencies in entire regions are deploying new strategies for it. Defense contractors and federal entities are all dealing with the same problem: edge devices are getting hammered, and traditional security products have no answer.
Why Are Edge Devices Such Attractive Targets?
Edge devices are public-facing by design. They need to be reachable from the internet so employees can connect from hotels, airports, home offices, or wherever work happens. This accessibility is exactly what makes them both valuable to the business and dangerous to the security posture.
When attackers compromise an edge device, they bypass the noisiest parts of an attack. They exploit a vulnerability in a device that’s designed to provide direct access to your internal network, and suddenly they’re inside.
Recent years have seen an acceleration in zero-day vulnerabilities affecting these devices. Fortinet, Citrix, Ivanti, MobileIron…the list grows monthly. Threat actors are actively hunting for vulnerabilities in edge devices because the payoff is immediate access without the complexity of compromising individual employees.
The Architectural Problem
Here’s the fundamental issue: you can’t install EDR or other security monitoring tools on most edge devices without breaking their core functionality. These devices need to maintain stable, low-latency connections. Adding security layers that inspect traffic or monitor processes will degrade performance or break the connection entirely.
One major bank recently told us they removed all their Ivanti devices after seeing three months of continuous remote vulnerabilities. The security team’s assessment was stark: “You can’t protect them, but you can’t trust them. But you need them.”
There is no security product on the market that adequately protects edge devices while maintaining their functionality. Security teams are left managing essential infrastructure that they know is vulnerable but can’t properly monitor or defend.
Why Detection Happens Too Late
When edge device compromises are eventually detected, the timeline looks like this:
- Zero-day or known vulnerability gets exploited
- Attacker gains access and begins reconnaissance
- Days or weeks pass with attacker activity going unnoticed
- Incident response team discovers the breach, often through secondary indicators
- Team must physically access the device or rely on limited logs
- IOCs and TTPs are extracted weeks after the initial compromise
- By this point, the intelligence is stale and the attacker has likely moved on
The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre emphasizes this gap in their recent guidance on edge device forensics: “When targeting these devices, malicious actors have exploited vulnerabilities and insecure design features to gain and maintain valuable accesses. These actors can remain inside networks until detected and denied access.” The problem is that threat actors are getting in, but it’s also how long they stay undetected.
Traditional incident response relies on post-breach forensics. For edge devices, this approach means working with incomplete data from devices that weren’t designed with forensic visibility in mind.
The Zero-Day Exploitation Timeline
When a zero-day affecting edge devices goes public, exploitation happens fast. Attackers use tools like Shodan or Censys to enumerate every vulnerable device on the internet. Within hours, mass exploitation begins.
For sophisticated nation-state actors, the goal is targeted access to specific organizations, such as NATO members, government agencies, critical infrastructure operators. For ransomware groups and less advanced threat actors, it’s about volume. They want to compromise as many organizations as possible before patches are deployed.
Both groups move quickly. One recent Ivanti vulnerability saw devices compromised within four hours of the zero-day disclosure. Most organizations didn’t detect the compromise for weeks. By the time incident response began, the attackers had already extracted what they needed and moved on.
It is well-known that a number of APT actors reverse-engineer every new patch available from those edge devices; they can get a working exploit sometimes in hours after a patch is published.
What Organizations Need But Aren’t Getting
Security teams managing edge devices need three things they currently don’t have:
Real-time visibility into exploitation attempts. Waiting weeks to discover a compromise means responding to an attack that’s already succeeded. Teams need to know when their device types are being targeted, not after their production environment has been breached.
Fresh threat intelligence during active campaigns. IOCs gathered weeks after an incident are often useless. The malware has evolved. The infrastructure has changed. The TTPs have been updated. Intelligence needs to be collected while the campaign is active.
Proactive defense that doesn’t disrupt operations. Edge devices can’t be taken offline for extended security testing. They can’t run resource-intensive monitoring tools. Any security approach needs to work without touching production systems or requiring architectural changes.
The current approach to edge device security is reactive by necessity. Organizations patch when vendors release fixes, hope their devices aren’t in the window between disclosure and deployment, and prepare for incident response when something eventually breaks through.
Why This Problem Is Getting Worse
Several trends are converging to make edge device security more challenging:
Increased remote work means more edge devices deployed across more locations. The perimeter has expanded, and each new VPN concentrator or remote desktop gateway is another potential entry point.
Vulnerability disclosure is accelerating. More researchers are focusing on edge devices. More nation-state actors are investing in finding and exploiting these vulnerabilities. The time between disclosure and active exploitation continues to shrink.
Detection gaps are widening. As edge devices proliferate and vulnerabilities multiply, the gap between what security teams need to monitor and what they can actually see keeps growing. Limited logging, delayed detection, and stale intelligence compound the problem.
No vendor is owning the solution space. Traditional security vendors haven’t developed products that address edge device security without impacting functionality. Edge device manufacturers haven’t prioritized forensic visibility or rapid patch cycles. The gap remains.
What Actually Works
The shift that needs to happen is straightforward, even if the execution isn’t: stop waiting to find out you’ve been compromised and start collecting intelligence while attacks are still in motion.
CounterCraft built specifically for this problem. We have a unique approach to this security issue, developed by our team of experts after months of testing in the field. We use Deception Satellites, transparent gateways deployed in front of edge devices, running across the internet or in production environments with different software versions. When a zero-day campaign launches, our devices get hit first. We capture the entire attack chain in real time, pre-exploitation and post-exploitation, before your production environment is touched.
That means fresh malware samples and C2 infrastructure while the campaign is still active. IOCs and TTPs you can actually use, not artifacts from a breach that happened three weeks ago. Post-exploitation behavior that tells you what the attacker was actually after. And all of it deployable without touching your infrastructure.
You get visibility into what’s targeting you, while you can still do something about it.
Protect Your Edge Devices
Your edge devices will be targeted. That’s the reality of running infrastructure that has to be publicly reachable. The only question is whether you find out in real time or during a forensic review of a breach that happened weeks ago.
The organizations getting ahead are changing when in the attack cycle they collect intelligence. We can show you how.
Download our edge device security one pager to see how CounterCraft’s deception campaigns work in practice.
Edge device security requires rethinking detection, intelligence collection, and response timelines. The old approaches aren’t working. The new ones need to be proactive, scalable, and built specifically for the unique challenges these devices present.