A surge in exploitation efforts by threat actors can serve as a preliminary warning of emerging cyber vulnerabilities.
Cybersecurity researchers have identified a significant pattern that could transform how organisations prepare for emerging threats. Their comprehensive analysis indicates that spikes in malicious attacker activity against enterprise edge technologies serve as reliable early warning signals for new vulnerability disclosures. This provides defenders with a critical window of opportunity to bolster their defences before zero-day exploits materialise. The research reveals that in 80 per cent of the analysed cases, notable increases in opportunistic attacker activity against specific edge technologies were followed by the disclosure of a new Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) affecting the same technology within six weeks. This predictive pattern emerged from the analysis of 216 statistically significant activity spikes observed across eight major enterprise vendors, including Cisco, Fortinet, Citrix, Ivanti, Palo Alto Networks, Juniper, MikroTik, and SonicWall.
What is particularly concerning about this discovery is that most preliminary attacks involved genuine exploit attempts against previously known vulnerabilities rather than mere reconnaissance scanning. GreyNoise analysts found that attackers frequently exploited surprisingly old vulnerabilities during these spike periods, such as CVE-2011-3315 affecting Cisco systems and CVE-2017-15944 targeting Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS. This demonstrates that legacy flaws remain valuable tools for threat actors conducting advanced reconnaissance operations. The technical methodology for detecting these patterns involves sophisticated statistical analysis of daily unique IP addresses targeting specific technologies. Researchers defined spikes using dual criteria: global elevation, where daily activity exceeded the median plus two times the interquartile range, and local elevation, surpassing the 28-day rolling mean plus two standard deviations. This mathematical approach ensures both statistical significance and practical relevance, revealing sophisticated attacker methodologies that extend beyond opportunistic scanning.
