Edge Infrastructure Under Siege: What Two Independent Datasets Reveal About Who’s Exploiting Your Perimeter

It is the shared attack surface where state-sponsored threat actors and financially motivated criminal groups independently converge — not the province of a single adversary category, and not exclusively a nation-state problem, despite two years of headlines about China-nexus actors targeting Ivanti, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks. The data here tells a different and much broader story. One focused on vendors vs CVEs.

Key Takeaways

• Two independent observation systems, Tenable exposure telemetry across thousands of customer containers and SentinelOne DFIR casework across 66 CVEs, converge 79% on the same vendor attack surfaces despite minimal CVE-level overlap.
• Twelve CVEs in the combined dataset have confirmed multi-nexus attribution: state-sponsored and criminal actors independently exploiting the same vulnerability, across five nexus categories (China, Russia, DPRK, Iran, ransomware).
• The exposure picture is flatter than the headlines suggest: Fortinet, the vendor most associated with edge-device attacks in the press, sits mid-pack on container-grain exposure (25%) — well behind F5 (54%) and in a tight 10-point band with Check Point, Ivanti, and Citrix.
• 54% of customer environments running F5 products have at least one exposed, actively-exploited CVE; Citrix customers show the slowest remediation patterns at 461 days median time to patch.
• Remediation complexity, particularly of high priority CVEs, leads to a statistically significant 24-day remediation gap, leaving large windows of opportunity for attackers.
• The same product lines get hit again and again: Ivanti EPMM and Ivanti Connect Secure each show a newly exploited CVE roughly every 8.5 to 13 months.
• Leverage multiple defense-in-depth strategies: patch as quickly as possible, but also minimize the attack surface (feature-set minimization) and run endpoints in protect mode to better stop lateral movement from attacks that gain initial access.

The Convergence is the Story

Twelve CVEs in the combined dataset have confirmed multi-nexus attribution: state-sponsored and criminal actors independently exploiting the same vulnerability, across five nexus categories. Four examples illustrate the pattern:

The remaining eight confirmed multi-nexus CVEs span Fortinet, Citrix, Cisco, and Ivanti product lines. State-sponsored actors and ransomware operators are not operating in separate vulnerability ecosystems. They share the same entry points into the same products. The breadth of the convergence, not any single actor’s activity, is the finding.

That pattern holds across the full combined analysis. Three conclusions emerge:

Vendor attack surfaces are the persistent exploitation target. The same eleven vendors (i.e., Fortinet, Citrix, Ivanti, Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, Juniper, VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, CrushFTP, and Meta’s React framework) appear in both observation systems at 79% convergence, and all seven edge-product vendors converge. Serial exploitation timing on Ivanti products shows the vulnerability-to-exploitation pipeline refreshing at 8.5 to 13-month intervals on the same product lines. This is structural, not episodic. Patching the current CVE does not remove the vendor attack surface from the threat landscape.

State-sponsored and ransomware actors converge structurally. Twelve CVEs with confirmed multi-nexus attribution span all five nexus categories and cross the state-criminal divide. Defending against one actor category on edge devices necessarily requires defending against all of them, because the attack surface is shared. An organization that patches only for nation-state TTPs leaves itself exposed to ransomware operators exploiting the same vulnerability, and vice versa.

High-priority CVEs take more time to remediate, not less. Across Tenable’s 238-CVE high-priority list, high-priority CVEs carry a median remediation time of 146 days, compared to 122 days for all other CVEs — a 24-day gap that is statistically significant. The edge-appliance-specific subset (52 CVEs) shows a consistent 8-day gap in the same direction, which was not statistically significant, but suggests the direction may hold for edge appliances too. External data corroborates the pattern: the 2026 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) found that median patch time increased from 32 to 43 days year over year, even as exploitation overtook credential theft as the number one initial access vector, and the 2025 DBIR, which incorporated Tenable RSO’s remediation trend analysis across 17 edge-related CVEs, found that only 54% of edge device KEVs were fully remediated. The explanation is structural: edge devices are the network boundary, so patching a VPN gateway or firewall means downtime for every user behind it, and change management gates multiply. These devices also resist standard patching workflows because they do not run endpoint agents, often require firmware-level updates with manual validation, and frequently lack active support contracts. The result is that the devices most worth patching are operationally the hardest to patch — and as the high-priority queue grows (the 2026 DBIR reports 50% more critical vulnerabilities to patch than the prior year), everything on it waits longer.

Background

Edge and perimeter devices occupy a uniquely consequential position in enterprise architecture. VPN gateways, firewalls, remote access appliances, and application delivery controllers sit at the boundary between trusted and untrusted networks. They are very often the first component an attacker touches and, for many organizations, the last component that gets patched. When one of these devices is compromised, the attacker inherits its network position: inside the perimeter, with access to internal resources, often without triggering endpoint detection.

This analysis combines two independent datasets to demonstrate that convergence. Tenable contributes exposure telemetry from the Tenable One Exposure Management Platform, covering thousands of customer containers and measuring what edge infrastructure is deployed, what is vulnerable, and how long it remains unpatched. This dataset extends Tenable Research’s ongoing analysis of edge device exposure trends, including the remediation telemetry Tenable contributed to the 2025 and 2026 Verizon DBIR reports. SentinelOne contributes findings from its digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) practice, documenting which threat actors actually exploit which vulnerabilities, observed firsthand inside compromised environments. Neither dataset was built for this analysis; each was constructed independently for different operational purposes.

The finding that makes this analysis compelling is not about any single CVE or any single actor. It is the structural convergence: two independent observation systems, looking at the problem from opposite sides, arrive at the same conclusion about which vendor surfaces are under persistent, broad exploitation, and by whom. (For how each dataset was built and scored, see the Methodology appendix below.)

What’s Exposed: The Vulnerability Surface

Tenable’s exposure telemetry provides the vulnerability-side view. All exposure metrics reported here use container-grain measurement: the percentage of customer environments (organizational containers) with at least one asset vulnerable to a given CVE as of Aug. 15, 2026, relative to total exposed containers over the preceding 14-month period. This measures breadth of organizational exposure to edge-product vendor vulnerabilities, not raw asset counts, across the sampling window.

This section covers 15 vendors in three groups: seven confirmed in both independently compiled corpora, two confirmed in SentinelOne’s casework but absent from Tenable’s attrib

Key Takeaways

• Two independent datasets reveal that edge infrastructure is under siege, with attackers increasingly targeting routers, VPNs, and IoT devices.
• Organizations should harden edge devices, apply firmware updates, and implement network monitoring for anomalies on perimeter infrastructure.
• Organizations should review the full article for complete details and implement relevant security measures.