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Hudson Rock summary cards for FortiBleed 2.0: 101,419 credential and account records, 40,573 cleartext secret records, 1,576 cleartext LDAP bind records and 54.7 percent of hosts absent from the first dataset.
Image: Hudson Rock (fair use). Headline counts from Hudson Rock's FortiBleed 2.0 analysis, published Oct. 27, 2026.

Response

Hudson Rock Says a Second FortiBleed Cache of FortiGate Configurations Holds 40,573 Cleartext Secrets, Including 1,576 Active Directory Bind Passwords

The 1,703 configuration reports, most dated Feb. 20, 2026, cover 1,689 firewall host identifiers, 924 of them missing from the first FortiBleed list. For responders, the lesson is that a FortiGate exposure reaches LDAP service accounts, administrator tables and HA, RADIUS and SMTP secrets, not just VPN passwords.

Noah Park, ResponseNew York5 min read

NEW YORK - A second cache of stolen Fortinet FortiGate configuration reports tied to the FortiBleed campaign holds 40,573 records with secrets in cleartext, including 1,576 bind passwords for the service accounts that connect the firewalls to Active Directory, according to an analysis published on Tuesday by the threat intelligence company Hudson Rock.

The firm calls the material FortiBleed 2.0. It covers 1,703 configuration-report files associated with 1,689 host identifiers and 101,419 credential and account records. In the export, 1,672 of the files carry report timestamps of Feb. 20, 2026, and 31 are undated, which Hudson Rock said makes the material earlier than the likely May or June data behind its first FortiBleed investigation, even though researchers obtained it only recently. It stressed that those are report dates, "not independently established dates of first compromise or configuration extraction."

The first dataset was a perimeter list of 73,932 login rows across 69,055 host identifiers. The new one is narrower but deeper. Of its 1,689 host identifiers, 924, or 54.7 percent, do not appear in the first list, and it contains whole categories of secrets the earlier list did not capture.

What a firewall backup gives away

Hudson Rock chart breaking the 101,419 FortiBleed 2.0 records into cleartext secrets, empty password fields, hash-classified records and undecrypted FortiOS ENC values.
Image: Hudson Rock (fair use).How the 101,419 records divide by secret type.

Local users and SSL VPN accounts make up 83,414 of the records, 37,076 with cleartext passwords, and 7,437 of those cleartext records are marked disabled. There are 2,163 LDAP bind records, 1,576 in cleartext; 13,786 system administrator entries, almost all stored as hashes; 1,672 administrator logins that the source labels as verified, 1,633 of them with a super_admin profile; 208 high-availability cluster records, 144 in cleartext; and 176 SMTP server accounts, 105 in cleartext. Hudson Rock said configurations that rely on FortiOS's system-default key can allow offline recovery of stored secrets, while device-specific private-data-encryption keys change that, so recoverability depends on version, settings and the material obtained.

"A firewall backup can expose remote-access accounts, the secrets connecting an appliance to Active Directory, and the addresses of internal systems," the analysis said. It credited the research firm NyxLab for work on the access broker known as k0t and the extraction tooling, which includes scripts that parse configurations, recover secrets and test VPN credentials. It added that the records "do not establish one initial-access mechanism for every host," and that while related Group-IB and NyxLab research describes victim overlap with the Qilin and The Gentlemen ransomware operations, "a direct affiliation or supplier relationship remains unconfirmed."

Same hosts, same passwords

Hudson Rock comparison of the 765 hosts that appear in both FortiBleed datasets: 68.4 percent identical credentials and 31.6 percent different administrator identities.
Image: Hudson Rock (fair use).The 765 overlapping hosts, compared login by login.

On the 765 hosts present in both datasets, 524 of 766 administrator login records in the new cache match a first-dataset record for the same host exactly, username and password. The other 242 use a different administrator name. The most frequent was fgtsecure, with 106 occurrences and what Hudson Rock described as a recurring password pattern, followed by admin, Technical_support, callcenter, fgtsec and forticloud-sync. In 216 of the 242 cases, the administrator name from the first dataset also sits in the earlier configuration's admin table alongside the different login. Hudson Rock cautioned that "names such as admin and callcenter alone do not establish that an account is unauthorized."

Where responders should look

Hudson Rock guidance titled What Affected Organizations Should Check, covering administrator accounts and directory bind secrets.
Image: Hudson Rock (fair use).The first two of four review areas in Hudson Rock's guidance.

The practical lesson for incident responders is that a FortiGate exposure is not closed by a firmware update and a VPN password reset. Fortinet's own response guidance calls for session termination, credential resets, configuration review and an investigation of lateral movement, and Hudson Rock mapped four areas onto that. Compare config system admin against approved owners and change history and investigate names such as fgtsecure, fgtsec, Technical_support, forticloud-sync and forti-auth-tech. Find the service accounts under config user ldap, check whether their secrets changed after the exposure, rotate any that did not and strip excess rights such as Domain Admins membership. Review config user local, VPN policies and effective MFA; the export recorded MFA methods for only 5,042 local users, and Hudson Rock said a blank field is missing information, not proof MFA is off. And replace HA cluster, RADIUS and SMTP secrets in coordination with the services that use them.

The records describe exposure, not proven compromise. "The files alone do not establish successful internal compromise, continuous attacker access, or the outcome of later remediation," the analysis said. Hudson Rock offers a free lookup of the FortiBleed records by domain.

Sources:


Noah Park covers incident response and blue-team operations for SOCtember from New York.

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