Pour yourself a glass of whiskey, because the latest security postmortem from the threat intel folks reads like the same old script: a near 500% spike in scans against Palo Alto Networks login portals on Oct 3, 2025. If you are surprised, congratulations — you must have missed the last ten warnings while re-reading last quarter’s board slides about risk appetite.
What happened
GreyNoise flagged a spike in IP addresses scanning the Palo Alto Networks login portals. This isn’t a gimmick or a botnet’s weekend street fair. It is targeted, structured reconnaissance intended to map your defenses and find a chink in the armor before you print the next vendor press release about conditional access and zero trust. The takeaway is simple: attackers are doing their homework, and your exposed admin surface is the test paper they are hoping to copy from.
Why this should bother you
This isn’t a one off. It is a reminder that the defenders are chasing shadows while the attackers are collecting real data. Vendors sell dashboards that promise visibility, CISOs chase the latest buzzword, and IT culture treats an exposed login page as normal risk. Meanwhile the attackers practice patience, methodically enumerating configurations, user behaviors, and MFA gaps. If you think this is hype, you probably already ignored the last warning and poured another pour of your favorite amber liquid.
What to fix before the next wave
Practical, boring steps you can actually apply before the next alert flood arrives:
– Enforce phishing resistant MFA on all remote access and admin portals.
– If possible, hide or tightly gate critical login surfaces behind VPNs or zero trust controls rather than leaving them wide open to the internet.
– Implement rate limiting and WAF rules on login endpoints; alert on anomalies such as rapid spikes in failed attempts from new geographies or odd user agents.
– Narrow admin access with device posture checks, strict session timeouts, and a policy of no default credentials.
– Regularly review access configurations, rotate secrets, and ensure admin and service accounts don’t linger with unnecessary privileges.
– Tie defenses to a mature incident response workflow so you stop treating alerts as suggestions and start treating them as calls to action rather than background noise.
Bottom line
The story is not glamorous, and that is the problem. It is a blunt reminder that the boring basics remain the weak link. If you are waiting for the vendor miracle pill or the CISO to admit the team is stretched thin, pour another whiskey and face reality: you protect what you expose and you monitor what matters. Otherwise you will be explaining to the board why the login surface was left to be probed like a cheap lock at a bar with the door wide open.
Read the original: Massive surge in scans targeting Palo Alto Networks login portals
