Literally the day after we migrated our Production workloads into Azure, I woke up in a panic.

We hadn’t even been 24 hours in the cloud when I opened my email to find what every Cybersecurity engineer dreads:

2,181,699 brute-force attempts.

Luckily, we survived. But it lit a fire under us to accelerate our Zero Trust Architecture rollout. We already had MFA everywhere, deny-first policies, and network segmentation — but as it turns out, that only goes so far.

Because this time, they actually got in. Not into Production, but into something worse in its own way — the portal where users download the VPN client.

After combing through endless logs, I traced it back to one user whose credentials were exposed in the 2018 LinkedIn breach. The attackers, using VPS infrastructure for wide-scoped credential stuffing, just happened to get lucky.

I immediately disabled the account and locked everything down. A five-minute conversation with that user could’ve saved us hours of forensics and a whole lot of stress.

We later learned we weren’t alone. According to KrebsOnSecurity, the “Stark Industries Solutions” infrastructure became the epicenter of large-scale DDoS and credential attacks right before the invasion of Ukraine.

Since then, we’ve doubled down:

• Implemented GEO-IP dynamic blocking on our Palo Alto firewalls
• Tuned our incident response playbooks
• Tightened conditional access and password hygiene policies

In cybersecurity, sometimes you don’t choose when your first real test comes. But you do choose how you respond — and whether you’ll be stronger for it.

#ZeroTrust #IncidentResponse #AzureSecurity #CredentialStuffing #PaloAltoNetworks