Protect the Network Edge
Visibility that enables proactive defense
In August 2025, CISA, NSA, FBI, and allied agencies jointly issued Advisory AA25-239A, warning that Chinese state-sponsored APT actors are actively targeting backbone, provider-edge, and customer-edge routers and switches. These adversaries are modifying router configurations, enabling GRE/IPsec tunnels or mirrored packet capture, manipulating ACLs, harvesting credentials, and exploiting commonly known CVEs in network infrastructure devices.
While many agency cybersecurity teams focus on internal traffic and endpoint telemetry, the network edge often remains opaque. That blind spot is precisely where APT actors now seek to establish and retain footholds.
For federal agencies, compromise at the network edge can be a stepping stone into internal systems, mission infrastructure, or intelligence domains. Visibility at the network edge is essential.
Eliminate Network Edge Blindspots
Agencies are responsible for managing high-throughput backbone networks connecting mission sites, field offices, and partner nodes. The SOC routinely monitors traffic in-routes and internal segmentation points, but the agency has limited visibility into the actual edge routers, transit links, and trusted interconnections.
CISA advisory (AA25-239A) highlights the need to verify that perimeter and provider-edge devices are free from persistence, unauthorized configuration, and exfiltration tunnels. Here’s how Cynamics Federal can help agencies solve for this:
Rapid, non-disruptive deployment at edge devices
- Deploy lightweight collectors at edge routers without routing changes or traffic interruption.
- No custom agent installation on the device itself is required.
Baseline and continuous monitoring for adversary patterns
- Map mirror or capture configurations, ACL changes, unauthorized local accounts, and tunnel creation.
- Correlate those signals with early-stage behavior documented in the AA25-239A advisory.
Alerting and hunting support for the SOC
- Surface suspicious events with context (which router, which interface, which peer, timestamp, risk severity).
- The agency’s analysts or Cynamics Federal virtual analysts could immediately begin triage or threat hunting without custom scripting.
Agencies can immediately discover misconfigurations at the network edge, such as in edge routers, which could be exposing sensitive internal traffic and be remediated before data is exfiltrated. This is the kind of value you can expect with Cynamics Federal — early detection, actionable insight, and mitigation before adversaries can lay persistent roots.