Secure by Design in Practice: A Year of Progress on Sophos Firewall
Sophos, Wednesday, July 29th, 2026
Sophos reports a year of firewall hardening and an internal AI vulnerability-hunting platform that outperformed pen testing on cost.
Sophos published a Secure by Design progress report on Sophos Firewall, arguing network edge devices remain the most attractive target class because they sit at trust boundaries and are chronically under-instrumented.
June 2026's FortiBleed credential exposure campaign tested the defaults: customers faced brute-force attempts, but no default credentials and enforced MFA prevented widespread compromise, while exposing an MFA enrollment weakness Sophos redesigned around email verification.
Shipped work includes the Sophos Linux Sensor on all XGS appliances, mandatory registration for virtual deployments, a modernized build toolchain, and visible hotfix status. An internal AI vulnerability-hunting platform using frontier models proved more cost-effective than traditional penetration testing.