# The Dutch Are Sounding the Alarm on Check Point VPN — and They Don't Cry Wolf
The Netherlands' national cybersecurity authority doesn't issue imminent exploitation warnings for sport. When the NCSC in The Hague says threat actors are about to start pulling triggers on a critical vulnerability, enterprise security teams in Europe — and everywhere else running Check Point gear — should be treating that as a fire drill happening right now.
The Dutch NCSC has flagged critical vulnerabilities in Check Point VPN products as facing imminent exploitation, urging organizations to patch immediately or accept that their network perimeter is effectively open.
## What's Actually Broken
Check Point's Security Gateway products, which power VPN access for tens of thousands of enterprise environments worldwide, contain flaws that allow attackers to reach past authentication controls and extract sensitive information — potentially including credentials and VPN configuration data. At the severe end of the severity scale, these aren't bugs that require a sophisticated nation-state to weaponize. They're the kind of vulnerabilities that get turned into working proof-of-concept exploits within days of a disclosure, then productized into commodity attack toolkits within weeks.
The NCSC's specific warning about "imminent" exploitation suggests something sharper than a routine advisory cycle: threat intelligence showing chatter, active scanning, or early-stage reconnaissance in the wild. Intelligence agencies and national CERTs typically use that language when they're seeing signals from monitoring infrastructure that suggests a countdown is underway.
## The VPN Graveyard Behind Us
If you've been covering this space for a decade, you've written some version of this story before. And before that. And before that.
The pattern is depressingly familiar. An enterprise VPN product ships with a serious vulnerability. Defenders get a narrow window — sometimes days, often just hours after a public PoC drops — to patch before mass exploitation begins. Organizations that haven't updated find their perimeter devices silently turned against them, handing attackers a foothold that can persist for months before detection.
We've been here with Ivanti Connect Secure, where two zero-days chained together gave attackers a complete bypass of authentication. We've been here with Fortinet SSL VPN, exploited by ransomware groups so aggressively that CISA issued emergency directives. We've been here with Pulse Secure, Citrix ADC, Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect. Each time, the gap between public disclosure and mass exploitation has shrunk.
Check Point had a particularly ugly moment with CVE-2024-24919, an information disclosure vulnerability in Security Gateway that attackers were actively exploiting before many organizations had even processed the advisory. The playbook writes itself: extract VPN credentials from the gateway, use those credentials to authenticate as a legitimate user, move laterally from there. Clean, quiet, effective.
The NCSC warning fits that same mold. The difference this time is the advance notice — which is only useful if organizations act on it.
## Who's Actually Exposed
Check Point has significant market share in European enterprise environments, financial services, healthcare, and critical infrastructure sectors. Governments and defense contractors in NATO member states are common customers. That means the potential target set for threat actors is exactly the kind of high-value network access that both financially motivated ransomware groups and state-sponsored APTs actively seek.
VPN gateways are particularly attractive targets because they sit at the perimeter and authenticate remote users — meaning a compromised gateway gives attackers a legitimate-looking entry vector. Traffic from an authorized VPN client blends in. It doesn't trigger the same alarms as an inbound exploit attempt against a public-facing web server.
The exploitation path also tends to be reliable: extract credentials or session tokens from the vulnerable gateway, use them to establish a legitimate VPN session, then operate inside the network with the access level of whoever's credentials you lifted. That's often a remote employee, sometimes an administrator.
## What Needs to Happen in the Next 24 Hours
Patch. That's the short version. But organizations that haven't done so yet need to be honest about why — and fix the underlying process, not just the current hole.
Immediate steps:
Organizations running Check Point products through managed service providers should be explicitly confirming patch status rather than assuming it's handled. The MSSP relationship introduces an accountability gap that attackers understand well.
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## HackWire Analysis
The Dutch NCSC warning deserves more attention than a standard vendor advisory, and not just because of the "imminent" language. The Netherlands runs one of Europe's more capable national cybersecurity programs, and its threat intelligence sharing relationships with Five Eyes partners and EU member states mean that when they say they're seeing signals of impending exploitation, they're not speculating.
What's missing from most coverage of this story is the structural problem underneath the immediate patch-or-get-breached situation. Enterprise organizations are still treating VPN gateways as set-and-forget infrastructure. Many security teams have better visibility into their SaaS applications than they do into the devices sitting at their own network perimeter. Patch management workflows that work reasonably well for endpoints and servers often break down at the boundary where network appliances live — managed by different teams, on different patching cycles, sometimes under contracts that delay updates.
The comparison that keeps coming to mind is the Ivanti wave of early 2024. Organizations that thought they had patched were still vulnerable because the patches weren't fully cleaning up existing compromises, and because attackers had already moved past the initial access point. The lesson there — verify your patch actually resolved the condition, don't just check a change ticket as closed — applies here too.
One more angle other coverage is underweighting: the timing relative to Q4 budget cycles and the run-up to major European political events. Sophisticated threat actors know that enterprise IT and security teams are distracted in this window. They plan around it. The NCSC warning being issued now isn't coincidental.
The bottom line for defenders: treat this as an active incident response situation, not a scheduled maintenance window. The patch matters less than the speed.
— HackWire Editorial
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