Edge infrastructure under siege: what two independent datasets reveal about who's exploiting your perimeter

A joint Tenable-SentinelOne analysis of 93 CVE-actor attribution pairs reveals that both state-sponsored actors and cybercriminals independently converge on the same edge infrastructure. Special thanks to SentinelOne® Incident Readiness & Response for their contributions to this publication.It is the shared attack surface where state-sponsored threat actors and financially motivated criminal groups independently converge — not the province of a single adversary category, and not exclusively a nation-state problem, despite two years of headlines about China-nexus actors targeting Ivanti, Fortinet, and Palo Alto Networks. The data here tells a different and much broader story. One focused on vendors vs CVEs.Key TakeawaysTwo independent observation systems, Tenable exposure telemetry across thousands of customer containers and SentinelOne DFIR casework across 66 CVEs, converge 79% on the same vendor attack surfaces despite minimal CVE-level overlap.Twelve CVEs in the combined dataset have confirmed multi-nexus attribution: state-sponsored and criminal actors independently exploiting the same vulnerability, across five nexus categories (China, Russia, DPRK, Iran, ransomware).The expos…