🛡️ **U.S. Senator Wyden Calls Federal VPN Purge — Zero Trust Mandated Amid Nation-State Targeting**
Published Thursday, July 30, 2026 at 04:07 AM PT BLUF: Senator Ron Wyden has formally urged federal agencies to eliminate legacy VPN infrastructure and adopt zero trust architectures to blunt nation-state cyber operations against U.S. government networks. Call reflects active NSA/CISA alerts on FSB targeting of federal routers and confirmed public-facing VPN compromise patterns. DETAILS Sen. Wyden (letter reported by CyberScoop) explicitly calls for federal government to discard older, insecure, public-facing VPNs as primary perimeter control Recommended replacement: zero trust network architecture with granular per-host/per-application trust validation instead of VPN-as-boundary Timing aligns with parallel NSA/CISA hardening advisories on FSB Center 16 targeting of routers and critical infrastructure; CISA separately issued Fortinet credential-exposure alert indicating active VPN/gateway compromise activity Legacy VPN reliance identified as material attack surface exploited by nation-state actors (FSB, Chinese state-sponsored groups documented in concurrent CISA alerts) Team82/Claroty research corroborates urgency: widespread CPS and data center infrastructure exposures confirm attackers can pivot through weak perimeter controls IMPACT ...