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12-minute briefing for CEOs

Admin access to a $180M company: $2,400.

A real listing on a criminal forum, for a US manufacturer. Your company has a price too. Someone already named it.

Cover of the ON2IT threat research report The Price of Your Front Door, US edition

The price of your front door

CEO edition, United States

  • 12-minute read
  • For US CEOs
  • Research as of 30 Sep 2026

Built on data from Anthropic, Microsoft, Mandiant and CISA, plus Palo Alto Networks Unit 42, CrowdStrike, Verizon, Chainalysis and others. Every claim traces to a named source.

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The listing

Not too small. Cheap.

A US manufacturer, $180 million in revenue, 400 endpoints. Full domain administrator access through a stolen VPN login, listed on a criminal forum. The asking price: $2,400. Not $2.4 million: two thousand four hundred dollars.

The seller is not selling secrets. Nobody has opened a single contract yet. The seller is selling the door: a password that still works. The usual buyer is an extortion crew, and for them $2,400 is small change next to a ransom.

Why the door is cheap now

AI did not invent the attack. It made trying cheap.

On 10 September 2026, Anthropic published a 154-page report on attacks it disrupted on its own AI models. Its conclusion: AI cut the cost of each campaign while the payoff stayed the same. Targets that were once not worth the effort are worth it now.

“We’ll patch it” is not a plan either. This year, the Microsoft Defender malware scanning engine had a public exploit and no fix for 22 days. Citrix NetScaler gateways at the edge of dozens of networks were exploited for up to 24 days before a patch existed, mostly unnoticed.

The briefing shows who buys doors like yours and what they pay. It gives you five questions to ask your CIO this week, so you know what still protects you when there is nothing to install.

Inside the briefing

What the briefing gives you.

Section
1 of 4
The whole paper in ninety seconds
What changed: the cost of trying an attack. What did not: the way an intrusion works. What you now answer for, and three things to do this month. One screen, for when you have one minute.
Section
2 of 4
What your door sells for
Two public price lists, from a $10 password log to a $20 million phone exploit. Your company appears on both, at very different prices, and the buyers are different people. Nobody paid millions for that manufacturer. They paid for a password.
Section
3 of 4
Five questions for your CIO
Five questions to ask your CIO and CISO this week, in your own voice, each with why it matters now and what a good answer sounds like. The test: do you hear evidence or a promise?
Section
4 of 4
Pay for it from what you already spend
Three things to stop before you ask for new money: subscriptions never switched on, overlapping agents on every laptop, and log storage priced by fear. Plus the one sentence to agree with your CFO first.
About this research
Research, not a pitch
Every claim in the briefing traces to a named source. Where a source is thin, or sells the defense it describes, the briefing says so on the page. ON2IT delivers Zero Trust as a Service, so read the recommendation with that in mind.
Who wrote it
About ON2IT
Founded in 2005, ON2IT set out to prevent incidents rather than chase them. Zero Trust gives that a strategy. ON2IT delivers it as a service, on its own AUXO™ platform and from a 24x7 GSOC in the United States and the Netherlands. ON2IT advised on the 2022 NSTAC report to the President on Zero Trust and Trusted Identity Management.
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The full story in twelve minutes, written for CEOs. Free, to read online or on your e-reader.

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The ON2IT threat research report The Price of Your Front Door: the cover on top of the open report