On January 15, 2024, Volexity detailed widespread exploitation of Ivanti Connect Secure VPN vulnerabilities CVE-2024-21887 and CVE-2023-46805. In that blog post, Volexity detailed broader scanning and exploitation by threat actors using still non-public exploits to compromise numerous devices. The following day, January 16, 2024, proof-of-concept code for the exploit was made public. Subsequently, Volexity has observed an increase in attacks from various threat actors against Ivanti Connect Secure VPN appliances beginning the same day. Additionally, Volexity has continued its investigation into activity conducted by UTA0178 and made a few notable discoveries. The first relates to the GIFTEDVISITOR webshell that Volexity scanned for, which led to the initial discovery of over 1,700 compromised Ivanti Connect Secure VPN devices. On January 16, 2024, Volexity conducted a new scan for this backdoor and found an additional 368 compromised Ivanti Connect Secure VPN appliances, bringing the total count of systems infected by GIFTEDVISITOR to […]
China
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Ivanti Connect Secure VPN Exploitation: New Observations
January 18, 2024
by Matthew Meltzer, Sean Koessel, Steven Adair
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Ivanti Connect Secure VPN Exploitation Goes Global
January 15, 2024
by Cem Gurkok, Paul Rascagneres, Sean Koessel, Steven Adair, Thomas Lancaster
Important: If your organization uses Ivanti Connect Secure VPN and you have not applied the mitigation, then please do that immediately! Organizations should immediately review the results of the built-in Integrity Check Tool for log entries indicating mismatched or new files. As of version 9.1R12, Ivanti started providing a built-in Integrity Checker Tool that can be run as a periodic or scheduled scan. Volexity has observed it successfully detecting the compromises described in this post across impacted organizations. Last week, Ivanti also released an updated version of the external Integrity Checker Tool that can be further used to check and verify systems. On January 10, 2024, Volexity publicly shared details of targeted attacks by UTA0178 exploiting two zero-day vulnerabilities (CVE-2024-21887 and CVE-2023-46805) in Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) VPN appliances. On the same day, Ivanti published a mitigation that could be applied to ICS VPN appliances to prevent exploitation of these […]
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Active Exploitation of Two Zero-Day Vulnerabilities in Ivanti Connect Secure VPN
January 10, 2024
by Matthew Meltzer, Robert Jan Mora, Sean Koessel, Steven Adair, Thomas Lancaster
Volexity has uncovered active in-the-wild exploitation of two vulnerabilities allowing unauthenticated remote code execution in Ivanti Connect Secure VPN devices. An official security advisory and knowledge base article have been released by Ivanti that includes mitigation that should be applied immediately. However, a mitigation does not remedy a past or ongoing compromise. Systems should simultaneously be thoroughly analyzed per details in this post to look for signs of a breach. During the second week of December 2023, Volexity detected suspicious lateral movement on the network of one of its Network Security Monitoring service customers. Upon closer inspection, Volexity found that an attacker was placing webshells on multiple internal and external-facing web servers. These detections kicked off an incident response investigation across multiple systems that Volexity ultimately tracked back to the organization’s Internet-facing Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) VPN appliance (formerly known as Pulse Connect Secure, or simply Pulse Secure). A closer inspection […]
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EvilBamboo Targets Mobile Devices in Multi-year Campaign
September 22, 2023
by Callum Roxan, Paul Rascagneres, Thomas Lancaster
Volexity has identified several long-running and currently active campaigns undertaken by the threat actor Volexity tracks as EvilBamboo (formerly named Evil Eye) targeting Tibetan, Uyghur, and Taiwanese individuals and organizations. These targets represent three of the Five Poisonous Groups of Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Volexity has tracked the activities of EvilBamboo for more than five years and continues to observe new campaigns from this threat actor. In September 2019, Volexity described the deployment of a reconnaissance framework and custom Android malware targeting both the Uyghur and Tibetan communities. In April 2020, Volexity detailed attacks by this threat actor against iOS devices, using a Safari exploit to infect Uyghur users with custom iOS malware. Key highlights from Volexity’s recent investigations include the following: Android targeting: Development of three custom Android malware families, BADBAZAAR, BADSIGNAL, and BADSOLAR, to infect CCP adversaries is ongoing. Fake websites and social media profiles: The attacker has […]
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DriftingCloud: Zero-Day Sophos Firewall Exploitation and an Insidious Breach
June 15, 2022
by Steven Adair, Thomas Lancaster, Volexity Threat Research
Volexity frequently works with individuals and organizations heavily targeted by sophisticated, motivated, and well-equipped threat actors from around the world. Some of these individuals or organizations are attacked infrequently or on an irregular basis, while others see a barrage of attacks nearly every week. Regardless of the attack frequency, Volexity keeps its guard up, looking for new and old threats however they manifest themselves. Earlier this year, Volexity detected a sophisticated attack against a customer that is heavily targeted by multiple Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) groups. This particular attack leveraged a zero-day exploit to compromise the customer’s firewall. Volexity observed the attacker implement an interesting webshell backdoor, create a secondary form of persistence, and ultimately launch attacks against the customer’s staff. These attacks aimed to further breach cloud-hosted web servers hosting the organization’s public-facing websites. This type of attack is rare and difficult to detect. This blog post serves […]
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Evil Eye Threat Actor Resurfaces with iOS Exploit and Updated Implant
April 21, 2020
by Andrew Case, Dave Lassalle, Matthew Meltzer, Sean Koessel, Steven Adair, Thomas Lancaster
In September 2019, Volexity published Digital Crackdown: Large-Scale Surveillance and Exploitation of Uyghurs, which described a series of attacks against Uyghurs from multiple Chinese APT actors. The most notable threat actor detailed in the blog was one Volexity calls Evil Eye. The Evil Eye threat actor was observed launching an exploit aimed at installing a malware implant on Android phones. Volexity also believed this was likely the same group responsible for the launching exploits aimed at installing an iOS implant as described by Google’s Project Zero. Immediately after the publications from Google and Volexity, the Evil Eye threat actor went fairly quiet. They removed their malicious code from compromised websites, command and control (C2) servers were taken down, and various hostnames stopped resolving. This largely remained the case until early January 2020, when Volexity observed a series of new activity across multiple previously compromised Uyghur websites. In the latest activity […]
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Virtual Private Keylogging: Cisco Web VPNs Leveraged for Access and Persistence
October 7, 2015
by Volexity
In the world of information security, there is never a dull moment. Part of the fun of working in this space is that you always get to see attackers do something new or put a new spin on something old. Last month at the CERT-EU Conference in Brussels, Belgium, Volexity gave a presentation on a recent evolution in how attackers are maintaining persistence within victim networks. The method, which involves modifying the login pages to Cisco Clientless SSL VPNs (Web VPN), is both novel and surprisingly obvious at the same time. Attackers have been able to successfully implant JavaScript code on the login pages that enables them to surreptitiously steal employee credentials as they login to access internal corporate resources. Whether you are proactively monitoring your network or reactively undergoing an incident response, one of the last places you might examine for backdoors are your firewalls and VPN gateway appliances. […]
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APT Group Wekby Leveraging Adobe Flash Exploit (CVE-2015-5119)
July 8, 2015
by Volexity
As if the recent breach and subsequent public data dump involving the Italian company Hacking Team wasn’t bad enough, it all gets just a little bit worse. Emerging from the bowels of Hacking Team data dump was a Flash 0-day exploit (CVE-2015-5119) that was just patched today by Adobe as covered in APSB15-16. The exploit has since been added into the Angler Exploit Kit and integrated into Metasploit. However, not to be out done, APT attackers have also started leveraging the exploit in targeted spear phishing attacks as well. Before we start dishing the details, there is going to be one main takeaway from this blog post: If you haven’t already, update/patch your Adobe Flash now. Spear Phishing This morning, a well known APT threat group, often referred to as Wekby, kicked off a rather ironic spear phishing campaign. The attackers launched spoofed e-mail messages purporting to be from Adobe. […]