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 […]
Exploit
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EvilBamboo Targets Mobile Devices in Multi-year Campaign
September 22, 2023
by Callum Roxan, Paul Rascagneres, Thomas Lancaster
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Mass Exploitation of (Un)authenticated Zimbra RCE: CVE-2022-27925
August 10, 2022
by Volexity Threat Research
[Note: Volexity has reported all findings in this post to Zimbra. Where an existing contact was known, Volexity has notified local CERTs of compromised Zimbra instances in their constituency. The newest versions of Zimbra are patched for both the RCE vulnerability and authentication bypass vulnerabilities described in this blog.] In July and early August 2022, Volexity worked on multiple incidents where the victim organization experienced serious breaches to their Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) email servers. Volexity’s investigations uncovered evidence indicating the likely cause of these breaches was exploitation of CVE-2022-27925, a remote-code-execution (RCE) vulnerability in ZCS. This initial CVE was patched by Zimbra in March 2022 in 8.8.15P31 and 9.0.0P24. Figure 1. Description of CVE-2022-27925 from the NIST website Initial research into the vulnerability did not uncover any public exploit code, but since a patch had been available for several months, it was reasonable that exploit code could have been […]
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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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Zero-Day Exploitation of Atlassian Confluence
June 2, 2022
by Andrew Case, Sean Koessel, Steven Adair, Thomas Lancaster, Volexity Threat Research
UPDATE: On June 3, 2022, Atlassian updated its security advisory with new information regarding a fix for Confluence Server and Data Center to address CVE-2022-26134. Users are encouraged to update immediately to mitigate their risk. Additional observations after publication of this blog post have been shared here, with guidance on how to verify if you have been impacted by unauthorized access. Over the Memorial Day weekend in the United States, Volexity conducted an incident response investigation involving two Internet-facing web servers belonging to one of its customers that were running Atlassian Confluence Server software. The investigation began after suspicious activity was detected on the hosts, which included JSP webshells being written to disk. Volexity immediately used Volexity Surge Collect Pro to collect system memory and key files from the Confluence Server systems for analysis. After a thorough review of the collected data, Volexity was able to determine the server compromise stemmed from […]
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Operation Exchange Marauder: Active Exploitation of Multiple Zero-Day Microsoft Exchange Vulnerabilities
March 2, 2021
by Josh Grunzweig, Matthew Meltzer, Sean Koessel, Steven Adair, Thomas Lancaster
[UPDATE] March 8, 2021 – Since original publication of this blog, Volexity has now observed that cyber espionage operations using the SSRF vulnerability CVE-2021-26855 started occurring on January 3, 2021, three days earlier than initially posted. Volexity is seeing active in-the-wild exploitation of multiple Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities used to steal e-mail and compromise networks. These attacks appear to have started as early as January 6, 2021. In January 2021, through its Network Security Monitoring service, Volexity detected anomalous activity from two of its customers’ Microsoft Exchange servers. Volexity identified a large amount of data being sent to IP addresses it believed were not tied to legitimate users. A closer inspection of the IIS logs from the Exchange servers revealed rather alarming results. The logs showed inbound POST requests to valid files associated with images, JavaScript, cascading style sheets, and fonts used by Outlook Web Access (OWA). It was initially suspected the […]
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Microsoft Exchange Control Panel (ECP) Vulnerability CVE-2020-0688 Exploited
March 6, 2020
by Volexity Threat Research
On February 11, 2020, as part of Patch Tuesday, Microsoft released cumulative updates and a service pack that addressed a remote code execution vulnerability found in Microsoft Exchange 2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019. The vulnerability was discovered by an anonymous security researcher and reported to Microsoft by way of Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative. Two weeks after the security updates were released, the Zero Day Initiative published a blog post providing more details on the vulnerability. The post made it clear that an attacker could exploit a vulnerable Exchange server if the following three criteria were met: The Exchange Server had not been patched since February 11, 2020. The Exchange Control Panel (ECP) interface was accessible to the attacker. The attacker has a working credential that allows them to access the Exchange Control Panel in order to collect the ViewStateKey from the authenticated session cookie as well as the __VIEWSTATEGENERATOR […]