Last month, Volexity reported on its discovery of zero-day, in-the-wild exploitation of CVE-2024-3400 in the GlobalProtect feature of Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS by a threat actor Volexity tracks as UTA0218. Palo Alto Networks released an advisory and threat protection signature for the vulnerability within 48 hours of Volexity’s disclosure of the issue to Palo Alto Networks, with official patches and fixes following soon after. Volexity has conducted several additional incident response investigations and proactive analyses of Palo Alto Networks firewall devices since the initial two cases described in Volexity’s blog post. These recent investigations were based primarily on data collected from customers generating a tech support file (TSF) from their devices and providing them to Volexity. From these investigations and analyses, Volexity has observed the following: Shortly after the advisory for CVE-2024-3400 was released, scanning and exploitation of the vulnerability immediately increased. The uptick in exploitation appears to have been associated […]
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Detecting Compromise of CVE-2024-3400 on Palo Alto Networks GlobalProtect Devices
May 15, 2024
by Volexity Threat Research
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CharmingCypress: Innovating Persistence
February 13, 2024
by Ankur Saini, Callum Roxan, Charlie Gardner, Damien Cash
Through its managed security services offerings, Volexity routinely identifies spear-phishing campaigns targeting its customers. One persistent threat actor, whose campaigns Volexity frequently observes, is the Iranian-origin threat actor CharmingCypress (aka Charming Kitten, APT42, TA453). Volexity assesses that CharmingCypress is tasked with collecting political intelligence against foreign targets, particularly focusing on think tanks, NGOs, and journalists. In their phishing campaigns, CharmingCypress often employs unusual social-engineering tactics, such as engaging targets in prolonged conversations over email before sending links to malicious content. In a particularly notable spear-phishing campaign observed by Volexity, CharmingCypress went so far as to craft an entirely fake webinar platform to use as part of the lure. CharmingCypress controlled access to this platform, requiring targets to install malware-laden VPN applications prior to granting access. Note: Some content in this blog was recently discussed in Microsoft’s report, New TTPs observed in Mint Sandstorm campaign targeting high-profile individuals at universities and […]