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 […]
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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, Tom 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, Tom 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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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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Active Exploitation of Newly Patched ColdFusion Vulnerability (CVE-2018-15961)
November 8, 2018
by Volexity Threat Research
If your organization is running an Internet-facing version of ColdFusion, you may want to take a close look at your server. Volexity recently observed active exploitation of a newly patched vulnerability in Adobe ColdFusion, for which no public details or proof-of-concept code exists. In the attack detected by Volexity, a suspected Chinese APT group was able to compromise a vulnerable ColdFusion server by directly uploading a China Chopper webshell. The target server was missing a single update from Adobe that had been released just two weeks earlier. On September 11, 2018, Adobe issued security bulletin APSB18-33, which fixed a variety of issues to include an unauthenticated file upload vulnerability. Per the advisory, this vulnerability was assigned CVE-2018-15961 and affects ColdFusion 11 (Update 14 and earlier), ColdFusion 2016 (Update 6 and earlier), and ColdFusion 2018 (July 12 release). This effectively includes all versions of ColdFusion released over the last four years. […]