Apr 15, 2024NewsroomFirewall Security / Vulnerability

Palo Alto Networks has released hotfixes to address a maximum-severity security flaw impacting PAN-OS software that has come under active exploitation in the wild.

Tracked as CVE-2024-3400 (CVSS score: 10.0), the critical vulnerability is a case of command injection in the GlobalProtect feature that an unauthenticated attacker could weaponize to execute arbitrary code with root privileges on the firewall.

Fixes for the shortcoming are available in the following versions –

• PAN-OS 10.2.9-h1
• PAN-OS 11.0.4-h1, and
• PAN-OS 11.1.2-h3

Patches for other commonly deployed maintenance releases are expected to be released over the next few days.

“This issue is applicable only to PAN-OS 10.2, PAN-OS 11.0, and PAN-OS 11.1 firewalls configured with GlobalProtect gateway or GlobalProtect portal (or both) and device telemetry enabled,” the company clarified in its updated advisory.

It also said that while Cloud NGFW firewalls are not impacted by CVE-2024-3400, specific PAN-OS versions and distinct feature configurations of firewall VMs deployed and managed by customers in the cloud are affected.

The exact origins of the threat actor exploiting the flaw are presently unknown but Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 is tracking the malicious activity under the name Operation MidnightEclipse.

Volexity, which attributed it to a cluster dubbed UTA0218, said CVE-2024-3400 has been leveraged since at least March 26, 2024, to deliver a Python-based backdoor called UPSTYLE on the firewall that allows for the execution of arbitrary commands via specially crafted requests.

It is unclear how widespread the exploitation has been, but the threat intelligence firm said it has “evidence of potential reconnaissance activity involving more widespread exploitation aimed at identifying vulnerable systems.”

In attacks documented to date, UTA0218 has been observed deploying additional payloads to launch reverse shells, exfiltrate PAN-OS configuration data, remove log files, and deploy the Golang tunneling tool named GOST (GO Simple Tunnel).

No other follow-up malware or persistence methods are said to have been deployed on victim networks, although it’s unknown if it’s by design or due to early detection and response.

Mar 21, 2024NewsroomDatabase / Vulnerability

Atlassian has released patches for more than two dozen security flaws, including a critical bug impacting Bamboo Data Center and Server that could be exploited without requiring user interaction.

Tracked as CVE-2024-1597, the vulnerability carries a CVSS score of 10.0, indicating maximum severity.

Described as an SQL injection flaw, it’s rooted in a dependency called org.postgresql:postgresql, as a result of which the company said it “presents a lower assessed risk” despite the criticality.

“This org.postgresql:postgresql dependency vulnerability […] could allow an unauthenticated attacker to expose assets in your environment susceptible to exploitation which has high impact to confidentiality, high impact to integrity, high impact to availability, and requires no user interaction,” Atlassian said.

According to a description of the flaw in the NIST’s National Vulnerability Database (NVD), “pgjdbc, the PostgreSQL JDBC Driver, allows attacker to inject SQL if using PreferQueryMode=SIMPLE.” The driver versions prior to the ones listed below are impacted –

• 42.7.2
• 42.6.1
• 42.5.5
• 42.4.4
• 42.3.9, and
• 42.2.28 (also fixed in 42.2.28.jre7)

“SQL injection is possible when using the non-default connection property preferQueryMode=simple in combination with application code that has a vulnerable SQL that negates a parameter value,” the maintainters said in an advisory last month.

“There is no vulnerability in the driver when using the default query mode. Users that do not override the query mode are not impacted.”

The Atlassian vulnerability is said to have been introduced in the following versions of Bamboo Data Center and Server –

• 8.2.1
• 9.0.0
• 9.1.0
• 9.2.1
• 9.3.0
• 9.4.0, and
• 9.5.0

The company also emphasized that Bamboo and other Atlassian Data Center products are unaffected by CVE-2024-1597 as they do not use the PreferQueryMode=SIMPLE in their SQL database connection settings.

SonarSource security researcher Paul Gerste has been credited with discovering and reporting the flaw. Users are advised to update their instances to the latest version to protect against any potential threats.

Mar 21, 2024NewsroomVulnerability / Web Security

Ivanti has disclosed details of a critical remote code execution flaw impacting Standalone Sentry, urging customers to apply the fixes immediately to stay protected against potential cyber threats.

Tracked as CVE-2023-41724, the vulnerability carries a CVSS score of 9.6.

“An unauthenticated threat actor can execute arbitrary commands on the underlying operating system of the appliance within the same physical or logical network,” the company said.

The flaw impacts all supported versions 9.17.0, 9.18.0, and 9.19.0, as well as older versions. The company said it has made available a patch (versions 9.17.1, 9.18.1, and 9.19.1) that can be downloaded via the standard download portal.

It credited Vincent Hutsebaut, Pierre Vivegnis, Jerome Nokin, Roberto Suggi Liverani and Antonin B. of NATO Cyber Security Centre for “their collaboration on this issue.”

Ivanti emphasized that it’s not aware of any customers affected by CVE-2023-41724, and added that “threat actors without a valid TLS client certificate enrolled through EPMM cannot directly exploit this issue on the internet.”

Recently disclosed security flaws in Ivanti software have been subject to exploitation by at least three different suspected China-linked cyber espionage clusters tracked as UNC5221, UNC5325, and UNC3886, according to Mandiant.

The development comes as SonarSource revealed a mutation cross-site scripting (mXSS) flaw impacting an open-source email client called Mailspring aka Nylas Mail (CVE-2023-47479) that could be exploited to bypass sandbox and Content Security Policy (CSP) protections and achieve code execution when a user replies to or forwards a malicious email.

“mXSS takes advantage of that by providing a payload that seems innocent initially when parsing (during the sanitization process) but mutates it to a malicious one when re-parsing it (in the final stage of displaying the content),” security researcher Yaniv Nizry said.

Feb 23, 2024NewsroomRed Teaming / Artificial Intelligence

Microsoft has released an open access automation framework called PyRIT (short for Python Risk Identification Tool) to proactively identify risks in generative artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

The red teaming tool is designed to “enable every organization across the globe to innovate responsibly with the latest artificial intelligence advances,” Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, AI red team lead at Microsoft, said.

The company said PyRIT could be used to assess the robustness of large language model (LLM) endpoints against different harm categories such as fabrication (e.g., hallucination), misuse (e.g., bias), and prohibited content (e.g., harassment).

It can also be used to identify security harms ranging from malware generation to jailbreaking, as well as privacy harms like identity theft.

PyRIT comes with five interfaces: target, datasets, scoring engine, the ability to support multiple attack strategies, and incorporating a memory component that can either take the form of JSON or a database to store the intermediate input and output interactions.

The scoring engine also offers two different options for scoring the outputs from the target AI system, allowing red teamers to use a classical machine learning classifier or leverage an LLM endpoint for self-evaluation.

“The goal is to allow researchers to have a baseline of how well their model and entire inference pipeline is doing against different harm categories and to be able to compare that baseline to future iterations of their model,” Microsoft said.

“This allows them to have empirical data on how well their model is doing today, and detect any degradation of performance based on future improvements.”

That said, the tech giant is careful to emphasize that PyRIT is not a replacement for manual red teaming of generative AI systems and that it complements a red team’s existing domain expertise.

In other words, the tool is meant to highlight the risk “hot spots” by generating prompts that could be used to evaluate the AI system and flag areas that require further investigation.

Microsoft further acknowledged that red teaming generative AI systems requires probing for both security and responsible AI risks simultaneously and that the exercise is more probabilistic while also pointing out the wide differences in generative AI system architectures.

“Manual probing, though time-consuming, is often needed for identifying potential blind spots,” Siva Kumar said. “Automation is needed for scaling but is not a replacement for manual probing.”

The development comes as Protect AI disclosed multiple critical vulnerabilities in popular AI supply chain platforms such as ClearML, Hugging Face, MLflow, and Triton Inference Server that could result in arbitrary code execution and disclosure of sensitive information.

Jan 30, 2024NewsroomVulnerability / Network Security

Juniper Networks has released out-of-band updates to address high-severity flaws in SRX Series and EX Series that could be exploited by a threat actor to take control of susceptible systems.

The vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2024-21619 and CVE-2024-21620, are rooted in the J-Web component and impact all versions of Junos OS. Two other shortcomings, CVE-2023-36846 and CVE-2023-36851, were previously disclosed by the company in August 2023.

• CVE-2024-21619 (CVSS score: 5.3) – A missing authentication vulnerability that could lead to exposure of sensitive configuration information
• CVE-2024-21620 (CVSS score: 8.8) – A cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that could lead to the execution of arbitrary commands with the target’s permissions by means of a specially crafted request

Cybersecurity firm watchTowr Labs has been credited with discovering and reporting the issues. The two vulnerabilities have been addressed in the following versions –

• CVE-2024-21619 – 20.4R3-S9, 21.2R3-S7, 21.3R3-S5, 21.4R3-S6, 22.1R3-S5, 22.2R3-S3, 22.3R3-S2, 22.4R3, 23.2R1-S2, 23.2R2, 23.4R1, and all subsequent releases
• CVE-2024-21620 – 20.4R3-S10, 21.2R3-S8, 21.4R3-S6, 22.1R3-S5, 22.2R3-S3, 22.3R3-S2, 22.4R3-S1, 23.2R2, 23.4R2, and all subsequent releases

As temporary mitigations until the fixes are deployed, the company is recommending that users disable J-Web or restrict access to only trusted hosts.

It’s worth noting that both CVE-2023-36846 and CVE-2023-36851 were added to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog in November 2023 by the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), based on evidence of active exploitation.

Earlier this month, Juniper Networks also shipped fixes to contain a critical vulnerability in the same products (CVE-2024-21591, CVSS score: 9.8) that could enable an attacker to cause a denial-of-service (DoS) or remote code execution and obtain root privileges on the device.

Jan 12, 2024NewsroomDevSecOps / Software security

GitLab has released security updates to address two critical vulnerabilities, including one that could be exploited to take over accounts without requiring any user interaction.

Tracked as CVE-2023-7028, the flaw has been awarded the maximum severity of 10.0 on the CVSS scoring system and could facilitate account takeover by sending password reset emails to an unverified email address.

The DevSecOps platform said the vulnerability is the result of a bug in the email verification process, which allowed users to reset their password through a secondary email address.

It affects all self-managed instances of GitLab Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE) using the below versions –

• 16.1 prior to 16.1.6
• 16.2 prior to 16.2.9
• 16.3 prior to 16.3.7
• 16.4 prior to 16.4.5
• 16.5 prior to 16.5.6
• 16.6 prior to 16.6.4
• 16.7 prior to 16.7.2

GitLab said it addressed the issue in GitLab versions 16.5.6, 16.6.4, and 16.7.2, in addition to backporting the fix to versions 16.1.6, 16.2.9, 16.3.7, and 16.4.5. The company further noted the bug was introduced in 16.1.0 on May 1, 2023.

“Within these versions, all authentication mechanisms are impacted,” GitLab said. “Additionally, users who have two-factor authentication enabled are vulnerable to password reset but not account takeover as their second authentication factor is required to login.”

Also patched by GitLab as part of the latest update is another critical flaw (CVE-2023-5356, CVSS score: 9.6), which permits a user to abuse Slack/Mattermost integrations to execute slash commands as another user.

To mitigate any potential threats, it’s advised to upgrade the instances to a patched version as soon as possible and enable 2FA, if not already, particularly for users with elevated privileges.

Jan 05, 2024NewsroomVulnerability / Network Security

Ivanti has released security updates to address a critical flaw impacting its Endpoint Manager (EPM) solution that, if successfully exploited, could result in remote code execution (RCE) on susceptible servers.

Tracked as CVE-2023-39336, the vulnerability has been rated 9.6 out of 10 on the CVSS scoring system. The shortcoming impacts EPM 2021 and EPM 2022 prior to SU5.

“If exploited, an attacker with access to the internal network can leverage an unspecified SQL injection to execute arbitrary SQL queries and retrieve output without the need for authentication,” Ivanti said in an advisory.

“This can then allow the attacker control over machines running the EPM agent. When the core server is configured to use SQL express, this might lead to RCE on the core server.”

The disclosure arrived weeks after the company resolved nearly two dozen security flaws in its Avalanche enterprise mobile device management (MDM) solution.

Of the 21 issues, 13 are rated critical (CVSS scores: 9.8) and have been characterized as unauthenticated buffer overflows. They have been patched in Avalanche 6.4.2.

“An attacker sending specially crafted data packets to the Mobile Device Server can cause memory corruption which could result in a denial-of-service (DoS) or code execution,” Ivanti said.

While there is no evidence that these aforementioned weaknesses have been exploited in the wild, state-backed actors have, in the past, exploited zero-day flaws (CVE-2023-35078 and CVE-2023-35081) in Ivanti Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) to infiltrate the networks of multiple Norwegian government organizations.

A month later, another critical vulnerability in the Ivanti Sentry product (CVE-2023-38035, CVSS score: 9.8) came under active exploitation as a zero-day.

The U.S. Justice Department (DoJ) has officially announced the disruption of the BlackCat ransomware operation and released a decryption tool that more than 500 affected victims can use to regain access to files locked by the malware.

Court documents show that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) enlisted the help of a confidential human source (CHS) to act as an affiliate for the BlackCat group and gain access to a web panel used for managing the gang’s victims, in what’s a case of hacking the hackers.

The confiscation effort involved collaboration and assistance from multiple law enforcement agencies from the U.S., Germany, Denmark, Australia, the U.K., Spain, Switzerland, and Austria.

BlackCat, also called ALPHV, GOLD BLAZER, and Noberus, first emerged in December 2021 and has since gone on to be the second most prolific ransomware-as-a-service variant in the world after LockBit. It’s also the first Rust-language-based ransomware strain spotted in the wild.

The development puts an end to speculations of a rumored law enforcement action after its dark web leak portal went offline on December 7, only to resurface five days later with just a single victim.

The FBI said it worked with dozens of victims in the U.S. to implement the decryptor, saving them from ransom demands totaling about $68 million, and that it also gained insight into the ransomware’s computer network, allowing it to collect 946 public/private key pairs used to host the TOR sites operated by the group and dismantle them.

One important thing to note here is that creating a hidden service with the .onion URL on the TOR anonymization network generates a unique key pair comprising a private and public key (aka the identifier) that can be used to access and control the URL.

An actor who is in possession of the key pair can, therefore, broadcast a new route redirecting traffic for the .onion site to a different server under their control.

BlackCat, like several other ransomware gangs, uses a ransomware-as-a-service model involving a mix of core developers and affiliates, who rent out the payload and are responsible for identifying and attacking high-value victim institutions.

It also employs the double extortion scheme to put pressure on victims to pay up by exfiltrating sensitive data prior to encryption.

“BlackCat affiliates have gained initial access to victim networks through a number of methods, including leveraging compromised user credentials to gain initial access to the victim system,” the DoJ said.

In all, the financially motivated actor is estimated to have compromised the networks of more than 1,000 victims across the world to earn nearly $300 million in illegal revenues as of September 2023.

Image Source: Resecurity

If anything, the takedown has proven to be a blessing in disguise for rival groups like LockBit, which is already capitalizing on the situation by actively recruiting displaced affiliates, offering its data leak site to resume victim negotiations.

Speaking to malware research group vx-underground, a BlackCat spokesperson said “they have moved their servers and blogs,” claiming that the law enforcement agencies only had access to a “stupid old key” for the old blog site which was deleted by the group a long time ago and has since not been used.

The threat actor’s newest leak website remains operational as of writing. “On December 13, the group published the first victim to its new leak site,” Secureworks said. “As of December 19, five victims were posted to the new site, demonstrating the group retained some operational capacity.”

However, hours after the takedown, the BlackCat group took steps to “unseize” the main leak site using the same set of cryptographic keys necessary to host the hidden service on the TOR network and post its own seizure notice.

It has also given affiliates the green light to infiltrate critical infrastructure entities such as hospitals and nuclear power plants as well as other targets with the exception of those inside the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) as a retaliatory measure. The FBI has since re-seized the website.

“The threats seem like ‘now you’ve done it’ posturing but, this group has a documented history of attacking healthcare and energy infrastructure targets already, so it feels like bluster,” Secureworks Counter Threat Unit (CTU) told The Hacker News.

“Given that such activity appears more likely to bring law enforcement attention – which is why many groups explicitly avoid it – it seems unlikely that affiliates will choose to specifically target such organizations, especially as ransomware is a crime of opportunity for the most part and based on available access to victim networks.”

“That said, some less risk averse affiliates may be more willing to target energy and healthcare organizations. The flip side is that it is just as likely that the uncertainty caused by the law enforcement disruption will drive affiliates away from BlackCat into the arms of other ransomware operators, such as LockBit. Such interventions breed distrust and paranoia among ransomware group members and affiliates.”

In a conversation with vx-underground, a LockBit administrator described the situation as “unfortunate” and that security loopholes in their infrastructure are a primary threat to “my business.”

(The story was updated after publication to include additional information about the infrastructure seizure.)