Mirai Botnet Exploits Ivanti Connect Secure Flaws for Malicious Payload Delivery
Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) devices are under attack! Two critical vulnerabilities are being exploited to deploy the notorious Mirai botnet.
Threat Actors Exploit Multiple Vulnerabilities in Ivanti Connect Connect and Policy Secure Gateways | CISA
Based upon the authoring organizations’ observations during incident response activities and available industry reporting, as supplemented by CISA’s research findings, the authoring organizations recommend that the safest course of action for network defenders is to assume a sophisticated threat actor may deploy rootkit level persistence on a device that has been reset and lay dormant for an arbitrary amount of time. For example, as outlined in PRC State-Sponsored Actors Compromise and Maintain Persistent Access to U.S. Critical Infrastructure), sophisticated actors may remain silent on compromised networks for long periods. The authoring organizations strongly urge all organizations to consider the significant risk of adversary access to, and persistence on, Ivanti Connect Secure and Ivanti Policy Secure gateways when determining whether to continue operating these devices in an enterprise environment.
How Memory Forensics Revealed Exploitation of Ivanti Connect Secure VPN Zero-Day Vulnerabilities
Volexity regularly prioritizes memory forensics when responding to incidents. This strategy improves investigative capabilities in many ways across Windows, Linux, and macOS. This blog post highlights some specific ways memory forensics played a key role in determining how two zero-day vulnerabilities were being chained together to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution in Ivanti Connect Secure VPN devices.
Ivanti Connect Secure VPN Exploitation Goes Global
On January 10, 2024, Volexity publicly shared details of targeted attacks by UTA00178 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 vulnerabilities. Since publication of these details, Volexity has continued to monitor its existing customers for exploitation. Volexity has also been contacted by multiple organizations that saw signs of compromise by way of mismatched file detections. Volexity has been actively working multiple new cases of organizations with compromised ICS VPN appliances.
Guarding the Bridge: New Attack Vectors in Azure AD Connect
By researching Azure AD Connect components, Sygnia was able to discover several attack vectors for extracting Connector credentials and domain users’ NT hashes, while avoiding common security solutions.