Volexity would like to thank Palo Alto Networks for their partnership, cooperation, and rapid response to this critical issue. Their research can be found here. On April 10, 2024, Volexity identified zero-day exploitation of a vulnerability found within the GlobalProtect feature of Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS at one of its network security monitoring (NSM) customers. Volexity received alerts regarding suspect network traffic emanating from the customer’s firewall. A subsequent investigation determined the device had been compromised. The following day, April 11, 2024, Volexity observed further, identical exploitation at another one of its NSM customers by the same threat actor. The threat actor, which Volexity tracks under the alias UTA0218, was able to remotely exploit the firewall device, create a reverse shell, and download further tools onto the device. The attacker focused on exporting configuration data from the devices, and then leveraging it as an entry point to move laterally within […]
edge device
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Zero-Day Exploitation of Unauthenticated Remote Code Execution Vulnerability in GlobalProtect (CVE-2024-3400)
April 12, 2024
by Volexity Threat Research
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How Memory Forensics Revealed Exploitation of Ivanti Connect Secure VPN Zero-Day Vulnerabilities
February 1, 2024
by Andrew Case, Michael Hale Ligh, Volexity Volcano Team
In a recent series of blog posts related to two zero-day vulnerabilities in Ivanti Connect Secure VPN, Volexity shared details of active in-the-wild exploitation; provided an update on how exploitation had gone worldwide; and reported observations of how malware and modifications to the built-in Integrity Checker Tool were used to evade detection. A critical piece of Volexity’s initial investigation involved collecting and analyzing a memory sample. As noted in the first blog post of the three-part series (emphasis added): “…Volexity analyzed one of the collected memory samples and uncovered the exploit chain used by the attacker. Volexity discovered two different zero-day exploits which were being chained together to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE). Through forensic analysis of the memory sample, Volexity was able to recreate two proof-of-concept exploits that allowed full unauthenticated command execution on the ICS VPN appliance.” Collect & Analyze Memory ASAP Volexity regularly prioritizes memory forensics […]
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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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DriftingCloud: Zero-Day Sophos Firewall Exploitation and an Insidious Breach
June 15, 2022
by Steven Adair, Tom 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, Tom 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 […]