Summary:
The Russian APT group GruesomeLarch executed a novel cyber-espionage technique known as the Nearest Neighbor Attack, targeting organizations in proximity to their intended victim by exploiting Wi-Fi networks. This attack involved living-off-the-land tactics and a zero-day privilege escalation vulnerability, specifically aimed at Ukrainian-related projects just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.…
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Author: Volexity
“`html Short Summary:
StormBamboo compromised an ISP to poison DNS responses, enabling the installation of malware on victim machines via insecure software update mechanisms. The malware includes new variants of MACMA and POCOSTICK, with post-exploitation activities involving a malicious browser extension named RELOADEXT for data exfiltration.…
Note: Volexity has reported the activity described in this blog and details of the impacted systems to CERT at the National Informatics Centre (NIC) in India.
In 2024, Volexity identified a cyber-espionage campaign undertaken by a suspected Pakistan-based threat actor that Volexity currently tracks under the alias UTA0137.…
Last month, Volexity reported on its discovery of zero-day, in-the-wild exploitation of CVE-2024-3400 in the GlobalProtect feature of Palo Alto Networks PAN-OS by a threat actor Volexity tracks as UTA0218. Palo Alto Networks released an advisory and threat protection signature for the vulnerability with 48 hours of Volexity’s disclosure of the issue to Palo Alto Networks, with official patches and fixes following soon after.…
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.…
Through its managed security services offerings, Volexity routinely identifies spear-phishing campaigns targeting its customers. One persistent threat actor, whose campaigns Volexity frequently observes, is the Iranian-origin threat actor CharmingCypress (aka Charming Kitten, APT42, TA453). Volexity assesses that CharmingCypress is tasked with collecting political intelligence against foreign targets, particularly focusing on think tanks, NGOs, and journalists.…
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.…
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.…
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 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.…
Volexity has identified several long-running and currently active campaigns undertaken by the threat actor Volexity tracks as EvilBamboo (formerly named Evil Eye) targeting Tibetan, Uyghur, and Taiwanese individuals and organizations. These targets represent three of the Five Poisonous Groups of Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Volexity has tracked the activities of EvilBamboo for more than five years and continues to observe new campaigns from this threat actor.…
Volexity works with many individuals and organizations often subjected to sophisticated and highly targeted spear-phishing campaigns from a variety of nation-state-level threat actors. In the last few years, Volexity has observed threat actors dramatically increase the level of effort they put into compromising credentials or systems of individual targets.…
[Update: Following additional analysis of shellcode used in ICONIC, in conjunction with other observations from the wider security community, Volexity now attributes the activity described in this post to the Lazarus threat actor. Specifically, in addition to other claims of similarity, the shellcode sequence {E8 00 00 00 00 59 49 89 C8 48 81 C1 58 06 00 00} appears to have been only used in the ICONIC loader and the APPLEJEUS malware, which is known to be linked to Lazarus.…
In the ever-changing cybersecurity landscape, threat actors are forced to evolve and continually modify the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) they employ to launch and sustain attacks successfully. They are continually modifying their malware and command-execution methods to evade detection. The attackers in these cases are attempting to get a step ahead of security software at the most basic level.…