Pierluigi Paganini
March 01, 2024
The Five Eyes intelligence alliance issued a joint cybersecurity advisory warning of threat actors exploiting known vulnerabilities in Ivanti Connect Secure and Ivanti Policy Secure gateways.
The advisory provides details about the exploitation in the wild of Connect Secure and Policy Secure vulnerabilities , , and . Multiple threat actors are chaining these issues to bypass authentication, craft malicious requests, and execute arbitrary commands with elevated privileges.
The CISA’s advisory also warns that the Ivanti Integrity Checker Tool is not sufficient to detect a compromise. Government experts also reported that the exploitation of the flaw can allow threat actors to maintain root-level persistence.
“The advisory describes cyber threat actor exploitation of multiple previously identified Connect Secure and Policy Secure vulnerabilities—namely , , and —which threat actors can exploit in a chain to bypass authentication, craft malicious requests, and execute arbitrary commands with elevated privileges.” . “Additionally, the advisory describes two key CISA findings:
The advisory includes mitigations and indicators of compromise (IOCs).
Below are the descriptions of the vulnerabilities included in the advisory:
The software firm also addressed the following two additional high-severity vulnerabilities:
“The authoring organizations encourage network defenders to (1) assume that user and service account credentials stored within the affected Ivanti VPN appliances are likely compromised, (2) hunt for malicious activity on their networks using the detection methods and indicators of compromise (IOCs) within this advisory, (3) run Ivanti’s most recent external ICT, and (4) apply available patching guidance provided by Ivanti as version updates become available.” continues the advisory. “If a potential compromise is detected, organizations should collect and analyze logs and artifacts for malicious activity and apply the incident response recommendations within this advisory.”
In response to the joint advisory and its findings, Ivanti published an update stating that technical findings observed in CISA’s lab have not been observed in real-world scenarios or considered viable in live customer environments. CISA and other government agencies suggest that defenders utilize Ivanti’s recently released external Integrity Checker Tool (ICT), made available on 27th February.
“As part of our exhaustive investigation into the recent attack against our customers, Ivanti and Mandiant released findings today regarding evolving threat actor tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs). These findings were identified in the ongoing analysis of the previously disclosed vulnerabilities affecting Ivanti Connect Secure, Policy Secure and ZTA gateways, and include potential persistence techniques that we are monitoring, even though to date they have not been deployed successfully in the wild.”
“Importantly, this is not a new CVE, and we and our security and government partners are not aware of any instances of successful threat actor persistence following implementation of security updates and factory resets.“
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