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posted by martyb on Tuesday February 18 2020, @05:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the Hack-the-planet! dept.

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Iranian hackers have targeted Pulse Secure, Fortinet, Palo Alto Networks, and Citrix VPNs to hack into large companies.

2019 will be remembered as the year when major security bugs were disclosed in a large number of enterprise VPN servers, such as those sold by Pulse Secure, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, and Citrix.

A new report published today reveals that Iran's government-backed hacking units have made a top priority last year to exploit VPN bugs as soon as they became public in order to infiltrate and plant backdoors in companies all over the world.

According to a report from cyber-security firm ClearSky, Iranian hackers have targeted companies "from the IT, Telecommunication, Oil and Gas, Aviation, Government, and Security sectors."

[...] ClearSky says that "Iranian APT[*] groups have developed good technical offensive capabilities and are able to exploit 1-day vulnerabilities in relatively short periods of time."

In some instances, ClearSky says it observed Iranian groups exploiting VPN flaws within hours after the bugs been publicly disclosed.

[...] ClearSky says that in 2019, Iranian groups were quick to weaponize vulnerabilities disclosed in the Pulse Secure "Connect" VPN (CVE-2019-11510), the Fortinet FortiOS VPN (CVE-2018-13379), and Palo Alto Networks "Global Protect" VPN (CVE-2019-1579).

Attacks against these systems began last summer, when details about the bugs were made public, but they've also continued in 2020.

Furthermore, as details about other VPN flaws were made public, Iranian groups also included these exploits in their attacks (namely CVE-2019-19781, a vulnerability disclosed in Citrix "ADC" VPNs).

[...] According to the ClearSky report, the purpose of these attacks is to breach enterprise networks, move laterally throughout their internal systems, and plant backdoors to exploit at a later date.

While the first stage (breaching) of their attacks targeted VPNs, the second phase (lateral movement) involved a comprehensive collection of tools and techniques, showing just how advanced these Iranian hacking units have become in recent years.

For example, hackers abused a long-known technique to gain admin rights on Windows systems via the "Sticky Keys" accessibility tool [1, 2, 3, 4].

They also exploited open-sourced hacking tools like JuicyPotato and Invoke the Hash, but they also used legitimate sysadmin software like Putty, Plink, Ngrok, Serveo, or FRP.

[...] Furthermore, taking into account the conclusions of the ClearSky report, we can also expect that Iranian hackers will also pounce on the opportunity to exploit new VPN flaws once they become public.

This means that we can expect that Iranian hackers will most likely target SonicWall SRA and SMA VPN servers in the future after earlier this week security researchers have published details about six vulnerabilities impacting these two products.

[*] APT - Advanced Persistent Threat — a term often used to describe nation-state hacking units

Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/iranian-hackers-have-been-hacking-vpn-servers-to-plant-backdoors-in-companies-around-the-world/


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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 18 2020, @07:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 18 2020, @07:23PM (#959632)

    The Crack of Doom.

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