Monthly Briefing: Breaches Due To Unpatched Vulnerabilities

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Jan 31, 2025

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32% of ransomware attacks start with an unpatched vulnerability, and these have the greatest business impact. In our weekly top 5 hacker-relevant vulnerabilities, we have been reporting on vulnerabilities, which are pertinent to threat actors. In this ongoing series, we will provide monthly recaps on selected security breaches associated with the reported vulnerabilities.

January 2025

  • Breach Victim: AT&T and Verizon

  • Victim Whois: AT&T Inc., headquartered in Dallas, Texas, is a multinational conglomerate and the largest telecommunications provider in the United States. The company delivers mobile, broadband, and enterprise solutions to millions of customers globally. Verizon Communications Inc., based in New York City, is a leading telecommunications conglomerate and a key component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, providing wireless services, broadband connectivity, and fiber-optic solutions to businesses and consumers worldwide

  • Breach Date: Q4 2024

  • Threat Actor: Salt Typhoon is a state-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) group known for conducting cyber espionage and targeting critical infrastructure

  • Impact: Unauthorized access to internal corporate networks, potentially exposing sensitive customer data and confidential internal communications. While both AT&T and Verizon have stated that their core networks remain secure, forensic investigations and threat assessments are ongoing to determine the full scope of the breach

  • Vulnerability: Selected vulnerabilities associated with Salt Typhoon are:

    • CVE-2024-21887: Ivanti Connect Secure and Ivanti Policy Secure Command Injection Vulnerability
    • CVE-2023-46805: Ivanti Connect Secure and Ivanti Policy Secure Authentication Bypass Vulnerability
    • CVE-2023-48788: FortiClient Enterprise Management Server (FortiClientEMS) SQL Injection Vulnerability
    • CVE-2022-3236: Sophos Firewall Code Injection Vulnerability
    • CVE-2021-26855: Microsoft Exchange Server Server-Side Request Forgery Vulnerability (ProxyLogon)
  • Backstory: AT&T and Verizon reaffirm network security following Salt Typhoon cyber intrusion

December 2024

  • Breach Victim: U.S. Treasury Department

  • Victim Whois: The U.S. Treasury Department is the executive agency responsible for promoting economic prosperity and ensuring the financial security of the United States. It manages federal finances, collects taxes, produces currency, and formulates economic policy. The department also oversees the enforcement of federal finance and tax laws. Established in 1789, it plays a crucial role in advising the President on financial matters and maintaining the stability of the U.S. financial system and combating financial crimes

  • Breach Date: Q4 2024

  • Threat Actor: “Based on available indicators, the incident has been attributed to a Chinese state-sponsored Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actor”, Aditi Hardikar, assistant secretary for management at the U.S. Treasury

  • Impact: Compromise of workstations and access to documents. The U.S. Treasury deemed the breach a “major incident”, see Chinese Hackers Accessed US Treasury Workstations in ‘Major’ Cybersecurity Incident

  • Vulnerability: BeyondTrust Privileged Remote Access (PRA) and Remote Support (RS) | Unauthenticated Remote Attack | Revoked API Key and Command Injection Vulnerabilities | CVE-2024-12356, CVE-2024-12686

  • Backstory: BeyondTrust suffering a cyberattack in early December

November 2024

  • Breach Victims: Delta Air Lines & Amazon.com

  • Victim Whois: Delta Air Lines is a major American airline, founded in 1925 and headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, with a global network of over 5,000 flights daily. Amazon.com, founded in 1994 and headquartered in Seattle, Washington, is a leading e-commerce and technology company known for its vast online marketplace and cloud services (AWS). Both companies employ hundreds of thousands of people globally

  • Breach Date: Q4 2024

  • Threat Actor: Nam3L3ss

  • Breach Impact: Exfiltrating employee data, including contact information and organizational structures

  • Threat Actor Initial Access: An unpatched MOVEit Transfer database vulnerable to CVE-2023-34362. The latter is a SQL injection vulnerability that allows unauthenticated access to the MOVEit file transfer utility’s database to remote attackers; see details, PoC

  • Threat Actor Relevant Vulnerabilities: Selected vulnerabilities associated with Nam3L3ss: CVE-2023-34362 (MOVEit Transfer), among others. The actor claims to rely primarily on any exposed sources, including ransomware leaks

October 2024

  • Breach Victim: BORN Group

  • Victim Whois: BORN Group Inc. is a global digital marketing, commerce, and technology services provider specializing in end-to-end digital transformations for enterprises. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in New York, BORN Group has offices in London, Hong Kong, Singapore and India. BORN Group employs over 1,100 people and has clients like Google, Tata, Red Bull, and TAG Heuer. In 2019, BORN Group was acquired by IT services firm Tech Mahindra

  • Breach Date: Q3 2024

  • Threat Actor: IntelBroker

  • Breach Impact: Exfiltrating sensitive data from multiple clients. Additionally, IntelBroker claims to have compromised the Market database as part of this breach, exposing the personal information of approximately 196,000 individuals

  • Threat Actor Initial Access: An exposed Jenkins server vulnerable to CVE-2024-23897. The latter allows unauthenticated read of arbitrary files on the Jenkins controller file system. The threat actor used this vulnerability to steal SSH keys from the Jenkins server, which were further used to carry on the attack via the GitHub repository of the BORN group; see details

  • Threat Actor Relevant Vulnerabilities: Selected vulnerabilities associated with IntelBroker: CVE-2024-23897 (Jenkins), CVE-2024-23897 (Postgresql)

September 2024

  • Breach Victim: Deloitte

  • Victim Whois: Deloitte is one of the world’s largest professional services firms, providing consulting, audit, tax, and advisory services to businesses and governments globally. It operates across various industries, helping clients address challenges in areas like technology, strategy, and operations. In 2023, Deloitte generated approximately $64.9 billion in global revenue

  • Breach Date: Q3 2024

  • Impact: The threat actor claims to have compromised sensitive information such as email addresses, internal settings, and communications between intranet users

  • Attack Entry Point: An exposed Apache Solr to the Internet with default configurations leading to unauthorized access up to remote code execution

  • Threat Relevant Vulnerabilities: Selected vulnerabilities affecting Apache Solr: Default credentials, CVE-2021–44228, CVE-2019-17558, CVE-2019-12409

August 2024

  • Breach Victim: City of Helsinki

  • Affected Unit: Education division

  • Breach Date: Q2 2024

  • Official Statement About Root Cause: “A hotfix patch has been available to eliminate this vulnerability, but it is not currently known why this hotfix was not installed on the server”, says the City of Helsinki’s Chief Digital Officer Hannu Heikkinen

  • Attack Entry Point: Unpatched vulnerability in a remote access server. Details regarding the specific product and vulnerability have not been made public

  • Threat Relevant Vulnerabilities: Selected vulnerabilities affecting remote access products like VPNs and OpenSSH: CVE-2024-21887, CVE-2024-6387, CVE-2024-21888, CVE-2024-24919, CVE-2023-27997

July 2024

  • Breach Victim: U.S. Cyber Defense Agency

  • Affected Unit: CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is a component of the United States Department of Homeland Security responsible for cybersecurity and infrastructure protection across all levels of government, coordinating cybersecurity programs with U.S. states, and improving the government’s cybersecurity protections against private and nation-state hackers

  • Breach Date: Q1 2024

  • Impact: Access to critical information about the interdependency of U.S. infrastructure, and the chemical security assessment tool, which houses private sector chemical security plans

  • Vulnerability: Ivanti Connect Secure and Policy Secure Gateway | Authentication Bypass and Command Injection Vulnerabilities Leading to Remote Code Execution, Unauthenticated Remote Attack | CVE-2023-46805, CVE-2024-21887, CVE-2024-21893

June 2024

  • Breach Victim: United Health Group

  • Affected Business Unit: United Health Group’s subsidiary Optum. United Health Group is a health insurance company with a presence across all 50 U.S. states. The organization is the world’s largest healthcare company by revenue. United Health Group formed Optum by merging its existing pharmacy and care delivery services into the single Optum brand. In 2017, Optum accounted for 44 percent of UnitedHealth Group’s profits and as of 2019, Optum’s revenues have surpassed 100 billion $

  • Breach Date: Q1 2024

  • Impact: Service outage (a.o. in billing) affecting payment processing, care coordination, and data analytics systems in U.S. hospitals, clinics, and pharmacies

  • Vulnerability: ConnectWise ScreenConnect | Path Traversal and Authentication Bypass Vulnerabilities Leading to Remote Code Execution, Unauthenticated Remote Attack | CVE-2024-1708 & CVE-2024-1709

May 2024

  • Breach Victim: Schneider Electric

  • Affected Business Unit: Schneider Electric’s sustainability division. The latter provides software and consulting services to enterprises and serves a broad swath of organizations in more than 100 countries, including 30% of the Fortune 500, as of 2021

  • Breach Date: Q1 2024

  • Impact: Data breach involving terabytes of data and ransom demand

  • Vulnerability: Fortinet VPN | Fortinet FortiOS Heap-Based Buffer Overflow, Authentication Bypass, and Path Traversal Vulnerabilties | CVE-2023-2799 & CVE-2022-41328 & CVE-2022-42475 & CVE-2022-40684, Qlik Sense Enterprise | Improper Validation of HTTP Request Handler in Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows Leading to Arbitrary Code Execution, Unauthenticated Remote Attack | CVE-2023-41265 & CVE-2023-41266 & CVE-2023-48365

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