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Microsoft Corp. today released software updates to quash 130 security bugs in its Windows operating systems and related software, including at least five flaws that are already seeing active exploitation. Meanwhile, Apple customers have their own zero-day woes again this month: On Monday, Apple issued (and then quickly pulled) an emergency update to fix a zero-day vulnerability that is being exploited on MacOS and iOS devices.
On July 10, Apple pushed a “Rapid Security Response” update to fix a code execution flaw in the Webkit browser component built into iOS, iPadOS, and macOS Ventura. Almost as soon as the patch went out, Apple pulled the software because it was reportedly causing problems loading certain websites. MacRumors says Apple will likely re-release the patches when the glitches have been addressed.
Launched in May, Apple’s Rapid Security Response updates are designed to address time-sensitive vulnerabilities, and this is the second month Apple has used it. July marks the sixth month this year that Apple has released updates for zero-day vulnerabilities — those that get exploited by malware or malcontents before there is an official patch available.
If you rely on Apple devices and don’t have automatic updates enabled, please take a moment to check the patch status of your various iDevices. The latest security update that includes the fix for the zero-day bug should be available in iOS/iPadOS 16.5.1, macOS 13.4.1, and Safari 16.5.2.
On the Windows side, there are at least four vulnerabilities patched this month that earned high CVSS (badness) scores and that are already being exploited in active attacks, according to Microsoft. They include CVE-2023-32049, which is a hole in Windows SmartScreen that lets malware bypass security warning prompts; and CVE-2023-35311 allows attackers to bypass security features in Microsoft Outlook.
The two other zero-day threats this month for Windows are both privilege escalation flaws. CVE-2023-32046 affects a core Windows component called MSHTML, which is used by Windows and other applications, like Office, Outlook and Skype. CVE-2023-36874 is an elevation of privilege bug in the Windows Error Reporting Service.
Many security experts expected Microsoft to address a fifth zero-day flaw — CVE-2023-36884 — a remote code execution weakness in Office and Windows.
“Surprisingly, there is no patch yet for one of the five zero-day vulnerabilities,” said Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7. “Microsoft is actively investigating publicly disclosed vulnerability, and promises to update the advisory as soon as further guidance is available.”
Barnett notes that Microsoft links exploitation of this vulnerability with Storm-0978, the software giant’s name for a cybercriminal group based out of Russia that is identified by the broader security community as RomCom.
“Exploitation of CVE-2023-36884 may lead to installation of the eponymous RomCom trojan or other malware,” Barnett said. “[Microsoft] suggests that RomCom / Storm-0978 is operating in support of Russian intelligence operations. The same threat actor has also been associated with ransomware attacks targeting a wide array of victims.”
Microsoft’s advisory on CVE-2023-36884 is pretty sparse, but it does include a Windows registry hack that should help mitigate attacks on this vulnerability. Microsoft has also published a blog post about phishing campaigns tied to Storm-0978 and to the exploitation of this flaw.
Barnett said it’s while it’s possible that a patch will be issued as part of next month’s Patch Tuesday, Microsoft Office is deployed just about everywhere, and this threat actor is making waves.
“Admins should be ready for an out-of-cycle security update for CVE-2023-36884,” he said.
Microsoft also today released new details about how it plans to address the existential threat of malware that is cryptographically signed by…wait for it….Microsoft.
In late 2022, security experts at Sophos, Trend Micro and Cisco warned that ransomware criminals were using signed, malicious drivers in an attempt to evade antivirus and endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools.
In a blog post today, Sophos’s Andrew Brandt wrote that Sophos identified 133 malicious Windows driver files that were digitally signed since April 2021, and found 100 of those were actually signed by Microsoft. Microsoft said today it is taking steps to ensure those malicious driver files can no longer run on Windows computers.
As KrebsOnSecurity noted in last month’s story on malware signing-as-a-service, code-signing certificates are supposed to help authenticate the identity of software publishers, and provide cryptographic assurance that a signed piece of software has not been altered or tampered with. Both of these qualities make stolen or ill-gotten code-signing certificates attractive to cybercriminal groups, who prize their ability to add stealth and longevity to malicious software.
Dan Goodin at Ars Technica contends that whatever Microsoft may be doing to keep maliciously signed drivers from running on Windows is being bypassed by hackers using open source software that is popular with video game cheaters.
“The software comes in the form of two software tools that are available on GitHub,” Goodin explained. “Cheaters use them to digitally sign malicious system drivers so they can modify video games in ways that give the player an unfair advantage. The drivers clear the considerable hurdle required for the cheat code to run inside the Windows kernel, the fortified layer of the operating system reserved for the most critical and sensitive functions.”
Meanwhile, researchers at Cisco’s Talos security team found multiple Chinese-speaking threat groups have repurposed the tools—one apparently called “HookSignTool” and the other “FuckCertVerifyTimeValidity.”
“Instead of using the kernel access for cheating, the threat actors use it to give their malware capabilities it wouldn’t otherwise have,” Goodin said.
For a closer look at the patches released by Microsoft today, check out the always-thorough Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.
And as ever, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. If you encounter any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
The U.S. government agency in charge of improving the nation’s cybersecurity posture is ordering all federal agencies to take new measures to restrict access to Internet-exposed networking equipment. The directive comes amid a surge in attacks targeting previously unknown vulnerabilities in widely used security and networking appliances.
Under a new order from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), federal agencies will have 14 days to respond to any reports from CISA about misconfigured or Internet-exposed networking equipment. The directive applies to any networking devices — such as firewalls, routers and load balancers — that allow remote authentication or administration.
The order requires federal departments to limit access so that only authorized users on an agency’s local or internal network can reach the management interfaces of these devices. CISA’s mandate follows a slew of recent incidents wherein attackers exploited zero-day flaws in popular networking products to conduct ransomware and cyber espionage attacks on victim organizations.
Earlier today, incident response firm Mandiant revealed that since at least October 2022, Chinese cyber spies have been exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in many email security gateway (ESG) appliances sold by California-based Barracuda Networks to hoover up email from organizations using these devices.
Barracuda was alerted to the exploitation of a zero-day in its products in mid-May, and two days later the company pushed a security update to address the flaw in all affected devices. But last week, Barracuda took the highly unusual step of offering to replace compromised ESGs, evidently in response to malware that altered the systems in such a fundamental way that they could no longer be secured remotely with software updates.
According to Mandiant, a previously unidentified Chinese hacking group was responsible for exploiting the Barracuda flaw, and appeared to be searching through victim organization email records for accounts “belonging to individuals working for a government with political or strategic interest to [China] while this victim government was participating in high-level, diplomatic meetings with other countries.”
When security experts began raising the alarm about a possible zero-day in Barracuda’s products, the Chinese hacking group altered their tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) in response to Barracuda’s efforts to contain and remediate the incident, Mandiant found.
Mandiant said the attackers will continue to change their tactics and malware, “especially as network defenders continue to take action against this adversary and their activity is further exposed by the infosec community.”
Meanwhile, this week we learned more details about the ongoing exploitation of a zero-day flaw in a broad range of virtual private networking (VPN) products made by Fortinet — devices many organizations rely on to facilitate remote network access for employees.
On June 11, Fortinet released a half-dozen security updates for its FortiOS firmware, including a weakness that researchers said allows an attacker to run malware on virtually any Fortinet SSL VPN appliance. The researchers found that just being able to reach the management interface for a vulnerable Fortinet SSL VPN appliance was enough to completely compromise the devices.
“This is reachable pre-authentication, on every SSL VPN appliance,” French vulnerability researcher Charles Fol tweeted. “Patch your #Fortigate.”
In details published on June 12, Fortinet confirmed that one of the vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-27997) is being actively exploited. The company said it discovered the weakness in an internal code audit that began in January 2023 — when it learned that Chinese hackers were exploiting a different zero-day flaw in its products.
Shodan.io, the search engine made for finding Internet of Things devices, reports that there are currently more than a half-million vulnerable Fortinet devices reachable via the public Internet.
The new cybersecurity directive from CISA orders agencies to remove any networking device management interfaces from the internet by making them only accessible from an internal enterprise network (CISA recommends an isolated management network). CISA also says agencies should “deploy capabilities, as part of a Zero Trust Architecture, that enforce access control to the interface through a policy enforcement point separate from the interface itself (preferred action).”
Security experts say CISA’s directive highlights the reality that cyberspies and ransomware gangs are making it increasingly risky for organizations to expose any devices to the public Internet, because these groups have strong incentives to probe such devices for previously unknown security vulnerabilities.
The most glaring example of this dynamic can be seen in the frequency with which ransomware groups have discovered and pounced on zero-day flaws in widely-used file transfer applications. One ransomware gang in particular — Cl0p — has repeatedly exploited zero day bugs in various file transfer appliances to extort tens of millions of dollars from hundreds of ransomware victims.
On February 2, KrebsOnSecurity broke the news that attackers were exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in the GoAnywhere file transfer appliance by Fortra. By the time security updates were available to fix the vulnerability, Cl0p had already used it to steal data from more than a hundred organizations running Fortra’s appliance.
According to CISA, on May 27, Cl0p began exploiting a previously unknown flaw in MOVEit Transfer, a popular Internet-facing file transfer application. MOVEit parent Progress Software has since released security updates to address the weakness, but Cl0p claims to have already used it to compromise hundreds of victim organizations. TechCrunch has been tracking the fallout from victim organizations, which range from banks and insurance providers to universities and healthcare entities.
The always on-point weekly security news podcast Risky Business has recently been urging organizations to jettison any and all FTP appliances, noting that Cl0p (or another crime gang) is likely to visit the same treatment on other FTP appliance vendors.
But that sound advice doesn’t exactly scale for mid-tier networking devices like Barracuda ESGs or Fortinet SSL VPNs, which are particularly prominent in small to mid-sized organizations.
“It’s not like FTP services, you can’t tell an enterprise [to] turn off the VPN [because] the productivity hit of disconnecting the VPN is terminal, it’s a non-starter,” Risky Business co-host Adam Boileau said on this week’s show. “So how to mitigate the impact of having to use a domain-joined network appliance at the edge of your network that is going to get zero-day in it? There’s no good answer.”
Risky Business founder Patrick Gray said the COVID-19 pandemic breathed new life into entire classes of networking appliances that rely on code which was never designed with today’s threat models in mind.
“In the years leading up to the pandemic, the push towards identity-aware proxies and zero trust everything and moving away from this type of equipment was gradual, but it was happening,” Gray said. “And then COVID-19 hit and everybody had to go work from home, and there really was one option to get going quickly — which was to deploy VPN concentrators with enterprise features.”
Gray said the security industry had been focused on building the next generation of remote access tools that are more security-hardened, but when the pandemic hit organizations scrambled to cobble together whatever they could.
“The only stuff available in the market was all this old crap that is not QA’d properly, and every time you shake them CVEs fall out,” Gray remarked, calling the pandemic, “a shot in the arm” to companies like Fortinet and Barracuda.
“They sold so many VPNs through the pandemic and this is the hangover,” Gray said. “COVID-19 extended the life of these companies and technologies, and that’s unfortunate.”
Microsoft Corp. today released software updates to fix dozens of security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. This month’s relatively light patch load has another added bonus for system administrators everywhere: It appears to be the first Patch Tuesday since March 2022 that isn’t marred by the active exploitation of a zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft’s products.
June’s Patch Tuesday features updates to plug at least 70 security holes, and while none of these are reported by Microsoft as exploited in-the-wild yet, Redmond has flagged several in particular as “more likely to be exploited.”
Top of the list on that front is CVE-2023-29357, which is a “critical” bug in Microsoft SharePoint Server that can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker on the same network. This SharePoint flaw earned a CVSS rating of 9.8 (10.0 is the most dangerous).
“An attacker able to gain admin access to an internal SharePoint server could do a lot of harm to an organization,” said Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs. “Gaining access to sensitive and privileged documents, stealing and deleting documents as part of a ransomware attack or replacing real documents with malicious copies to further infect users in the organization.”
There are at least three other vulnerabilities fixed this month that earned a collective 9.8 CVSS score, and they all concern a widely-deployed component called the Windows Pragmatic General Multicast (PGM), which is used for delivering multicast data — such as video streaming or online gaming.
Security firm Action1 says all three bugs (CVE-2023-32015, CVE-2023-32014, and CVE-2023-29363) can be exploited over the network without requiring any privileges or user interaction, and affected systems include all versions of Windows Server 2008 and later, as well as Windows 10 and later.
It wouldn’t be a proper Patch Tuesday if we also didn’t also have scary security updates for organizations still using Microsoft Exchange for email. Breen said this month’s Exchange bugs (CVE-2023-32031 and CVE-2023-28310) closely mirror the vulnerabilities identified as part of ProxyNotShell exploits, where an authenticated user in the network could exploit a vulnerability in the Exchange to gain code execution on the server.
Breen said while Microsoft’s patch notes indicate that an attacker must already have gained access to a vulnerable host in the network, this is typically achieved through social engineering attacks with spear phishing to gain initial access to a host before searching for other internal targets.
“Just because your Exchange server doesn’t have internet-facing authentication doesn’t mean it’s protected,” Breen said, noting that Microsoft says the Exchange flaws are not difficult for attackers to exploit.
For a closer look at the patches released by Microsoft today and indexed by severity and other metrics, check out the always-useful Patch Tuesday roundup from the SANS Internet Storm Center. And it’s not a bad idea to hold off updating for a few days until Microsoft works out any kinks in the updates: AskWoody.com usually has the lowdown on any patches that may be causing problems for Windows users.
As always, please consider backing up your system or at least your important documents and data before applying system updates. And if you run into any problems with these updates, please drop a note about it here in the comments.
It’s not often that a zero-day vulnerability causes a network security vendor to urge customers to physically remove and decommission an entire line of affected hardware — as opposed to just applying software updates. But experts say that is exactly what transpired this week with Barracuda Networks, as the company struggled to combat a sprawling malware threat which appears to have undermined its email security appliances in such a fundamental way that they can no longer be safely updated with software fixes.
The Barracuda Email Security Gateway (ESG) 900 appliance.
Campbell, Calif. based Barracuda said it hired incident response firm Mandiant on May 18 after receiving reports about unusual traffic originating from its Email Security Gateway (ESG) devices, which are designed to sit at the edge of an organization’s network and scan all incoming and outgoing email for malware.
On May 19, Barracuda identified that the malicious traffic was taking advantage of a previously unknown vulnerability in its ESG appliances, and on May 20 the company pushed a patch for the flaw to all affected appliances (CVE-2023-2868).
In its security advisory, Barracuda said the vulnerability existed in the Barracuda software component responsible for screening attachments for malware. More alarmingly, the company said it appears attackers first started exploiting the flaw in October 2022.
But on June 6, Barracuda suddenly began urging its ESG customers to wholesale rip out and replace — not patch — affected appliances.
“Impacted ESG appliances must be immediately replaced regardless of patch version level,” the company’s advisory warned. “Barracuda’s recommendation at this time is full replacement of the impacted ESG.”
In a statement, Barracuda said it will be providing the replacement product to impacted customers at no cost, and that not all ESG appliances were compromised.
“No other Barracuda product, including our SaaS email solutions, were impacted by this vulnerability,” the company said. “If an ESG appliance is displaying a notification in the User Interface, the ESG appliance had indicators of compromise. If no notification is displayed, we have no reason to believe that the appliance has been compromised at this time.”
Nevertheless, the statement says that “out of an abundance of caution and in furtherance of our containment strategy, we recommend impacted customers replace their compromised appliance.”
“As of June 8, 2023, approximately 5% of active ESG appliances worldwide have shown any evidence of known indicators of compromise due to the vulnerability,” the statement continues. “Despite deployment of additional patches based on known IOCs, we continue to see evidence of ongoing malware activity on a subset of the compromised appliances. Therefore, we would like customers to replace any compromised appliance with a new unaffected device.”
Rapid7‘s Caitlin Condon called this remarkable turn of events “fairly stunning,” and said there appear to be roughly 11,000 vulnerable ESG devices still connected to the Internet worldwide.
“The pivot from patch to total replacement of affected devices is fairly stunning and implies the malware the threat actors deployed somehow achieves persistence at a low enough level that even wiping the device wouldn’t eradicate attacker access,” Condon wrote.
Barracuda said the malware was identified on a subset of appliances that allowed the attackers persistent backdoor access to the devices, and that evidence of data exfiltration was identified on some systems.
Rapid7 said it has seen no evidence that attackers are using the flaw to move laterally within victim networks. But that may be small consolation for Barracuda customers now coming to terms with the notion that foreign cyberspies probably have been hoovering up all their email for months.
Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at University of California, Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), said it is likely that the malware was able to corrupt the underlying firmware that powers the ESG devices in some irreparable way.
“One of the goals of malware is to be hard to remove, and this suggests the malware compromised the firmware itself to make it really hard to remove and really stealthy,” Weaver said. “That’s not a ransomware actor, that’s a state actor. Why? Because a ransomware actor doesn’t care about that level of access. They don’t need it. If they’re going for data extortion, it’s more like a smash-and-grab. If they’re going for data ransoming, they’re encrypting the data itself — not the machines.”
In addition to replacing devices, Barracuda says ESG customers should also rotate any credentials connected to the appliance(s), and check for signs of compromise dating back to at least October 2022 using the network and endpoint indicators the company has released publicly.
Update, June 9, 11:55 a.m. ET: Barracuda has issued an updated statement about the incident, portions of which are now excerpted above.
Microsoft today released software updates to fix at least four dozen security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, including patches for two zero-day vulnerabilities that are already being exploited in active attacks.
First up in May’s zero-day flaws is CVE-2023-29336, which is an “elevation of privilege” weakness in Windows which has a low attack complexity, requires low privileges, and no user interaction. However, as the SANS Internet Storm Center points out, the attack vector for this bug is local.
“Local Privilege escalation vulnerabilities are a key part of attackers’ objectives,” said Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs. “Once they gain initial access they will seek administrative or SYSTEM-level permissions. This can allow the attacker to disable security tooling and deploy more attacker tools like Mimikatz that lets them move across the network and gain persistence.”
The zero-day patch that has received the most attention so far is CVE-2023-24932, which is a Secure Boot Security Feature Bypass flaw that is being actively exploited by “bootkit” malware known as “BlackLotus.” A bootkit is dangerous because it allows the attacker to load malicious software before the operating system even starts up.
According to Microsoft’s advisory, an attacker would need physical access or administrative rights to a target device, and could then install an affected boot policy. Microsoft gives this flaw a CVSS score of just 6.7, rating it as “Important.”
Adam Barnett, lead software engineer at Rapid7, said CVE-2023-24932 deserves a considerably higher threat score.
“Microsoft warns that an attacker who already has Administrator access to an unpatched asset could exploit CVE-2023-24932 without necessarily having physical access,” Barnett said. “Therefore, the relatively low CVSSv3 base score of 6.7 isn’t necessarily a reliable metric in this case.”
Barnett said Microsoft has provided a supplementary guidance article specifically calling out the threat posed by BlackLotus malware, which loads ahead of the operating system on compromised assets, and provides attackers with an array of powerful evasion, persistence, and Command & Control (C2) techniques, including deploying malicious kernel drivers, and disabling Microsoft Defender or Bitlocker.
“Administrators should be aware that additional actions are required beyond simply applying the patches,” Barnett advised. “The patch enables the configuration options necessary for protection, but administrators must apply changes to UEFI config after patching. The attack surface is not limited to physical assets, either; Windows assets running on some VMs, including Azure assets with Secure Boot enabled, also require these extra remediation steps for protection. Rapid7 has noted in the past that enabling Secure Boot is a foundational protection against driver-based attacks. Defenders ignore this vulnerability at their peril.”
In addition to the two zero-days fixed this month, Microsoft also patched five remote code execution (RCE) flaws in Windows, two of which have notably high CVSS scores.
CVE-2023-24941 affects the Windows Network File System, and can be exploited over the network by making an unauthenticated, specially crafted request. Microsoft’s advisory also includes mitigation advice. The CVSS for this vulnerability is 9.8 – the highest of all the flaws addressed this month.
Meanwhile, CVE-2023-28283 is a critical bug in the Windows Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) that allows an unauthenticated attacker to execute malicious code on the vulnerable device. The CVSS for this vulnerability is 8.1, but Microsoft says exploiting the flaw may be tricky and unreliable for attackers.
Another vulnerability patched this month that was disclosed publicly before today (but not yet seen exploited in the wild) is CVE-2023-29325, a weakness in Microsoft Outlook and Explorer that can be exploited by attackers to remotely install malware. Microsoft says this vulnerability can be exploited merely by viewing a specially-crafted email in the Outlook Preview Pane.
“To help protect against this vulnerability, we recommend users read email messages in plain text format,” Microsoft’s writeup on CVE-2023-29325 advises.
“If an attacker were able to exploit this vulnerability, they would gain remote access to the victim’s account, where they could deploy additional malware,” Immersive’s Breen said. “This kind of exploit will be highly sought after by e-crime and ransomware groups where, if successfully weaponized, could be used to target hundreds of organizations with very little effort.”
For more details on the updates released today, check out roundups by Action1, Automox and Qualys, If today’s updates cause any stability or usability issues in Windows, AskWoody.com will likely have the lowdown on that.
Please consider backing up your data and/or imaging your system before applying any updates. And feel free to sound off in the comments if you experience any problems as a result of these patches.
A shocking number of organizations — including banks and healthcare providers — are leaking private and sensitive information from their public Salesforce Community websites, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The data exposures all stem from a misconfiguration in Salesforce Community that allows an unauthenticated user to access records that should only be available after logging in.
A researcher found DC Health had five Salesforce Community sites exposing data.
Salesforce Community is a widely-used cloud-based software product that makes it easy for organizations to quickly create websites. Customers can access a Salesforce Community website in two ways: Authenticated access (requiring login), and guest user access (no login required). The guest access feature allows unauthenticated users to view specific content and resources without needing to log in.
However, sometimes Salesforce administrators mistakenly grant guest users access to internal resources, which can cause unauthorized users to access an organization’s private information and lead to potential data leaks.
Until being contacted by this reporter on Monday, the state of Vermont had at least five separate Salesforce Community sites that allowed guest access to sensitive data, including a Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program that exposed the applicant’s full name, Social Security number, address, phone number, email, and bank account number.
This misconfigured Salesforce Community site from the state of Vermont was leaking pandemic assistance loan application data, including names, SSNs, email address and bank account information.
Vermont’s Chief Information Security Officer Scott Carbee said his security teams have been conducting a full review of their Salesforce Community sites, and already found one additional Salesforce site operated by the state that was also misconfigured to allow guest access to sensitive information.
“My team is frustrated by the permissive nature of the platform,” Carbee said.
Carbee said the vulnerable sites were all created rapidly in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, and were not subjected to their normal security review process.
“During the pandemic, we were largely standing up tons of applications, and let’s just say a lot of them didn’t have the full benefit of our dev/ops process,” Carbee said. “In our case, we didn’t have any native Salesforce developers when we had to suddenly stand up all these sites.”
Earlier this week, KrebsOnSecurity notified Columbus, Ohio-based Huntington Bank that its recently acquired TCF Bank had a Salesforce Community website that was leaking documents related to commercial loans. The data fields in those loan applications included name, address, full Social Security number, title, federal ID, IP address, average monthly payroll, and loan amount.
Huntington Bank has disabled the leaky TCF Bank Salesforce website. Matthew Jennings, deputy chief information security officer at Huntington, said the company was still investigating how the misconfiguration occurred, how long it lasted, and how many records may have been exposed.
KrebsOnSecurity learned of the leaks from security researcher Charan Akiri, who said he wrote a program that identified hundreds of other organizations running misconfigured Salesforce pages. But Akiri said he’s been wary of probing too far, and has had difficulty getting responses from most of the organizations he has notified to date.
“In January and February 2023, I contacted government organizations and several companies, but I did not receive any response from these organizations,” Akiri said. “To address the issue further, I reached out to several CISOs on LinkedIn and Twitter. As a result, five companies eventually fixed the problem. Unfortunately, I did not receive any responses from government organizations.”
The problem Akiri has been trying to raise awareness about came to the fore in August 2021, when security researcher Aaron Costello published a blog post explaining how misconfigurations in Salesforce Community sites could be exploited to reveal sensitive data (Costello subsequently published a follow-up post detailing how to lock down Salesforce Community sites).
On Monday, KrebsOnSecurity used Akiri’s findings to notify Washington D.C. city administrators that at least five different public DC Health websites were leaking sensitive information. One DC Health Salesforce Community website designed for health professionals seeking to renew licenses with the city leaked documents that included the applicant’s full name, address, Social Security number, date of birth, license number and expiration, and more.
Akiri said he notified the Washington D.C. government in February about his findings, but received no response. Reached by KrebsOnSecurity, interim Chief Information Security Officer Mike Rupert initially said the District had hired a third party to investigate, and that the third party confirmed the District’s IT systems were not vulnerable to data loss from the reported Salesforce configuration issue.
But after being presented with a document including the Social Security number of a health professional in D.C. that was downloaded in real-time from the DC Health public Salesforce website, Rupert acknowledged his team had overlooked some configuration settings.
Washington, D.C. health administrators are still smarting from a data breach earlier this year at the health insurance exchange DC Health Link, which exposed personal information for more than 56,000 users, including many members of Congress.
That data later wound up for sale on a top cybercrime forum. The Associated Press reports that the DC Health Link breach was likewise the result of human error, and said an investigation revealed the cause was a DC Health Link server that was “misconfigured to allow access to the reports on the server without proper authentication.”
Salesforce says the data exposures are not the result of a vulnerability inherent to the Salesforce platform, but they can occur when customers’ access control permissions are misconfigured.
“As previously communicated to all Experience Site and Sites customers, we recommend utilizing the Guest User Access Report Package to assist in reviewing access control permissions for unauthenticated users,” reads a Salesforce advisory from Sept. 2022. “Additionally, we suggest reviewing the following Help article, Best Practices and Considerations When Configuring the Guest User Profile.”
In a written statement, Salesforce said it is actively focused on data security for organizations with guest users, and that it continues to release “robust tools and guidance for our customers,” including:
Control Which Users Experience Cloud Site Users Can See
Best Practices and Considerations When Configuring the Guest User Profile
“We’ve also continued to update our Guest User security policies, beginning with our Spring ‘21 release with more to come in Summer ‘23,” the statement reads. “Lastly, we continue to proactively communicate with customers to help them understand the capabilities available to them, and how they can best secure their instance of Salesforce to meet their security, contractual, and regulatory obligations.”
Microsoft today released software updates to plug 100 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, including a zero-day vulnerability that is already being used in active attacks. Not to be outdone, Apple has released a set of important updates addressing two zero-day vulnerabilities that are being used to attack iPhones, iPads and Macs.
On April 7, Apple issued emergency security updates to fix two weaknesses that are being actively exploited, including CVE-2023-28206, which can be exploited by apps to seize control over a device. CVE-2023-28205 can be used by a malicious or hacked website to install code.
Both vulnerabilities are addressed in iOS/iPadOS 16.4.1, iOS 15.7.5, and macOS 12.6.5 and 11.7.6. If you use Apple devices and you don’t have automatic updates enabled (they are on by default), you should probably take care of that soon as detailed instructions on how to attack CVE-2023-28206 are now public.
Microsoft’s bevy of 100 security updates released today include CVE-2023-28252, which is a weakness in Windows that Redmond says is under active attack. The vulnerability is in the Windows Common Log System File System (CLFS) driver, a core Windows component that was the source of attacks targeting a different zero-day vulnerability in February 2023.
“If it seems familiar, that’s because there was a similar 0-day patched in the same component just two months ago,” said Dustin Childs at the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative. “To me, that implies the original fix was insufficient and attackers have found a method to bypass that fix. As in February, there is no information about how widespread these attacks may be. This type of exploit is typically paired with a code execution bug to spread malware or ransomware.”
According to the security firm Qualys, this vulnerability has been leveraged by cyber criminals to deploy Nokoyawa ransomware.
“This is a relatively new strain for which there is some open source intel to suggest that it is possibly related to Hive ransomware – one of the most notable ransomware families of 2021 and linked to breaches of over 300+ organizations in a matter of just a few months,” said Bharat Jogi, director of vulnerability and threat research at Qualys.
Jogi said while it is still unclear which exact threat actor is targeting CVE-2023-28252, targets have been observed in South and North America, regions across Asia and at organizations in the Middle East.
Satnam Narang at Tenable notes that CVE-2023-28252 is also the second CLFS zero-day disclosed to Microsoft by researchers from Mandiant and DBAPPSecurity (CVE-2022-37969), though it is unclear if both of these discoveries are related to the same attacker.
Seven of the 100 vulnerabilities Microsoft fixed today are rated “Critical,” meaning they can be used to install malicious code with no help from the user. Ninety of the flaws earned Redmond’s slightly less-dire “Important” label, which refers to weaknesses that can be used to undermine the security of the system but which may require some amount of user interaction.
Narang said Microsoft has rated nearly 90% of this month’s vulnerabilities as “Exploitation Less Likely,” while just 9.3% of flaws were rated as “Exploitation More Likely.” Kevin Breen at Immersive Labs zeroed in on several notable flaws in that 9.3%, including CVE-2023-28231, a remote code execution vulnerability in a core Windows network process (DHCP) with a CVSS score of 8.8.
“‘Exploitation more likely’ means it’s not being actively exploited but adversaries may look to try and weaponize this one,” Breen said. “Micorosft does note that successful exploitation requires an attacker to have already gained initial access to the network. This could be via social engineering, spear phishing attacks, or exploitation of other services.”
Breen also called attention to CVE-2023-28220 and CVE-2023-28219 — a pair of remote code execution vulnerabilities affecting Windows Remote Access Servers (RAS) that also earned Microsoft’s “exploitation more likely” label.
“An attacker can exploit this vulnerability by sending a specially crafted connection request to a RAS server, which could lead to remote code execution,” Breen said. While not standard in all organizations, RAS servers typically have direct access from the Internet where most users and services are connected. This makes it extremely enticing for attackers as they don’t need to socially engineer their way into an organization. They can simply scan the internet for RAS servers and automate the exploitation of vulnerable devices.”
For more details on the updates released today, see the SANS Internet Storm Center roundup. If today’s updates cause any stability or usability issues in Windows, AskWoody.com will likely have the lowdown on that.
Please consider backing up your data and/or imaging your system before applying any updates. And feel free to sound off in the comments if you experience any problems as a result of these patches.
Microsoft on Tuesday released updates to quash at least 74 security bugs in its Windows operating systems and software. Two of those flaws are already being actively attacked, including an especially severe weakness in Microsoft Outlook that can be exploited without any user interaction.
The Outlook vulnerability (CVE-2023-23397) affects all versions of Microsoft Outlook from 2013 to the newest. Microsoft said it has seen evidence that attackers are exploiting this flaw, which can be done without any user interaction by sending a booby-trapped email that triggers automatically when retrieved by the email server — before the email is even viewed in the Preview Pane.
While CVE-2023-23397 is labeled as an “Elevation of Privilege” vulnerability, that label doesn’t accurately reflect its severity, said Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs.
Known as an NTLM relay attack, it allows an attacker to get someone’s NTLM hash [Windows account password] and use it in an attack commonly referred to as “Pass The Hash.”
“The vulnerability effectively lets the attacker authenticate as a trusted individual without having to know the person’s password,” Breen said. “This is on par with an attacker having a valid password with access to an organization’s systems.”
Security firm Rapid7 points out that this bug affects self-hosted versions of Outlook like Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise, but Microsoft-hosted online services like Microsoft 365 are not vulnerable.
The other zero-day flaw being actively exploited in the wild — CVE-2023-24880 — is a “Security Feature Bypass” in Windows SmartScreen, part of Microsoft’s slate of endpoint protection tools.
Patch management vendor Action1 notes that the exploit for this bug is low in complexity and requires no special privileges. But it does require some user interaction, and can’t be used to gain access to private information or privileges. However, the flaw can allow other malicious code to run without being detected by SmartScreen reputation checks.
Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, said CVE-2023-24880 allows attackers to create files that would bypass Mark of the Web (MOTW) defenses.
“Protective measures like SmartScreen and Protected View in Microsoft Office rely on MOTW, so bypassing these makes it easier for threat actors to spread malware via crafted documents and other infected files that would otherwise be stopped by SmartScreen,” Childs said.
Seven other vulnerabilities Microsoft patched this week earned its most-dire “critical” severity label, meaning the updates address security holes that could be exploited to give the attacker full, remote control over a Windows host with little or no interaction from the user.
Also this week, Adobe released eight patches addressing a whopping 105 security holes across a variety of products, including Adobe Photoshop, Cold Fusion, Experience Manager, Dimension, Commerce, Magento, Substance 3D Stager, Cloud Desktop Application, and Illustrator.
For a more granular rundown on the updates released today, see the SANS Internet Storm Center roundup. If today’s updates cause any stability or usability issues in Windows, AskWoody.com will likely have the lowdown on that.
Please consider backing up your data and/or imaging your system before applying any updates. And feel free to sound off in the comments if you experience any problems as a result of these patches.
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