The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued an emergency directive, urging federal agencies to address actively exploited zero-day flaws in Ivanti Connect Secure (ICS) and Ivanti Policy Secure (IPS) products. These vulnerabilities, an authentication bypass (CVE-2023-46805) and a code injection bug (CVE-2024-21887), have become targets for multiple threat actors, allowing them to craft malicious requests and execute arbitrary commands on compromised systems. CISA emphasizes the urgency of mitigation measures due to a sharp increase in threat actor activity since the vulnerabilities were publicly disclosed on January 11, 2024.
Ivanti, the U.S. company behind the affected products, acknowledges the vulnerabilities and plans to release an update to address the flaws next week. In the meantime, CISA recommends immediate actions, including applying a temporary workaround provided by Ivanti through an XML file to make necessary configuration changes. Organizations using Ivanti products are urged to run an External Integrity Checker Tool to identify signs of compromise, disconnect affected devices from networks if compromise is found, reset devices, and import the XML file. Additionally, Federal Civilian Executive Branch (FCEB) entities are advised to take further steps, such as revoking and reissuing certificates, resetting passwords, and addressing potential API key issues.
Cybersecurity firms Volexity and Mandiant report observing attacks exploiting these flaws to deploy web shells and passive backdoors for persistent access to compromised devices. As many as 2,100 devices worldwide are estimated to have been compromised. The initial attack wave in December 2023 is attributed to a Chinese nation-state group, UTA0178. Mandiant, tracking the activity as UNC5221, notes that it has not been linked to any specific group or country. Threat intelligence firm GreyNoise observes opportunistic exploitation of the vulnerabilities for financial gain, with attackers dropping persistent backdoors and cryptocurrency miners.
