Ivanti has disclosed two zero-day vulnerabilities, CVE-2023-46805 and CVE-2024-21887, affecting its Connect Secure and Policy Secure gateways. The first flaw is an authentication bypass issue, allowing attackers to access restricted resources by circumventing control checks, while the second is a command injection vulnerability enabling the execution of arbitrary commands on vulnerable appliances. Threat actors have exploited these zero-days in the wild, targeting a small number of Ivanti customers. Patches are set to be released in a staggered schedule, with the first version expected the week of January 22, 2024, and the final version the week of February 19, 2024. In the interim, Ivanti recommends mitigations, and the vulnerabilities have been identified as potentially exploited by a Chinese state-backed threat actor.
Volexity, a threat intelligence company, discovered the zero-days being actively exploited in December 2023. Ivanti acknowledges less than 10 impacted customers and emphasizes that there’s no indication these vulnerabilities were introduced maliciously into its code development process. As a precaution, Ivanti recommends that all customers run the external integrity checker. The zero-days allow attackers to execute arbitrary commands and bypass multi-factor authentication, and security researcher Kevin Beaumont warns that over 15,000 Connect Secure and Policy Secure gateways are currently exposed online.
These zero-days follow previous security concerns with Ivanti products, including a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Endpoint Management software in January 2024 and other zero-days explored by state hackers in 2023. Ivanti’s products are widely used by over 40,000 companies globally for managing IT assets and systems.
