SonicWall VPNs targeted by ransomware hitting corporate networks

3 weeks ago

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Cybercriminals person successfully breached astatine slightest 30 organizations utilizing a vulnerability successful SonicWall VPNs, information experts person warned.

Earlier successful 2024, SonicWall reported discovering, and patching, a captious vulnerability successful nan SonicWall SonicOS. This bug, which is tracked arsenic CVE-2024-40766, has a severity people of 9.3 (critical), and tin consequence successful unauthorized assets access, and moreover crashes of nan VPN.

At nan time, nan institution did not person immoderate grounds of in-the-wild abuse, nevertheless conscionable a fewer weeks later, some caller reports from Arctic Wolf and Rapid7 person now warned users to spot instantly aft hackers started exploiting nan flaw.

Akira dominating

The improper entree power vulnerability is affecting Gen 5, Gen 6, and Gen 7 firewalls, arsenic good arsenic nan firewalls’ SSLVPN feature. The researchers warned that nan crooks were abusing them to deploy Akira and Fog ransomware variants. Akira, which seems to beryllium nan much progressive of nan two, usually targets firms successful education, finance, existent estate, manufacturing, and consulting industries.

Of nan 30 recorded victims, 75% were infected pinch Akira, and nan remainder pinch Fog. However, it seems that nan 2 threat actors are profoundly connected, sharing nan aforesaid infrastructure, and are not competing for nan aforesaid onslaught surface.

Besides abusing nan SonicWall vulnerability, nan researchers besides said that nan victims astir apt did not person multi-factor authentication (MFA) enabled connected nan compromised SSL VPN accounts, which would make things a batch much difficult for nan attackers. Furthermore, they were moving nan services connected nan default larboard 4433, which besides played to nan attackers’ strengths.

"In intrusions wherever firewall logs were captured, connection arena ID 238 (WAN area distant personification login allowed) aliases connection arena ID 1080 (SSL VPN area distant personification login allowed) were observed," Arctic Wolf said. "Following 1 of these messages, location were respective SSL VPN INFO log messages (event ID 1079) indicating that login and IP duty had completed successfully."

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CVE-2024-40766 was added to CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, giving national firms a deadline to spot up.

Via BleepingComputer

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Sead is simply a seasoned freelance journalist based successful Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes astir IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, information breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning much than a decade, he’s written for galore media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s besides held respective modules connected contented penning for Represent Communications.

Source Technology