The ransomware group utilized the MOVEit transfer vulnerability, CVE-2023-34362, to steal data from firms that had been using the product. Despite some evidence indicating that the hackers tested the vulnerability as early as 2021, broad exploitation appears to have begun in late May 2023.
In no time, the attacked were proved to be connected to the CIOp group, that had earlier utilized a zero-day in the GoAnywhere MFT products, stealing data of several firms. The MOVEit zero-day campaign's perpetrators have acknowledged their involvement, and they have given victims until June 14 to contact them in order to stop the release of data taken from their systems. They say they have struck hundreds of targets.
The victims of the attacks include energy giant Shell, as well as firms from various sectors like financial, healthcare, manufacturing, IT, pharmaceutical, and education sectors. A large number of victims include US-based banks and other financial institutions, followed by healthcare organizations. The hackers declared they would not target pediatric healthcare facilities after the breach was discovered.
The first known victims of the attacks included UK-based payroll and HR company Zellis (and its clients British Airways, Aer Lingus, the BBC, and the Boots), the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, the University of Rochester, the Illinois Department of Innovation & Technology (DoIT), and the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE).
Following the ransomware attacks, the group has not yet leaked any data stolen from these organizations.
The number of businesses that have reported being impacted keeps expanding. In recent days, statements about the incident have been released by Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Health System, UK media authority Ofcom, and a Missouri state agency.
Moreover, in a report published on Thursday, CNN noted that a number of US federal government organizations were also impacted with the attacks, as per Eric Goldstein who is the executive director for CISA. These agencies include Department of Energy, which is now working on the issue to control the impact of the attack.
However, the ransomware gang claims that their prime motive behind these attacks is to acquire ransoms from businesses and confirms that all the state-related data they may have acquired in the attacks has been deleted.
Atlassian issued security updates for a critical zero-day vulnerability in Confluence Server and Data Center, the flaw was exploited in the wild to backdoor web-exposed servers. The zero-day (CVE-2022-26134) vulnerability impacts all versions that support Confluence Server and Data Center, it allows threat actors to access remote code execution on unpatched servers. As the vulnerability was reported as actively exploited bug, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added the vulnerability to its "Known Exploited Vulnerabilites Catalog".
It means federal agencies can block all web traffic to Confluence servers on their networks. Atlassian has released patches and asked its customers to update their devices to versions 7.4.17, 7.13.7, 7.14.3, 7.15.2, 7.16.4, 7.17.4, and 7.18.1, that have been patched for this vulnerability. "We strongly recommend upgrading to a fixed version of Confluence as there are several other security fixes included in the fixed versions of Confluence," it says.
Users who can't upgrade their Confluence installs for now can use temporary workaround and mitigate the CVE-2022-26134 security vulnerability via upgrading few JAR files on their confluence servers. The flaw was discovered by cybersecurity firm Volexity. During investigation, the firm found that zero-day was used to deploy a BEHINDER JSP web shell, it allowed the hackers to perform remote code execution on the servers. Threat actors also used a China Chopper web shell and a file upload software as backups to keep access to the hacked servers.
Volexity researchers believe that various hackers from China are using CVE-2022-26134 flaws to gain access into web-exposed and unpatched Confluence servers. "The targeted industries/verticals are quite widespread. This is a free-for-all where the exploitation seems coordinated. It is clear that multiple threat groups and individual actors have the exploit and have been using it in different ways. Some are quite sloppy and others are a bit more stealth. Loading class files into memory and writing JSP shells are the most popular we have seen so far," said Volexity.