Google-owned Mandiant said it identified new malware employed by a China-nexus espionage threat actor known as UNC5221 and other threat groups during post-exploitation activity targeting Ivanti Connect Secure VPN and Policy Secure devices. This includes custom web shells such as BUSHWALK, CHAINLINE, FRAMESTING, and a variant of LIGHTWIRE. "CHAINLINE is a Python web shell backdoor that is embedded in a Ivanti Connect Secure Python package that enables arbitrary command execution," the company said, attributing it to UNC5221, adding it also detected multiple new versions of WARPWIRE, a JavaScript-based credential stealer. The infection chains entail a successful exploitation of CVE-2023-46805 and CVE-2024-21887, which allow an unauthenticated threat actor to execute arbitrary commands on the Ivanti appliance with elevated privileges. The flaws have been abused as zero-days since early December 2023. Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) said it's aware of "multiple compromised systems" in the country. BUSHWALK, written in Perl and deployed by circumventing the Ivanti-issued mitigations in highly-targeted attacks, is embedded into a legitimate Connect Secure file named "querymanifest.cgi" and offers the ability to read or write to files to a server. On the other hand, FRAMESTING is a Python web shell embedded in an Ivanti Connect Secure Python package (located in the following path…Read More
Warning: New Malware Emerges in Attacks Exploiting Ivanti VPN Vulnerabilities
