Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

“It’s about doing good and doing it exceedingly well.” This was how Daniel Thanos, Head of Arctic Wolf Labs, described the work of Arctic Wolf Labs when accepting the award for Open-Source Tool Creator of the Year, as voted by the SANS Insitute community at the 2022 Difference Makers Awards. This prestigious awards program “honors individuals and teams in the cyber security community who have made a measurable and significant difference in security.”

Challenge Accepted is a podcast from Arctic Wolf that has informative and insightful discussions around the real-world challenges organizations face on their security journey. Hosted by Arctic Wolf’s VP of Strategy Ian McShane and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Adam Marrè, the duo draw upon their years of security operations experience to share their thoughts and opinions on issues facing today’s security leaders.

On Wednesday, December 21, 2022, security researchers shared that they observed ransomware threat actors using a new exploit chain that bypasses the ProxyNotShell URL rewrite mitigations that were shared by Microsoft in September and October. This new exploit chain works by abusing CVE-2022-41080 & CVE-2022-41082 and leads to remote code execution on affected Exchange servers through Outlook Web Access (OWA).

Like many industries, the federal government and the Department of Defense (DoD) are more digital, more dispersed, and work with more third parties than ever before. This shift means that information the departments deal with, referred to as controlled unclassified information, needs to be protected due to its high value. Enter “Safeguarding covered defense information and cyber incident reporting,” which is part of the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) requirements.

In a coordinated disclosure with Microsoft on December 13th, 2022, security researchers with Mandiant, SentinelOne, and Sophos published evidence of a threat actor technique where malicious crafted drivers were invoked using a valid cryptographic signature. The malicious drivers were observed attempting to terminate a list of security products and evade detection.

On December 13th, 2022, Citrix disclosed a critical remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2022-27518) affecting several versions of Citrix ADC and Citrix Gateway. Citrix strongly advises affected customers to update to a supported version as soon as possible. While no public proof-of-concept exploit code is available for this vulnerability, Citrix has observed several instances of targeted exploitation.

As part of Microsoft’s September 2022 Security Update, Microsoft released security updates to remediate CVE-2022-37958–an information disclosure vulnerability in SPNEGO NEGOEX that impacted all Windows versions 7 or newer. On December 13, Microsoft reclassified the vulnerability as Critical severity after security researchers discovered that the vulnerability could allow threat actors to remotely execute code pre-authentication.

On the 12th of December 2022, Fortinet published an advisory regarding an actively exploited remote code execution vulnerability affecting FortiOS through the SSL VPN service. Fortinet has stated that they are aware of at least one instance where this vulnerability was successfully exploited in the wild, though other undocumented cases may exist. The threat actors leveraged the vulnerability to deploy malicious files on the filesystem of affected devices.

On Friday, September 23rd, 2022, Sophos disclosed a critical code injection vulnerability impacting Sophos Firewall. This vulnerability, assigned CVE-2022-3236, affects Sophos Firewall versions v19.0 MR1 (19.0.1) and older and could lead to remote code execution. In order for a threat actor to exploit this vulnerability, WAN access would need to be enabled for the Webadmin and User Portal consoles.

In today’s world of remote work, business trips, and home offices, cybercrime doesn’t just occur within the four walls of an office. Bad actors can strike at all hours and utilize any and every vulnerability to gain access to valuable networks and assets — no matter where the device may be or what the user may be using it for. For example, look at the May Cisco breach.