Active intrusion campaign targeting users of the 3CX softphone telephony platform. The threat actor group, LABYRINTH CHOLLIMA, associated with the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is suspected to be behind this campaign.

CrowdStrike’s Intelligence Team has identified unexpected malicious activity emanating from a legitimate, signed binary, 3CXDesktopApp, a softphone application from 3CX.

WHY IS THIS A BIG DEAL?

The trojanized malware is signed with 3CX’s certificate, creating complexity for prevention using traditional security controls. The malicious activity includes beaconing to actor-controlled infrastructure, deployment of second-stage payloads, and, in a small number of cases, hands-on-keyboard activity.

The 3CX CEO Nick Galea has been quoted by numerous sources urging users to uninstall the affected software, which includes versions 18.12.407 and 18.12.416 of the Windows application. The Macintosh application also appears to be impacted.

We recommend two steps: first if you have application control set up in your environments make sure this product is blacklisted and cannot run. Then go through and uninstall it.

We also recommend searching your software lists using your RMM to make sure it is not installed on any devices you may be unaware of.

MORE DETAILS: HOW CAN THIS BE DETECTED, SO FAR…

CrowdStrike has behavioral preventions and atomic detectors targeting the abuse of 3CXDesktopApp. If you are a customer, please ensure that your prevention policies are properly configured with “Suspicious Processes” enabled. (This may not be on by default.) We recommend locating the presence of 3CXDesktopApp software in your environment by using the provided queries and hunting for historical presence of indicators in third-party tooling (if available).

Todyl also is tracking the campaign and has released preventions and detections across multiple Todyl modules, in addition to active threat hunting from the MXDR Team. Todyl’s ATI (Adversary Threat Intelligence) team is continuing to monitor developments and coordinating with both the MXDR and Detection Engineering teams.

As of March 29th, 10:43AM MT, VirusTotal showed that most antivirus vendors were not detecting this attack. However, other vendors like Sophos and SentinelOne and ESET have reportedly been marking the 3CX desktop application as malicious.

The actions mentioned in the links below significantly reduce the risk of infection for tenants leveraging CrowdStrike as well as Todyl’s Endpoint Security, SIEM, and SASE modules. However, it is still necessary to audit both you and your client’s environments thoroughly for the presence of 3CX associated malware.

PROTECTIVE ACTION

As this campaign is still developing, it’s crucial to take immediate action to protect your customers from this threat. We recommend that you contact your security vendors to stay informed about their response to this attack. It’s also essential to regularly monitor your environment for any suspicious activities and follow the recommendations provided in the links below. By taking these measures, you can help ensure the safety and security of your business and your customers.

· CrowdStrike Tech Alert (requires a CrowdStrike login) – https://supportportal.crowdstrike.com/s/article/Tech-Alert-CrowdStrike-Tracking-Active-Intrusion-Campaign-Targeting-3CX-Customers

· Todyl’s Blog Post – https://www.todyl.com/blog/post/threat-advisory-3cx-softphone-telephony-campaign

· Please take a look at the Atomic Indicators in this Reddit post from CrowdStrike in order to use them within your own security stack to search for indications of compromise – https://www.reddit.com/r/crowdstrike/comments/125r3uu/20230329_situational_awareness_crowdstrike/

A critical vulnerability (CVE-2023-23397) in Microsoft Outlook/365 applications suite is actively being exploited in the wild, requiring urgent patching.

Why worry about CVE-2023-23397?

The CVSS 9.8 bug allows remote, unauthenticated attackers to breach systems and steal credentials by sending a specially crafted email. The malicious email triggers automatically when processed by the Outlook client, even before being viewed in the Preview Pane.

What is impacted by CVE-2023-23397?

This vulnerability affects 32 and 64-bit versions of Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise, Office 2013, 2016, and 2019 (including LTSC).

How the attack works

The attack is initiated through a malicious email that causes a connection from the victim to a location under attacker control, leaking the Net-NTLMv2 hash of the victim to the attacker who can then authenticate as the victim.

What you can do about CVE-2023-23397

Microsoft suggests mitigations such as adding users to the “Protected Users Security Group” and blocking TCP 445/SMB outbound from your network. The vulnerability was found by CERT-UA, Microsoft Incident Response, and Microsoft Threat Intelligence.

At least 15 European organizations in government, military, energy, and transportation sectors have been targeted with the attacks attributed to Russian military intelligence.

We strongly advise immediate patching or implementation of the suggested mitigations. Remember with patching, start with a test group first. For more information on patch best practices, I’d recommend watching SecOps 140: Windows 10 & 11 Patching.

Further attacks are expected as the patch is reverse-engineered, and more threat actors identify the exploit.

If you have any questions, concerns or would like further information, please do not hesitate to reach out to our security desk or one of our security advisors.

On Monday, January 23rd, CISA officially recognized and posted an advisory (https://www.cisa.gov/known-exploited-vulnerabilities-catalog) for both public and private entities warning against a set of exploits that bring a high risk of abuse.

Attackers are actively exploiting a number of Zoho ManageEngine products including but not limited to: Active Directory 360, ADSelfServicePlus, ADManagerPlus, EndPoint Central, & EndPoint Central MSP.

According to a recently released security advisory (https://www.manageengine.com/security/advisory/CVE/cve-2022-47966.html) connected to a confirmed CVE (https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2022-47966), at least 24 individual ManageEngine products may be affected by this critical exploit.

The exploit allows for remote code execution which can instantly lead to total SYSTEM level access. A scan of internet facing devices estimates that at least 10% of all exposed instances of ManageEngine products may be vulnerable.

If the ManageEngine products currently or have ever had SAML authentication enabled, they may be vulnerable. Remediation relies on having the latest patches, so please refer to this advisory page (https://www.manageengine.com/security/advisory/CVE/cve-2022-47966.html) to download the necessary upgrades/hot fixes for your product.

Since this exploit covers such a wide range of ManageEngine products, now might be a good time to run a Galactic scan on your environment as well as your clients for previously unknown software that may belong to the Zoho ManageEngine family.

ManageEngine products are heavily used both within the MSP space as well as across enterprises worldwide. Federal agencies are being given 3 weeks, until February 13th to patch these exploits. Please check your environments for this vulnerability.

Based on previous data from the dark-web and underground sources, we have seen that ManageEngine products are a prime target (https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-sell-access-to-your-network-via-remote-management-apps/) for both cyber-attackers and brokers of stolen data.

If you have any questions, concerns or would like further information, please do not hesitate to reach out to our security desk or one of our security advisors.

A number of Comcast customers logged into their Xfinity email accounts only to discover that they had been hacked. The source of these widespread attacks seems to be an exploit that allows an attacker to bypass Xfinity two-factor authentication (2FA) for Xfinity accounts.

A quick look into the hacker underground reveals that there is a privately circulated tool that bypasses the one-time-passcode (OTP) used in 2FA. First, the attackers compromise an Xfinity email account by using stolen passwords that have been leaked on the Dark Web. From there, they login with the stolen passwords and use a private 2FA bypass tool to get around phone verification.

After that, the password is reset, and any backup or secondary emails are changed to one the attacker controls. Once the threat actors have access to the Xfinity email, they use this email to attempt a password reset on other services with the ‘Forgot my Password’ feature.

They have been observed using this method to compromise DropBox, EverNote and even cryptocurrency exchange accounts such as Coinbase and Gemini.

There are a few important things to note in these attacks:

• 2FA was not enough. The hackers bypassed it.

• Those who regained access to their accounts did so because they noticed a change in 2FA from monitoring their email accounts.
• The accounts were originally compromised via “credential stuffing” which uses leaked passwords found on the Dark Web

These are all common pain points that Galactic Scan monitors for. This is why we add findings to our reports related to leaked passwords, as well as providing educational training videos on the weaknesses in MFA and how to use alerting to stay prepared against being compromised.

Comcast has not released an official statement as of this communication, and it is unknown how many accounts were compromised. If you have a Comcast email account, we recommend that you immediately update your password and check the recovery email and 2FA information you have on file. Reach out to Comcast Xfinity support if necessary.

It is also a good idea to review your other accounts and services in case they are compromised.

If you have any questions or concerns, contact us!