CISA Adds CVE-2022-36804 to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog

Read Time:1 Minute, 53 Second

FortiGuard Labs is aware that the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recently added CVE-2022-36804 (Atlassian Bitbucket Server and Data Center Command Injection Vulnerability) to their Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The catalog list vulnerabilities that are being actively exploited in the wild and require federal agencies to apply patches by the due date. Successfully exploiting CVE-2022-36804 allows an attacker to execute arbitrary commands.Why is this Significant?This is significant because the vulnerability is in widely used Bitbucket Server and Data Center and is being actively exploited in the wild. Successful exploitation allows a remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands.The vulnerability is rated Critical by Atlassian, has a CVSS score of 9.9, and attack complexity is listed as low.What is Bitbucket?Bitbucket is a widely used repository management and collaboration tool that provides a code storage location for developers and enables them to manage, track and control their code.When was CVE-2022-36804 Discovered?The vulnerability was disclosed by Atlassian on August 24, 2022.What is CVE-2022-36804?CVE-2022-36804 is a critical command injection vulnerability that affects Atlassian’s Bitbucket Server and Data Center. Successful exploitation of the vulnerability allows an attacker that has access to a publicly repository or has read access to a private repository to run arbitrary commands.What Version of Bitbucket Server and Datacenter does the Vulnerability Affect?The vulnerability affects the following versions of Bitbucket Server and Datacenter:7.6 prior to 7.6.177.17.0 prior to 7.17.107.21 prior to 7.21.48.0 prior to 8.0.38.1 prior to 8.1.38.2 prior to 8.2.28.3 prior to 8.3.1Has the Vendor Released an Advisory?Yes, Atlassian released an advisory on August 24, 2022.Has the Vendor Released a Patch for CVE-2022-36804?Yes, Atlassian released fixed versions on August 21, 2022.What is the Status of Protection?FortiGuard Labs has the following IPS protection in place for CVE-2022-36804:Atlassian.Bitbucket.Server.CVE-2022-36804.Command.InjectionAny Suggested Mitigation?Atlassian provided the mitigation information in the advisory. For details, see the Appendix for a link to “Bitbucket Server and Data Center Advisory 2022-08-24”.

Read More

USN-5663-1: Thunderbird vulnerabilities

Read Time:56 Second

Multiple security issues were discovered in Thunderbird. If a user were
tricked into opening a specially crafted website in a browsing context, an
attacker could potentially exploit these to cause a denial of service,
spoof the mouse pointer position, obtain sensitive information, spoof the
contents of the addressbar, bypass security restrictions, or execute
arbitrary code. (CVE-2022-2505, CVE-2022-36318, CVE-2022-36319,
CVE-2022-38472, CVE-2022-38473, CVE-2022-38476 CVE-2022-38477,
CVE-2022-38478)

Multiple security issues were discovered in Thunderbird. An attacker could
potentially exploit these in order to determine when a user opens a
specially crafted message. (CVE-2022-3032, CVE-2022-3034)

It was discovered that Thunderbird did not correctly handle HTML messages
that contain a meta tag in some circumstances. If a user were tricked into
replying to a specially crafted message, an attacker could potentially
exploit this to obtain sensitive information. (CVE-2022-3033)

A security issue was discovered with the Matrix SDK in Thunderbird. An
attacker sharing a room with a user could potentially exploit this to
cause a denial of service. (CVE-2022-36059)

Read More

Report: Big U.S. Banks Are Stiffing Account Takeover Victims

Read Time:8 Minute, 15 Second

When U.S. consumers have their online bank accounts hijacked and plundered by hackers, U.S. financial institutions are legally obligated to reverse any unauthorized transactions as long as the victim reports the fraud in a timely manner. But new data released this week suggests that for some of the nation’s largest banks, reimbursing account takeover victims has become more the exception than the rule.

The findings came in a report released by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who in April 2022 opened an investigation into fraud tied to Zelle, the “peer-to-peer” digital payment service used by many financial institutions that allows customers to quickly send cash to friends and family.

Zelle is run by Early Warning Services LLC (EWS), a private financial services company which is jointly owned by Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, PNC Bank, Truist, U.S. Bank, and Wells Fargo. Zelle is enabled by default for customers at over 1,000 different financial institutions, even if a great many customers still don’t know it’s there.

Sen. Warren said several of the EWS owner banks — including Capital One, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo — failed to provide all of the requested data. But Warren did get the requested information from PNC, Truist and U.S. Bank.

“Overall, the three banks that provided complete data sets reported 35,848 cases of scams, involving over $25.9 million of payments in 2021 and the first half of 2022,” the report summarized. “In the vast majority of these cases, the banks did not repay the customers that reported being scammed. Overall these three banks reported repaying customers in only 3,473 cases (representing nearly 10% of scam claims) and repaid only $2.9 million.”

Importantly, the report distinguishes between cases that involve straight up bank account takeovers and unauthorized transfers (fraud), and those losses that stem from “fraudulently induced payments,” where the victim is tricked into authorizing the transfer of funds to scammers (scams).

A common example of the latter is the Zelle Fraud Scam, which uses an ever-shifting set of come-ons to trick people into transferring money to fraudsters. The Zelle Fraud Scam often employs text messages and phone calls spoofed to look like they came from your bank, and the scam usually relates to fooling the customer into thinking they’re sending money to themselves when they’re really sending it to the crooks.

Here’s the rub: When a customer issues a payment order to their bank, the bank is obligated to honor that order so long as it passes a two-stage test. The first question asks, Did the request actually come from an authorized owner or signer on the account? In the case of Zelle scams, the answer is yes.

Trace Fooshee, a strategic advisor in the anti money laundering practice at Aite-Novarica, said the second stage requires banks to give the customer’s transfer order a kind of “sniff test” using “commercially reasonable” fraud controls that generally are not designed to detect patterns involving social engineering.

Fooshee said the legal phrase “commercially reasonable” is the primary reason why no bank has much — if anything — in the way of controlling for scam detection.

“In order for them to deploy something that would detect a good chunk of fraud on something so hard to detect they would generate egregiously high rates of false positives which would also make consumers (and, then, regulators) very unhappy,” Fooshee said. “This would tank the business case for the service as a whole rendering it something that the bank can claim to NOT be commercially reasonable.”

Sen. Warren’s report makes clear that banks generally do not pay consumers back if they are fraudulently induced into making Zelle payments.

“In simple terms, Zelle indicated that it would provide redress for users in cases of unauthorized transfers in which a user’s account is accessed by a bad actor and used to transfer a payment,” the report continued. “However, EWS’ response also indicated that neither Zelle nor its parent bank owners would reimburse users fraudulently induced by a bad actor into making a payment on the platform.”

Still, the data suggest banks did repay at least some of the funds stolen from scam victims about 10 percent of the time. Fooshee said he’s surprised that number is so high.

“That banks are paying victims of authorized payment fraud scams anything at all is noteworthy,” he said. “That’s money that they’re paying for out of pocket almost entirely for goodwill. You could argue that repaying all victims is a sound strategy especially in the climate we’re in but to say that it should be what all banks do remains an opinion until Congress changes the law.”

UNAUTHORIZED FRAUD

However, when it comes to reimbursing victims of fraud and account takeovers, the report suggests banks are stiffing their customers whenever they can get away with it. “Overall, the four banks that provided complete data sets indicated that they reimbursed only 47% of the dollar amount of fraud claims they received,” the report notes.

How did the banks behave individually? From the report:

-In 2021 and the first six months of 2022, PNC Bank indicated that its customers reported 10,683 cases of unauthorized payments totaling over $10.6 million, of which only 1,495 cases totaling $1.46 were refunded to consumers. PNC Bank left 86% of its customers that reported cases of fraud without recourse for fraudulent activity that occurred on Zelle.

-Over this same time period, U.S. Bank customers reported a total of 28,642 cases of unauthorized transactions totaling over $16.2 million, while only refunding 8,242 cases totaling less than $4.7 million.

-In the period between January 2021 and September 2022, Bank of America customers reported 81,797 cases of unauthorized transactions, totaling $125 million. Bank of America refunded only $56.1 million in fraud claims – less than 45% of the overall dollar value of claims made in that time.

Truist indicated that the bank had a much better record of reimbursing defrauded customers over this same time period. During 2021 and the first half of 2022, Truist customers filed 24,752 unauthorized transaction claims amounting to $24.4 million. Truist reimbursed 20,349 of those claims, totaling $20.8 million – 82% of Truist claims were reimbursed over this period. Overall, however, the four banks that provided complete data sets indicated that they reimbursed only 47% of the dollar amount of fraud claims they received.

Fooshee said there has long been a great deal of inconsistency in how banks reimburse unauthorized fraud claims — even after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CPFB) came out with guidance on what qualifies as an unauthorized fraud claim.

“Many banks reported that they were still not living up to those standards,” he said. “As a result, I imagine that the CFPB will come down hard on those with fines and we’ll see a correction.”

Fooshee said many banks have recently adjusted their reimbursement policies to bring them more into line with the CFPB’s guidance from last year.

“So this is heading in the right direction but not with sufficient vigor and speed to satisfy critics,” he said.

Seth Ruden is a payments fraud expert who serves as director of global advisory for digital identity company BioCatch. Ruden said Zelle has recently made “significant changes to its fraud program oversight because of consumer influence.”

“It is clear to me that despite sensational headlines, progress has been made to improve outcomes,” Ruden said. “Presently, losses in the network on a volume-adjusted basis are lower than those typical of credit cards.”

But he said any failure to reimburse victims of fraud and account takeovers only adds to pressure on Congress to do more to help victims of those scammed into authorizing Zelle payments.

“The bottom line is that regulations have not kept up with the speed of payment technology in the United States, and we’re not alone,” Ruden said. “For the first time in the UK, authorized payment scam losses have outpaced credit card losses and a regulatory response is now on the table. Banks have the choice right now to take action and increase controls or await regulators to impose a new regulatory environment.”

Sen. Warren’s report is available here (PDF).

There are, of course, some versions of the Zelle fraud scam that may be confusing financial institutions as to what constitutes “authorized” payment instructions. For example, the variant I wrote about earlier this year began with a text message that spoofed the target’s bank and warned of a pending suspicious transfer.

Those who responded at all received a call from a number spoofed to make it look like the victim’s bank calling, and were asked to validate their identities by reading back a one-time password sent via SMS. In reality, the thieves had simply asked the bank’s website to reset the victim’s password, and that one-time code sent via text by the bank’s site was the only thing the crooks needed to reset the target’s password and drain the account using Zelle.

None of the above discussion involves the risks affecting businesses that bank online. Businesses in the United States do not enjoy the same fraud liability protection afforded to consumers, and if a banking trojan or clever phishing site results in a business account getting drained, most banks will not reimburse that loss.

This is why I have always and will continue to urge small business owners to conduct their online banking affairs only from a dedicated, access restricted and security-hardened device — and preferably a non-Windows machine.

For consumers, the same old advice remains the best: Watch your bank statements like a hawk, and immediately report and contest any charges that appear fraudulent or unauthorized.

Read More

Top 20 CVEs Exploited by People’s Republic of China State-Sponsored Actors (AA22-279A)

Read Time:5 Minute, 4 Second

Top 20 CVEs Exploited by People’s Republic of China State-Sponsored Actors (AA22-279A)

CISA, the NSA and FBI issue a joint advisory detailing the top 20 vulnerabilities exploited by state-sponsored threat actors linked to the People’s Republic of China.

Background

On October 6, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) along with the National Security Agency (NSA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued a joint cybersecurity advisory (CSA), identified as AA22-279A, outlining the top 20 CVEs exploited by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) state-sponsored threat actors since 2020. These vulnerabilities have been used to target a variety of U.S. and allied networks, including software and hardware companies with the explicit goal to “steal intellectual property and develop access into sensitive networks.” This advisory follows a similar advisory in October 2020, where the NSA published a list of 25 known vulnerabilities exploited by Chinese state-sponsored actors.

Analysis

The following 20 vulnerabilities were included in the joint CSA:

CVE
Description
CVSSv3
VPR*

CVE-2019-11510
Pulse Connect Secure Arbitrary File Disclosure Remote Code Execution (RCE) Vulnerability
10.0
10.0

CVE-2019-19781
Citrix ADC, Gateway and SD-WAN WANOP Path Traversal Vulnerability
9.8
9.2

CVE-2020-5902
F5 BIG-IP Traffic Management User Interface RCE Vulnerability
9.8
9.5

CVE-2021-1497
Cisco HyperFlex HX Command Injection Vulnerability
9.8
7.4

CVE-2021-20090
Buffalo WSR-32533DHPL2 Path Travesral Vulnerability
9.8
8.4

CVE-2021-22005
VMware vCenter Server File Upload Vulnerability
9.8
7.4

CVE-2021-22205
GitLab CE/EE RCE Vulnerability
10.0
10.0

CVE-2021-26084
Atlassian Confluence Webwork OGNL Vulnerability
9.8
9.7

CVE-2021-26855
Microsoft Exchange Server SSRF Vulnerability (“ProxyLogon”)
9.8
9.8

CVE-2021-26857
Microsoft Exchange Server Insecure Deserialization Vulnerability
7.8
7.4

CVE-2021-26858
Microsoft Exchange Server Arbitrary File Write Vulnerability
7.8
7.4

CVE-2021-27065
Microsoft Exchange Server Arbitrary File Write Vulnerability
7.8
9.8

CVE-2021-36260
Hikvision Web Server Command Injection Vulnerability
9.8
9.4

CVE-2021-40539
Zoho ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus Improper Authentication Vulnerability
9.8
7.4

CVE-2021-41773
Apache HTTP Server Path Traversal Vulnerability
7.5
6.7

CVE-2021-42237
Sitecore Insecure Deserialization Vulnerability
9.8
7.4

CVE-2021-44228
Apache Log4j2 RCE Vulnerability (“Log4Shell”)
10.0
10.0

CVE-2022-1388
F5 BIG-IP iControl REST Authentication Bypass Vulnerability
9.8
9.6

CVE-2022-24112
Apache APISIX Authentication Bypass by Spoofing Vulnerability
9.8
7.4

CVE-2022-26134
Atlassian Confluence Server and Data Center RCE Vulnerability
9.8
9.5

*Please note: Tenable’s Vulnerability Priority Rating (VPR) scores are calculated nightly. This blog post was published on October 7 and reflects VPR at that time.

Of the 20 vulnerabilities on the list, over 80% (16) of vulnerabilities were rated critical, while only 20% (four) of the vulnerabilities were rated high based on CVSSv3 scores.

Deja vu: Known vulnerabilities are valuable to threat actors

When reviewing the list of vulnerabilities included in the CSA, it’s hard not to notice the sheer volume of legacy vulnerabilities being leveraged by the PRC-sponsored threat actors. These flaws have been known for up to three years and have had patches available for some time. Yet, despite the availability of patches, threat actors find continued success in exploiting them. In fact, three of the vulnerabilities from the October 2020 NSA CSA were carried over into the latest CSA published on October 6, 2022:

CVE-2019-11510 – Pulse Connect Secure Arbitrary File Disclosure RCE
CVE-2019-19781 – Citrix ADC, Gateway and SD-WAN WANOP Path Traversal
CVE-2020-5902 – F5 BIG-IP Traffic Management User Interface RCE

Legacy flaws in VPNs still provide a door for attackers to enter

Included in the list of 20 CVEs are a pair of flaws in Secure Socket Layer Virtual Private Network solutions from Pulse Connect Secure (CVE-2019-11510) and Citrix (CVE-2019-19781). Both flaws have been exploited in the wild by a variety of attackers from ransomware affiliates to advanced persistent threat actors. We called out both of these flaws as part of our 2020 Threat Landscape Retrospective report along with a dedicated blog post in 2021 emphasizing the need for organizations to prioritize patching these flaws. They clearly remain some of the most valuable vulnerabilities in-use today.

Exchange Server is a prime target for PRC state-sponsored threat actors

ProxyLogon (CVE-2021-26855) and associated vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-26857, CVE-2021-26858, CVE-2021-27065) are included in this list. These vulnerabilities were disclosed in early 2021 after they were exploited in the wild by Chinese state-sponsored actors that Microsoft calls HAFNIUM. Later in 2021, the researcher responsible for ProxyLogon also disclosed three additional flaws in Microsoft Exchange Server dubbed ProxyShell, though the CSA did not explicitly call out these flaws. However, in September, two zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft Exchange Server, dubbed ProxyNotShell and disclosed by researchers at GTSC, were attributed to “a Chinese attack group.” The fact that Exchange Server continues to be targeted by Chinese threat actors is a reminder of the increasing importance of securing Microsoft Exchange Server.

Solution

All of the vulnerabilities referenced in the CSA have patches available for them. We strongly encourage customers to review the vendor advisories and apply the available patches as soon as possible to eliminate these known attack paths.

Identifying affected systems

A list of Tenable plugins to identify these vulnerabilities can be found here. This link uses a search filter to ensure that all matching plugin coverage will appear for the vulnerabilities referenced in this blog post.

Get more information

AA22-279A: CISA Top 20 CVEs Exploited by PRC State-Sponsored Actors
NSA CSA: Chinese State-Sponsored Actors Exploit Publicly Known Vulnerabilities

Join Tenable’s Security Response Team on the Tenable Community.

Learn more about Tenable, the first Cyber Exposure platform for holistic management of your modern attack surface.

Get a free 30-day trial of Tenable.io Vulnerability Management.

Read More

CVE-2021-40166

Read Time:12 Second

A maliciously crafted PNG file in Autodesk Image Processing component may be used to attempt to free an object that has already been freed while parsing them. This vulnerability may be exploited by attackers to execute arbitrary code.

Read More

CVE-2021-40165

Read Time:12 Second

A maliciously crafted TIFF, PICT, TGA, or RLC file in Autodesk Image Processing component may be used to write beyond the allocated buffer while parsing TIFF, PICT, TGA, or RLC files. This vulnerability may be exploited to execute arbitrary code.

Read More