Hackers backed by a powerful nation-state have been exploiting two zero-day vulnerabilities in Cisco firewalls in a five-month-long campaign that breaks into government networks around the world, researchers reported Wednesday.
These devices are ideal targets because they sit at the edge of a network, provide a direct pipeline to its most sensitive resources, and interact with virtually all incoming communications.
Those characteristics, combined with a small cast of selected targets all in government, have led Talos to assess that the attacks are the work of government-backed hackers motivated by espionage objectives.
“Our attribution assessment is based on the victimology, the significant level of tradecraft employed in terms of capability development and anti-forensic measures, and the identification and subsequent chaining together of 0-day vulnerabilities,” Talos researchers wrote.
“Regardless of your network equipment provider, now is the time to ensure that the devices are properly patched, logging to a central, secure location, and configured to have strong, multi-factor authentication (MFA),” the researchers wrote.
It stems from improper validation of files when they’re read from the flash memory of a vulnerable device and allows for remote code execution with root system privileges when exploited.
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Hackers backed by a powerful nation-state have been exploiting two zero-day vulnerabilities in Cisco firewalls in a five-month-long campaign that breaks into government networks around the world, researchers reported Wednesday.
These devices are ideal targets because they sit at the edge of a network, provide a direct pipeline to its most sensitive resources, and interact with virtually all incoming communications.
Those characteristics, combined with a small cast of selected targets all in government, have led Talos to assess that the attacks are the work of government-backed hackers motivated by espionage objectives.
“Our attribution assessment is based on the victimology, the significant level of tradecraft employed in terms of capability development and anti-forensic measures, and the identification and subsequent chaining together of 0-day vulnerabilities,” Talos researchers wrote.
“Regardless of your network equipment provider, now is the time to ensure that the devices are properly patched, logging to a central, secure location, and configured to have strong, multi-factor authentication (MFA),” the researchers wrote.
It stems from improper validation of files when they’re read from the flash memory of a vulnerable device and allows for remote code execution with root system privileges when exploited.
The original article contains 533 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 64%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!