Virtual Event: Threat Detection and Incident Response Summit - Watch Sessions
Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Ransomware

Veritas Vulnerabilities Exploited in Ransomware Attacks Added to CISA ‘Must Patch’ List

CISO ordered federal agencies to patch Veritas Backup Exec vulnerabilities exploited in ransomware attacks.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has ordered federal agencies to patch three Veritas Backup Exec vulnerabilities exploited in ransomware attacks.

A data backup product, Veritas Backup Exec supports mixed environments, with support for desktop operating systems, virtual environments (such as VMware and Hyper-V), and cloud platforms (including Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Storage).

Tracked as CVE-2021-27876, CVE-2021-27877, and CVE-2021-27878, the three issues that CISA has added to its ‘Must Patch’ list were disclosed in March 2021, when Veritas released patches.

All three issues were identified in the SHA Authentication scheme of the Veritas Backup Exec agent and could allow an attacker to access arbitrary files or execute arbitrary commands.

In September 2022, a Metasploit module exploiting these vulnerabilities was released, and the first in-the-wild exploitation attempts were observed one month later.

In a report last week, Mandiant warned that the three flaws have been exploited in Alphv (BlackCat) ransomware attacks, for initial access.

According to the cybersecurity firm, there are roughly 8,500 Veritas Backup Exec instances exposed to the internet, some of which might be vulnerable to these flaws.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

Last month, Veritas updated its 2021 advisory to warn customers of the observed exploitation attempts: “a known exploit is available in the wild for the vulnerabilities below and could be used as part of a ransomware attack.”

In addition to the Veritas Backup Exec flaws, CISA also added to its Must Patch list CVE-2019-1388, a privilege escalation issue in Microsoft Windows Certificate Dialog, and CVE-2023-26083, an information disclosure bug in Arm Mali GPU kernel driver.

“There is evidence that this vulnerability may be under limited, targeted exploitation. Users are recommended to upgrade if they are impacted by this issue,” Arm noted on March 31.

CISA added the five security defects to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on April 7. Per Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01, federal agencies have until April 28 to apply the available patches where necessary.

Related: Zimbra Flaw Exploited by Russia Against NATO Countries Added to CISA ‘Must Patch’ List

Related: Google Links More iOS, Android Zero-Day Exploits to Spyware Vendors

Related: CISA Gets Proactive With New Pre-Ransomware Alerts

Written By

Ionut Arghire is an international correspondent for SecurityWeek.

Click to comment

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

SecurityWeek’s Threat Detection and Incident Response Summit brings together security practitioners from around the world to share war stories on breaches, APT attacks and threat intelligence.

Register

Securityweek’s CISO Forum will address issues and challenges that are top of mind for today’s security leaders and what the future looks like as chief defenders of the enterprise.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Vulnerabilities

Less than a week after announcing that it would suspended service indefinitely due to a conflict with an (at the time) unnamed security researcher...

Data Breaches

OpenAI has confirmed a ChatGPT data breach on the same day a security firm reported seeing the use of a component affected by an...

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Cybercrime

Satellite TV giant Dish Network confirmed that a recent outage was the result of a cyberattack and admitted that data was stolen.

Risk Management

The supply chain threat is directly linked to attack surface management, but the supply chain must be known and understood before it can be...

Vulnerabilities

The latest Chrome update brings patches for eight vulnerabilities, including seven reported by external researchers.

Vulnerabilities

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft warns vulnerability (CVE-2023-23397) could lead to exploitation before an email is viewed in the Preview Pane.

Vulnerabilities

Apple has released updates for macOS, iOS and Safari and they all include a WebKit patch for a zero-day vulnerability tracked as CVE-2023-23529.