Vulnerabilities

In-the-Wild Exploitation of Recent ManageEngine Vulnerability Commences

Organizations are being compromised in attacks exploiting a recently patched Zoho ManageEngine vulnerability.

January 20, 2023

Cloud risk management and threat detection firm Rapid7 warns that it has seen organizations being compromised in attacks exploiting a recently patched Zoho ManageEngine vulnerability.

Tracked as CVE-2022-47966, the security defect exists in a third-party dependency (Apache xmlsec, also known as XML Security for Java, version 1.4.1), allowing attackers to execute arbitrary code remotely without authentication.

Deemed ‘critical severity’, the issue was brought to light in November 2022, when Zoho announced that patches were released for more than 20 on-premises products that are impacted.

A NIST advisory explains that the bug exists “because the xmlsec XSLT features, by design in that version, make the application responsible for certain security protections, and the ManageEngine applications did not provide those protections.”

Earlier this month, automated penetration testing firm Horizon3.ai warned that there are at least a thousand vulnerable ManageEngine products exposed to the internet, and that all of them were susceptible to spray and pray attacks.

Horizon3.ai also published a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit targeting the issue.

Now, Rapid7 says it has been responding to compromises resulting from the active exploitation of CVE-2022-47966. The attacks appear to have started before Horizon3.ai released its PoC exploit.

The cybersecurity firm underlines that some of the impacted products, including ADSelfService Plus and ServiceDesk Plus, are highly popular among organizations, and that they are known to have been targeted in previous attacks.

Other impacted products include Access Manager Plus, Active Directory 360, ADAudit Plus, ADManager Plus, Application Control Plus, Device Control Plus, Endpoint Central, Endpoint Central MSP, PAM 360, Password Manager Pro, Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM), SupportCenter Plus, and Vulnerability Manager Plus.

“Organizations using any of the affected products listed in ManageEngine’s advisory should update immediately and review unpatched systems for signs of compromise, as exploit code is publicly available and exploitation has already begun,” Rapid7 warns.

Threat intelligence company GreyNoise has also started seeing attacks exploiting CVE-2022-47966.

Written By Ionut Arghire

Ionut Arghire is an international correspondent for SecurityWeek.

Latest News

Click to comment

Dealing With the Carcinization of Security

Varied viewpoints as related security concepts take on similar traits create substantial confusion among security teams trying to evaluate and purchase security technologies.

Marc Solomon

Stop, Collaborate and Listen: Disrupting Cybercrime Networks Requires Private-Public Cooperation

No one combatting cybercrime knows everything, but everyone in the battle has some intelligence to contribute to the larger knowledge base.

Derek Manky

How the Atomized Network Changed Enterprise Protection

Our networks have become atomized which, for starters, means they’re highly dispersed. Not just in terms of the infrastructure – legacy, on-premises, hybrid, multi-cloud, and edge.

Matt Wilson

Mapping Threat Intelligence to the NIST Compliance Framework Part 2

How threat intelligence is critical when justifying budget for GRC personnel, and for threat intelligence, incident response, security operations and CISO buyers.

Landon Winkelvoss

Password Dependency: How to Break the Cycle

Hackers rarely hack in anymore. They log in using stolen, weak, default, or otherwise compromised credentials. That’s why it’s so critical to break the password dependency cycle. But how can this be done?

Torsten George