Federal Bureau of Investigation – CyberSecurity Confabulation

New 0-Day Attacks Linked to China’s ‘Volt Typhoon’

Posted 3 weeks ago by BrianKrebs

Malicious hackers are exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Versa Director, a software product used by many Internet and IT service providers. Researchers believe the activity is linked to Volt Typhoon, a Chinese cyber espionage group focused on infiltrating critical U.S. networks and laying the groundwork for the ability to disrupt communications between the United States and Asia during any future armed conflict with China.

Image: Shutterstock.com

Versa Director systems are primarily used by Internet service providers (ISPs), as well as managed service providers (MSPs) that cater to the IT needs of many small to mid-sized businesses simultaneously. In a security advisory published Aug. 26, Versa urged customers to deploy a patch for the vulnerability (CVE-2024-39717), which the company said is fixed in Versa Director 22.1.4 or later.

Versa said the weakness allows attackers to upload a file of their choosing to vulnerable systems. The advisory placed much of the blame on Versa customers who “failed to implement system hardening and firewall guidelines…leaving a management port exposed on the internet that provided the threat actors with initial access.”

Versa’s advisory doesn’t say how it learned of the zero-day flaw, but its vulnerability listing at mitre.org acknowledges “there are reports of others based on backbone telemetry observations of a 3rd party provider, however these are unconfirmed to date.”

Those third-party reports came in late June 2024 from Michael Horka, senior lead information security engineer at Black Lotus Labs, the security research arm of Lumen Technologies, which operates one of the global Internet’s largest backbones.

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Horka said Black Lotus Labs identified a web-based backdoor on Versa Director systems belonging to four U.S. victims and one non-U.S. victim in the ISP and MSP sectors, with the earliest known exploit activity occurring at a U.S. ISP on June 12, 2024.

“This makes Versa Director a lucrative target for advanced persistent threat (APT) actors who would want to view or control network infrastructure at scale, or pivot into additional (or downstream) networks of interest,” Horka wrote in a blog post published today.

Black Lotus Labs said it assessed with “medium” confidence that Volt Typhoon was responsible for the compromises, noting the intrusions bear the hallmarks of the Chinese state-sponsored espionage group — including zero-day attacks targeting IT infrastructure providers, and Java-based backdoors that run in memory only.

In May 2023, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a joint warning (PDF) about Volt Typhoon, also known as “Bronze Silhouette” and “Insidious Taurus,” which described how the group uses small office/home office (SOHO) network devices to hide their activity.

In early December 2023, Black Lotus Labs published its findings on “KV-botnet,” thousands of compromised SOHO routers that were chained together to form a covert data transfer network supporting various Chinese state-sponsored hacking groups, including Volt Typhoon.

In January 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice disclosed the FBI had executed a court-authorized takedown of the KV-botnet shortly before Black Lotus Labs released its December report.

In February 2024, CISA again joined the FBI and NSA in warning Volt Typhoon had compromised the IT environments of multiple critical infrastructure organizations — primarily in communications, energy, transportation systems, and water and wastewater sectors — in the continental and non-continental United States and its territories, including Guam.

“Volt Typhoon’s choice of targets and pattern of behavior is not consistent with traditional cyber espionage or intelligence gathering operations, and the U.S. authoring agencies assess with high confidence that Volt Typhoon actors are pre-positioning themselves on IT networks to enable lateral movement to OT [operational technology] assets to disrupt functions,” that alert warned.

In a speech at Vanderbilt University in April, FBI Director Christopher Wray said China is developing the “ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing,” and that China’s plan is to “land blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic.”

Ryan English, an information security engineer at Lumen, said it’s disappointing his employer didn’t at least garner an honorable mention in Versa’s security advisory. But he said he’s glad there are now a lot fewer Versa systems exposed to this attack.

“Lumen has for the last nine weeks been very intimate with their leadership with the goal in mind of helping them mitigate this,” English said. “We’ve given them everything we could along the way, so it kind of sucks being referenced just as a third party.”

U.S. Hacks QakBot, Quietly Removes Botnet Infections

Posted 1 year ago by BrianKrebs

The U.S. government today announced a coordinated crackdown against QakBot, a complex malware family used by multiple cybercrime groups to lay the groundwork for ransomware infections. The international law enforcement operation involved seizing control over the botnet’s online infrastructure, and quietly removing the Qakbot malware from tens of thousands of infected Microsoft Windows computer systems.

Qakbot/Qbot was once again top malware loader observed in the wild in the first six months of 2023. Source: Reliaquest.com.

In an international operation announced today dubbed “Duck Hunt,” the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said they obtained court orders to remove Qakbot from infected devices, and to seize servers used to control the botnet.

“This is the most significant technological and financial operation ever led by the Department of Justice against a botnet,” said Martin Estrada, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of California, at a press conference this morning in Los Angeles.

Estrada said Qakbot has been implicated in 40 different ransomware attacks over the past 18 months, intrusions that collectively cost victims more than $58 million in losses.

Emerging in 2007 as a banking trojan, QakBot (a.k.a. Qbot and Pinksplipbot) has morphed into an advanced malware strain now used by multiple cybercriminal groups to prepare newly compromised networks for ransomware infestations. QakBot is most commonly delivered via email phishing lures disguised as something legitimate and time-sensitive, such as invoices or work orders.

Don Alway, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, said federal investigators gained access to an online panel that allowed cybercrooks to monitor and control the actions of the botnet. From there, investigators obtained court-ordered approval to instruct all infected systems to uninstall Qakbot and to disconnect infected machines from the botnet, Alway said.

The DOJ says their access to the botnet’s control panel revealed that Qakbot had been used to infect more than 700,000 machines in the past year alone, including 200,000 systems in the United States.

Working with law enforcement partners in France, Germany, Latvia, the Netherlands, Romania and the United Kingdom, the DOJ said it was able to seize more than 50 Internet servers tied to the malware network, and nearly $9 million in ill-gotten cryptocurrency from QakBot’s cybercriminal overlords. The DOJ declined to say whether any suspects were questioned or arrested in connection with Qakbot, citing an ongoing investigation.

According to recent figures from the managed security firm Reliaquest, QakBot is by far the most prevalent malware “loader” — malicious software used to secure access to a hacked network and help drop additional malware payloads. Reliaquest says QakBot infections accounted for nearly one-third of all loaders observed in the wild during the first six months of this year.

Researchers at AT&T Alien Labs say the crooks responsible for maintaining the QakBot botnet have rented their creation to various cybercrime groups over the years. More recently, however, QakBot has been closely associated with ransomware attacks from Black Basta, a prolific Russian-language criminal group that was thought to have spun off from the Conti ransomware gang in early 2022.

Today’s operation is not the first time the U.S. government has used court orders to remotely disinfect systems compromised with malware. In April 2022, the DOJ quietly removed malware from computers around the world infected by the “Snake” malware, an even older malware family that has been tied to the GRU, an intelligence arm of the Russian military.

Documents published by the DOJ in support of today’s takedown state that beginning on Aug. 25, 2023, law enforcement gained access to the Qakbot botnet, redirected botnet traffic to and through servers controlled by law enforcement, and instructed Qakbot-infected computers to download a Qakbot Uninstall file that uninstalled Qakbot malware from the infected computer.

“The Qakbot Uninstall file did not remediate other malware that was already installed on infected computers,” the government explained. “Instead, it was designed to prevent additional Qakbot malware from being installed on the infected computer by untethering the victim computer from the Qakbot botnet.”

The DOJ said it also recovered more than 6.5 million stolen passwords and other credentials, and that is has shared this information with two websites that let users check to see if their credentials were exposed: Have I Been Pwned, and a “Check Your Hack” website erected by the Dutch National Police.