On December 15, 2024, reports emerged that threat actors have begun attempting to exploit a recently disclosed critical vulnerability in Apache Struts (CVE-2024-53677) shortly after the publication of a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) exploit. Apache Struts is a widely used open-source web application framework for developing Java-based applications.

Since early December 2024, Arctic Wolf has been monitoring threat activity involving the malicious use of management interfaces on FortiGate firewall devices on the public internet. While our investigation into this activity is ongoing and the scope is yet to be fully determined, organizations running these products should ensure that they are adhering to security best practices for management access of firewall devices.

On December 16, 2024, BeyondTrust published a security advisory outlining a vulnerability impacting their Remote Support (RS) and Privileged Remote Access (PRA) software. The flaw, CVE-2024-12356, is a critical severity command injection vulnerability. If successfully exploited it can allow an unauthenticated remote threat actor to execute underlying operating system commands within the context of the site user.

Arctic Wolf has taken a decisive step forward in our mission to end cyber risk by acquiring Cylance, a pioneer of AI-based endpoint protection. With this acquisition, Arctic Wolf ushers a new era of simplicity and automation to the endpoint security market that will deliver the security outcomes endpoint security customers have been struggling to achieve for years.

With the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), there has been a flurry of new terms to describe an increasing variety of new problems. Some of those problems have been around for decades but are now more difficult to manage due to the versatility of AI-based tools and applications. One of those ongoing challenges is shadow IT with a new class of problems classified as shadow AI.

In December 2024, Arctic Wolf Labs observed a mass exploitation campaign involving Cleo Managed File Transfer (MFT) products for initial access. The execution chain involved an obfuscated PowerShell stager, a Java loader, and ultimately a Java-based backdoor, which we will refer to as Cleopatra. In this article we will provide insight into the execution chain in this campaign, obfuscated malicious payloads deployed, and surrounding threat intelligence context around these activities.

On December 11, 2024, Cleo released patches addressing the zero-day vulnerability recently observed in attacks targeting Cleo Managed File Transfer (MFT) products. This vulnerability allowed unauthenticated threat actors to import and execute arbitrary shell commands on Windows and Linux on affected devices by exploiting default settings of the Autorun directory. The fix is included in version 5.8.0.24, and is now available for Cleo Harmony, VLTrader, and Lexicom.

On December 10, 2024, Ivanti released updates for three critical-severity vulnerabilities impacting their Cloud Services Application. By chaining the vulnerabilities together, a threat actor could obtain administrative privileges via authentication bypass (CVE-2024-11639), which could then allow for remote code execution (CVE-2024-11172) and/or SQL injection (CVE-2024-11173).

Update: Dec 11, 2024. Find the latest information in our follow-up security bulletin. On December 7, 2024, Arctic Wolf began observing a novel campaign exploiting Cleo Managed File Transfer (MFT) products across several customer environments. Initial indications of malicious activity in this campaign were identified as early as October 19, with a sharp increase in early December.

On December 3, 2024, Veeam disclosed a critical vulnerability within the Veeam Service Provider Console (VSPC), tracked as CVE-2024-42448, which was discovered during internal testing. VSPC is a management tool designed for service providers to manage customer backups. The vulnerability allows a remote threat actor to perform Remote Code Execution (RCE) on the VSPC server machine from an authorized VSPC management agent machine.