• Articles
    • Editorial Articles
    • Research Articles
    • WatchGuard Articles
  • The 443 Podcast
  • Threat Landscape
  • About
    • About Us
    • Contact Us
    • Contribute to Secplicity

Secplicity - Security Simplified

Powered by WatchGuard Technologies

Active Compromises of vCenter Using The Log4J Vulnerability

December 20, 2021 By Trevor Collins

Much of what we see exploiting the log4j2 vulnerability, CVE-2021-44228, appears like a scan for the vulnerability, not necessarily exploitation. However, our own honey pot https://github.com/WatchGuard-Threat-Lab/log4shell-iocs has seen activity from this exploit to install coin miners. In one of the first targeted cases for this vulnerability, a ransomware gang have exploited VMware vCenter with Conti ransomware. Many companies have internal infrastructure hosted on  vCenter environments. Small cloud providers often use vCenter for their own infrastructure as well. An attack on these systems especially a ransomware attacks could compromise the entire server structure of a business.

VMware has provided workarounds to prevent the vulnerability from compromising your systems. By now many system administrators have mitigated the vulnerability vCenter and if you have one you should too. One mitigating factor that many vCenter implementations already had in place was they were not connected directly to the internet but because of the current active exploitation, even if your instance of vCenter doesn’t directly connect to the internet, we recommend scanning all traffic to vCenter and perform the mitigating steps.

For other vulnerable software, security experts have created lists of software to determine what’s vulnerable and what’s not. We expect to see the Log4J2 vulnerability long term as more threat actors find systems to compromise. Some software may have the vulnerably but no one to patch it or notify users of the vulnerability.

A good IPS with updated signatures can help mitigate this threat even to systems that don’t have patches, or we can’t work around the vulnerability. Watchguard has signatures for CVE-2021-44228 and will block attempts to use the vulnerability if we can scan the traffic. A word of warning, we found that most admins don’t scan encrypted traffic that many of the vulnerable systems use.  Admins should setup their  network firewalls to scan TLS encrypted traffic for this vulnerability.

Share This:

Related

Filed Under: Editorial Articles

Comments

  1. domenic says

    December 20, 2021 at 11:17 am

    great advice ” Admins should setup their network firewalls to scan TLS encrypted traffic for this vulnerability.” now tell me how

    Reply
    • Trevor Collins says

      January 21, 2022 at 10:30 am

      Hi Domenic, I’m happy to see admins are interested in setting up inspection of TLS encrypted traffic. Firebox admins need to have the users trust the Firebox certificate. Here’s how to do that: https://www.watchguard.com/help/docs/help-center/en-US/Content/en-US/Fireware/certificates/cert_https_proxy_resign_c.html For more information on configuring the HTTPS proxy to scan the correct traffic see here. https://www.watchguard.com/help/docs/help-center/en-US/Content/en-US/Fireware/proxies/https/https_proxy_contentinspection_c.html Hope that helps.

      Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

The 443 Podcast

A weekly podcast featuring the leading white-hat hackers and security researchers. Listen Now
the 443 podcast

Threat Landscape

Filter and view Firebox Feed data by type of attack, region, country, and date range. View Now
threat landscape

Top Posts

  • Cybersecurity News: Free Cybersecurity Training, TrickBot Group Exposed, Major GoDaddy Breach, and Russia to Legalize cybercrime?!
  • US National Cybersecurity Strategy
  • Here Come The Regulations
  • Cybersecurity’s Toll on Mental Health

Email Newsletter

Sign up to get the latest security news and threat analysis delivered straight to your inbox

By signing up you agree to our Privacy Policy.


The views and opinions expressed on this website are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of WatchGuard Technologies.

Stay in Touch

Recent Posts

  • Cybersecurity News: LastPass Incident Revealed, White House Issues Cybersecurity Strategy, FBI Purchases Leaked USHOR PII Data, and a Slew of Other Breaches
  • An Update on Section 230
  • Here Come The Regulations
  • US National Cybersecurity Strategy
  • Cybersecurity News: Free Cybersecurity Training, TrickBot Group Exposed, Major GoDaddy Breach, and Russia to Legalize cybercrime?!
View All

Search

Archives

Copyright © 2023 WatchGuard Technologies · Cookie Policy · Privacy Policy · Terms of Use