Security News > 2021 > February > Hackers Exploit IT Monitoring Tool Centreon to Target Several French Entities

Russia-linked state-sponsored threat actor known as Sandworm has been linked to a three-year-long stealthy operation to hack targets by exploiting an IT monitoring tool called Centreon.

The intrusion campaign - which breached "Several French entities" - is said to have started in late 2017 and lasted until 2020, with the attacks particularly impacting web-hosting providers, said the French information security agency ANSSI in an advisory.

"On compromised systems, ANSSI discovered the presence of a backdoor in the form of a webshell dropped on several Centreon servers exposed to the internet," the agency said on Monday.

While the initial attack vector seems unknown as yet, the compromise of victim networks was tied to Centreon, an application, and network monitoring software developed by a French company of the same name.

In light of the SolarWinds supply-chain attack, it should come as no surprise that monitoring systems such as Centreon have become a lucrative target for bad actors to gain a foothold and laterally move across victim environments.

UPDATE. French software company Centreon on Tuesday issued a clarification following the publication of ANSSI's report, stating none of its customers were affected in the hacking campaign that was found to strike business entities running its network monitoring software.

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