Security News > 2022 > April > New Incident Report Reveals How Hive Ransomware Targets Organizations

A recent Hive ransomware attack carried out by an affiliate involved the exploitation of "ProxyShell" vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Exchange Server that were disclosed last year to encrypt an unnamed customer's network.

"The actor managed to achieve its malicious goals and encrypt the environment in less than 72 hours from the initial compromise," Varonis security researcher, Nadav Ovadia, said in a post-mortem analysis of the incident.

Hive, which was first observed in June 2021, follows the lucrative ransomware-as-a-service scheme adopted by other cybercriminal groups in recent years, enabling affiliates to deploy the file-encrypting malware after gaining a foothold into their victims' networks.

ProxyShell - tracked as CVE-2021-31207, CVE-2021-34523, and CVE-2021-34473 - involves a combination of security feature bypass, privilege escalation, and remote code execution in the Microsoft Exchange Server, effectively granting the attacker the ability to execute arbitrary code on affected servers.

In this case, successful exploitation of the flaws allowed the adversary to deploy web shells on the compromised server, using them to run malicious PowerShell code with SYSTEM privileges to create a new backdoor administrator user, hijack the domain admin account, and perform lateral movement.

"Ransomware attacks have grown significantly over the past years and remain the preferred method of threat actors aiming to maximize profits," Ovadia said.

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2022/04/new-incident-report-reveals-how-hive.html