Security News > 2023 > January > Chinese Hackers Exploited Recent Fortinet Flaw as 0-Day to Drop Malware

A suspected China-nexus threat actor exploited a recently patched vulnerability in Fortinet FortiOS SSL-VPN as a zero-day in attacks targeting a European government entity and a managed service provider located in Africa.

The intrusion vector in question relates to the exploitation of CVE-2022-42475, a heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability in FortiOS SSL-VPN that could result in unauthenticated remote code execution via specifically crafted requests.

The latest findings from Mandiant indicate that the threat actor managed to abuse the vulnerability as a zero-day to its advantage and breach targeted networks for espionage operations.

The malware, written in C, is said to have both Windows and Linux variants, with the latter capable of reading data from a file format that's proprietary to Fortinet.

An extended Linux sample of the malware comes with extra features to disable and manipulate logging features in an attempt to avoid detection, corroborating Fortinet's report.

"The exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities in networking devices, followed by the installation of custom implants, is consistent with previous Chinese exploitation of networking devices," Mandiant noted.

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2023/01/new-chinese-malware-spotted-exploiting.html