Security News > 2023 > March > Multiple Hacker Groups Exploit 3-Year-Old Vulnerability to Breach U.S. Federal Agency

Multiple threat actors, including a nation-state group, exploited a critical three-year-old security flaw in Progress Telerik to break into an unnamed federal entity in the U.S. The disclosure comes from a joint advisory issued by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center.

"Exploitation of this vulnerability allowed malicious actors to successfully execute remote code on a federal civilian executive branch agency's Microsoft Internet Information Services web server," the agencies said.

Tracked as CVE-2019-18935, the issue related to a.NET deserialization vulnerability affecting Progress Telerik UI for ASP.NET AJAX that, if left unpatched, could lead to remote code execution.

CVE-2019-18935, in conjunction with CVE-2017-11317, has also been weaponized by a threat actor tracked as Praying Mantis to infiltrate the networks of public and private organizations in the U.S. Last month, CISA also added CVE-2017-11357 - another remote code execution bug affecting Telerik UI - to the Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation.

Threat actors are said to have leveraged the flaw to upload and execute malicious dynamic-link library files masquerading as PNG images via the w3wp.

The web shell is equipped to "Enumerate drives; to send, receive, and delete files; and to execute incoming commands" and "Contains an interface for easily browsing files, directories, or drives on the system, and allows the user to upload or download files to any directory."

News URL

https://thehackernews.com/2023/03/multiple-hacker-groups-exploit-3-year.html