Fortinet diligently balances our commitment to the security of our customers and our culture of responsible transparency and commits to sharing information with that goal in mind. While efforts by threat actors to exploit known vulnerabilities are not new, recent Fortinet investigations have discovered a post exploitation technique used by a threat actor. This blog offers analysis of that finding to help our customers make informed decisions.
Bishop Fox internally developed an exploit for CVE-2023-27997, a heap overflow in FortiOS—the OS behind FortiGate firewalls—that allows remote code execution. There are 490,000 affected SSL VPN interfaces exposed on the internet, and roughly 69% of them are currently unpatched. You should patch yours now
Affected Platforms: FortiOS
Impacted Users: Targeted at government, manufacturing, and critical infrastructure
Impact: Data loss and OS and file corruption
Severity Level: Critical
Today, Fortinet published a CVSS Critical PSIRT Advisory (FG-IR-23-097 / CVE-2023-27997) along with several other SSL-VPN related fixes. This blog adds context to that advisory, providing our customers with additional details to help them make informed, risk-based decisions, and provides our perspective relative to recent events involving malicious actor activity.
When Lexfo Security teased a critical pre-authentication RCE bug in FortiGate devices on Saturday 10th, many people speculated on the practical impact of the bug. Would this be a true, sky-is-falling level vulnerability like the recent CVE-2022-42475? Or was it some edge-case hole, requiring some unusual and exotic requisite before any exposure? Others even went further, questioning the legitimacy of the bug itself. Details were scarce and guesswork was rife.