On Thursday, February 2, 2023, security reporter Brian Krebs published a warning on Mastodon about an actively exploited zero-day vulnerability affecting on-premise instances of Fortra’s GoAnywhere MFT managed file transfer solution. Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) evidently published an advisory on February 1 behind authentication; there is no publicly accessible advisory.

Command & Control (C2) frameworks are a very sensitive component of Red Team operations. Often, a Red Team will be in a highly privileged position on a target’s network, and a compromise of the C2 framework could lead to a compromise of both the red team operator’s system and control over beacons established on a target’s systems. As such, vulnerabilities in C2 frameworks are high priority targets for threat actors and Counterintelligence (CI) operations. On September 20, 2022, HelpSystems published an out-of-band patch for Cobalt Strike which stated that there was potential for Remote Code Execution (RCE).