In 2023, threat actors continued to exploit a variety of vulnerabilities — both newly discovered weaknesses and unresolved issues — to carry out sophisticated attacks on global organizations. The number of documented software vulnerabilities continued to rise, and threat actors were quick to capitalize on new vulnerabilities and leverage recent releases of publicly available vulnerability research and exploit code to target entities. However, while there was a high number of vulnerabilities released in the reporting period, only a handful actually were weaponized in attacks. The ones of most interest are those that threat actors use for exploitation. In this report, we’ll analyze the numbers and types of vulnerabilities in 2023 with a view to understanding attack trends and how organizations can better defend themselves.
Based upon the authoring organizations’ observations during incident response activities and available industry reporting, as supplemented by CISA’s research findings, the authoring organizations recommend that the safest course of action for network defenders is to assume a sophisticated threat actor may deploy rootkit level persistence on a device that has been reset and lay dormant for an arbitrary amount of time. For example, as outlined in PRC State-Sponsored Actors Compromise and Maintain Persistent Access to U.S. Critical Infrastructure), sophisticated actors may remain silent on compromised networks for long periods. The authoring organizations strongly urge all organizations to consider the significant risk of adversary access to, and persistence on, Ivanti Connect Secure and Ivanti Policy Secure gateways when determining whether to continue operating these devices in an enterprise environment.
Volexity regularly prioritizes memory forensics when responding to incidents. This strategy improves investigative capabilities in many ways across Windows, Linux, and macOS. This blog post highlights some specific ways memory forensics played a key role in determining how two zero-day vulnerabilities were being chained together to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution in Ivanti Connect Secure VPN devices.
QNAP has released patches for a dozen vulnerabilities in its products, including several high-severity flaws.
"We must build a robust understanding of AI vulnerabilities, foreign intelligence threats to these AI systems and ways to counter the threat in order to have AI security," Gen. Paul Nakasone said. "We must also ensure that malicious foreign actors can't steal America’s innovative AI capabilities to do so.”
This month we got patches for 49 vulnerabilities. Of these, 6 are critical, and 2 are already being exploited, according to Microsoft.
One of the exploited vulnerabilities is a Win32k Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability (CVE-2023-29336). This vulnerability has low attack complexity, low privilege, and none user interaction. The attack vector is local, the CVSS is 7.8, and the severity is Important.
In late 2022 and early 2023, Project Zero reported eighteen 0-day vulnerabilities in Exynos Modems produced by Samsung Semiconductor. The four most severe of these eighteen vulnerabilities (CVE-2023-24033 and three other vulnerabilities that have yet to be assigned CVE-IDs) allowed for Internet-to-baseband remote code execution. Tests conducted by Project Zero confirm that those four vulnerabilities allow an attacker to remotely compromise a phone at the baseband level with no user interaction, and require only that the attacker know the victim's phone number. With limited additional research and development, we believe that skilled attackers would be able to quickly create an operational exploit to compromise affected devices silently and remotely.