In September of 2023, X-Force uncovered a campaign where attackers were exploiting the vulnerability identified in CVE-2023-3519 to attack unpatched NetScaler Gateways to insert a malicious script into the HTML content of the authentication web page to capture user credentials. The campaign is another example of increased interest from cyber criminals in credentials. The 2023 X-Force cloud threat report found that 67% of cloud-related incident response engagements were associated with the use of stolen credentials.
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).