It’s not typically {that a} zero-day vulnerability causes a community safety vendor to induce prospects to bodily take away and decommission a complete line of affected {hardware} — versus simply making use of software program updates. However specialists say that’s precisely what transpired this week with Barracuda Networks, as the corporate struggled to fight a sprawling malware menace which seems to have undermined its e-mail safety home equipment in such a basic method that they will not be safely up to date with software program fixes.
The Barracuda Electronic mail Safety Gateway (ESG) 900 equipment.
Campbell, Calif. primarily based Barracuda stated it employed incident response agency Mandiant on Could 18 after receiving stories about uncommon visitors originating from its Electronic mail Safety Gateway (ESG) gadgets, that are designed to take a seat on the fringe of a corporation’s community and scan all incoming and outgoing e-mail for malware.
On Could 19, Barracuda recognized that the malicious visitors was making the most of a beforehand unknown vulnerability in its ESG home equipment, and on Could 20 the corporate pushed a patch for the flaw to all affected home equipment (CVE-2023-2868).
In its security advisory, Barracuda stated the vulnerability existed within the Barracuda software program element answerable for screening attachments for malware. Extra alarmingly, the corporate stated it seems attackers first began exploiting the flaw in October 2022.
However on June 6, Barracuda all of a sudden started urging its ESG prospects to wholesale rip out and exchange — not patch — affected home equipment.
“Impacted ESG home equipment have to be instantly changed no matter patch model stage,” the corporate’s advisory warned. “Barracuda’s suggestion at the moment is full alternative of the impacted ESG.”
In an announcement, Barracuda stated it will likely be offering the alternative product to impacted prospects without charge, and that not all ESG home equipment had been compromised.
“No different Barracuda product, together with our SaaS e-mail options, had been impacted by this vulnerability,” the corporate stated. “If an ESG equipment is displaying a notification within the Consumer Interface, the ESG equipment had indicators of compromise. If no notification is displayed, we have now no motive to consider that the equipment has been compromised at the moment.”
Nonetheless, the assertion says that “out of an abundance of warning and in furtherance of our containment technique, we advocate impacted prospects exchange their compromised equipment.”
“As of June 8, 2023, roughly 5% of lively ESG home equipment worldwide have proven any proof of identified indicators of compromise because of the vulnerability,” the assertion continues. “Regardless of deployment of further patches primarily based on identified IOCs, we proceed to see proof of ongoing malware exercise on a subset of the compromised home equipment. Due to this fact, we want prospects to interchange any compromised equipment with a brand new unaffected system.”
Rapid7‘s Caitlin Condon known as this exceptional flip of occasions “pretty beautiful,” and stated there look like roughly 11,000 weak ESG gadgets nonetheless related to the Web worldwide.
“The pivot from patch to whole alternative of affected gadgets is pretty beautiful and implies the malware the menace actors deployed one way or the other achieves persistence at a low sufficient stage that even wiping the system wouldn’t eradicate attacker entry,” Condon wrote.
Barracuda stated the malware was recognized on a subset of home equipment that allowed the attackers persistent backdoor entry to the gadgets, and that proof of information exfiltration was recognized on some programs.
Rapid7 stated it has seen no proof that attackers are utilizing the flaw to maneuver laterally inside sufferer networks. However that could be small comfort for Barracuda prospects now coming to phrases with the notion that international cyberspies most likely have been hoovering up all their e-mail for months.
Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at College of California, Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), stated it’s probably that the malware was in a position to corrupt the underlying firmware that powers the ESG gadgets in some irreparable method.
“One of many objectives of malware is to be exhausting to take away, and this means the malware compromised the firmware itself to make it actually exhausting to take away and actually stealthy,” Weaver stated. “That’s not a ransomware actor, that’s a state actor. Why? As a result of a ransomware actor doesn’t care about that stage of entry. They don’t want it. In the event that they’re going for knowledge extortion, it’s extra like a smash-and-grab. In the event that they’re going for knowledge ransoming, they’re encrypting the information itself — not the machines.”
Along with changing gadgets, Barracuda says ESG prospects must also rotate any credentials related to the equipment(s), and test for indicators of compromise courting again to a minimum of October 2022 utilizing the community and endpoint indicators the corporate has released publicly.
Replace, June 9, 11:55 a.m. ET: Barracuda has issued an up to date assertion concerning the incident, parts of which are actually excerpted above.
