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The cyber assaults concentrating on the vitality sector in Denmark final yr could not have had the involvement of the Russia-linked Sandworm hacking group, new findings from Forescout present.
The intrusions, which focused round 22 Danish vitality organizations in Might 2023, occurred in two distinct waves, one which exploited a safety flaw in Zyxel firewall (CVE-2023-28771) and a follow-on exercise cluster that noticed the attackers deploy Mirai botnet variants on contaminated hosts by way of an as-yet-unknown preliminary entry vector.
The primary wave came about on Might 11, whereas the second wave lasted from Might 22 to 31, 2023. In a single such assault detected on Might 24, it was noticed that the compromised system was speaking with IP addresses (217.57.80[.]18 and 70.62.153[.]174) that had been beforehand used as command-and-control (C2) for the now-dismantled Cyclops Blink botnet.
Forescout’s nearer examination of the assault marketing campaign, nonetheless, has revealed that not solely had been the 2 waves unrelated, but in addition unlikely the work of the state-sponsored group owing to the very fact the second wave was a part of a broader mass exploitation marketing campaign in opposition to unpatched Zyxel firewalls. It is at the moment not recognized who’s behind the dual units of assaults.
“The marketing campaign described because the ‘second wave’ of assaults on Denmark, began earlier than and continued after [the 10-day time period], concentrating on firewalls indiscriminately in a really related method, solely altering staging servers periodically,” the corporate stated in a report aptly titled “Clearing the Fog of Conflict.”
There may be proof to counsel that the assaults could have began as early as February 16 utilizing different recognized flaws Zyxel gadgets (CVE-2020-9054 and CVE-2022-30525) alongside CVE-2023-28771, and endured as late as October 2023, with the exercise singling out numerous entities throughout Europe and the U.S.
“That is additional proof that exploitation of CVE-2023-27881, moderately than being restricted to Danish important infrastructure, is ongoing and concentrating on uncovered gadgets, a few of which simply occur to be Zyxel firewalls safeguarding important infrastructure organizations,” Forescout added.
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