It’s not usually {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 consultants say that’s precisely what transpired this week with Barracuda Networks, as the corporate struggled to fight a sprawling malware risk which seems to have undermined its e-mail safety home equipment in such a elementary manner that they’ll not be safely up to date with software program fixes.
The Barracuda E mail Safety Gateway (ESG) 900 equipment.
Campbell, Calif. primarily based Barracuda mentioned it employed incident response agency Mandiant on Could 18 after receiving studies about uncommon visitors originating from its E mail Safety Gateway (ESG) units, that are designed to take a seat on the fringe of a company’s community and scan all incoming and outgoing e-mail for malware.
On Could 19, Barracuda recognized that the malicious visitors was profiting from 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 safety advisory, Barracuda mentioned the vulnerability existed within the Barracuda software program part chargeable for screening attachments for malware. Extra alarmingly, the corporate mentioned it seems attackers first began exploiting the flaw in October 2022.
However on June 6, Barracuda out of the blue started urging its ESG prospects to wholesale rip out and exchange — not patch — affected home equipment.
“Impacted ESG home equipment should be instantly changed no matter patch model stage,” the corporate’s advisory warned. “Barracuda’s advice presently is full alternative of the impacted ESG.”
Rapid7‘s Caitlin Condon referred to as this exceptional flip of occasions “pretty gorgeous,” and mentioned there look like roughly 11,000 weak ESG units nonetheless linked to the Web worldwide.
“The pivot from patch to whole alternative of affected units is pretty gorgeous and implies the malware the risk actors deployed in some way achieves persistence at a low sufficient stage that even wiping the machine wouldn’t eradicate attacker entry,” Condon wrote.
Barracuda mentioned the malware was recognized on a subset of home equipment that allowed the attackers persistent backdoor entry to the units, and that proof of information exfiltration was recognized on some methods.
Rapid7 mentioned it has seen no proof that attackers are utilizing the flaw to maneuver laterally inside sufferer networks. However which may be small comfort for Barracuda prospects now coming to phrases with the notion that overseas cyberspies most likely have been hoovering up all their e-mail for months.
Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at College of California, Berkeley’s Worldwide Laptop Science Institute (ICSI), mentioned it’s seemingly that the malware was in a position to corrupt the underlying firmware that powers the ESG units in some irreparable manner.
“One of many targets of malware is to be exhausting to take away, and this implies the malware compromised the firmware itself to make it actually exhausting to take away and actually stealthy,” Weaver mentioned. “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 info itself — not the machines.”
Along with changing units, Barracuda says ESG prospects also needs to rotate any credentials linked to the equipment(s), and examine for indicators of compromise courting again to at the least October 2022 utilizing the community and endpoint indicators the corporate has launched publicly.
