My colleagues in Sophos X-Ops MDR and Incident Response are tracking a series of attacks in the past month leveraging compromised credentials and a known vulnerability in Veeam (CVE-2024-40711) to create an account and attempt to deploy ransomware. We put out a social media thread on this last week that was highlighted in a recent BleepingComputer article on the Veeam vulnerability. As I wrote in our Mastodon post:
In one case, attackers dropped Fog ransomware. Another attack in the same timeframe attempted to deploy Akira ransomware. Indicators in all 4 cases overlap with earlier Akira and Fog ransomware attacks.
In each of the cases, attackers initially accessed targets using compromised VPN gateways without multifactor authentication enabled. Some of these VPNs were running unsupported software versions.
Each time, the attackers exploited VEEAM on the URI /trigger on port 8000, triggering the Veeam.Backup.MountService.exe to spawn net.exe. The exploit creates a local account, “point,” adding it to the local Administrators and Remote Desktop Users groups.
In the Fog ransomware incident, the attacker deployed it to an unprotected Hyper-V server, then used the utility rclone to exfiltrate data. Sophos endpoint protection and MDR prevented ransomware deployments in the other cases.
These cases underline the importance of patching known vulnerabilities, updating/replacing out-of-support VPNs, and using multifactor authentication to control remote access. Sophos X-Ops continues to track this threat behavior.
Sophos X-Ops on infosec.exchange
We’ve since connected another case to the same threat activity cluster, and are continuing to hunt and research the threat. But this is just another case of weaponized unpatched hardware and software being used against organizations struggling to stay on top of security threats— particularly small and medium businesses without dedicated information security teams.
The Packet Rat 
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