Hackers are actively exploiting BIG-IP vulnerability with a 9.eight severity ranking

Researchers are marveling on the scope and magnitude of a vulnerability that hackers are actively exploiting to take full management of community units that run on a number of the world’s greatest and most delicate networks.

The vulnerability, which carries a 9.eight severity ranking out of a doable 10, impacts F5’s BIG-IP, a line of home equipment that organizations use as load balancers, firewalls, and for inspection and encryption of knowledge passing into and out of networks. There are greater than 16,000 cases of the gear discoverable on-line, and F5 says it’s utilized by 48 of the Fortune 50. Given BIG-IP’s proximity to community edges and their capabilities as units that handle visitors for net servers, they typically are able to see decrypted contents of HTTPS-protected visitors.

Final week, F5 disclosed and patched a BIG-IP vulnerability that hackers can exploit to execute instructions that run with root system privileges. The menace stems from a defective authentication implementation of the iControl REST, a set of web-based programming interfaces for configuring and managing BIG-IP units.

“This problem permits attackers with entry to the administration interface to principally faux to be an administrator attributable to a flaw in how the authentication is applied,” Aaron Portnoy, the director of analysis and improvement at safety agency Randori, stated in a direct message. “As soon as you might be an Administrator, you’ll be able to work together with all of the endpoints the applying supplies, together with one which straight executes instructions.”

Photos floating round Twitter up to now 24 hours present how hackers can use the exploit to entry an F5 software endpoint named bash. Its operate is to offer an interface for working user-supplied enter as a bash command with root privileges.

Whereas many photos present exploit code supplying a password to make instructions run, exploits additionally work when no password is supplied. The picture rapidly drew the eye of researchers who marveled on the energy of an exploit that enables the execution of root instructions with no password. Solely half-joking, some requested how performance this highly effective may have been so poorly locked down.

Elsewhere on Twitter, researchers shared exploit code and reported seeing in-the-wild exploits that dropped backdoor webshells that menace actors may use to keep up management over hacked BIG-IP units even after they’re patched. One such attack confirmed menace actors from the addresses 216.162.206.213 and 209.127.252.207 dropping a payload to the file path /tmp/f5.sh to put in PHP-based webshell in /usr/native/www/xui/frequent/css/. From then on, the machine is backdoored.

The severity of CVE-2022-1388 was rated at 9.eight final week earlier than many particulars had been accessible. Now that the convenience, energy, and broad availability of exploits are higher understood, the dangers tackle elevated urgency. Organizations that use BIG-IP gear ought to prioritize the investigation of this vulnerability and the patching or mitigating of any threat that arises. Randori supplied an in depth evaluation of the vulnerability and a one-line bash script here that BIG-IP customers can use to verify exploitability. F5 has extra recommendation and steerage here.