Guardicore Labs

A critical vulnerability (CVE-2018-10933) was disclosed in libSSH, a library implementing the SSH2 protocol for clients and servers. The vulnerability allows an attacker to completely bypass the authentication step and connect to the server without providing any credentials, the worst possible flaw for a library implementing SSH.

As this security flaw still exists and puts Azure environments at risk, we believe it’s important to continuously verify whether your environment is vulnerable. To do that we integrated Azure password harvesting capabilities into the Infection Monkey.

We are pleased to announce a new version of our Infection Monkey open source attack simulation tool with several significant enhancements. We first introduced the Infection Monkey in 2016 and have continuously developed and supported it. Part of what we did came from feedback we received from our community so thanks everyone for contributing!

In the last few months GuardiCore Labs has been investigating multiple attack campaigns conducted by an established Chinese crime group that operates worldwide. The campaigns are launched from a large coordinated infrastructure and are mostly targeting servers running database services. By now we were able to identify three attack variants - Hex, Hanako and Taylor - targeting different SQL Servers, each with its own goals, scale and target services. This report covers the attackers’ infrastructure, attack variants and how the victims are used for both profit and further propagation.

VMware vSphere is the most widely used virtualization platform for on-premises data centers. Similarly to other virtualization platforms, it basically relies on host servers running guest machines. These hosts and guest machines can be managed using administration interfaces such as vSphere API and VIX API. The GuardiCore Labs team has discovered a vulnerability in the vSphere infrastructure that can be exploited using VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure eXtension (VIX) API. This vulnerability allows an attacker to remotely execute code on guest machines, bypassing the need for guest authentication.