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ONGOING VMWARE ESXI RANSOMWARE ATTACK HIGHLIGHTS INHERENT VIRTUALIZATION RISKS

The global assault on vulnerable VMware hypervisors may have been mitigated by
updating to the latest version of the product, but patch management is only part
of the story.
Elizabeth Montalbano
Contributor, Dark Reading
February 07, 2023
Source: MR via Adobe Stock
PDF


Organizations using older versions of VMWare ESXi hypervisors are learning a
hard lesson about staying up-to-date with vulnerability patching, as a global
ransomware attack on what VMware has deemed "End of General Support (EOGS)
and/or significantly out-of-date products" continues.



However, the onslaught also points out wider problems in locking down virtual
environments, the researchers say.

VMware confirmed in a statement Feb. 6 that a ransomware attack first flagged by
the French Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-FR) on Feb. 3 is not
exploiting an unknown or "zero-day" flaw, but rather previously identified
vulnerabilities that already have been patched by the vendor.

Indeed, it was already believed that the chief avenue of compromise in an attack
propagating a novel ransomware strain dubbed "ESXiArgs" is an exploit for a
2-year-old remote code execution (RCE) security vulnerability (CVE-2021-21974),
which affects the hypervisor's Open Service Location Protocol (OpenSLP) service.



"With this in mind, we are advising customers to upgrade to the latest available
supported releases of vSphere components to address currently known
vulnerabilities," VMware told customers in the statement.



The company also recommended that customers disable the OpenSLP service in ESXi,
something VMware began doing by default in shipped versions of the project
starting in 2021 with ESXi 7.0 U2c and ESXi 8.0 GA, to mitigate the issue.


UNPATCHED SYSTEMS AGAIN IN THE CROSSHAIRS

VMware's confirmation means that the attack by as-yet unknown perpetrators
that's so far compromised thousands of servers in Canada, France, Finland,
Germany, Taiwan, and the US may have been avoided by something that all
organizations clearly need to do better — patch vulnerable IT assets — security
experts said.

"This just goes to show how long it takes many organizations to get around to
patching internal systems and applications, which is just one of many reasons
why the criminals keep finding their way in," notes Jan Lovmand, CTO for
ransomware protection firm BullWall.



It's a "sad truth" that known vulnerabilities with an exploit available are
often left unpatched, concurs Bernard Montel, EMEA technical director and
security strategist for security exposure management firm Tenable.

"This puts organizations at incredible jeopardy of being successfully
penetrated," he tells Dark Reading. "In this case, with the … VMWare
vulnerability, the threat is immense given the active exploitation."

However, even given the risks of leaving vulnerable systems unpatched, it
remains a complex issue for organizations to balance the need to update systems
with the effect the downtime required to do so can have on a business, Montel
acknowledges.

"The issue for many organizations is evaluating uptime, versus taking something
offline to patch," he says. "In this case, the calculation really couldn’t be
more straightforward — a few minutes of inconvenience, or days of disruption."


VIRTUALIZATION IS INHERENTLY A RISK

Other security experts don't believe the ongoing ESXi attack is as
straightforward as a patching issue. Though lack of patching may solve the
problem for some organizations in this case, it's not as simple as that when it
comes to protecting virtualized environments in general, they note.

The fact of the matter is that VMware as a platform and ESXi in particular are
complex products to manage from a security perspective, and thus easy targets
for cybercriminals, says David Maynor, senior director of threat intelligence at
cybersecurity training firm Cybrary. Indeed, multiple ransomware campaigns have
targeted ESXi in the past year alone, demonstrating that savvy attackers
recognize their potential for success.

Attackers get the added bonus with the virtualized nature of an ESXi environment
that if they break into one ESXi hypervisor, which can control/have access to
multiple virtual machines (VMs), "it could be hosting a lot of other systems
that could also be compromised without any additional work," Maynor says.

Indeed, this virtualization that's at the heart of every cloud-based environment
has made the task of threat actors easier in many ways, Montel notes. This is
because they only have to target one vulnerability in one instance of a
particular hypervisor to gain access to an entire network.

"Threat actors know that targeting this level with one arrow can allow them to
elevate their privileges and grant access to everything," he says. "If they are
able to gain access, they can push malware to infiltrate the hypervisor level
and cause mass infection."


HOW TO PROTECT VMWARE SYSTEMS WHEN YOU CAN'T PATCH

As the latest ransomware attack persists — with its operators encrypting files
and asking for around 2 Bitcoin (or $23,000 at press time) to be delivered
within three days of compromise or risk the release of sensitive data —
organizations grapple with how to resolve the underlying issue that creates such
a rampant attack.

Patching or updating any vulnerable systems immediately may not be entirely
realistic, other approaches may need to be implemented, notes Dan Mayer, a
threat researcher at Stairwell. "The truth is, there are always going to be
unpatched systems, either due to a calculated risk taken by the organizations or
due to resource and time constraints," he says.

The risk of having an unpatched system in and of itself may be mitigated then by
other security measures, such as continuously monitoring enterprise
infrastructure for malicious activity and being prepared to respond quickly and
segment areas of attack if a problem arises.

Indeed, organizations need to act on the assumption that preventing ransomware
"is all but impossible," and focus on putting tools in place "to lessen the
impact, such as disaster recovery plans and context-switched data," notes Barmak
Meftah, founding partner at cybersecurity venture capital firm Ballistic
Ventures.

However, the ongoing VMware ESXi ransomware attack highlights another issue that
contributes to an inherent inability for many organizations to take the
necessary preventative measures: the skill and income gaps across the globe in
the IT security realm, Mayer says.

"We do not have enough skilled IT professionals in nations where wealthy
companies are targets," he tells Dark Reading. "At the same time, there are
threat actors across the globe who are able to make a better living leveraging
their skills to extort money from others than if they took legitimate
cybersecurity work."

Mayer cites a report by the international cybersecurity nonprofit (ICS2) that
said to secure assets effectively, the cybersecurity workforce needs 3.4 million
cybersecurity workers. Until that happens, "we need to ramp up training these
workers, and while the gap still exists, pay those with the skills around the
world what they are worth, so they don’t turn to being part of the problem,"
Mayer says.

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