U.S. CISA adds ProjectSend, North Grid Proself, and Zyxel firewalls bugs to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

U.S. CISA adds ProjectSend, North Grid Proself, and Zyxel firewalls bugs to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog

Pierluigi Paganini
December 04, 2024

U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) adds ProjectSend, North Grid Proself, and Zyxel firewalls bugs to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added the following vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog:

• CVE-2023-45727 North Grid Proself Improper Restriction of XML External Entity (XEE) Reference Vulnerability
• CVE-2024-11680 ProjectSend Improper Authentication Vulnerability
• CVE-2024-11667 Zyxel Multiple Firewalls Path Traversal Vulnerability

Proself versions before Ver5.62, Ver1.65, and Ver1.08 are vulnerable to XXE attacks, allowing unauthenticated attackers to read server files with account data. Attackers can use malformed XML requests to access arbitrary server files containing account information.

Last week, VulnCheck researchers warned that ProjectSend vulnerability CVE-2024-11680 (CVSS score: 9.8) appears to have been exploited by attackers in the wild.

The vulnerability is an improper authentication issue that impacts ProjectSend versions before r1720.

Remote, unauthenticated attackers can exploit this flaw by sending crafted HTTP requests to options.php, enabling unauthorized modification of the application’s configuration. Successful exploitation allows attackers to create accounts, upload webshells, and embed malicious JavaScript.

ProjectSend is an open-source file-sharing web application. Censys indexed over 1,500 GitHub stars and more than 4,000 instances exposed online. The vulnerability was published on November 26, the patch has been publicly available since May 16, 2023. The researchers pointed out that since the patch release, multiple exploits have been published by research teams, including Synactiv, Project Discovery (Nuclei), and Rapid7 (Metasploit).

“VulnCheck noticed that public-facing ProjectSend servers had started to change their landing page titles to long, random-ish strings. Some of the “random” names have larger groupings, for example” read the advisory published by VulnCheck. “These long and random-ish names are in line with how both Nuclei and Metasploit implement their vulnerability testing logic. Both exploit tools modify the victim’s configuration file to alter the sitename (and therefore HTTP title) with a random value.”

VulnCheck experts believe that threat actors started using the exploit code released by Project Discovery and Rapid7 since September 2024.

Attackers also enabled user registration, a non-default setting, to gain post-authentication access, altering the landing page to prompt account creation.

The webshells uploaded by attackers are stored in a predictable location (upload/files/), with filenames based on upload timestamps, username hashes, and the original file name.

Defender can identify exploitation attempts by analyzing server access logs and checking for direct access to upload/files/, which bypasses intended download endpoints.

The vulnerability CVE-2024-11667 is a directory traversal flaw in Zyxel firmware (V5.00–V5.38) that could let attackers download or upload files through crafted URLs in the web management interface.

According to Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 22-01: Reducing the Significant Risk of Known Exploited Vulnerabilities, FCEB agencies have to address the identified vulnerabilities by the due date to protect their networks against attacks exploiting the flaws in the catalog.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, CISA)