Second Ivanti EPMM Zero-Day Vulnerability Exploited In Targeted Attacks

Ivanti has warned customers about a second zero-day vulnerability in its Endpoint Manager Mobile (EPMM) product that has been exploited in targeted attacks.

Norwegian authorities announced on July 24 that a dozen government ministries had been targeted in a cyberattack involving exploitation of CVE-2023-35078, an Ivanti EPMM zero-day that allows an unauthenticated attacker to obtain sensitive information and make changes to impacted servers. 

Further investigation by cybersecurity firm Mnemonic revealed the existence of CVE-2023-3508, a high-severity flaw that allows an authenticated attacker with administrator privileges to remotely write arbitrary files to the server. 

Late last week, Ivanti published an advisory and CISA issued an alert to inform organizations about this second vulnerability and warn them of active exploitation. Organizations have been urged to immediately patch their devices.

EPMM, formerly known as MobileIron Core, is a mobile management software engine used by IT teams to set policies for mobile devices, applications, and content. 

Ivanti noted that CVE-2023-35081 can be exploited in conjunction with CVE-2023-35078 to bypass admin authentication and access control list (ACL) restrictions. 

“Successful exploitation can be used to write malicious files to the appliance, ultimately allowing a malicious actor to execute OS commands on the appliance as the tomcat user,” Ivanti explained. “As of now we are only aware of the same limited number of customers impacted by CVE-2023-35078 as being impacted by CVE-2023-35081.”

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It’s still unclear who is behind the attacks exploiting these zero-days, but it’s likely a state-sponsored threat actor.

While currently the vulnerabilities have been leveraged in limited attacks, exploitation is likely to increase considering that there are thousands of potentially vulnerable internet-exposed systems and proof-of-concept (PoC) code for CVE-2023-35078 has become available. 

CISA’s Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog currently lists 10 Ivanti product flaws, but it does not include the latest zero-day. The flaws affect Pulse Connect Secure and MobileIron products, which Ivanti acquired in 2020.  

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