Handler on Duty: Guy Bruneau
Threat Level: green
Podcast Detail
ANS Stormcast Monday, April 21st: MSFT Entra Lockouts; Erlang/OTP SSH Exploit; Sonicwall Exploit; bubble.io bug
If you are not able to play the podcast using the player below: Use this direct link to the audio file: https://traffic.libsyn.com/securitypodcast/9416.mp3
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Application Security: Securing Web Apps, APIs, and Microservices | San Diego | May 5th - May 10th 2025 |
Network Monitoring and Threat Detection In-Depth | Baltimore | Jun 2nd - Jun 7th 2025 |
Microsoft Entra User Lockout
Multiple organizations reported widespread alerts and account lockouts this weekend from Microsoft Entra. The issue is caused by a new feature Microsoft enabled. This feature will lock accounts if Microsoft believes that the password for the account was compromised.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/widespread-microsoft-entra-lockouts-tied-to-new-security-feature-rollout/
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/entra/identity/authentication/feature-availability
Erlang/OTP SSH Exploit
An exploit was published for the Erlang/OTP SSH vulnerability. The vulnerability is easy to exploit, and the exploit and a Metasploit module allow for easy remote code execution.
https://github.com/exa-offsec/ssh_erlangotp_rce/blob/main/ssh_erlangotp_rce.rb
Sonicwall Exploited
An older command injection vulnerability is now exploited on Sonicwall devices after initially gaining access by brute-forcing credentials.
https://psirt.global.sonicwall.com/vuln-detail/SNWLID-2021-0022
Unpatched Vulnerability in Bubble.io
An unpatched vulnerability in the no-code platform bubble.io can be used to access any project hosted on the site.
https://github.com/demon-i386/pop_n_bubble
Application Security: Securing Web Apps, APIs, and Microservices | San Diego | May 5th - May 10th 2025 |
Network Monitoring and Threat Detection In-Depth | Baltimore | Jun 2nd - Jun 7th 2025 |
Application Security: Securing Web Apps, APIs, and Microservices | Washington | Jul 14th - Jul 19th 2025 |
Application Security: Securing Web Apps, APIs, and Microservices | Las Vegas | Sep 22nd - Sep 27th 2025 |
Application Security: Securing Web Apps, APIs, and Microservices | Denver | Oct 4th - Oct 9th 2025 |
Podcast Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Monday, April 21st, 2025 edition of the SANS Internet Storm Center's Stormcast. My name is Johannes Ulrich and today I'm recording from Jacksonville, Florida. Looks like this weekend was not a good weekend for administrators using Microsoft Entra for authentication. Microsoft apparently made live a new feature. They're calling it MACE and the idea behind the feature is not a bad idea. It does flag accounts whose credentials have been compromised in the past. So they're tying into some kind of backend. I'm not sure if it's have I been pwned or something they built themselves. But if you're using credentials that were found in recent compromises, the account is then automatically locked. The problem is that, well, a lot of accounts apparently were affected by this. Some report like about a third of their accounts were flagged. So you got this rash of alerts. And of course, attackers haven't necessarily taken advantage of this issue. So it's very possible that the account itself is still fine. It's a little bit tricky how you should react to these alerts. Of course, you should probably ask your users to update their passwords. But on the other hand, having a third of your users all for a sudden disabled is often not really sustainable from customer support as well as from a business perspective overall. So you may need to find a quick workaround here to keep these accounts going for now. It's not clear what exactly was compromised. If just the password showed up in any compromises of the username and password combination showed up. Of course, the second being much more dangerous than your users just using a somewhat weak password that someone else may have used as well. And then that password was compromised. Like I said, don't ignore these alerts. But you may come Monday as you get to the office. Need to find a workaround to at least keep business going until you got this all sorted out. Well, apparently attackers are using a neat, quick social engineering trick in order to gain access to remote users via Zoom. The trick involves, first of all, getting into a Zoom call with the victim. This is often done under some kind of pretense, like being a company they would like to work with. And then the attacker is changing their real name in Zoom to the word Zoom. And now if the attacker is requesting system access, it looks pretty much like Zoom, the software itself, is requesting system access, making it more likely for the victim to approve the request. That, of course, is then in turn used by the attacker to execute commands on the victim's system. Apparently, it's possible in Zoom to globally disable this feature across an organization. This may not necessarily be what you want to do, given that this feature is sometimes used legitimately in customer support scenarios, for example. But overall, where your best bet is educate users about these risks. And I can see that similar attacks will also work for other remote conferencing platforms, not just Zoom, because they all have fairly similar feature sets. And SonicWall updated an older advisory from September 2021, indicating that this particular arbitrary code execution vulnerability is now being exploited. The reason this particular vulnerability actually, I think, hasn't been exploited so far is that it doesn't give you access to the system. So you do need valid credentials. That also explains the somewhat lower CVSS score of 7-ish for this particular vulnerability. But we all know that the credential brute forcing is heavily used against these kind of SLBP and other border devices. So once the attacker gains access to the device using a probably lower privileged account, they can now use this vulnerability to execute arbitrary commands and essentially get a privileged escalation on the device. If you do find a device that you suspect to be compromised, definitely keep that in mind, in particular if you think that the attacker logged in using some lower level credentials. How do we have? Well, more trouble in no-code land. This time it's Bubble .io. Bubble.io is one of those no-code platforms that allow you to quickly generate apps using AI. Well, they actually ran into an issue that we talk about in the Defending Web App class, that with Elasticsearch, some developers are tempted to expose Elasticsearch directly to the user because it's so easy to access it with JavaScript. That's exactly what Bubble.io did. They expose Elasticsearch to JavaScript requests created by the user. Now, in order to keep users apart in that scenario, they're encrypting the payload. However, they don't really use a secret here in the encryption. They're using the app name, which, of course, you know what app name people are using. And then they're using an IV initialization vector, but they're not using a random one. There are only two across all the different applications that are hard-coded into the JavaScript. And that way, well, it's very easy to derive the encryption key for a random application. And with that decrypt the code being returned for that application. And then the biggest problem here overall is that even though Bubble.io was notified by researchers who discovered the flaw back in 2024, they yet have to deploy a fix. So if you're using Bubble.io, your applications are currently still vulnerable. I just took a quick look at the Bubble.io website and couldn't really find anything if they have fixed anything since the vulnerability was publicly released. Well, that's it for today. Thanks to all that said hi in Orlando last week. In two weeks, I'll be actually in San Diego. And I'll be teaching the Network Inclusion Detection class again. I'll also be, of course, at Sans Fire. And as I announced last week, you'll occasionally see QR codes, links for the class here in these daily podcast videos. If you're not listening or if you're not watching, if you're listening instead, of course, links will be on the ISC website. Thanks and talk to you again tomorrow. Bye.