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Unit 42

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Almost Half of Malware Samples Communicate Direct to IP

Unit 42 analysis of 4 million malware reports finds 45% of C2-active samples connect directly to hard-coded IPs, bypassing DNS defenses.

Palo Alto Unit 42 analyzed over 4 million Advanced WildFire dynamic analysis reports and found that 45.32% of malware samples with C2 activity made at least one direct-to-IP connection, accounting for 23.17% of all C2 connection attempts. The firm proposes zero trust IP (ZT-IP), an enforcement approach that verifies whether outbound destinations were ever sanctioned by a DNS response. ZT-IP analysis surfaced Phorpiex ransomware droppers fetching payloads directly from C2 IPs, a persistent data exfiltration campaign using an obfuscated \GET protocol, and Mozi P2P botnet payloads delivered to IoT devices without DNS. Only 1% of benign samples connected directly to untrusted IP addresses.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 29d agoResearch

Attack Paths Into VMs in the Cloud

Unit 42 maps attack paths into AWS, Azure, and GCP VMs through intended features like startup scripts and SSH key pushes.

Palo Alto Unit 42 reviewed attack vectors against virtual machine services on AWS, Azure, and GCP, finding that 11% of internet-exposed cloud hosts carry Critical or High severity vulnerabilities. The attack paths rely on legitimate features such as EC2 User Data, VM custom data, EC2 Instance Connect, SSM Run Command, and serial consoles rather than vulnerabilities, and exploiting them requires attackers to first obtain control plane permissions. A compromised VM exposes not only its data but the workload identity and cloud permissions assigned to it, making identity compromise potentially more damaging than data theft. The firm places mitigation responsibility on cloud users and administrators.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 29d agoResearch1

AI Tool Identifies BOLA Vulnerabilities in Easy!Appointments

Unit 42's AI-powered tool found 15 BOLA vulnerabilities in Easy!Appointments, rated up to CVSS 9.9, letting low-privileged users escalate privileges; fixed in 1.5.0.

Unit 42's automated BOLA detection tool, built on generative AI, uncovered 15 broken object-level authorization flaws in the open-source scheduling application Easy!Appointments, tracked as CVE-2023-3285 through CVE-2023-3290 and CVE-2023-38047 through CVE-2023-38055. Nine flaws scored CVSS 9.9, letting logged-in customers view or manipulate appointments and accounts of providers and admins, including creating admin users for privilege escalation. The maintainers patched all issues in version 1.5.0. The same tool previously found a BOLA in Grafana (CVE-2024-1313).

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 29d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2023-3285CVE-2023-3286CVE-2023-3287+13 CVEs

Identifying a BOLA Vulnerability in Harbor, a Cloud

Unit 42 found a BOLA flaw, CVE-2024-22278 (CVSS 6.4), letting Maintainers improperly alter Harbor project metadata; fixed in versions 2.9.5, 2.10.3, and 2.11.0.

Unit 42 researchers identified a broken object-level authorization flaw, CVE-2024-22278, in Harbor, a CNCF-graduated cloud-native container registry with 1.8 million downloads. The flaw (CVSS 6.4) lets users with the Maintainer role create, update, and delete project metadata, actions reserved for ProjectAdmin, risking data exposure, integrity compromise, and circumvention of vulnerability scanning. Harbor patched the issue in versions 2.9.5, 2.10.3, and 2.11.0. The finding came from Unit 42's automated BOLA detection tool built on generative AI.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 29d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2024-22278

Harnessing LLMs for Automating BOLA Detection

Unit 42's BOLABuster methodology uses LLMs to automate detection of broken object-level authorization vulnerabilities, uncovering flaws in Grafana, Harbor, and Easy!Appointments.

Palo Alto Unit 42 details BOLABuster, a methodology combining large language models with heuristics to automate detection of broken object-level authorization (BOLA) flaws, which traditional fuzzing and static analysis struggle to find. The approach uses LLM reasoning to understand application logic, map endpoint dependency relationships, and generate and interpret test cases. It found CVE-2024-1313 in Grafana, CVE-2024-22278 in Harbor, and 15 CVEs in Easy!Appointments. The team is continuing to hunt for BOLAs in open-source and internal projects.

Palo Alto Unit 42 · 29d agoResearchCVE-2024-1313CVE-2024-22278CVE-2023-3285+14 CVEs

Related CVEs

  • CVE-2023-32888.8<1%
    A BOLA vulnerability in POST /providers allows a low privileged user to create a privileged user (provider) in the system.
    A BOLA vulnerability in POST /providers allows a low privileged user to create a privileged user (provider) in the system. This results in privilege escalation.
    · easyappointments easyappointments—
  • CVE-2023-32878.8<1%
    A BOLA vulnerability in POST /admins allows a low privileged user to create a high privileged user (admin) in the system.
    A BOLA vulnerability in POST /admins allows a low privileged user to create a high privileged user (admin) in the system. This results in privilege escalation.
    · easyappointments easyappointments—
  • CVE-2023-380518.1<1%
    A BOLA vulnerability in GET, PUT, DELETE /secretaries/{secretaryId} allows a low privileged user to fetch, modify or delete a low privileged user (secretary).
    A BOLA vulnerability in GET, PUT, DELETE /secretaries/{secretaryId} allows a low privileged user to fetch, modify or delete a low privileged user (secretary). This results in unauthorized access and unauthorized data manipulation.
    · easyappointments easyappointments—
  • CVE-2023-380548.1<1%
    A BOLA vulnerability in GET, PUT, DELETE /customers/{customerId} allows a low privileged user to fetch, modify or delete a low privileged user (customer).
    A BOLA vulnerability in GET, PUT, DELETE /customers/{customerId} allows a low privileged user to fetch, modify or delete a low privileged user (customer). This results in unauthorized access and unauthorized data manipulation.
    · easyappointments easyappointments—
  • CVE-2023-380508.1<1%
    A BOLA vulnerability in GET, PUT, DELETE /webhooks/{webhookId} allows a low privileged user to fetch, modify or delete a webhook of any user (including admin).
    A BOLA vulnerability in GET, PUT, DELETE /webhooks/{webhookId} allows a low privileged user to fetch, modify or delete a webhook of any user (including admin). This results in unauthorized access and unauthorized data manipulation.
    · easyappointments easyappointments—
  • CVE-2023-32857.7<1%
    A BOLA vulnerability in POST /appointments allows a low privileged user to create an appointment for any user in the system (including admin).
    A BOLA vulnerability in POST /appointments allows a low privileged user to create an appointment for any user in the system (including admin). This results in unauthorized data manipulation.
    —
  • CVE-2024-13136.5<1%
    It is possible for a user in a different organization from the owner of a snapshot to bypass authorization and delete a snapshot by issuing a DELETE request to
    It is possible for a user in a different organization from the owner of a snapshot to bypass authorization and delete a snapshot by issuing a DELETE request to /api/snapshots/ using its view key. This functionality is intended to only be available to individuals with the permission to write/edit to the snapshot in question, but due to a bug in the authorization logic, deletion requests issued by an unprivileged user in a different organization than the snapshot owner are treated as authorized. Grafana Labs would like to thank Ravid Mazon and Jay Chen of Palo Alto Research for discovering and…
    —
  • CVE-2023-32896.5<1%
    A BOLA vulnerability in POST /services allows a low privileged user to create a service for any user in the system (including admin).
    A BOLA vulnerability in POST /services allows a low privileged user to create a service for any user in the system (including admin). This results in unauthorized data manipulation.
    · easyappointments easyappointments—
  • CVE-2023-32905.0<1%
    A BOLA vulnerability in POST /customers allows a low privileged user to create a low privileged user (customer) in the system.
    A BOLA vulnerability in POST /customers allows a low privileged user to create a low privileged user (customer) in the system. This results in unauthorized data manipulation.
    · easyappointments easyappointments—
  • CVE-2024-222784.3<1%
    Incorrect user permission validation in Harbor <v2.9.5 and Harbor <v2.10.3 allows authenticated users to modify configurations.
    Incorrect user permission validation in Harbor <v2.9.5 and Harbor <v2.10.3 allows authenticated users to modify configurations.
    · linuxfoundation harbor—

Appears with

organization Unit 42 5organization Palo Alto Networks 5vendor Palo Alto Networks 5product Easy!Appointments 2product Grafana 2product Harbor 2organization Microsoft Azure 1malware Mozi 1vendor Amazon Web Services 1vendor CNCF 1vendor Easy!Appointments 1vendor Google Cloud Platform 1vendor Microsoft Azure 1product Advanced WildFire 1malware Phorpiex 1ai model BOLABuster 1
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