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Week in review: MS Exchange zero-days exploited, AD attack paths, developing secure APIs

criticalRansomware exploited in the wildimportance 60CVE-2022-41040CVE-2022-41082CVE-2022-3236

Vulnerabilities mentionedAll →

CVEVulnerabilityCVSSEPSSFlagsAffectedExposurePublished
CVE-2022-3236
Unauthenticated Code Injection RCE in Sophos Firewall (User Portal/Webadmin)

CVE-2022-3236 is a critical (CVSS 9.8) code injection flaw (CWE-94) in the User Portal and Webadmin interfaces of Sophos Firewall version v19.0 MR1 and older. A remote, unauthenticated attacker can send crafted input to an exposed User Portal or Webadmin service, and the network-reachable, no-privilege, no-user-interaction nature of the flaw makes it trivially triggerable once those interfaces are reachable. Successful exploitation results in arbitrary code execution on the firewall appliance, with high impact to confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Any organization running Sophos Firewall v19.0 MR1 or older is affected, including end-of-life appliances for which the vendor issued a dedicated hotfix. The flaw is confirmed exploited in the wild: it was abused as a zero-day before the patch, added to CISA KEV on 2022-09-23, carries a 98.9% EPSS, and news reports indicate it was still being exploited against EOL firewalls well after disclosure.

Do: Upgrade Sophos Firewall to version 19.5 or later per vendor instructions (the fix shipped in the 19.5 release line), and apply the vendor hotfix to end-of-life appliances that cannot upgrade. Restrict internet exposure of the User Portal (TCP 443) and Webadmin (TCP 4444) to trusted management IPs via WAN access rules, and review appliance logs for signs of exploitation. As this CVE is in CISA KEV, federal agencies and other defenders with KEV-driven patch mandates should confirm the update is applied.

9.899% KEV
  • Sophos Firewall (User Portal and Webadmin) v19.0 MR1 and older
masshundreds of thousands of deployed Sophos Firewall appliances; tens of thousands of User Portal/Webadmin instances internet-exposed per public scans
CVE-2022-41040
+1 in the same advisory: …41082
Server-Side Request Forgery in Microsoft Exchange Server (ProxyNotShell)

CVE-2022-41040 is a server-side request forgery (SSRF, CWE-918) vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange Server, publicly tracked under the name "ProxyNotShell" together with CVE-2022-41082. It is triggered when an attacker sends crafted HTTP requests to exposed Exchange web endpoints (such as Autodiscover), causing the server to issue attacker-influenced requests to itself. On its own the SSRF coerces authenticated server-side requests, but when chained with the CVE-2022-41082 remote code execution flaw it gives the attacker code execution on the Exchange server, typically followed by web shells, data access, and — in observed campaigns — ransomware deployment. Organizations running on-premises Microsoft Exchange Server are affected; the source data lists only Microsoft Exchange Server and does not specify affected version ranges, and hosted Exchange Online is a separate product not listed here. The vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild: it was added to CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2022-09-30 with known ransomware use, and EPSS assigns it a 100% probability of exploitation within 30 days; no public PoC is listed.

Do: Apply Microsoft's Exchange Server security updates per vendor instructions immediately, as required by the CISA KEV catalog. As interim mitigation, restrict or block untrusted internet access to Exchange web endpoints (e.g., Autodiscover, OWA, ECP), and review IIS logs for suspicious crafted requests indicating SSRF or the chained CVE-2022-41082 exploitation. Given documented ransomware use, prioritize any internet-facing Exchange server and hunt for web shells and post-exploitation activity.

8.8
group max
100% KEV ransomware PoC
  • Microsoft Exchange Server
mass≈250,000+ internet-exposed Exchange servers (public scans of exposed OWA/ECP/Exchange endpoints)
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Text extracted automatically; images, tables and formatting may be missing. Original: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2022/10/02/week-in-review-ms-exchange-zero-days-exploited-ad-attack-paths-developing-secure-apis/