Threat Brief: Maze Ransomware
Unit 42 issued a threat brief on Maze ransomware, noting an uptick across industries and exploitation of Pulse VPN and IE flaws for initial access.
Palo Alto Networks detected an uptick in Maze ransomware samples across finance, healthcare, government, and other sectors. Maze, a variant of ChaCha ransomware first seen in May 2019, is distributed via weaponized Word/Excel attachments and the Spelevo exploit kit leveraging CVE-2018-15982 and CVE-2018-4878, and has used CVE-2019-11510 (Pulse VPN) and CVE-2018-8174 (Internet Explorer). Operators establish a foothold, escalate privileges, move laterally, and exfiltrate files before encryption for extortion leverage.
- Maze distributed via weaponized Office attachments and Spelevo exploit kit
- Exploited CVE-2019-11510 (Pulse VPN) and CVE-2018-8174 (IE)
- Pre-encryption data exfiltration used for public exposure coercion
- Affected industries span finance, healthcare, government, and utilities
- ATT&CK
- T1566.001 Spearphishing AttachmentT1189 Drive-by CompromiseT1486 Data Encrypted for ImpactT1076 Remote Desktop Protocol
- Products
- Cortex XDRWildFire
- Organizations
- Palo Alto NetworksUnit 42
Vulnerabilities mentioned
All| CVE | Vulnerability | CVSS | EPSS | Signals | Published |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CVE-2018-15982 | Use-After-Free in Adobe Flash Player Allows Arbitrary Code Execution | 7.8 | 90% | KEVRansomwarePoC | KEV |
| CVE-2018-4878 | Use-After-Free RCE in Adobe Flash Player before 28.0.0.161 | 7.8 | 90% | KEVRansomwarePoC ×2 | KEV |
| CVE-2018-8174 | Out-of-Bounds Write RCE in Microsoft Windows VBScript Engine | 7.5 | 88% | KEVRansomwarePoC ×2 | KEV |
| CVE-2019-11510 | Unauthenticated Arbitrary File Read in Ivanti Pulse Connect Secure VPN | 10.0 | 100% | KEVRansomwarePoC ×2 | KEV |
From the original article
6 min read at unit42.paloaltonetworks.com
Since the beginning of the calendar year, Palo Alto Networks has detected an uptick in Maze ransomware samples across multiple industries. As a result, we've created this general threat assessment post on the Maze ransomware activities and full visualization of these techniques can be viewed in the Unit 42 Playbook Viewer .
By Doel Santos, Brittany Barbehenn · unit42.paloaltonetworks.com
A short excerpt; the article and its images belong to the publisher. Summary, key facts and assessment above are AI-written from the article and can be wrong.