NSA Released Top 5 Vulnerabilities That Exploited by Russian Hackers to Hack US Based Networks

The cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) along with The National Security Agency (NSA), and the FBI has recently, released an advisory together about ongoing Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) exploitation of five publicly known vulnerabilities.

Mitigation against these vulnerabilities is critically important as U.S based networks are constantly scanned, targeted, and exploited by Russian state-sponsored threat actors.

The news pronounced that this advisory is continuously targetting five vulnerabilities in attacks against U.S. organizations and interests.

Not only this after knowing all the details regarding the advisory NSA said that they got the information that the Russian SVR is using the vulnerabilities to hack USA Govt. Networks.

The vulnerabilities were used against services that are being faced by the public, and the main motive of the threat actors was to obtain authentication credentials.

Once the threat actors get the details they can easily compromise the networks of US corporate and also the government networks.

Vulnerabilities Exploited

• CVE-2018-13379: In this vulnerability, the threat actors can easily download all the files through HTTP resource requests.
• CVE-2019-9670: This is a vulnerability of XML External Entity injection (XXE).
• CVE-2019-11510: Through this vulnerability, the threat actors can send a specific crafted Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) so that they can perform an arbitrary file read.
• CVE-2019-19781: This is a Directory traversal vulnerability, and it generally enables the threat actors to perform the arbitrary code.
• CVE-2020-4006: It is a command injection vulnerability, that enables and threat actors to execute commands with unrestricted dues on the operating system.

Mitigation

Some mitigations were mentioned by the experts in this joint advisory, and here they are mentioned below:-

• Always, keep the systems updated and patch soon after the patches are released.
• Remember to disable external management abilities so that you can easily set up the management network.
• Always, allow the robust logging of Internet-facing services and authentication functions.
• Remember to block expire or redundant protocols that are present at the network edge and break them in device configurations.

The cybersecurity experts declared that the joint advisory clearly pronounces that the Russian SVR has been using a proper mixture of these vulnerabilities in their attacks.

However, the analysts have suggested that every administrator must install the security updates that are being associated with the updates as soon as possible. 

Moreover, the mitigations that were mentioned above should be maintained and followed carefully by the administrators. Not only this but the NSA, CISA, and FBI have recognized all partners of private as well as public sectors for inclusive and collaborative efforts.

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