WatchGuard failed to explicitly disclose critical flaw exploited by Russian hackers

Safety vendor WatchGuard quietly fastened a essential vulnerability in a line of its firewall units and didn’t explicitly disclose the flaw till Wednesday, following revelations hackers from Russia’s army equipment exploited it en masse to assemble an enormous botnet.

Regulation enforcement businesses within the US and UK on February 23 warned that members of Sandworm—among the many Russian authorities’s most aggressive and elite hacker teams—had been infecting WatchGuard firewalls with malware that made the firewalls a part of an enormous botnet. On the identical day, WatchGuard launched a software program software and directions for figuring out and locking down contaminated units. Among the many directions was guaranteeing home equipment had been operating the most recent model of the corporate’s Fireware OS.

Placing prospects at pointless threat

In courtroom paperwork unsealed on Wednesday, an FBI agent wrote that the WatchGuard firewalls hacked by Sandworm had been “weak to an exploit that enables unauthorized distant entry to the administration panels of these units.” It wasn’t till after the courtroom doc was public that WatchGuard printed this FAQ, which for the primary time made reference to CVE-2022-23176, a vulnerability with a severity score of 8.8 out of a potential 10.

“WatchGuard Firebox and XTM home equipment permit a distant attacker with unprivileged credentials to entry the system with a privileged administration session through uncovered administration entry,” the outline learn. “This vulnerability impacts Fireware OS earlier than 12.7.2_U1, 12.x earlier than 12.1.3_U3, and 12.2.x via 12.5.x earlier than 12.5.7_U3.”

The WatchGuard FAQ mentioned that CVE-2022-23176 had been “absolutely addressed by safety fixes that began rolling out in software program updates in Might 2021.” The FAQ went on to say that investigations by WatchGuard and out of doors safety agency Mandiant “didn’t discover proof the menace actor exploited a distinct vulnerability.”

When WatchGuard launched the Might 2021 software program updates, the corporate made solely essentially the most indirect of references to the vulnerability.

“These releases additionally embody fixes to resolve internally detected safety points,” an organization publish said. “These points had been discovered by our engineers and never actively discovered within the wild. For the sake of not guiding potential menace actors towards discovering and exploiting these internally found points, we’re not sharing technical particulars about these flaws that they contained.”

In accordance with Wednesday’s FAQ, FBI brokers knowledgeable WatchGuard in November that about 1 p.c of the firewalls it had bought had been contaminated by Cyclops Blink, a brand new pressure of malware developed by Sandworm to switch a botnet the FBI dismantled in 2018. Three months after studying of the infections from the FBI, WatchGuard printed the detection software and the accompanying 4-Step Prognosis and Remediation Plan for contaminated units. The corporate obtained the CVE-2022-23176 designation a day later, on February 24.

Even in spite of everything of those steps, together with acquiring the CVE, nevertheless, the corporate nonetheless did not explicitly disclose the essential vulnerability that had been fastened within the Might 2021 software program updates. Safety professionals, a lot of whom have spent weeks working to rid the Web of weak units, blasted WatchGuard for the failure to explicitly disclose.

“Because it seems, menace actors *DID* discover and exploit the problems,” Will Dormann, a vulnerability analyst at CERT, mentioned in a personal message. He was referring to the WatchGuard rationalization from Might that the corporate was withholding technical particulars to forestall the safety points from being exploited. “And with no CVE issued, extra of their prospects had been uncovered than wanted to be.”

He continued:

WatchGuard ought to have assigned a CVE once they launched an replace that fastened the vulnerability. In addition they had a second probability to assign a CVE once they had been contacted by the FBI in November. However they waited for practically 3 full months after the FBI notification (about 8 months whole) earlier than assigning a CVE. This habits is dangerous, and it put their prospects at pointless threat.

WatchGuard representatives didn’t reply to repeated requests for clarification or remark.