Never-before-seen Linux malware gets installed using 1-day exploits

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Never-before-seen Linux malware gets installed using 1-day exploits
arstechnica.com
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Seems it's exploiting vulnerabilities in some software called "Ivanti Connect Secure VPN", so unless you're running that, you're safe I guess. Says in the past they used vulnerabilities in "Qlik Sense" and Adobe "Magento". Never heard of any of those, but I guess maybe some businesses use them?

Ivanti Connect Secure VPN

So its spreading via a closed source VPN software. Why should you even use that when there is great VPN software available on Linux which works reliable for decades?

Well of course you miss zero trust connections, multi-cloud readiness, award‑winning security and proven secure corporate access ...

Because someone built an easy-to-use solution for organisations to charge money for. The same thing with Cisco VPN that every other software company seems to use.

My university has us use Ivanti to connect to our network from offsite...

These vpns seem to be quite a good target since at least the one my university uses is run as a setuid executable, so if there is a vulnerability in there, you can execute code as root that wasn't intended to be executed as root.

"Linux isn't more secure than Windows! It has vulnerabilities"

The Linux vulnerability: ^

I pay for ProtonVPN, and I still run my traffic through OpenVPN.

Hate to victim blame, but unless you're going to audit every line of code yourself, don't use obscure software.

As TonyTonyChopper this thread said, sometimes that obscure software is what you are required to use in your institution, or they don't offer support for anything else.

Yeah it sucks. Of course there are outlying situations where people are obliged to use shit software.

But for those with a choice, just don't use shit software.

Are these tools implementing proprietary protocols or something? So far I have not found a VPN I couldn't make work with openvpn or wireguard.

To be fair you should be using wire guard then. Because multiple of the largest and most well-known security auditing firms in the world have said that openvpn is impossible to truly audit. It's too large, you can audit individual parts of it, and you can audit individual interactions between parts. But it's not possible to fully audit.

Meanwhile wireguard is quite small so it can be fairly easily audited by a small team and has been multiple times

But it could be banned by DPI. Russia does it, China also obviously

You can wrap it into https with nginx if you wanna get super fancy so it just looks like web traffic even with dpi. Takes a latency and speed hit but it works

Magento is the e-commerce platform. Adobe acquired it in 2018. Quite a few businesses use it.

ITT people who don’t understand the difference between “privacy” VPNs pitched by influencers and corporate remote access VPN.

This is the latter. Ivanti bought Pulse a few years back. Pulse, iirc, spun out of Juniper and Netscreen.

Ivanti is a huge name in enterprise management. They make LANdesk which has been one of the most widely deployed enterprise endpoint management tools.

Juniper is one of the biggest names in enterprise and service-provider networks.