Hackers Actively Exploiting Cisco AnyConnect and GIGABYTE Drivers Vulnerabilities

Cisco has warned of active exploitation attempts targeting a pair of two-year-old security flaws in the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client for Windows.

Tracked as CVE-2020-3153 (CVSS score: 6.5) and CVE-2020-3433 (CVSS score: 7.8), the vulnerabilities could enable local authenticated attackers to perform DLL hijacking and copy arbitrary files to system directories with elevated privileges.

While CVE-2020-3153 was addressed by Cisco in February 2020, a fix for CVE-2020-3433 was shipped in August 2020.

“In October 2022, the Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team became aware of additional attempted exploitation of this vulnerability in the wild,” the networking equipment maker said in an updated advisory.

“Cisco continues to strongly recommend that customers upgrade to a fixed software release to remediate this vulnerability.”

The alert comes as the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) moved to add the two flaws to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, alongside four bugs in GIGABYTE drivers, citing evidence of active abuse in the wild.

The vulnerabilities – assigned the identifiers CVE-2018-19320, CVE-2018-19321, CVE-2018-19322, and CVE-2018-19323, and patched in May 2020 – could permit an attacker to escalate privileges and run malicious code to take complete control of an affected system.

The development also follows a comprehensive report released by Singapore-based Group-IB last week detailing the tactics adopted by a Russian-speaking ransomware group dubbed OldGremlin in its attacks aimed at entities operating in the country.

Chief among its methods for gaining initial access is the exploitation of the above-stated Cisco AnyConnect flaws, with the GIGABYTE driver weaknesses employed to disarm security software, the latter of which has also been put to use by the BlackByte ransomware group.

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