Every single Ivanti product (including their SSL-VPN) should be considered a critical threat. The fact that this company is allowed to continue to sell their malware dressed-up as "security solutions" is a disaster. How they haven't been sued into bankruptcy is something I'll never understand.
The purpose of cybersecurity products and companies is not to sell security. It's to sell the illusion of security to (often incompetent) execs - which is perfectly fine because the market doesn't actually punish security breaches so an illusion is all that's needed. It is an insanely lucrative industry selling luxury-grade snake oil.
Actual cybersecurity isn't something you can just buy off-the-shelf and requires skill and making every single person in the org to give a shit about it, which is already hard to achieve, and even more so when you've tried for years to pay them as little as you can get away with.
Actually there is a significant push to more effective products coming from the reinsurance companies that underwrite cyber risks. Most of them come with a checklist of things you need to have before they sign you at any reasonable price. The more we get government regulation for fines in cases of breaches etc. the more this trend will accelerate.
The thing is that real security isn't something that a checklist can guarantee. You have to build it into the product architecture and mindset of every engineer that works on the project. At every single stage, you have to be thinking "How do I minimize this attack surface? What inputs might come in that I don't expect? What are the ways that this code might be exploited that I haven't thought about? What privileges does it have that it doesn't need?"
I can almost guarantee you that your ordinary feature developer working on a deadline is not thinking about that. They're thinking about how they can ship on time with the features that the salesguy has promised the client. Inverting that - and thinking about what "features" you're shipping that you haven't promised the client - costs a lot of money that isn't necessary for making the sale.
So when the reinsurance company mandates a checklist, they get a checklist, with all the boxes dutifully checked off. Any suitably diligent attacker will still be able to get in, but now there's a very strong incentive to not report data breaches and have your insurance premiums go up or government regulation come down. The ecosystem settles into an equilibrium of parasites (hackers, who have silently pwned a wide variety of computer systems and can use that to setup systems for their advantage) and blowhards (executives who claim their software has security guarantees that it doesn't really).
There is no bad publicity? I take few had heard of them before so this is free marketing putting the name in public. Or then there is some broken LLM based sentiment analysis bot that automatically buy companies in news...
Suing for negligence and friends is how car companies -- when it is found out they've built something highly unsafe/dangerously broken -- happens. I don't see the difference.
In most cases, you can't evade liability for negligence that results in personal injury. You can usually disclaim away liability for other types of damage caused by negligence.
"We are aware" can mean "we are taking this very seriously and have seen very little so far" or it can mean "after covering our eyes and plugging our ears we are seeing and hearing very little of this problem".
And "a very limited number" may mean "though we pretend to be a big company, we have a limited number of customers and while they all pay licence fees, most are not actually using the product in production."
Can't help but notice the weird choice of illustration in TFA.
Ivanti is a US company. But if you have never heard of them, the dragon-resembling creature in the illustration (representing the dormant backdoor?) makes it look like the incident is somehow related to China.
There is some dark amusement about an MDM and general enterprise management and security systems being used as the attack vector. Ivanti in particular has proven itself to be swiss cheese as of late, and would be bankrupt if people cared about security rather than it being a compliance/insurance checkbox that truly _nobody_ cares about in practice.
Semi-related: with the recent much-touted cybersecurity improvements of AI models (as well as the general recent increase in tensions and conflicts worldwide) I wonder just how much the pace of attacks will increase, and whether it’ll prove to be a benefit or a disadvantage over time. Government sponsored teams were already combing through every random weekend project and library that somehow ended in node or became moderately popular, but soon any dick and tom will be able to do it at scale for a few bucks. On the other hand, what’s being exploited tends to get patched in time - but this can take quite a while, especially when the target is some random side project on github last updated 4 years ago.
My gut feeling is that there will be a lot more exploitation everywhere, and not much upside for the end consumer (who didn’t care about state level actors anyway). Probably a good idea to firewall aggressively and minimize the surface area that can be attacked in the first place. The era of running any random vscode extension and trust-me-bro chrome extension is likely at an end. I’m also looking forward to being pwned by wifi enabled will-never-be-updated smart appliances that seem to multiply by the year.
Actual cybersecurity isn't something you can just buy off-the-shelf and requires skill and making every single person in the org to give a shit about it, which is already hard to achieve, and even more so when you've tried for years to pay them as little as you can get away with.
I can almost guarantee you that your ordinary feature developer working on a deadline is not thinking about that. They're thinking about how they can ship on time with the features that the salesguy has promised the client. Inverting that - and thinking about what "features" you're shipping that you haven't promised the client - costs a lot of money that isn't necessary for making the sale.
So when the reinsurance company mandates a checklist, they get a checklist, with all the boxes dutifully checked off. Any suitably diligent attacker will still be able to get in, but now there's a very strong incentive to not report data breaches and have your insurance premiums go up or government regulation come down. The ecosystem settles into an equilibrium of parasites (hackers, who have silently pwned a wide variety of computer systems and can use that to setup systems for their advantage) and blowhards (executives who claim their software has security guarantees that it doesn't really).
Isn't most off-the-shelf software effectively always supplied without any kind of warranty? What grounds would the lawsuit have?
“We are aware” and “very limited” are likely (in our opinion, this is probably not fact, etc, etc) to be doing a significant amount of lifting.
For avoidance of doubt, the following versions of Ivanti EPMM are patched:
None
----
Ah, this company is a security joke as most software security companies are.
1. https://labs.watchtowr.com/someone-knows-bash-far-too-well-a...
Ivanti is a US company. But if you have never heard of them, the dragon-resembling creature in the illustration (representing the dormant backdoor?) makes it look like the incident is somehow related to China.
Anyway, the image is just the end result of plugging the title into nano banana. You ought to address your complaints to Google :)
https://hub.ivanti.com/s/article/Security-Advisory-Ivanti-En...
Ivanti doesn't explain how this happened or what mistake led to this exploit being created.
Semi-related: with the recent much-touted cybersecurity improvements of AI models (as well as the general recent increase in tensions and conflicts worldwide) I wonder just how much the pace of attacks will increase, and whether it’ll prove to be a benefit or a disadvantage over time. Government sponsored teams were already combing through every random weekend project and library that somehow ended in node or became moderately popular, but soon any dick and tom will be able to do it at scale for a few bucks. On the other hand, what’s being exploited tends to get patched in time - but this can take quite a while, especially when the target is some random side project on github last updated 4 years ago.
My gut feeling is that there will be a lot more exploitation everywhere, and not much upside for the end consumer (who didn’t care about state level actors anyway). Probably a good idea to firewall aggressively and minimize the surface area that can be attacked in the first place. The era of running any random vscode extension and trust-me-bro chrome extension is likely at an end. I’m also looking forward to being pwned by wifi enabled will-never-be-updated smart appliances that seem to multiply by the year.