Mass exploitation of critical MOVEit flaw is ransacking orgs big and small

Organizations big and small are falling prey to the mass exploitation of a critical vulnerability in a widely used file-transfer program. The exploitation started over the Memorial Day holiday—while the critical vulnerability was still a zeroday—and continues now, some nine days later.

As of Monday evening, payroll service Zellis, the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, British Airways, the BBC, and UK retailer Boots were all known to have had data stolen through the attacks, which are fueled by a recently patched vulnerability in MOVEit, a file-transfer provider that offers both cloud and on-premises services. Both Nova Scotia and Zellis had their own instances or cloud services breached. British Airways, the BBC, and Boots were customers of Zellis. All of the hacking activity has been attributed to the Russian-speaking Clop crime syndicate.

Widespread and rather substantial

Despite the relatively small number of confirmed breaches, researchers monitoring the ongoing attacks are describing the exploitation as widespread. They liken the hacks to smash-and-grab robberies, in which a window is broken and thieves grab whatever they can, and warned that the quick-moving heists are hitting banks, government agencies, and other targets in alarmingly high numbers.

“We have a handful of customers that were running MOVEit Transfer open to the Internet, and they were all compromised,” Steven Adair, president of security firm Volexity, wrote in an email. “Other folks we have talked to have seen similar.”

Adair continued:

I do not want to categorize our customers at this point since I do not know what all is out there in terms of who is running the software and give them away. With that said, though—it’s both massive and small organizations that have been hit. The cases we have looked into have all involved some level of data exfiltration. The attackers typically grabbed files from the MOVEit servers less than two hours after exploitation and shell access. We believe this was likely widespread and a rather substantial number of MOVEit Transfer servers that were running Internet-facing web services were…