Microsoft hyperlinks SolarWinds hacker group to China

Tech large Microsoft has attributed the notorious SolarWinds cyberattack from final 12 months to a Chinese hacker group. The firm’s Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) mentioned the assaults had been carried out by a gaggle referred to as “DEV-0322″ who had a “presumed goal” of accessing purchasers of the United States’ protection trade.

“Microsoft has detected a 0-day distant code execution exploit getting used to assault SolarWinds Serv-U FTP software program in restricted and focused assaults. The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) attributes this marketing campaign with excessive confidence to DEV-0322, a gaggle working out of China, based mostly on noticed victimology, techniques, and procedures,” the corporate mentioned in a weblog submit.

SolarWinds assault was found final 12 months and is called as such as a result of the hackers compromised a well-liked community monitoring software referred to as Orion, made by IT agency SolarWinds. The software, in accordance with studies on the time, was utilized by over 400 Fortune 500 firms. Some studies initially suspected the group to be of Russian origin on the time.

MSTIC mentioned it has additionally noticed the hacker group focusing on “entities within the US Defense Industrial Base Sector and software program firms.” It added, “This activity group is based in China and has been observed using commercial VPN solutions and compromised consumer routers in their attacker infrastructure.”

The risk intelligence group found the zero-day exploit throughout a “routine investigation” of Microsoft 365 Defender, its enterprise security software suite. SolarWinds had patched the vulnerabilities found by Microsoft on July 9, 2021. “The vulnerability exists in the latest Serv-U version 15.2.3 HF1 released May 5, 2021, and all prior versions. A threat actor who successfully exploited this vulnerability could run arbitrary code with privileges. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or run programs on the affected system,” the corporate mentioned in its disclosure.

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