Iran's Pioneer Kitten hits US networks via buggy Check Point, Palo Alto gear

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Iran's Pioneer Kitten hits US networks via buggy Check Point, Palo Alto gear
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The government-backed crew also enjoys ransomware as a side hustle

Iranian government-backed cybercriminals have been hacking into US and foreign networks as recently as this month to steal sensitive data and deploy ransomware, and they're breaking in via vulnerable VPN and firewall devices from Check Point, Citrix, Palo Alto Networks and other manufacturers, according to Uncle Sam.

Most of the attacks against American targets, however, are financially motivated and not state-sanctioned, according to the FBI and friends. The cyber spies also used Azure cloud infrastructure hosted in fraudulent, attacker-controlled Azure subscriptions for command-and-control . "The Iranian cyber actors' involvement in these ransomware attacks goes beyond providing access; they work closely with ransomware affiliates to lock victim networks and strategize on approaches to extort victims," according to the."The FBI assesses these actors do not disclose their Iran-based location to their ransomware affiliate contacts and are intentionally vague as to their nationality and origin.

While Pioneer Kitten has historically abused years-old bugs in Citrix Netscaler and BIG-IP F5 devices to gain initial access to victim organizations. As of July, they have been scanning the Shodan search engine for IP addresses hosting Check Point Security Gateways devices that are vulnerable to CVE-2024-24919, which the software vendor in June warned was

They also create new accounts — observed names include"sqladmin$,""adfsservice,""IIS_Admin,""iis-admin," and"John McCain" — and request exemptions from the zero-trust application and security policies for various tools they intend to deploy. And then, they install backdoors to load malware and exfiltrate data.

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