The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are warning of active exploitation of a newly patched flaw in Zoho’s ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus product to deploy web shells and carry out an array of malicious activities.
Tracked as CVE-2021-44077, the issue relates to an unauthenticated, remote code execution vulnerability affecting ServiceDesk Plus versions up to, and including, 11305 that if left unfixed “Allows an attacker to upload executable files and place web shells that enable post-exploitation activities, such as compromising administrator credentials, conducting lateral movement, and exfiltrating registry hives and Active Directory files,” CISA said.
“A security misconfiguration in ServiceDesk Plus led to the vulnerability,” Zoho noted in an independent advisory published on November 22.
CVE-2021-44077 is also the second flaw to be exploited by the same threat actor that was formerly found exploiting a security shortcoming in Zoho’s self-service password management and single sign-on solution known as ManageEngine ADSelfService Plus to compromise at least 11 organizations, according to a new report published by Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 threat intelligence team.
“Most notably, between October 25 and November 8, the actor shifted attention to several organizations running a different Zoho product known as ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus.”.
Over the past three months, at least two organizations have been compromised using the ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus flaw, a number that’s expected to climb further as the APT group ramps up its reconnaissance activities against technology, energy, transportation, healthcare, education, finance, and defense industries.
