Government based hacking groups are attacking Microsoft Exchange Servers

Various government-backed hacking groups and APTs are targeting and exploiting a vulnerability in Microsoft Exchange email servers. The vulnerability was patched last month February 2020.

Volexity, a UK cyber security firm was the first to discover these exploitation attempts on Friday. But neither did they share the names of the hacking groups nor did they comment further on the matter. It is rumoured that the hacking groups are “the big players” but nothing has been confirmed yet. The vulnerability is identified as CVE-2020-0688.

Microsoft released fixes for this on Feb 11 and asked system admins to install the fixes as soon as possible to ward of attacks. After the release of the patch, things remained calm only to escalate after two weeks when Zero-Day Initiative reported the bug to Microsoft and published a detailed report on the vulnerability and how it worked. Security researchers used this report to craft proof-of-concept exploits to test their own servers and create detection rules.

And as soon as all this info became public, hackers started playing attention and when all this information was easily available they took advantage of the vulnerability.

“On February 26, a day after the Zero-Day Initiative report went live, hacker groups began scanning the internet for Exchange servers, compiling lists of vulnerable servers they could target at a later date. First scans of this type were detected by threat intel firm Bad Packets.” reports Zdnet.

Volexity said, these scans turned into actual attacks.

APTs – “advanced persistent threats,” were the first to exploit this bug to attack. APTs are state sponsored hacking groups. Security Researchers say, this vulnerability could become quite popular among ransomware attackers.

It is not easy to exploit CVE-2020-0688 vulnerability. Only expert hackers can abuse this bug as they need the credentials for an email account on the Exchange server- but it will not stop ransom gangs and APTs as these are well versed in phishing mail campaigns and gain credentials through the same.

Companies and organizations which have had previous phishing and malware attacks, are adviced to update their Exchange email servers with the bug fix as soon as possible.