Microsoft: Lace Tempest Hackers Behind Active Exploitation of MOVEit Transfer App

Microsoft has officially linked the ongoing active exploitation of a critical flaw in the Progress Software MOVEit Transfer application to a threat actor it tracks as Lace Tempest.

“Exploitation is often followed by deployment of a web shell with data exfiltration capabilities,” the Microsoft Threat Intelligence team said in a series of tweets today. “CVE-2023-34362 allows attackers to authenticate as any user.”

Lace Tempest, also called Storm-0950, is a ransomware affiliate that overlaps with other groups such as FIN11, TA505, and Evil Corp. It’s also known to operate the Cl0p extortion site.

The threat actor also has a track record of exploiting different zero-day flaws to siphon data and extort victims, with the group recently observed weaponizing a severe bug in PaperCut servers.

CVE-2023-34362 relates to an SQL injection vulnerability in MOVEit Transfer that enables unauthenticated, remote attackers to gain access to the database and execute arbitrary code.

There are believed to be at least over 3,000 exposed hosts utilizing the MOVEit Transfer service, according to data from attack surface management company Censys.

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