Ride the Lightning

Accellion Breach Worsens: Dozens of Companies and Government Organizations Compromised

March 11, 2021

Wired reported on March 8 that firewall vendor Accellion released a patch in late December2020, and then more fixes in January, to address a cluster of vulnerabilities in one of its network equipment offerings. Since then, dozens of companies and government organizations worldwide have acknowledged that they were breached as a result of the flaws—and many face extortion, as the ransomware group Clop has threatened to make their data public if they don’t pay the monies demanded.

On March 1, security firm FireEye announced the results of its investigation, concluding that two separate, previously unknown hacking groups carried out the hacking and the extortion work, respectively. The hackers appear to have connections to the financial crimes group FIN11 and the ransomware gang Clop. Known victims include the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, the state of Washington, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, the Singaporean telecom Singtel, the high-profile law firm Jones Day, the grocery store chain Kroger, and the University of Colorado. Last week, cybersecurity firm Qualys also acknowledged that it was a victim.

The four vulnerabilities are in Accellion’s File Transfer Appliance, essentially a dedicated computer used to move large and sensitive files within a network.

“These vulnerabilities are particularly damaging, because in a normal case an attacker has to hunt to find your sensitive files, and it’s a bit of a guessing game, but in this case the work is already done,” says Jake Williams, founder of the security firm Rendition Infosec, which is working on remediating an Accellion FTA-related breach. “By definition, everything sent through Accellion FTA was pre-identified as sensitive by the user.”

Accellion FTA exploitation has made the news in recent months along with massive nation-state hacking sprees that targeted the IT services firm SolarWinds and the managed email system Microsoft Exchange Server. Both of those initiatives appear to have hit thousands of companies, but primarily for espionage purposes. The Accellion hackers, however, look to be motivated by criminal profit.

“Worldwide, actors have exploited the vulnerabilities to attack multiple federal and state, local, tribal, and territorial government organizations as well as private industry organizations including those in the medical, legal, telecommunications, finance, and energy sectors,” the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said at the end of February in a joint statement with international authorities. “In some instances observed, the attacker has subsequently extorted money from victim organizations to prevent public release of information exfiltrated from the Accellion appliance.”

Accellion has consistently emphasized that its FTA product, which has been around for more than 20 years, is at the end of its life. The company had already planned to end support for FTA on April 30, and had discontinued support for its operating system, Centos 6, on November 30. The company says it has been working for three years to transition customers away from FTA and onto its new platform, Kiteworks.

“Since becoming aware of these attacks, our team has been working around the clock to develop and release patches that resolve each identified FTA vulnerability, and support our customers affected by this incident,” Accellion CEO Jonathan Yaron has said.

Incident responders counter that Accellion was slow to raise the alarm about the potential risk to FTA users.

“The Accellion zero days were particularly damaging because actors were mass-exploiting this vulnerability quickly, and the severity of this wasn’t being communicated from Accellion,” says David Kennedy, CEO of the corporate incident response consultancy TrustedSec. “We had a number of customers that were reaching out to Accellion to understand the impact without any response. There was a large time window for active exploitation.”

The company now faces multiple lawsuits in Northern California and Washington state court with further lawsuits expected.

Accellion devices sit on-premises, meaning attackers had to seek out vulnerable pieces of equipment within targets’ networks. Incident responders worry that the situation also raises the fear of how catastrophic it might be if similar vulnerabilities were in public cloud services, like those offered by Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure. One key that opens many doors could make things much worse.

At the end of 2020, for example, hundreds of organizations worldwide, including universities and charities, suffered data breaches because of vulnerabilities in the Blackbaud cloud platform.

In the case of Accellion, maybe they should have pressed for change harder and sooner. But what about the CISOs who are supposed to monitor for end-of-life devices? I suspect that some may lose their jobs here.

Sharon D. Nelson, Esq., President, Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
3975 University Drive, Suite 225|Fairfax, VA 22030
Email:  Phone: 703-359-0700
Digital Forensics/Cybersecurity/Information Technology
https://senseient.com
https://twitter.com/sharonnelsonesq
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharondnelson
https://amazon.com/author/sharonnelson