Cisco firewall 0-days under attack for 5 months by resourceful nation-state hackers

Dude something fucking wild is brewing in cyber warfare. I can feel it in my news feed.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Hackers backed by a powerful nation-state have been exploiting two zero-day vulnerabilities in Cisco firewalls in a five-month-long campaign that breaks into government networks around the world, researchers reported Wednesday.

These devices are ideal targets because they sit at the edge of a network, provide a direct pipeline to its most sensitive resources, and interact with virtually all incoming communications.

Those characteristics, combined with a small cast of selected targets all in government, have led Talos to assess that the attacks are the work of government-backed hackers motivated by espionage objectives.

“Our attribution assessment is based on the victimology, the significant level of tradecraft employed in terms of capability development and anti-forensic measures, and the identification and subsequent chaining together of 0-day vulnerabilities,” Talos researchers wrote.

“Regardless of your network equipment provider, now is the time to ensure that the devices are properly patched, logging to a central, secure location, and configured to have strong, multi-factor authentication (MFA),” the researchers wrote.

It stems from improper validation of files when they’re read from the flash memory of a vulnerable device and allows for remote code execution with root system privileges when exploited.

The original article contains 533 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

ASAs are still way more prevalent than they should be when Palo Alto and others are much better options. Still, I'm glad I barely have to deal with them any more.