Sleeper Shells: Attackers Are Planting Dormant Backdoors in Ivanti EPMM (defusedcyber.com)

112 points by waihtis 7 hours ago

mmsc 6 hours ago

Every single Ivanti product (including their SSL-VPN) should be considered a critical threat. The fact that this company is allowed to continue to sell their malware dressed-up as "security solutions" is a disaster. How they haven't been sued into bankruptcy is something I'll never understand.

Nextgrid 6 hours ago

The purpose of cybersecurity products and companies is not to sell security. It's to sell the illusion of security to (often incompetent) execs - which is perfectly fine because the market doesn't actually punish security breaches so an illusion is all that's needed. It is an insanely lucrative industry selling luxury-grade snake oil.

Actual cybersecurity isn't something you can just buy off-the-shelf and requires skill and making every single person in the org to give a shit about it, which is already hard to achieve, and even more so when you've tried for years to pay them as little as you can get away with.

bootsmann 5 hours ago

Actually there is a significant push to more effective products coming from the reinsurance companies that underwrite cyber risks. Most of them come with a checklist of things you need to have before they sign you at any reasonable price. The more we get government regulation for fines in cases of breaches etc. the more this trend will accelerate.

nostrademons 3 hours ago

VladVladikoff 3 hours ago

technion an hour ago

cortesoft 5 hours ago

It's also selling box checks for various certifications.

yoyohello13 6 hours ago

If crowdstrike is any indicator, expect Ivanti stock to go up now. Seems to be the mo for security companies. Fuck up, get paid.

Ekaros 6 hours ago

There is no bad publicity? I take few had heard of them before so this is free marketing putting the name in public. Or then there is some broken LLM based sentiment analysis bot that automatically buy companies in news...

Nextgrid 6 hours ago

> How they haven't been sued into bankruptcy is something I'll never understand.

Isn't most off-the-shelf software effectively always supplied without any kind of warranty? What grounds would the lawsuit have?

mmsc 5 hours ago

Suing for negligence and friends is how car companies -- when it is found out they've built something highly unsafe/dangerously broken -- happens. I don't see the difference.

strbean 4 hours ago

waihtis 6 hours ago

Well, next week there will be a similar vulnerability Fortinet and everyone will momentarily forget about Ivanti again :-)

mmsc 6 hours ago

Yes. These companies should be shut down in the name of national security, seriously.

pixl97 6 hours ago

>We are aware of a very limited number of customers whose solution has been exploited at the time of disclosure.

“We are aware” and “very limited” are likely (in our opinion, this is probably not fact, etc, etc) to be doing a significant amount of lifting.

For avoidance of doubt, the following versions of Ivanti EPMM are patched:

None

----

Ah, this company is a security joke as most software security companies are.

ghostly_s 5 hours ago

It seems you forgot to note this comment is a quote from [1].

1. https://labs.watchtowr.com/someone-knows-bash-far-too-well-a...

javcasas 6 hours ago

"We are aware" can mean "we are taking this very seriously and have seen very little so far" or it can mean "after covering our eyes and plugging our ears we are seeing and hearing very little of this problem".

pipo234 5 hours ago

And "a very limited number" may mean "though we pretend to be a big company, we have a limited number of customers and while they all pay licence fees, most are not actually using the product in production."

pixl97 3 hours ago

moepstar 6 hours ago

If you're aware of the sheer number of exploits that can work around or without authentication against anything Ivanti, it has to be the latter.

chillax 6 hours ago

Related: Someone Knows Bash Far Too Well, And We Love It (Ivanti EPMM Pre-Auth RCEs CVE-2026-1281 & CVE-2026-1340) https://labs.watchtowr.com/someone-knows-bash-far-too-well-a...

ddtaylor 6 hours ago

I think there is an easier substitution attack since there is shell expansion occuring. I will toy with it later today.

PhilipRoman 3 hours ago

The array indexing thing is a special case in [[...]] which is otherwise more-or-less secure (no expansion occurs under typical unquoted variable access). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46631811

m000 5 hours ago

Can't help but notice the weird choice of illustration in TFA.

Ivanti is a US company. But if you have never heard of them, the dragon-resembling creature in the illustration (representing the dormant backdoor?) makes it look like the incident is somehow related to China.

waihtis 4 hours ago

Ivanti may be a US company but the webshells very likely aren’t.

Anyway, the image is just the end result of plugging the title into nano banana. You ought to address your complaints to Google :)

sebstefan 6 hours ago

I didn't see that exploit showing up on Hackernews so here it is

https://hub.ivanti.com/s/article/Security-Advisory-Ivanti-En...

Ivanti doesn't explain how this happened or what mistake led to this exploit being created.

rezhaze88 6 hours ago

There is some dark amusement about an MDM and general enterprise management and security systems being used as the attack vector. Ivanti in particular has proven itself to be swiss cheese as of late, and would be bankrupt if people cared about security rather than it being a compliance/insurance checkbox that truly _nobody_ cares about in practice.

Semi-related: with the recent much-touted cybersecurity improvements of AI models (as well as the general recent increase in tensions and conflicts worldwide) I wonder just how much the pace of attacks will increase, and whether it’ll prove to be a benefit or a disadvantage over time. Government sponsored teams were already combing through every random weekend project and library that somehow ended in node or became moderately popular, but soon any dick and tom will be able to do it at scale for a few bucks. On the other hand, what’s being exploited tends to get patched in time - but this can take quite a while, especially when the target is some random side project on github last updated 4 years ago.

My gut feeling is that there will be a lot more exploitation everywhere, and not much upside for the end consumer (who didn’t care about state level actors anyway). Probably a good idea to firewall aggressively and minimize the surface area that can be attacked in the first place. The era of running any random vscode extension and trust-me-bro chrome extension is likely at an end. I’m also looking forward to being pwned by wifi enabled will-never-be-updated smart appliances that seem to multiply by the year.

goopypoop 5 hours ago

thank god they're dormant eh

mschuster91 3 hours ago

Why the fuck do people still use Ivanti, and while we're at it, Cisco gear? How many backdoors and vulnerabilities can these two companies produce until they get put out of business?

If you ask me... both these companies should be treated similarly to misbehaving banks: banned from acquiring new customers, an external overseer installed, and only when the products do not pose a threat to the general public any more, they can acquire new customers again.