FortiBleed Credential Theft Linked to INC and Lynx Ransomware Operations

Source Domain: thehackernews.com

The recently discovered financially-motivated FortiBleed campaign has been attributed to INC and Lynx ransomware operations, indicating that the verified, stolen credentials were intended for follow-on intrusions.

“An operator tied to FortiBleed’s infrastructure was found actively working negotiation panels for both groups, tying mass FortiGate credential theft directly to ransomware deployment for the first time,” SOCRadar said in a new report published Wednesday.

The company said it tracked scanning activity against approximately 11,250 FortiGate portals in more than 150 countries, followed by confirmed admin-level access on 409 targets and successful completion of the full attack chain on 354 of them. In all, at least 12 ransomware deployments have resulted from this access, causing hundreds of endpoints to be encrypted across affected organizations.

The large-scale credential-harvesting operation, which came to light last month, involved the threat actors systematically scanning the internet for exposed Fortinet devices, attempting to break into them using known credential combinations, and then deploying custom packet sniffers to passively gather credentials and other authentication data from network traffic.

The campaign is assessed to have targeted 430,000 FortiGate firewalls globally, gathering over 110 million credentials in the process. The activity was exposed after an operational security error on the part of the attackers left a server containing credentials stolen from thousands of Fortinet appliances exposed on the internet.

The Golang sniffer is estimated to have been installed on about 12,000 Fortinet devices, making it a subset of the total number of networking gear targeted.

The latest findings from SOCRadar show that an operator with access to FortiBleed infrastructure was found logged in to both INC Ransom and Lynx negotiation panels, with victims listed by INC Ransom overlapping with data from the campaign. The links are based on one…

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