Kaseya Not a Supply-Chain Attack

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It seems root cause attribution was incorrect and Kaseya has just ruled out the recent compromise of client networks as a supply-chain attack but rather the direct exploitation of a zero-day (CVE-2021-30116) vulnerability.

Initial reports raised speculation that the REvil ransomware gang was behind the attack and might have obtained backend infrastructure access at Kaseya and abused it to deploy malicious payloads by way of updates to customers using VSA servers; similar to the Solarwinds/SUNBURST supply-chain attack.

"The attackers were able to exploit zero-day vulnerabilities in the VSA product to bypass authentication and run arbitrary command execution," Kaseya stated. "This allowed the attackers to leverage the standard VSA product functionality to deploy ransomware to endpoints. There is no evidence that Kaseya's VSA codebase has been maliciously modified." 

Essentially, they're saying that while the zero-day exploitation on Kaseya VSA software by itself wasn't a supply-chain attack, taking advantage of the flaw to breach MSPs and their customers would represent one.

What we don't know (yet) is how the threat actors learned of these vulnerabilities. Details around those flaws have not been released publicly, although researchers at Huntress Labs showed that "Cybercriminals have exploited an arbitrary file upload and code injection vulnerability and have high confidence an authentication bypass was used to gain access into these servers". 


Additional specifics on the attack chains, IOCs, and actors can be seen here.


Relevant Articles

https://blog.sploited.org/2021/07/kaseya-vsa-supply-chain-attack.html

https://blog.sploited.org/2021/07/kaseya-update-hundreds-to-thousands-of.html

https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/kaseya-rules-out-supply-chain-attack.html

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