Pierluigi Paganini May 10, 2022

Threat actors are exploiting critical F5 BIG-IP flaw CVE-2022-1388 to deliver malicious code, cybersecurity researchers warn.

Threat actors started massively exploiting the critical remote code execution vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-1388, affecting F5 BIG-IP.

Last week security and application delivery solutions provider F5 released its security notification to inform customers that it has released security updates from tens of vulnerabilities in its products.ⓘ

The company addressed a total of 43 vulnerabilities, the most severe one is a critical issue tracked as CVE-2022-1388 (CVSS score of 9.8). An unauthenticated attacker with network access to the BIG-IP system through the management port and/or self IP addresses can exploit the CVE-2022-1388 flaw to execute arbitrary system commands, create or delete files, or disable services.

“This vulnerability may allow an unauthenticated attacker with network access to the BIG-IP system through the management port and/or self IP addresses to execute arbitrary system commands, create or delete files, or disable services. There is no data plane exposure; this is a control plane issue only.” reads the advisory published by the vendor.”

The flaw affects the following versions:

16.1.0 – 16.1.2
15.1.0 – 15.1.5
14.1.0 – 14.1.4
13.1.0 – 13.1.4
12.1.0 – 12.1.6
11.6.1 – 11.6.5

and the vendor addressed it with the release of:

17.0.0
16.1.2.2
15.1.5.1
14.1.4.6
13.1.5

The company provided the following temporary mitigations for customers that cannot install the patched versions:

• Block iControl REST access through the self IP address
• Block iControl REST access through the management interface
• Modify the BIG-IP httpd configuration

Researchers from Positive Technologies and Horizon3 Attack Team developed their own exploit code for CVE-2022-1388 and explained that the issue is trivial to exploit.

The popular researcher Kevin Beaumont confirmed the attack the ongoing attacks, but pointed out that they are not targeting the management interface.

The researcher Germán Fernández reported that threat actors are exploiting the flaw to drop PHP webshells to “/tmp/f5.sh” and install them to “/usr/local/www/xui/common/css/.”

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, F5 BIG-IP)

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