VPN Flaw Allows Criminal Access to Everything on Victims' Computers

A VPN vulnerability that provided both initial access to a victim's computer and privilege escalation once access was granted has been disclosed. The vulnerability in the Aviatrix VPN client, used by large organizations such as NASA and Shell, has been patched in all versions and is available for download.

Immersive Labs researcher and content engineer Alex Seymour discovered the vulnerability in early October. After noting evidence that a pair of Web servers were launched during the VPN client's open sequence, he found the servers and the Python used to create them had known issues, especially with the very lax permissions given the servers during the sequence.

Seymour was able to show proof of the privilege escalation that would allow an attacker to run essentially any random code desired on the targeted machine. Aviatrix responded to the notice of the breach and patched the vulnerability in less than a month. Both Aviatrix and Seymour recommend that all Aviatrix VPN client users update to the latest version as soon as possible.

Read more here.

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