Cybersecurity Briefing — January 22, 2024

Executive briefing: CISA, the FBI, NSA, and international partners published joint advisory AA24-022A on January 22, 2024 warning that state-sponsored actors were exploiting Ivanti Connect Secure and Policy Secure zero-days (CVE-2023-46805, CVE-2024-21887) to obtain persistent access.

Key threat signals

Active exploitation. Incident response teams observed attackers chaining authentication bypass and command-injection flaws to deploy webshells and harvest credentials from hardened appliances.
Forensic blind spots. The advisory highlighted that default logging fails to capture attacker actions, urging deployment of Ivanti’s integrity-checker tool and out-of-band network telemetry.
Remediation deadlines. CISA mandated civilian agencies to disconnect affected devices or apply hotfixes within 48 hours via Emergency Directive 24-01.

Control alignment

NIST CSF 2.0 PR.AA & DE.AE. Enforce multi-factor authentication, privileged access segmentation, and automated anomaly detection on VPN infrastructure.
CIS Critical Security Control 12. Maintain asset inventories and configuration baselines for remote-access services; validate that emergency patches propagate across HA pairs.

Detection and response priorities

Run Ivanti’s external integrity scanner, collect memory dumps, and compare with CISA’s YARA signatures to evict webshells.
Rotate credentials for accounts accessed via compromised gateways and monitor downstream SaaS sign-ins for unusual OAuth grants.

Enablement moves

Accelerate zero-trust network access (ZTNA) pilots that replace legacy VPN concentrators with policy-driven access brokers.
Update third-party risk questionnaires to confirm partners have applied Ivanti mitigations or isolated vulnerable appliances.

Sources

Zeph Tech equips cyber defenders with mitigation runbooks and partner assurance templates for critical remote-access flaws.