Sophos Firewall zero-day bug exploited weeks before fix

A vulnerability in the Sophos Firewall, first discovered in late March and patched soon afterwards, was being exploited by a Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT), in the weeks before the patch was released, reports have revealed.

Researchers from cybersecurity firm Volexity, the threat actor, known as DriftingCloud, exploited the CVE-2022-1040 since early March, against a number of unnamed entities. It used it to bypass authentication, and run arbitrary code on the victims’ endpoints. The flaw affects the User Portal and Webadmin of Sophos Firewall, and the threat actors managed to install webshell backdoors and other malware.