Securing Palo Alto management interfaces from exploitation

Audience

This Alert is intended for IT professionals and managers.

Purpose

An Alert is used to raise awareness of a recently identified cyber threat that may impact cyber information assets, and to provide additional detection and mitigation advice to recipients. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (“Cyber Centre”) is also available to provide additional assistance regarding the content of this Alert to recipients as requested.

Details

On November 8, 2024, Palo Alto Networks (PAN) published an advisory (PAN-SA-2024-0015) regarding a claim of exploitation that the vendor was investigating. On November 14, 2024, PAN updated the advisory to confirm that malicious activity has been observed targeting a limited number of PAN firewall management interfaces that are exposed to the Internet^{Footnote 1}.

The vendor confirms in the updated advisory that malicious actors have been observed exploiting an as-yet undisclosed unauthenticated remote command execution (RCE) vulnerability. It bears repeating that this is active exploitation by malicious actors.

The Cyber Centre notes that the vendor has also updated advisory PAN-SA-2024-0010 (“Multiple Vulnerabilities in Expedition Lead to Exposure of Firewall Credentials”)^{Footnote 2Footnote 3}. The PAN advisory explicitly states that multiple vulnerabilities in Palo Alto Networks Expedition led to exposure of firewall credentials.

Suggested actions

It is imperative that organizations review the inventory of PAN devices and applications in their networks and verify whether these products require patching and/or further recommended mitigations.

Organizations can verify whether they have any firewall management interfaces exposed to the Internet by consulting the Palo Alto Customer Support Portal (Products > Assets > All Assets > Remediation Required)^{Footnote 4}.

Devices and applications should then be configured according to the vendor’s recommended best practices^{Footnote 5}.

Organizations should also review and implement the Cyber Centre’s Top 10 IT Security Actions^{Footnote 6} with an emphasis on the following topics:

• consolidating, monitoring, and defending Internet gateways
• patching operating systems and applications
• isolating Web-facing applications

If activity matching the content of this alert is discovered, recipients are encouraged to report via the My Cyber Portal, or email contact@cyber.gc.ca.

Partner reporting

Palo Alto Networks Emphasizes Hardening Guidance