Mandiant has released details of a zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2025-0282) that Ivanti disclosed and simultaneously patched, affecting its Ivanti Connect Secure VPN (“ICS”) applications.
Ivanti identified the vulnerability based on evidence from the company's Integrity Checker Tool ("ICT") and other commercial security monitoring tools. As Mandiant notes in its analysis, CVE-2025-0282 was exploited by a suspected Chinese espionage actor as early as December 2024. While Mandiant cannot currently attribute the exploitation of CVE-2025-0282 to a specific threat actor, the security researchers have observed the same malware family (SPAWN) reported back in April 2024 and associated with the UNC5337 actor, which Mandiant believes is the same grouping as UNC5221.
Mandiant states that it is possible that multiple actors are responsible for creating and deploying the various malware families it has seen in its ongoing investigations (SPAWN, DRYHOOK, and PHASEJAM), but notes that "at the time of publication of this report, we do not have enough data to accurately determine the number of threat actors targeting CVE-2025-0282." Successful exploitation of CVE-2025-0282 allows attackers to:
- Remote code execution: May lead to remote code execution, allowing attackers to take control of affected systems.
- Lateral movement: Once compromised, attackers move laterally within networks to expand their access, which can result in impacts beyond the compromised appliance.
- Stubborn backdoors: Attackers install backdoors to maintain access to compromised systems. Some backdoors are able to persist across system upgrades. Therefore, Ivanti advises affected customers to perform a factory reset.
exploitation of the vulnerability
After successfully exploiting CVE-2025-0282, the threat actor deploys the custom malware “PHASEJAM” to initially establish itself in the system and prevent the installation of system upgrades, allowing an attempt at persistent access across system upgrades.
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Believing that a failed upgrade installation would attract the system administrator's attention, the threat actor instead displays a fake upgrade progress bar to trick the administrator into believing that the attempted upgrade was installed correctly, but silently blocks the legitimate upgrade process.
Recent versions of Ivanti Connect Secure have a built-in Integrity Check Tool (ICT) that has proven effective in detecting compromises related to this vulnerability. The ICT acts like an indicator light for the appliance that can illuminate to let users know that something is wrong or unusual behavior has been detected. It runs diagnostics on the appliance at regular intervals, constantly monitoring its vital signs for any anomalies or deviations from its known "healthy" state. In some cases, the threat actor has attempted to edit the ICT's "healthy files" manifest to include their malicious files and evade detection.
More at Mandiant.com
About Mandiant
Mandiant is a recognized leader in dynamic cyber defense, threat intelligence and incident response. With decades of experience on the cyber frontline, Mandiant helps organizations confidently and proactively defend against cyber threats and respond to attacks. Mandiant is now part of Google Cloud.
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