US govt shares top flaws exploited by Chinese hackers since 2020

NSA, CISA, and the FBI revealed today the top security vulnerabilities most exploited by hackers backed by the People's Republic of China (PRC) to target government and critical infrastructure networks.

The three federal agencies said in a joint advisory that Chinese-sponsored hackers are targeting U.S. and allied networks and tech companies to gain access to sensitive networks and steal intellectual property.

"NSA, CISA, and FBI continue to assess PRC state-sponsored cyber activities as being one of the largest and most dynamic threats to U.S. government and civilian networks," the advisory says.

"This joint CSA builds on previous NSA, CISA, and FBI reporting to inform federal and state, local, tribal and territorial (SLTT) government; critical infrastructure, including the Defense Industrial Base Sector; and private sector organizations about notable trends and persistent tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs)."

The advisory also bundles recommended mitigations for each of the security flaws most exploited by Chinese threat actors, as well as detection methods and vulnerable technologies to help defenders spot and block incoming attack attempts.

The following security vulnerabilities have been the top most exploited by Chinese-backed state hackers since 2020, according to the NSA, CISA, and the FBI.

Vendor	CVE	Vulnerability Type
Apache Log4j	CVE-2021-44228	Remote Code Execution
Pulse Connect Secure	CVE-2019-11510	Arbitrary File Read
GitLab CE/EE	CVE-2021-22205	Remote Code Execution
Atlassian	CVE-2022-26134	Remote Code Execution
Microsoft Exchange	CVE-2021-26855	Remote Code Execution
F5 Big-IP	CVE-2020-5902	Remote Code Execution
VMware vCenter Server	CVE-2021-22005	Arbitrary File Upload
Citrix ADC	CVE-2019-19781	Path Traversal
Cisco Hyperflex	CVE-2021-1497	Command Line Execution
Buffalo WSR	CVE-2021-20090	Relative Path Traversal
Atlassian Confluence Server and Data Center	CVE-2021-26084	Remote Code Execution
Hikvision Webserver	CVE-2021-36260	Command Injection
Sitecore XP	CVE-2021-42237	Remote Code Execution
F5 Big-IP	CVE-2022-1388	Remote Code Execution
Apache	CVE-2022-24112	Authentication Bypass by Spoofing
ZOHO	CVE-2021-40539	Remote Code Execution
Microsoft	CVE-2021-26857	Remote Code Execution
Microsoft	CVE-2021-26858	Remote Code Execution
Microsoft	CVE-2021-27065	Remote Code Execution
Apache HTTP Server	CVE-2021-41773	Path Traversal

Mitigation measures

NSA, CISA, and FBI also urged U.S. and allied governments, critical infrastructure, and private sector orgs to apply the following mitigation measures to defend against Chinese-sponsored cyber-attacks.

The three federal agencies advise organizations to apply security patches as soon as possible, use phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication (MFA) whenever possible, and replace end-of-life network infrastructure no longer receiving security patches.

They also recommend moving towards the Zero Trust security model and enabling robust logging on internet-exposed services to detect attack attempts as soon as possible.

Today's joint advisory follows two others that shared information on tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by Chinese-backed threat groups (in 2021) and publicly known vulnerabilities they exploit in attacks (in 2020).

In June, they also revealed that Chinese state hackers had compromised major telecommunications companies and network service providers to steal credentials and harvest data.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Government also issued an alert about state-backed hackers stealing data from U.S. defense contractors using a custom CovalentStealer malware and the Impacket framework.