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In this blog post we will cover WAF evasion patterns and exfiltration attempts seen in the wild, trend data on attempted exploitation, and information on exploitation that we saw prior to the public disclosure of CVE-2021-44228.
In short, we saw limited testing of the vulnerability on December 1, eight days before public disclosure. We saw the first attempt to exploit the vulnerability just nine minutes after public disclosure showing just how fast attackers exploit newly found problems.
We also see mass attempts to evade WAFs that have tried to perform simple blocking, we see mass attempts to exfiltrate data including secret credentials and passwords.
WAF Evasion Patterns and Exfiltration Examples
Since the disclosure of CVE-2021-44228 (now commonly referred to as Log4Shell) we have seen attackers go from using simple attack strings to actively trying to evade blocking by WAFs. WAFs provide a useful tool for stopping external attackers and WAF evasion is commonly attempted to get past simplistic rules.
In the earliest stages of exploitation of the Log4j vulnerability attackers were using un-obfuscated strings typically starting with ${jndi:dns, ${jndi:rmi
and ${jndi:ldap
and simple rules to look for those patterns were effective.
Quickly after those strings were being blocked and attackers Continue reading